00:11 Hello and welcome to We haven’t got time for this.

00:16 I just realised in thinking about that it’s a bit tough. We have got time to watch this. We haven’t got time in our lives as marketers. So, one of the really key stats that hit me this last few weeks is we know that a lot of marketing folk are hitting burnout.

00:32 In fact, this year, there’s a CMO Alliance poll that shows that burnout was the top challenge by over a quarter. I think it’s like 25 26% of marketers are saying that they’re in burnout, and the rest of us, apparently, according to marketing week, are overwhelmed. And in fact, 65% have felt overwhelmed in the past 12 months, and 55% say they feel emotionally exhausted. So deep breath. We’ll take a moment, because I’m super excited to have a guest on today who I’ve wanted on for ages, and that’s

Max. Hello, Max who is marketing director of Fujitsu, UK, and you’ve been doing B to B Tech for years. And I think one of the things I actually adore about is you’re really quite calm under pressure. I’m sure on the inside, you’re not. On the outside, you are very you kind of make marketing look easy, but you’re also very committed to the decisions that you make. And I’ve asked max to join us, because I want her to talk about a story of how in this current climate where everything is changing and everything is insane, how she didn’t try and outwork the chaos. You changed, how the work is run, how teams are structured, the operating rhythm, and how those internal rules all fit together. So

02:10 now you become a better version given all the challenges we’re facing by restructuring. So thank you and welcome. Thank you very much. Been very excited to be here today, so really looking forward to it, and we’ll have a really proper good chat. So, my first question is, what was the moment you realise that the way marketing was structured couldn’t keep up with the reality of how work is today.

02:44 So I’ll set the context a bit Katy, so I’ve been with Fujitsu for over 20 years now, so definitely showing my age. And during this time, the structure of the UK marketing team had remained completely unchanged, even though the workforce had reduced, which is very, very typical in today’s environment. But we had gone from when I started in the mid 2000s 90 people in the UK marketing team, and today I have 13. The business continued to grow, but the number shrunk. And how we had it was the team was organised by sector or by accounts, with a smaller group focusing on like those specialist disciplines such as digital and events, and that group is now a centralised function. But while this model, as we know, worked brilliantly, because what you really want is people embedded dedicated marketers into accounts and understanding the sectors they in with the amount of people. It’s just became increasingly unsustainable. So over time, what happened was we were working in silos, so all the people

working across the different areas, they were duplicating effort. We were finding very limited economies of scale, and with 13 people just really insufficient coverage across the breadth of the business, we just couldn’t get to everyone. So, I took a step back, and in January last year, I dived in, and I thought, right, we need to begin a bit of a restructuring of the UK marketing team. And in April. So next week, it’ll be a year since we started our transformation. And what I did was we sat down and had a look at the team, had the look at their strengths, and we organised them to two core areas. So, as we know, as a field marketing team, demand generation. So, so important, we have to create that demand for the business. So, a creative demand generation space, and this spanned across our horizontal and our vertical markets. And then we also had customer interlock. So, this is covering, very importantly, Account Based Marketing, deal based marketing, and then thought leadership.

05:00 Partners, events, analysts, that bucket of things we needed to pull together and what this mean then, rather being tied to specific sectors or accounts, the team now worked across the entire business, and then they could draw on each other’s expertise. So, I’ll give you an example. So, if we drove, say, a vertical demand generation initiative. So, we might deliver a digital campaign with sector specific content. You could enrich it with horizontal campaign assets. We then did tailored thought leadership. We added in partner activation. We had personalised ABM for those key accounts in that sector, and then through in a face to face. So, what we had was we had each specialist in the team own their part of the delivery, have an integrated approach, and then we could just replicate it across all the sectors. So, what we were finding is the new model allowed us to learn, and we now improving on every campaign, we’re using results and feedback. We’re refining our approach and becoming more effective as we deliver more across the sectors. So even though we are we are a small team, we’re doing more, which is brilliant, yeah, which is what every marketeer is trying to do right now,

06:22 before we get into the some of the challenges and everything else, how did you identify where time was really leaking? Because there’s the there’s a lot that happens in enterprise where there’s sort of meetings and handoffs and approvals and the hell of reporting and all this kind of how did you identify and then how did you solve that? Okay, so I think that prior to the restructure, I think significant time was being lost through the different sector teams independently creating very similar work, but in silos. So, the core messaging was probably largely the same and only needed a bit of refinement at the account or industry level.

