In this episode, Katy Howell sits down with Tejal Patel and Scott Stockwell to break down why fixing the fundamentals is the key to marketing success. While trends come and go, businesses that align marketing with business goals are 37% more likely to succeed, yet only 6% use customer insights effectively—and that’s where the real opportunity lies.
Full transcript:
Katy Howell: Hello, and I think, I’m hoping we are live. Welcome. Welcome. I’m Katy Howell. I am the founder and owner of immediate future social media agency, and today I’ve got some guests for me to talk about something that I think is very close to a lot of our hearts at the moment, which is marketing feels like we’re spinning plates. There’s so many tools, so much noise, and we never seem to have enough time to get it done. And you know, talking to my guests earlier, you know, from the pandemic to the political climate, we’ve been running from one place to the other, trying to get our jobs done. So that’s why today we’re going to strip it all back and focus on the one thing that makes everything else work, getting the basics right. So, joining me today are two incredible experts who we’ve had before, who’ve been in the trenches solving these challenges. Firstly, I’ve got the amazing Tejal Patel. Hello.
Tejal Patel: Hello.
Katy Howell: Customer centric marketing leader with senior roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Nokia. I love your mantra, Tejal, which is, fix the basics, then earn the right to innovate. You can see I’ve stolen that it’s just brilliant, and you’re well known for driving growth and transformational change. And returning as one of our guests is Scott Stockwell, creator, creative communicator and consulting expert across a multitude of industries. Advocate for, and we’re going to, apparently, do an exercise, advocate for agile and design thinking, which I adore, chair of the DMA, B2B Council, ex IBM, PwC, a storyteller at heart, I think a strategic storyteller at heart, driving business impact. So, let’s set the context. So, the thing is, in marketing, innovation often steals the headlines, but the real game changes are often the really what appear to be the very fundamental basics of what we do, whether it’s how we align our teams, understanding customers or simply having a strategy. And according to a study by McKinsey, organisations with high alignment between marketing and business goals are nearly 40% more likely to achieve their strategic objectives, which is amazing, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s who are the ones that don’t have it yet, because 24% of businesses don’t even map their customer behaviours. And that, I think this is, you know, what we’re seeing is a lot of data showing that we’re not ahead of the game. We’re just running around being reactive. So, I’m going to dive into the questions. Please ask questions. Pop them in comments. I will happily read them out. Let’s get this a solution we can get together. So, I want to kick off with you Tejal, your mantra, fix the basics before you innovate. Tell us more.
Tejal Patel: Well, actually, as you said, you’ve stolen that. I think I heard it somewhere as well. I think I’ve always been a big fan of fixing basics. In fact, that’s something I used a lot at Cisco when I first joined. But then I picked up the other part of it elsewhere, which is, you gotta earn the right to innovate. And I think sometimes, especially as marketers, we get, we get drawn to the innovation part first and the shiny new thing. And I’ll be spending enough time on the basics parts, which kind of sounds boring, but I think it’s important to have those strong foundations. And I’ve got another statistic I wanted to add to your McKinsey, one, actually, that I came across recently. Apparently, according to Gartner, 60% of marketing strategies fail due to poor execution. Um, which I thought was astonishing figure. So I’ve been talking to a lot of marketing leaders, my own experience, and I’ve been doing a lot of research as I’ve been developing my new consulting practice, and a leader recently, in fact, just last week I was talking to and I was like, yeah, there’s no this is what the big problem is the strategy, and then there’s not alignment with execution. And the response I got back was, oh Tejal, a lot of times, the strategy itself doesn’t exist. And I was like, oh, my God, that’s actually true, because I’ve seen it myself as well, that we’re not stopping to create that strategy in the first place. You know? Why do we exist? What does success look like? You know, what are we laddering up to? What’s the vision, what’s our purpose as a team? And you know, what the metrics that matter? Are we aligning that with other functions in our organisation? So, I’ll be speaking the same language, and I don’t think that enough time is invested in doing that and then the other thing, I think, is also strategy in itself isn’t enough. And I think in big companies, you can have really pretty strategy documents that look really impressive, lots of great infographics and all sorts of things. But unless you actually deliver against that strategy, it’s only going to ever stay on paper. And so, I think the next part of all of this is, are you creating a plan, an annual plan? And again, I’ve seen this many times where it just doesn’t exist. What is it you’re going to do in your team, in your function that ladders up to that bigger strategy? And I genuinely believe that it has to be down to the leader to provide that clarity. But then every individual in your team, even if you’re a team of four or three or a team of 20 or 50 – does every individual feel like, yeah, what I’m doing every day is laddering up to into this plan, and this is my contribution into the bigger strategy. Because if they’re not seeing that then, and we’re going to talk about some of that later, if they’re not seeing that, they’re not motivated, they’re not necessarily working on the prioritised things. So, strategy is important, but then a plan that is regularly reviewed is equally important. And it all sounds really boring, but I think it’s really foundational. And I think planning is like a muscle. It needs training and it needs discipline.