07:06 Yet what we’re seeing was multiple versions were being developed in parallel, instead of running that one core campaign and tailoring it in but also, if I think about time leakage, you know.

07:18 and our current way of working, we spend the entire day going from one teams call to the next to the next, and there is very little uninterrupted time for the deep work, for us to think. And if I think back seven years ago, prior to covid,

07:34 the volume of meetings has just increased, and we now have meetings to prepare for meetings. And I’m going to admit it’s really I’m partially responsible. I genuinely like speaking to people, so I would rather phone then write a message. But I think at the same time, we’ve just got to think about how we operate slightly differently to be more effective. And then if I was to touch on reporting, this is always going to be a major part of our roles. So almost every department is expected to report regularly, and effectively we justifying our activity. And I really, really don’t see that changing. However, how we report should evolve, and I think there’s huge potential to improve. And we are eight minutes in, and I’m going to use the AI word because, you know, that’s never, not going to happen when we’re talking about marketing,

08:28 but AI should help us reclaim some time. But I think that the real challenge is freeing up time to learn how to use the tools effectively. And you know, it’s often said that AI won’t take our jobs, but people who know how to use it well, nice. So, I think for all of us, we need to just be a little bit more clever in what we’re doing. Yes, and I have to put a little pitch in if you have no idea how AI could help you in marketing, we’ve got a report on our website. I’ll pop a link into comments later that talks about the use cases. It’s not telling you what you should and shouldn’t do, but it’s just to there to spark some ideas. Because I think you’re absolutely right the admin and particularly in reporting, where, you know, unfortunately, you know, even in the world of social media, we never seem to get the same results out of each platform. So, drawing out what’s in meta versus what’s in LinkedIn, well, versus what’s in Reddit, is joy.

09:25 Feel the same. I feel like I spend my entire time reporting on the reporting the nice did in another

09:34 kind of version, absolutely, that’s, that’s what we do. It’s such a pain. And I think, you know, getting a nice little agentic workflow running that is able to solve some of this makes a huge amount of difference. I think where the smarts come in is having you mentioned time to think, and I think that’s the bit that has in the last few years. I think for marketers, has been horrific.

10:00 It not being able to step back and go, What are we doing? How are we impacting the business? What changes are we making? How can we do this? But we have had no time for that. And what I love most about this,

10:13 and I know you’ve had to go through some pain to do it, the restructure is about, really, is about looking to the future and how you can free up.

10:23 So I think it’s worth talking now about what you did to the team. You’ve talked about the overall catching, but really those roles and and what you stopped doing, and maybe some of the challenges that you had. Yeah, absolutely so. So I think what we did the team was restructured so the individuals became almost specialists within specific areas of marketing, delivery across the business. But also we opened up the ability that if people wanted to try things and then change, there was the ability to do that. Also super important. You don’t want anyone pigeonholed within a specific delivery or specific discipline, so everyone can move around, but I’m going to what it allowed us to do is, and I’ll take a horizontal campaign as an example around how we roll it out to market in in really defined stages. So, you’ve got your awareness stage, your consideration, your decision. And what we did was we progressively built with tailored, specific focus in getting that repetition to work across the teams. And what I did with the team is I looked at it from the perspective of we created this demand gen side into horizontals and verticals, and then we created this other side that kind of brought in all that gold around ABM and everything else, and then the team was working across all the areas to bring it together. Now there is absolutely challenges with this. And the challenges were that people didn’t have the marketing person anymore, and they found that quite difficult, because there was, there was now this whole team who was servicing them. But I think, you know, repetition is the most important thing. So what I would do is we did constant meetings to say, this is the team, this is the structure, this is who you need to go to. And eventually they started finding the rhythm. And actually what they found in the back of it, which was really interesting, is that they were getting so much more so they weren’t only getting perhaps the discipline that their marketing person was delivering. They were getting the breadth of everything we had in country and region and global, and all of a sudden they were getting serviced in a slightly different way. And I think that was exciting. But I think, you know, I won’t, I won’t say that it was easy for the team. The team found it challenging, you know, so all of a sudden they had to go from probably a niche space into something really broad. So there was a real learning curve that everyone had to go on, because all of a sudden they had to have a broad understanding of the entire business, be it industry or even be it like our portfolio, and understanding where the portfolio sat. And so there was, there was quite a lot of learning that they had to put into this too. So it was difficult, and but we’re finding our feet and we’re seeing the returns, and that’s really, really exciting. And I think in a year of reflection, when I change it back, absolutely not, absolutely not, definitely the way forward,