Katy Howell: Yeah, could not agree with you more. And I think one of the things is and you just mentioned there, it can often feel boring, because, you know, once you’ve been in marketing a few years, like me, it’s the same stuff you’re doing again and again. But actually, you need to remember that the goal is that people around you haven’t, and you’re more important your customers haven’t, so stop changing things just because you’re a bit bored. Scott
Scott Stockwell: Yes, can I pick up something that Tejal says. So, it’s great to have the strategy, but like you said, don’t sort of make it pretty and wonderful and frame it and put it on a wall or put it in a drawer. It has to be useful. But does everybody understand what the strategy is? Because you can get into a little bit of a leadership, sort of preaching to the choir. They’re all super happy with the strategy. They’ve built it together. They understand it. They’ve talked about it, and they think that means that the rest of an organisation has that same understanding. But how clearly is it communicated to everybody? So yes, you sent out the strategy document, or you’ve had your all-hands call. But have people understood? You know, Katy, to your point, what it is. What does it mean to me when I do something? Can I see it is actually laddering up to delivering this big vision that we’ve got at the top? Because if it doesn’t, it’s like being in a relay race, but you might be in a different lane or a different track, or running the other way, or you don’t understand what the baton is. You know, everybody really needs to understand the strategy to know where they fit within it.
Katy Howell: Which kind of neatly fits with this design thinking. Start off by telling us, Scott, what is design thinking?
Scott Stockwell: Design thinking, it’s a little bit, I sort of picture it a little bit like yoga. It’s sort of a set of principles and practices that you deploy. But what they all do is put the human in the center. It’s all about understanding what is the human problem that you’re trying to face, and starting there, and then, when you start there, everything else you do, going back to that laddering back, will have an impact which is going to meet your ultimate need. You know, organisations exist to solve problems with people. That’s usually where most organisations have come up. Someone’s thought, I can see someone with a problem. I can see they’re not getting it fixed. I’ve got a better way of doing it, or a different way of doing it, or a quicker way of doing it. It’s rarer that someone invents something brand new and then goes and finds a market and a problem that it’s going to fix. So always putting the human in the center helps you with those practices to design things that are going to work for them.
Katy Howell: Brilliant, beautifully explained. Do ask questions if you’re watching live, I’m getting more and more embarrassed the more I have to say the word AI, because I always think, yeah, it’s just a big trend and a big innovation. But, but, but, – research is showing that AI driven marketing strategies can improve campaign ROI, apparently up by 30% but, and you too, both have really extensive experience with. AI. So I’m super keen to understand how you can use AI responsibly. Both of you really. Should we start with you, Tejal?
Tejal Patel: I’m going to throw in another statistic as well, actually, because I’ve been looking at some of this and I can’t, everyone’s been looking at AI. I know you’re right. Katy, it does feel like, oh my god, you don’t go a day without talking about AI. But apparently, I saw a data point from the World Economic Forum, and this is a bit of a scary one, but 40% of companies plan workforce reductions in 2025 due to AI. So, the big cheeses in companies think that AI means they’re not going to need as many people to do the work. I think that’s, you know, maybe pushing it too fast. I don’t know if it’s going to be that that many companies just in one year. I think the point is, there is a lot that AI can do at speed, efficiently. It needs the human quality control, the human inputs, the prompts that are got to be quality prompts to get the quality out, let alone other models trained with robust data. I think let’s make sure we think about all of those things. If you’re putting crap in and then you’re trying to build some sort of, you know, response from AI based on that, then you’re going to get crap out. And the dangerous part is sometimes you don’t know if the quality of that data, the model has been trained on is good in the first place. So I think you got to have a little bit of caution there, and a bit of the, definitely the human angle, but AI is here to stay. It isn’t just a trend. Everyone, I’m sure who’s joining us today will have used AI to some level. I’m sure you have in your own personal life when you’re using it for work. I think the creative industry kind of, you know, change that we’re going to see is going to be huge. And this is the year for kind of the visual AI changes we saw the Coca Cola ad over Christmas that was generated by AI. I don’t know how much they saved in in their creative cost. Apparently, they’ve also said it minimised environmental impact because of they didn’t need as much lighting or whatever it was traveling somewhere to build the ad. I mean, my argument would be, the amount of energy taken in every single prompt that you put in is huge, right? I don’t know the data point there. Someone might know what is joining us, but it’s actually not very environmentally friendly to be using AI either. But that’s a different conversation. The point is that, in my opinion, I think for smaller organisations, AI is the great equalizer. It’s going to allow smaller companies with even tighter resource constraints to kind of punch above their weight to get great content out, video production out without the big budgets. I think that’s really important. I think the analysis around data and how you leverage that to enable you to understand, you know, what customer data do you have? How do you build your ABM strategy faster? What trends are you missing out on? Or where are the gaps? Where are the commonalities between your customer groups and segments? I think there’s a lot of all of that. I’ve not used all of that yet fully. I know Co Pilots like becoming really popular. I’m not a big fan of Co Pilot yet, but I think there are lots of areas of opportunity there. We should all be testing this out and really thinking hard about how you’re not getting more people automatically. Everyone is struggling to get more resource and more budget. You’re not going to get that this year, most of you. So, what are you going to do using AI?
Katy Howell: Excellent points. Scott?