13:32 I think I just need to make a bit more space for the team. And I think that’s really, really important, because they had so much learning to do, so much to take on that it was another really intensive year last year. So I would say now that because we’re starting to hit our rhythm, what I’d really like is for them to kind of just slow it down a bit and be confident in what

they now know, and to deliver it out and perhaps with all that additional noise around them that they had last year.

14:04 Yeah, that’s amazing, absolutely amazing. I think it’s really interesting as well. You talk about the need to communicate to marketing stakeholders. Because one of the things I find as many of us are remote, or some of us are remote and some of us aren’t, or whatever, your mix of folk are in larger organisations, is that need to over communicate is massive now, and that is also adding weight to our time. We need to find better ways of doing it. But I’m with you. I’d rather spend more time chatting to people, talking to them about how it works, then, you know, fighting it out with a dashboard to try and get something meaningful out of a lot?

14:42 Yeah, I think that for all of us, that makes sense. And I think there’s something that’s really joyous as well about becoming, you know, what is that phrase when you wear your master of none? Is that phrase, oh, take a ball trades. Master. What?

15:00 Kind of like the idea that you have specialisms that people are able to at least learn, and then they can move on absolutely to try something new.

15:10 And I’ve always felt that that sometimes marketing is so I mean, when I started in marketing, there were, like, seven channels, I mean,

15:18 so easy, and now, you know, 40 years later, we’ve got the best we’ve got now, and it is really tough to keep ahead of what you’re doing, keep ahead of what’s changing. You know, just as you think, like the SEO world thought, right, we’ve got this solid, yes, there’s algorithm changes. Yes, there’s this along comes AI and breaks the model completely. And it’s just, we’re just, you know, change management is one of our biggest challenges, so I’m with you. To anybody who’s watching us live, please ask questions we’re happy to take, maybe like, in the meantime,

15:56 talk to me about what kind of I’m quite interested in, cadences and the word rituals, you know, the things you do to to kind of bring everybody along, because it that, you know, you’re not talking about machines. In this case, you’re talking about, even if it is only 13 people, it’s still 13 people. So what cadence did you kind of set so that you had

16:19 a new model for operating.

16:22 So as I mentioned previously, you know, at first, people find it really difficult not to have their marketing person to go to. So we started doing these calls with them quite regularly, just to drive the cadence of understanding. And now that the understanding is in place, what we tend to do is we hold sector specific meetings every eight about six to eight weeks. And what we do is we do it with my four leads, so across the demand generation space, biobetics, horizontals, the ABM and then the bucket of everything else. And we go into these sessions to report what we’re delivering to them, so we explain what are we doing for their area, what the results are, what we’re achieving, and, most importantly, where we need their support.

17:11 And this is really helps us demonstrate the reuse and localise model so that they can start understanding it. And as I said, they’re now seeing the breadth of what they’re getting from the team, and that’s kind of been the feedback we’ve had from them, which is which has been really, really good. And actually that because of having that cadence of meetings in where we report to them, because we’re going into the new financial year, so we’re first of April, so actually rapidly approaching financial year, what we’ve done in the last two months is we’ve flipped the meetings onto them. So we’ve said we’re approaching the end of the financial year. You know what we’ve been delivering? We can give you a quick snapshot of the results we’ve given, but actually, let’s turn the tables to you. Tell us what your targets are for the year. Tell us where you are selling, what your capability focuses we’re in the portfolio. Do you want us to focus? And actually, because they know the structure that we’re delivering in, it’s really easy for them to say, this is our focus across the horizontals, this is our focus into these specific verticals, and these are our really key accounts in ABM. So it’s kind of creating that dialogue that’s really, really built up. And I think that is really, really been important. But also I think what’s been really important for me

18:31 is the moving away from the single person has helped us stop the and I’m going to call them the non essential marketing requests, okay? And one of my

18:45 colleagues, on my favourite colleagues, has this fantastic term that she says it’s the pens parties and PowerPoints. Now, the best thing about them not having their marketing person is, who do they go to for the pens parties and PowerPoints? Because, as we know this is not what marketing does. And so we’ve been able to drive focus on what we are doing, activity wise, that is genuinely making an impact, and pushing that through to self service. So we’ve got everything set substantially that people can go and do that themselves, and we are driving the culture that is allowing them to do that, so we can get on with doing what we need to do for the business.

19:26 Oh, God, that sounds like heaven.

19:29 Well, I

19:31 wish I could say it’s 100%

19:34 there, but we’re definitely on the road, and that’s the most important thing. It’s just Yes, exactly. And it’s that whole view, which is often it’s the others in the in our business who don’t really know what we do. And it’s our job to kind of keep us focused on we’re here to impact commercials, not here to arrange for you to meet people at a party.

19:59 I.

20:01 Yeah, we got a question in from this slide. Please, yes.

20:05 Yes, exactly. I got lovely question in here from Terry Donovan. She would be intrigued to understand, what did you find was the most effective way to divide the specialisms ownership across team members?

20:22 Really really interesting.

20:26 To be honest, I always had a senior team sitting at the top, and we had a I had a conversation with all of them, looked at their strengths, about where I thought they should go, but also, because this was an ability, they’ve always been very broad marketers, my very senior team, so they could go into any discipline. So some people, it was a natural so the person who runs My Account Based Marketing, absolutely natural for her. This is her passion. She knows what she she’s 100% in the space she went in there. I had someone else who was very, very linked to a very specific part of our business, and had been embedded in that business for about five years, and actually she wanted to come out and try something completely different and fully capable. So what we did then was to divide a role for her that would actually move her right out of her comfort zone. So it wasn’t a one fits all. It was more a conversation. And actually, what we decided is that if, after the year, people went, This is not for me, we could have made the change around. And we have made changes for the new financial year, very small ones with the more,

21:41 I suppose, junior team, but the senior team are absolutely holding their own, and I think because they carved it out so beautifully in the business, I can’t see them wanting to change where they are at the moment, but it was really an ability for us to put strengths where we needed it, but also give people who’ve got immense strength opportunity to grow. So we did a bit of a combination. I love that, because in the modern day of the world we’re in, and I know it’s our immediate future runs we we allow people to lean into the things that they enjoy doing. We don’t have to have the rigid this is what you need to do type thing. You can actually be quite flexible, and because the world keeps moving, in a way, it’s kind of what you want exactly. And the thing is, is that where our focus is at the moment as a Field Marketing team is very much within specific areas. As something new comes in, we’re going to have to upskill, learn and shift again. So we all need to be really, really flexible in what we’re doing and adaptive. So I think that it also showed a bit of

22:49 within the team to say, Do you know I want to try this, or I’m really comfortable here, and that allowed us to go, Okay, let’s give it a go. Let’s give it a go and see, see what happens. I love it. I absolutely think this is how careers should progress. In my view, this is a great way to grow as a person, yeah. But let’s get on to some a little bit of a knotty question. Okay, when budgets are tight? When are they not tight? But they’re particularly tight at the moment,

23:18 what changed in how, how you

23:21 how you prove value? Is it pure metrics, decision, ready, signals, what? How do you make it a clearer story for people who are maybe not in marketing? Yeah.