Scott Stockwell: So many things to unpack in that one. Definitely garbage, garbage in, garbage out. So, you know, yes, you’ve got some new tools, but when you put your data through it, what’s going to come out the other side? And do you know what good is and what bad is? That’s really going to be the test, given that you can reduce the amount of time you’re spending on things that are repetitive, things that really could do with automating. And let’s face it, as marketers, there’s sort of, first of all, there was marketing, and then ERP packages came in, and more sophisticated tools, and we spent a lot of time as marketers learning how to make the tools work, and then we spend more and more time just doing making tools work and creating dashboards. And here’s another one stop shop for all the different data points that we haven’t managed to get into another dashboard. And all of that’s very busy work based on data. But going back to the getting the basics right, what difference does that make to the customer with a problem that they’ve come to you to try and solve? And when you start to think about how much time might AI give you back, when you start using it, you ask the question, rather than it being an automatic well, we’ll have fewer people because we’ve saved some time. Think about what could those people be doing better with the time that they’ve now got? And actually, I’ve run quite a few workshops around this. When you go to marketers and say you’ve got 40% of your time back, what are you going to start doing with that time first? There’s some awkward shuffling. There’s that Brits in a lift feel everyone goes a little bit quiet, and nobody says anything, and sort of looks around the table for who’s going to say something. That’s when we have to go back to the basics. What are we really here to do? Because that’s where you would probably start with your 40% of time back. The other one is it really has the chance to be all the gear and no idea. You know, you’ve got a new tool. It’s very spangly and sparkly, and there’s some people that are doing it really well. Can you do it well? Do you know how to do it? Do you know when you’ve done it right, when you’ve done it wrong? Are you talking to anybody else about how they’re using it. And what results have they seen? You know, you look around for case studies today of where have people used AI, well, there’s not that many out there. So there’s a lot of experimentation. And I think 2024 was definitely put your toe in the water, you know, generate that picture of, you know, I did one yesterday, socks on an octopus in Photoshop to see what it would come out with. Nothing very useful. This year is more, right, we’ve played with it. We can start to see that there’s some benefits here. Let’s find some practical applications for it. I think wind the clock forwards a couple of years, it’s going to be like digital marketing. You know, you won’t talk about digital marketing, because all marketing will have some kind of digital component to it. And I really don’t think it’s going to be long before we think the same thing of AI.
Katy Howell: I think Tom has got I’m just going to put this up now. I need my glasses. Thank you. AI -replacing people. Ultimately, when business lean on tools too heavily, what separates you from your competitors? If every company is doing the same thing, the human value add is priceless. AI will have its place, but there is a ceiling, and companies need to be careful how gung-ho they will go with cutting people. I think it’s a very valid point. If you don’t know what really it speaks to what you guys have been saying, which is, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can if you don’t know the data that’s going in, is right. If you don’t know what you’re expecting out, and somebody isn’t checking that, just letting the machines run, the world is just going to take us to beige, in my view.
Scott Stockwell: I think it’s called the Iron Triangle. I might got the name wrong, but it’s the sort of the speed, quality and cost, which is the things. It’s very hard to get all of those three things working well at the same time. The really big one here is quality. You know, yes, you can do it quicker, yes, you can do it cheaper, yes, you can do it at more scale. Do you know what good is? And that really is the human input. You know, you’ve got to use the tool well, that’s the whole all the gear, no idea. But when you’ve used it, you’ve then got to know, has what’s come out the other end been any quality? And then now we’ve involved our audience, and we’re hopefully seeing some results from them. Is it making a difference? If you’re not doing those three things, you’re not going to get the value from it.
Katy Howell: Absolutely. And I would say to any CMO, and every CMO should be having a crack at AI. Learn how to prompt. It’s not, it’s not as easy as you think. You know, some of my prompts are, you know, a couple of pages long. They’re not straightforward. And learning how to ask the machine so that you get what you need is somewhat apart from learning the basics, but it’s somewhat trial and error. You don’t know until you start practicing it. So yeah, big cry out to CMOs. Let’s move on, because you’ve both mentioned something. Well, in fact, Scott, you talked about the fact that you know, once it’s out in the wild, whatever, whoever produced it, whether it was a machine or man, once it’s out in the wild, you know, it’s what your audience thinks. And I think many organisations struggle with putting the customer first. It’s really bad because, you know, studies show that putting the customer, knowing your customer, knowing those segments, actually outperforms anything else that you can do. And it is a very basic thing. But it seems to me, it’s still in B2B, a really big challenge to understand the customer. So I’d love your thoughts on, why don’t you kick off, Scott because, that follows what you said.
Scott Stockwell: Yeah. I mean, this is one also to ask everybody, you know, everyone on the live, reflect on when was the last time you actually talked to one of your customers. And I know in B2B, that’s a little bit more challenging, because it’s, it’s less direct for marketers, I think, than B2C. But if you didn’t talk to a customer, when was the last time you talked to sales who talked to a customer? And for most of us, it’s probably been a while. So that’s that would be question number one. Question number two, when was the last time you try to sign up for a trial of your product and or use the service you’re selling? You know, did you do the research to find out what made you different from everybody else? Did you try and create an ID? Log on, purchase something, download it, have a problem with it, get some support with the problem you had, because we’re very good at getting campaigns out there to drive interest and get people’s, you know, enthusiasm for what we do, but really you have to know what their experience is like first hand to know, are you going back to that, that source we’ve been on from the beginning, what’s the pain you’re solving for them? And just asking those couple of things, when was the last time you talked to someone, when was the last time you did it? And this is going back a little bit to when the internet was kind of like not great dial up and you had real capacity issues. There was one organisation that, on a Thursday, used to slow all of their it down to the fastest speed of the slowest customer they had. So, if your dial up was, like, really slow, they would make the whole organisation for that day go at that speed, and the frustration people had on like, why I can’t do this quick enough, and this is terrible, and that’s your customer experience. And now you know that, how are you going to work so that you get the best experience with those limited resources.