23:34 So, I think that

23:36 fewer metrics,

23:38 yes, but sharper metrics really, really important. So we need to focus on a small set of signals that matter to the business. So what we were doing is looking at maybe things that can translate better so qualified opportunity for sales. What, which of those generated pipeline activities in, say, the ABM approach, that influenced the pipeline, where we were seeing the win rate uplift,

24:06 but also on decision ready signals. What we needed to do was take away some of the vanity matrix. You know, those ones of we had so many people come to this and everything else. And you know, if they’re not the right people, it doesn’t matter. And what we needed to do is concentrate on what was moving specific deals forward. So, you know, is it that we were seeing content being reused in bids? Had accounts changed behaviours? Were we seeing new stakeholders engaged? Was the new opportunities open to us? So, looking at where we were seeing that decision ready signal bringing us the information. But I think also really importantly is that we need to have a clearer story for finance and sales. So, we need to reframe our reporting around the business language, not marketing. So, I mean anyone in the marketing team, we’re the only one who gets the market.

25:00 Marketing metrics, no one else in the business does, and so what we needed to understand is start talking to them in their language and also link it to activities that they are understanding, which is deals, extensions, upsells. You know, where we can see marketing making a difference so that we get that investment and make sure that it continues. But I think we all have the, you know, we get into the lingo. We get into the acronyms, really, really quickly, and it goes right over everyone’s heads. So, for me, I think that was probably one of the most important things, yeah, and I think it’s, it’s a real tough one as well, because often, you know, senior leadership teams tend to understand a bit about marketing,

25:44 but not really what what we do. And, you know, we get it all the time, which is, oh, have we got more followers, you know, from the CFO. And we’re thinking, Well, yes, but does that matter? Why do you care? One thing they can they can remember probably because their kids showed them or something, you know, and it’s Sorry, I’m stereotyping CFOs now, but you know, it’s that, that bit which is very tough telling. And I do think that we have, in a way, many marketers, including myself, have sort of overwhelmed our leadership team with these amazing dashboards with lots and lots of things on and not really explained what they mean. So, I do think there’s a large amount what we have to do is, is, unfortunately, is also educate those around us and aspiring to them why it matters so absolutely. But it’s another,

26:38 it’s another, another part, another reporting.

26:44 So one of the things that we just checking there aren’t any, any, any more questions. Please ask questions, yes. So, we know that buyers, you know the whatever the buyer group is. I just saw one the other day that showed it to be about 20 or 30 and that you need 90 or touch points before you get anywhere. We know that buyers are shortlisting without you in the room, and it’s that messy middle.

27:10 Really love this term because, like, it was ever a straightforward funnel?

27:15 I don’t know who ever thought that, but anyway, it’s got worse, and people are bouncing. So how did you change? So, in that, in that mix that you now have, how has it changed? So that your teams think about that kind of content, the proof points that the buyers want, we, you know, we call it nudge nurture the nudge nurture programmes. How did you how did you make that switch within the team?

27:46 Yeah, so I think also there’s been a move from the one big brochure approach, although I seem to be getting that back a little bit in last few weeks, but the approach we’ve been looking at, is that full content spine, across the entire journey? So, we’ve been looking at, from a perspective of, you know, where we’re starting. So, is it, is it problem? Framing? Is that industry insight? Is it thought leadership, you know what? What goes in the middle? Is it solution options? Is there our capability? And then finally, showing that proof led marketing, which is really important. So, this is case studies, it’s reference, it’s evidence where we’ve done before. I think another thing we’re seeing really, really important is the creating of that persona specific content. So, the team are really concentrating on that, because that answers the real questions that the buyers are actually asking so not just pushing things out, but understanding what they want to hear from us,

28:46 evidence based assets really important, and for us, it’s about the work we’re doing in social value. It’s our sustainability credentials, it’s perhaps our security posture or partner ecosystem. It’s the things that are actually driving scoring and bits that we should also be talking about, because they that is what is going to be part of that decision process. And if anything, as we’ve said, the design content needs to be findable. First of all, we can’t find it. It’s not much. It needs to be bingeable. So, people really want to look at it. You know, Katy, you know about the SEO optimisation, interlinking pages and also clear next steps so the buyer knows where they can navigate across. But I think from

we need to start with the bias questions and objectives like persona and journey mapping. You know, we need to do that, or else, what we do is we put out what we think they want to see.

29:51 We need to treat content as a system, not a one source. So, every asset needs to have its role. You know, there needs to be no graphs in the.

30:00

Critical decision points that they’re making. So, everything that they’re thinking about we need to be covering, and we need to build proof into all of it. So, link back to the references I’ve mentioned, the data points, the analysts, quotes, you know, the partner validation. And again, all of this can be used in our ABM and DBM work, which is really important. And then again, as we’ve said, nonlinear journeys assume that the buyer is going to come in at any point, and each asset needs to be standalone, and you also should then be signpost to where you go next. But I think the messy middle, I agree, great word, is really forcing us to publish richer, more structured mix of content and proof and to think like the buying group. So we need to give them the reason to confidently shortlist us before we get into the room. Clear marketing role to do that.

30:57 I agree with everything.

30:59

There’s nothing I can add to that.

31:03

Oh, the whole the customer journey mapping as your kind of central point for decisions around this is just, it’s just music to my ears. It’s just, it’s, it’s absolutely frustrating. The amount of companies I speak to who know what they want to talk about, but have no idea what their customer wants to talk about, or at what point they’re at this point in asking that question. And if there is a use for AI, it’s putting your research in there and going, what are the questions you know that this audience is asking of us? So, we have a question from CJ, who is part of our team, and you know very well, so it’s probably an easy one. Do you have a different reporting head office in Japan? Oh, hold on, let me put it up here.

31:54 Say your regional country reporting, and if so, how do you decide who needs to see and hear? What, in other words, are you doing separately? Yeah. So great question. So how we’re structured is, UK is one of the countries in a region which is Europe, and then Europe is obviously part of the global sphere. So, we do have all that reporting that goes up and up, and actually you see the dilution as it goes further up. Of course you do. Because if I think about the breadth of my reporting in the UK, if I had to roll that up to Europe, and every country in Europe did the same that I did, and then it went up to global, it would be completely pointless, because there’d be too much info. So you tend to find it gets tighter and tighter, and what we’re finding with it, it is 100% KPI. So the measurement is around that sales stage one, opportunity creation. It’s the conversion rate of them. It’s what has generated the pipeline of those conversions and where we’ve supported influence pipeline through, say, Account Based Marketing or touching those broad aspects of those deals that we need to extend or upsell in. So, it goes down from the broad that we’re seeing and perhaps the delivery to get us to that point to just the outcome that is what they’re reporting on, scary, but also refreshing. And I think it can be scary to a degree, because sometimes, you know, I think all of us in the marketing world know you can put a huge amount of efforts into a campaign effort, cost, resource and time, and it can probably result in something quite small.

33:47 The generated is obviously, you know, the golden star that you want to get, but the amount of work to get it to that point is sometimes really, really long, and so is the buying cycle. And I think also that needs to be really, really clearly understood, because often we sit in a financial year and the buying cycle sits without, you know, it’s much broader. It could be 12 to 18 months, or it could be 24 months. So it’s when you see metrics compared to the work. Sometimes it just looks a bit smaller.

34:21 Encourage the senior stakeholders to hold their nerve. I just want to nip back to the messy middle, because I’d love to know where you feel social helps this whole system. Because you know how I feel like I often say social is the oil in the engine. It kind of touches everything. But I’d be really keen to know how you feel social fits in that new structure that you have, and also that that dealing with that messy middle, that multi touch point part,

34:52 absolutely so social, for me, is an accelerator. That’s what it is. But it has to be integrated. So, it cannot be standard.

35:00 Own, but for us, it’s the fastest place to test messages and creatives with real time feedback. So, it can help us look, refine and change in our channels instantly.