Katy Howell: For me, this is a massively fundamental basic that it is not just, you know, I’m selling to everybody who buys, you know, this kind of software, or I’m selling to all CFOs. Is this very vanilla way of looking at your audiences. Often, you know, the ICP is one sort of blobby type of buyer, and we know they’re buying units. I mean, I’d love your thoughts to Tejal.
Tejal Patel: Ah, well, look, I think I want to make a point first on what Scott was saying about the customer, part of it, are we even talking to our customers, that’s exactly the same quote I’d make. And you don’t need the big research, budgets to do big customer research. It literally is, can you talk to a customer? Have you tried buying your own product or signing up for a trial? And if those things fail, can you talk to your sales team, your account team? They are talking to their customers, their accounts on a very regular basis. Are they helping you to develop that ICP, social listening tools? Kate, come on that. You know what? Why are we not using the insights from social media? There’s conversations that are happening. What are the trends? What are they saying? What they’re saying about brands, what’s really worrying them? Because they’re probably going to say more stuff there than they’re ever going to tell you or tell your account people. So, I think there’s a lot of data out there that can be used. And then the other thing, actually, I wanted to also make a point about with the customer centricity part. And having come from B2C, by the way, I always found that really odd in my time, I’ve had in B2B that no one talks about the customer enough. Yet we’re talking about 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of dollars pounds worth of solutions that they’re often buying in B2B, and yet we don’t really talk about what the customer cares about and what access to them. I find it really bizarre that it’s very inward looking. Here’s our spec and our product, and it’s really just features based and not very benefits led. I think it’s changing, to be fair.
Katy Howell: It’s changing. But you really, you really see the blunt side of that in social you really do, which is, you know, customers are talking about one thing, and the suppliers or vendors are just, you know, on another planet, you know, yeah, surprises me.
Tejal Patel: Creatively, honestly and I know Scott, last time is stuck in my head really well that with the reason why blue is used so much in all these B2B brands, so that’s something I’ve learned now, but yeah, the point I was going to make actually, apart from the lack of customer centricity or not as great as it should be. The other thing we don’t talk enough about is testing. If you’re not sure about your messaging, you live in a digital world and social media, instantaneous testing is possible, of your messaging, your proposition, your positioning, test it out, put it out. Your customers will soon tell you whether it’s resonating with them. Because who are you to know it’s right, you’re not the customer. I mean, unless you genuinely are the customer. And this is where it’s easier, in the consumer world, where you might be buying a particular shampoo or whatever, and you have affinity to it. In the B2B space, you unlikely, as a marketeer, to have an affinity for that product you’re marketing. So, test it out there. Yeah, and then the personalisation part, and that’s another one, by the way, we’ve talked so much about personalisation over the years, and I don’t know how successfully we’ve cracked it, but back to the AI conversation from earlier. I think now the content opportunity is there to have the personalised content, really, at, you know, individual level, almost, or a much more personal level than we’ve ever had. So, I think that enables you to scale much quicker than before. So, yeah, I think we should definitely talk about the customer.
Scott Stockwell: I think that testing, that testing is such a good such a good point. I think we’ve always been on about, you know, test it, AB test it, test it before you go, learn from it. I mean, hand on heart. How many of us have made that, you know, a frequent activity. We’d love to do it. Do we have the time to do it? Get it out the door. I need the results straight away. Quarterly reporting is coming up. Haven’t got too long to run tests. Just get it out there. Get it out there. I think AI gives us that really good opportunity. Katy, as you said, you actually do have to try your prompt several different ways before you get the answer that you’re looking for. And equally, we should be trying once we’ve had that answer, get that out and test that before you sort of assume that it’s right. The other thing AI gives us, and I’m still a little bit unpersuaded on how useful this is, is the synthetic data. So, the synthetic users, your synthetic focus group, that you can go and ask them what they think, and you’re sort of taking the risk away from you’re not asking customers directly, you’re asking your synthetic panel. So again, is your data right? Does it really represent your audience? Is it really a good indicator of how they might respond? It’s certainly better than doing nothing at all and just sending it out and hoping so. I think again, 2025, synthetic data. You know, synthetic profiles and personas going to be interesting to see what happens.