35:13 I also think that it probably gives us the credibility check and it helps us validate whether our story, and as I’ve said, our proof points are landing with real audiences. And if anything, it forces simple customer centric language, because if it doesn’t work on social, it’s going to be way too complex then. And sometimes we get really, really caught up into our business language that most people don’t understand. But I think the great thing about social is that it extends the reach way beyond the one contact. So it extends to the wider buying committee, which nowadays is really, really important, and it shows us interest at account role and sector level, which again will help us see where the interest is building. And I think it’s an enabler for sales. So, we get those engagement signals, really, really important that we can use for outreach, and the sales team can then use the content we’ve created to support their conversation and with customers. So I think really, really important, but they are areas where we might get it wrong, and I’m just going to kind of add that in, because I think this is really important too, and I think it’s sometimes when people, again, I’ve might have mentioned those pet projects that people want to do, and that that’s when we get it wrong in social because you’re always going to see really, really low impact when It goes out. Because if there’s no integration into other elements of the campaign, so making sure it’s linked to that web, to that email, to the events, we’re not going to see anything, and it’s not going to generate that return that we needed to. And for us this year, it’s been quite a fundamental change. Is that we’ve got an inside sales team. They are an absolute godsend. There are teams that are working in lockstep with us, that when we start getting those engagement rates, when we start seeing that interest through the campaign that are being pulled down from social we look at it and we go,

37:15 should we look at reaching out at this point, at an early stage, or do we put it back into social nurturing, and actually that’s allowed us to move a lot quicker. So we really seeing that benefit of social bringing that whole system together, because we’re now moving faster. We’re building that clarity, we’re getting our story out, and sales are also seeing that enablement come in. So just has to be right in the centre, integrating everything in, yeah, as I said, oil in the engine. And I think absolutely, really super interesting, actually, because not only is it that you just talked about, it’s also a lovely test bed. At the moment, we all know that AEO, you know, the AI search engines, are becoming dominant, and a major part of how our buyers are shortlisting, which is terrifying, and we’ve recently, with your more European Division, started working with Reddit. So we know LinkedIn gets picked up also Reddit. And what was really interesting was we use tools like brand watch to go into

38:18 the detail of Reddit, and we can see the questions people are asking. I mean, just like Kevin, you know. So, so now we can go, you know, if they’re looking at Cloud compatibility or cyber security in a specific area, what questions are being asked, and you can see the questions and the in a way, some of the thought processes that buyers have got. And that is, you know, it becomes, it means that areas that maybe sit outside of the typical sort of LinkedIn become the place you can test bed as well. So, yeah, I think it’s, it’s, you know, I do love social. It keeps changing. But, you know, right now, it’s an exciting space to be in for B to be, I agree. So, before we wrap up, I’ve got a couple of questions before we wrap up, and one of them is, if there was one thing you protect, even you know under pressure, if we were all sick,

39:15 because it saved time and gave you that chance to have the confidence for later on, what would you? What would you? What would you save? What’s the one thing you think?

39:25 I think it’s, it’s probably one thing that I try and stick to as as much as I possibly can. And we’re feeling at a loss at the moment, is that it’s getting clear objectives from business and what we want to achieve before we start the work. And so the reason I say that is that sometimes, in beginning, we so dependent on the accounts and the sales team for their plans, and we’re eager to start working, and we sometimes maybe push it, push it forward a bit.

40:00

It’s but I think that we need to recognise that it’s okay to be slower at the start and make sure that we get the right direction, because in the long run, it saves us a huge amount of time, because it means we get those fewer rewrites, we get those fewer projects, we get less scope creeper is going to mess it up. Scope creep and far less debate around if it if it worked or not, you know. So, I think if there’s one thing I really protect is that, as we stand by that to say, actually we need the objectives, we need the what we want to achieve before, because it’s going to build confidence for the stakeholder and sales, because when we report back, we’ve agreed the exact goals, we’ve agreed together. But sometimes it’s that, oh, they don’t know, I’m just going to do this. So I think, if anything, it’s just to protect the we want the clear objectives, and we’re not going to do anything until we’ve got it, you know, and I just need to listen to those words. I’m going to put this on repeat when I when I finish listening, because it really is really important. But sometimes it’s difficult to get and you’ve got to hold your nerve on that one. Oh, I just, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, you totally have my agreement on that because, yeah, the frustration is often a woolly brief, and you think, you know, I always think that’s also terrible for, you know, just as normal human beings with anxiety, because you never know if you’re quite doing this right, or if you’re getting in the right. You’re having to make a judgement call, which you don’t really need to. If they told you the answer yes, I’m absolutely with you. And as an agency, yeah, we get this all the time,

41:46 actual objectives, and also get objectives that go beyond we want, you know, more followers, so go beyond that and actually something that actually means something to the business. So we’ve come majority to the end. I think this has been it’s not just useful. It’s really fascinating to talk to max about, actually, what is quite a challenging thing to do. Restructure your department, manage people in that process, because change is difficult. You know, what’s your kind of looking back on the year? What’s your kind of one thing that you kind of go, Yeah, I’m really pleased I did this.

42:35 I think that it’s to sit now and to look back being a year,

42:42 we can see the work has paid off. Think if you had asked me six months in, I would have probably had a bit of more of a wobble and thought, have I done the right thing? And I can still go back,

42:55

But I think sticking to the to our guns of doing it, and if anything, it’s a shout out to my team, who are incredible and who bought into it and the change, I wouldn’t say without question, because they all at the level where they challenge, which is really important, but bought into it and then delivered it with me. And I think having that unified voice as the team to kind of stick to what we’re doing, we’ve managed to achieve it.

43:31 So, for me, I think, if I look back, I think was the team who actually helped push this over the line, and actually brought everyone with them, because they were the ones doing the work. And so, all the accounts and the sectors and our stakeholders have got a real respect for what the team have delivered.

43:53 And perhaps in some areas, there wasn’t a big change because they didn’t have a marketing person. And so now they think marketing is amazing because now they’ve got all these marketing people. So, I think if I look back, I’d say that I’m proud of the team, I’m proud of what we’ve done, and really pleased we did it. I’m really pleased we did it now. I’m also not going to say we’re going to stick on this structure for the next 20 years, but I think what it allows us to see is that we’ve got the ability to be agile, we’ve got the strength to kind of move with it, and if anything that in, it’s in a test by itself. To know that we’ve got that resilience as a team is the most important thing for me, because I know regardless of what I throw at them, it’s not going to be as hard as the COI is, and so they’re going to be amazing.

44:44 Just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And, you know, I did an interview the other day with another podcaster, and I said they asked me what I thought was the one thing that marketeers need in today’s day and age, and I said it’s the ability to change.

45:00 That is thing that because the world is moving so fast in our world, whether it’s data, whether it’s AI, whether it’s machine learning, whatever it is, it’s just it’s crazy fast, and if we don’t change with it, there’s no point going, Oh, I wish for the days when we could send, you know, faxes. You know, wishing for those days shows you how old that I remember when we used to run campaigns on a fax machine. Yes,

45:29 but, you know, we can’t. There’s no point wishing. You know, it’s this is the way it is. And, you know, I think getting time back to be able to think about these things, and more importantly, I would think with our teams, is giving them the opportunity to learn more skills is very satisfying. It rounds out the role, makes people feel more comfortable, and allows them to see how interconnected it is. You talked about social being interconnected, but that that wonderful interconnection between all that we do and how we can bring it together, because it’s like tidying up our own messy middle put onto a bit world.

46:10 Max. Thank you so much. This has been, I knew it would be. I knew it would be. And I really hope that there are an awful lot of marketers out there who are, you know, maybe on the brink of making changes or feeling that their teams are creaking, who can take some comfort from this, that it does work. It, you know, it’s not an easy path, but it is a path that actually draws benefit from it. And, you know, we’ll try and pull some stuff together in a blog and a little bit of a framework afterwards show how you might ask yourselves the right questions, so that if you’re going through this yourself and looking for change, you too, can you too? Can make it happen?

46:54 Thank you again. Thank you for having me, lovely listeners, and we’ll catch you after Easter

47:03 bye.