Katy Howell: I think, since you last mentioned them, synthetic personas, I think they’re going to be huge. And part of the reason I think they’re going to be huge is I’ve been having conversations with brands like Global Web Index, who do quarterly survey data like sort of TGI, for want of a better word. Amazing insight on purchase behaviours, everything from the typical demographics through to media consumption, through to behaviours, attitudes, values, and they are looking at this. And I think this is, this is super interesting, that if you, you know, get the right data in place, that’s the big question mark. This could be incredibly valuable. And while we’re talking about AI, I just want to bring up. Katie Bell has put up a question, which I think is really interesting, because it sort of flows into this. Katie says: I’m not sure whether AI has a subjective sense of good. Can humans even fully agree on what good means. Yeah, I’m with you on that. The real question is, Can AI be trained to recognise, measure and optimise for high quality outcomes? For me, that answer is yes. You know you both have had experience? Do you think AI can be trained to know what good is.
Scott Stockwell: I think if we know what good is, and if we learn from customers what they think good is, then yes, but it literally is, it will be as good as we train it. You know, not only garbage in, garbage out, but it is also the way that you train it. It’s like going back to that real basic training Pavlov’s dogs. You know, this was the experiment where he fed the dogs and rang a bell. He fed the dogs and rang a bell. He fed the dogs and rang a bell. Then when he just rang a bell, the dog salivated because they were ready to eat the food, because he just sort of trained them to do it. Very, very basic but do that at scale and complexity, you have to know what you want the quality of that outcome to be, and that goes into the training so that you can then evaluate it. Hundreds of years ago, back when I was in maths class at school, calculators came in. I did math so long ago that we didn’t have calculators. They were new and exciting. And before we were allowed to use calculators, you had to write down on a piece of paper what you thought roughly the answer was going to be, so that when you then typed the sort of the equation into your calculation, you got an answer you would know roughly – yes, that’s kind of the right scale of response. And I think it’s so important as we go into this, you know, brave new world, we have to have a good sense of what that good is before we ask a question. Otherwise, how do we know what quality the answer is.
Tejal Patel: Yeah. And I think then the other thing I don’t add to that completely agree with everything Scott said, I think in the end, we, as much as we talk about AI, in the end most well, we’re all marketing to human beings, real life, 3d human beings. And we change our minds. We evolve at different pace. I think there’s been that famous study, not study that research that Coca Cola did years and years ago about a new taste, and on paper, it looked like all the customers that they surveyed and tested out this kind of better tasting coke that they wanted to go for it, and then they took it out to market, and it tanked, and so they had to relaunch with the original flavour, and I think they called it the real taste, or they had to kind of go through the whole thing again. And I think the point here is that what customers are going to tell you, or your synthetic customers are going to tell you, in theory versus how they behave in real life, could sometimes be two different things. So I think we just got to be mindful. Yes, we can train the data. Yes, we can set the standard of what good looks like, because we’ll have our own metrics in our organisation. But what’s the customer going to bite at that buying committee? What is it going to take and this? And with the buying committee, you’ve got all of this group of human beings with different things, different fears, different emotions, and at any given time, what is going to tip them into buying versus, oh no, we’re not ready yet. Or no, let’s go back and review who we’re going to work with. So, I think there’s going to be that element, and that’s never going away, right? Unless, literally, we are all run by droids and we’re in the matrix world, which hopefully isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes.
Katy Howell: Although, you know, it brings me on to this. We’ve talked a lot about technology, but that isn’t the answer to everything, and we, lot of marketeers that will be tuning into this will have limited budgets. You know, how do you balance the need to invest the basics, invest in the basics, but also balance that for immediate results, which seems to be, I speak to a lot of marketers who are in that tussle with their leadership teams, where the leadership teams are going to go, and we need this this quarter, and we need this this quarter and they’ve got very tight budgets. They can’t look long term. They’ve often in many cases, running from quarter to quarter, and it’s really hard to look up. So how do we improve the basics in that kind of running to catch up doing what’s in front of you, kind of mindset?
Scott Stockwell: I’d start with the good old adage, what’s measured or rewarded gets done. So are you really clear? Again, if you go back to the customer, what is the pain point? How close are we getting to solving it with what we’re doing, if you start with your measures there and go backwards, because there is that, let’s just do a load of stuff. Do stuff ,be busy. Let’s just see that there’s quantity of stuff happening. If you’re measuring quantity of stuff happening, you look great. We’ve done stuff. We’ve delivered stuff. It’s been amazing. That’s happened. Was it useful? Did the customer like it again? Go right the way back to the basics. It’s a little bit like building a house. You can have fantastic interior design, the most gorgeous looking rooms, but if you’ve got no foundations, it’s just going to be a pretty house that’s not going to last very long, and most organisations probably want to be around from more than the next quarter. So what are the basics? What are we measuring? Let’s start there.
Tejal Patel: Agree with that. I think, look, I feel the pain of people joining this call off, generally, all marketers out there. It is really, really hard out there. Everyone, your leaders, your bosses, your C-suite, your board, want more and more out of you with less and less resource. And it feels that, I spent all those years at Cisco, and I felt like even a big organisation like Cisco, every year, the budgets weren’t going up. They really weren’t going up, and it was really hard and but you somehow managed to pull stuff out the bag. But it is back to some of that planning part of it. So, in your planning, you’ve got to have those two or three big rocks you want to address for that year that are the longer term things that you want to get to. But absolutely, you do need to have your, you know, what I’d call you’re always on tactics, tactics that you they’re well versed. They kind of, you know, I think in the ideal world, you need to get to a place where you know what your levers are, to dial up and down, and you can get them out the bag as and when needed for. We’re not hitting targets this quarter, or whatever it might be, but it is back. It’s that basics of, have you got the sales and marketing alignment? Are you agreed on the accounts that mattered the most, and then are you all doubling down on those accounts? Do you have a nurture strategy? How are you following up there your warm leads? What are you doing with your retargeting? How robust is your website? Don’t try and fix all of it. Where are the conversion points on your site? Do you have a CRO strategy in place? Because your site is obviously incredibly important for generating those leads or potentially even driving the sale, doing things like low-cost webinars and virtual events. These are things, I think that after a while, if you practice that muscle back to the muscle of planning, you know, you’ve got these things, you’re going to kind of scatter through the course of the quarter of the year, and you have that as a well-oiled engine to then and using the bit of the AI part. And I love what Scott said earlier, how do you then free up the time of the brains of the people in your team to think about that long term stuff that does require thinking time to make the big changes you want to make that takes 1,2,3 years to make. So unfortunately, I know that this is no silver bullet here. You are going to keep being asked to do the short-term stuff, but you’ve got to somehow transform your business at the same time.
Katy Howell: The idea of having those rocks, having that plan, and Alison earlier on, I’m just going to put this up, I think this is a super point, because as CMOs, even if we’ve only got small teams, or, you know, our colleagues are our sales teams, having that business where you have that psychological safety means that team members can come forward and say, I don’t think this is working, or this is working really well, we’re getting loads of sales this way. It’s getting that feedback internally, we have, in many cases, the marketing department has siloed itself down because it’s so busy. I understand why, but it’s kind of become a little tiny enclave within the bigger organisation, and we do need to spread our wings. So having these long-term goals means that whilst we might not be able to do everything, the basics are that we can keep banging that drum. Maybe in 2026 we can do some of the long-term stuff. But if we’re not banging the drum and we’re just rushing about task after task, we’re not going to get where we need to be. So yeah, and we see it in social all the time, which is, you know, just what we see our brands, just getting content out there, particularly B2B, just get the content out there. We need to post three times a week on LinkedIn. Let’s just get it out there. And it’s not there’s nothing wrong with the content. It’s just nobody knows what you stand for. You’re not memorable. Any of the longer term benefits you want are not there because nobody’s heading in that direction and you are producing a lot of content.
Scott Stockwell: A lot of this goes hand in hand with the other debate that we have a lot, which is the brand versus demand. You know, are you doing demand activities? Are you doing brand activities? I don’t think you can do those separately. I think everything you do has something to do with building your brand. So, you have to think about the two things, you know, literally hand in glove. I think Alison made a really brilliant point on the psychological safety. I think if you’re an organisation that has a leadership team in a little bit of a Ivory Tower, here’s our strategy. We love it. We think it’s great. If there is a disconnect with the rest of the organisation, understanding it and feeling part of that that’s really when you’re going to start to have those challenges of being seen as a marketing function, of adding value. You know, you have to have that comfort, that safety, in order to have those conversations. I just want to pick up on one, one point. Tejal, you may, you made so many good points in that last bit, one I’d add is customer journey. And is the do you know what the customer journey is? And the big thing for me, and I think we’re lucky to be in a position, we do a bit of industry judging of awards, one of the things I look for is, are you looking for when somebody falls off of your golden path towards your purchase, and how do you know they’ve fallen off, and what are you doing to kind of bring them back in? I get that you’re never going to have one path that any one customer goes down to purchase something, because we all know it’s super complex, and I think you can generally kind of chart the paths. But do you care about what happens to people that fall off the edge, and how do you bring them back in? And I think a little bit more attention to that would do as good as well.
Tejal Patel: Totally, because it’s not linear, is it? And most people are going to drop off, and it’s and the buying cycle is so long, right? Three, six months plus so and these are things that can be automated. Your journey, your nurture flows, can be automated. And you can have your segmentation and your personalisation, use AI with your coffee and use the right tools, and you don’t have to then worry about it. Think about it, but at least you’ve got a net to capture the people who are falling out from that journey. But you’re right, exactly. It’s not linear. Great point.
Katy Howell: So as a social media person, I’m going to have to ask about social media, but also because the latest research shows that 83% of B2 B marketers use social media. That’s pretty much all of them. I don’t know what the rest of the 17% are doing.
Scott Stockwell: They’re busy scrolling.
Katy Howell: But I’m really interested in your views as because you’re not solely social, either of you. And you know is social the big hope for laying strong foundations in marketing. Where do you see it, and where do you see the value of it in the basics?
Tejal Patel: Shall I go first with this one?
Katy Howell: Yeah, please.
Tejal Patel: So it’s an interesting one, right? There’s so much change happening recently with social media, and we’ve seen some of the drama with TikTok as well in the US over the last couple of weeks, the landscapes changing we’ve seen about the fact checking and all of that changes that Meta have brought in as well. The thing you’ve got to remember is, where are your audiences first of all, and they are spending vast amounts of time on social media with their peers, what they’re watching. You know, for things like LinkedIn, that’s where your peers are. What are they saying about my industry, or whatever topic it might be, and that’s where a lot of these conversations are happening. So, I think for brands to have an authentic voice in those conversations is really important, whether that’s directly of our employees or customers or partners, you’ve got to have a strategy for what you’re doing on social media, because long before anyone’s going to come to your website. And I’ve said this so much as well in and I know this from my consumer tech days, a lot of research we had in the days when I was at Nokia is by the time people are coming to your site, they’ve already kind of shortlisted you. So much work has happened before that. So don’t just get fixated on your website. What are you doing before that? And that’s not just about chucking the ads out there, which you’re right, Katy, a lot of times it’s just nothing exciting about those ads in B2B, and everyone’s going after blue, because Scott says that’s the most trusted colour out there, but everyone looks the same, but you it’s a bit more hard work than just putting an ad out there. What’s your strategy, your employee advocacy, your thought leadership, how you showing up in those conversations? And it has a role to play from that brand component, the kind of brand to demand piece that Scott mentioned, it has high levels of engagement if you’re putting the right content out there to the right audience, and it can drive your lead gen as well. So, I think that you need to have a full funnel strategy for social and your customers there before and pick and choose by the way, that’s one last comment I’m going to make around social media. We think we need to be everywhere. I’m still not convinced about TikTok for a lot of B2B brands. I stand to be challenged on it. And do you have the resource in your team? We went through this exercise at Cisco as well, which is a huge company, huge resources. We pared it right down to can’t invest in X for lots of reasons over the last few years, LinkedIn was the priority. Reddit was the priority. Reddit, I still think, has got huge, oodles of potential from a community standpoint as well. So get behind a couple of platforms and do that well. What’s the point of trying to be on all of them?
Katy Howell: Yeah, couldn’t agree more and also be it be the places your audience actually is. People often say, oh, it’s all about LinkedIn. But if you’re targeting senior buyers, they’re often not on LinkedIn. That they might be signed up to LinkedIn, but they’re not there. Where they are is Facebook. I know everybody likes to deride Facebook on a daily basis, but actually it’s still the biggest social network out there, and if you want to grab them B2B or otherwise, that’s where you need to speak to them. So yeah, one of the bigger challenges, do you have any thoughts, Scott.
Scott Stockwell: Key word for me here is trust, where do you build trust? Because it’s all about relationships. End of the day, the purchase is about a relationship, and the relationships that are best are built on trust. And where do you form it? You know, it’s where you build perceptions. It’s where you have conversations, it’s where you observe people. And I think from a sort of a brand side, is three things. Number one, it’s trust. Number two, it’s consistency, so that when you show up, you show up consistently, and everybody in your organisation shows up consistently. You can still be your individual, authentic self, but you are part of an organisation which is solving particular problems for particular people. So be consistent in that one. And then the third one, which is more of a kind of a consumption of social from the brand side, is empathy. Are you learning how people are responding to you? Are you paying attention? Are you really listening? And are you hearing what they’re saying. And I think if you can get those three things, trust, consistency, empathy, social is such a strong channel for that.
Katy Howell: Yeah, brilliant. It’s lovely to hear different perspectives. I’m aware we’re slowly running out of time so, but I’m very keen, because we’ve talked about getting the basics right to maybe go back to the start of the conversation, talk about planning and cover off really with you, Scott, the how, how you can have agile practices or design thinking to help cut, help the marketing team cut through the complexity of all the things that they have to achieve and get results out the other end.
Scott Stockwell: Yes, so I’m going to going to do a bit of a live experiment here. And I would encourage everybody that’s watching this, if you’re watching it live, do this at the same time, if not, if you’re watching it on demand again, please have a go at this yourself. You only need a pen and either a posted note or one piece of paper. So, get those, get those hands. And this, again, is a little bit like prompting. I’m going to give you a role, and then I’m going to ask you a question. So, I want you to imagine that you are interior designers, and you are designing products for 2025/26 and the first product I’d like you to design on one posted note with a thick pen in less than a minute is a new vase. So, draw me a new vase for 25/26.
Tejal Patel: I hope you’re not judging our design skills.
Scott Stockwell: It’s not. It’s not about artistry. This is just about articulation. So, just a sketch, rough prototype. You know, earlier we were talking about testing. You know, this is not the finished product. This is your quick sketch. What might that vase look like in 25/26.
Tejal Patel: Okay, I feel like I’m literally going to get embarrassed live.
Scott Stockwell: I can see something excellent, okay, hold it up. Brilliant. Katy, thank you, Tajel, hold your hold your design up. Hold them up together. Brilliant. Excellent, okay, now, as you look at each other’s designs, anything in those that is similar?
Katy Howell: Well, there’s a vessel for water.
Scott Stockwell: The vessel for water, perfect. Vessel for water probably stands. Could you stand it? I’m not sure, Tejal, could you stand yours on a surface? It’s got a bit of a round bottom there. Okay, so Design Thinking exercise here, and this is taken from Toyota. So Toyota, who were famed for excellence in or getting their production lines working, they would have a technique called the five whys. If you ask the question, why five times you would come to the human cause of a problem? Equally, if you ask the question, five times you get to the emotional need for something. So, I’m going to start with question number one to you both. Why do you have a vase?
Katy Howell: To put flowers in.
Scott Stockwell: To put flowers in? Question number. Why do you put flowers in a vase?
Katy Howell: They’ve been gifted to you.
Scott Stockwell: Okay, so you’ve had a gift. Why do you want to have a gift around you?
Katy Howell: Bring joy.
Scott Stockwell: Bring joy. Okay, so question number two, on your posted note number two, I want you to design how can you use flowers to bring joy to your customer. So 25/26 a design how would you use flowers to bring joy to your customer? Minute to go, hopefully you’ll do it in less. And this is where I wish I had the bit of theme music. Fabulous. Katy, thank you. Tejal, still finishing hers off. No cheating. She was having a sneaky look there. Fabulous. Hold them both up. Brilliant, right now. Katy, give us a bit of information on your one.
Katy Howell: So, I’ve done lots of little vases that you can put all around the place, because then that would bring you happiness no matter where you were.
Scott Stockwell: So, you’re extending the idea of the vase into more around the room. Excellent, Tejal, your vase, your well, not your vase, your new way of experiencing joy from flowers.
Tejal Patel: Well, for our customers, I’ve thought about what’s their favourite color and their favourite flower. So how do I personalise?
Scott Stockwell: Personalisation? Excellent. Hold the design up.
Tejal Patel: It says Fave color there. You probably can’t.
Scott Stockwell: You’ve really sort of brought the audience in and personalising now, would you, would you be delivering it in a vase or another way of?
Tejal Patel: Oh, yeah, I forgot the vase.
Scott Stockwell: It’s okay. So the reason for doing the exercise is, in round one, when you were just designing another vase, you just designed another vase. He’s like, it’s a different shape or a different size, but it’s a vessel that holds water. When you start to think about, what do you want the audience to feel when you designed for they want to experience joy with flowers? The answer isn’t another vase. It’s lots of vases. In your case, Katy, because you’re putting them all around the customer, and Tejal, you’re getting insight from the audience on what is their favourite flower and how you then going to manifest that into the room. When you do this exercise with a lot of people, you generally find round number one, everyone does another vase because you’ve said, do another vase, and they’ve iterated. But when you say people really use flowers in vases because it makes them feel good, how can you get flowers to help them feel good? You’ve got lots of different ways of doing it, and then you’re innovating. So, going back Katy to the real premise of this call, what are the basics? The basics are understanding how your audience feels and what your audience needs. And if you start there, like we did with that exercise, you get lots of different ways of solving that challenge. Not I’m just going to iterate on what I’ve always done and get incrementally better, but it, it won’t differentiate.
Katy Howell: Brilliant. I absolutely love the five whys, it’s, it’s such a good exercise that I’m definitely going to be rolling that into more thinking from our marketing perspective. To go back again, you know, to this strategy and planning. Somebody, a lady called Louisa Lawrence, has asked the question for managing much smaller marketing, marketing teams. What do you recommend as the best software tool to manage projects and strategy? There’s so much noise out there, and I thought that was really interesting, because off the top of my head, I can’t think of one single tool that does it all.
Tejal Patel: You know it’s going to sound basic, but I’ve kind of going back to my own experience. I’ve used, obviously, PowerPoint to create strategy, things like mirror board and recently Canva to do the brainstorming to build your strategy or your plan, but then staying on top of it. I mean, I think, personally, some software can get really convoluted to project planners. And did we do this? I’ve tried to do that with things like Excel or smart sheets, and there’s all sorts of you know. Workflow software you can use. I think sometimes you can over complicate it, and it all becomes just about the tools in the end, like the point Scott was making before, just keep it simple. You can have a tracker within your PowerPoint if you’re meeting on a regular basis of break your plan down into monthly deliverables or quarterly deliverables. I think those are fairly straightforward, then to manage.
Katy Howell: I think they end up becoming an administrative nightmare. That’s where the challenge is. I am a really in a small team. Get together, invest half a day a month, sitting down, going, where are we? What’s worked, what hasn’t worked, that probably will give you more than, you know, yeah, having a project, there are loads of project management tools out there.
Scott Stockwell: One of the biggest takeaways that I had from Agile, so IBM was, you know, when I was there was a very big proponent of Agile in marketing. One of the biggest things was a daily conversation called a stand up. And the idea was, literally, you stand up because you’re going to be quick when you’re standing up. You’re not going to kind of take the stage, hold the mic, and, you know, be there for days. What? What have you finished? What’s finished? What’s done? What are you currently working on, and what’s getting in your way? And literally, everybody answered those same three questions around the team every day at a fixed time. And it didn’t matter if you were in the office or you were remote. You could do it on the phone. You didn’t need to have a, you know, web conference, you know, what have you done? What are you working on? What’s getting in the way? And that’s not a project plan or a tool or software that is people talking to each other, and I think with all of the planning, start with talking to each other, going back to where we started. You know, what’s the strategy? Why are we doing this in the first place? Who are we serving? What’s the problem, the pain point we’re fixing. Now, let’s talk about what we are planning to do to fix it and how we’re going along. Then start with something super, super basic. Imagine an old calendar like you used to have stuck on your fridge at home to sort out who was at which class, who was at which after school. Thing, you know, when was someone going to collect something? The smaller your team, the easier that is. But pen and paper and old school stuff. It that everyone looks at like the fridge might be a whiteboard in the office. It might be just, you know, one word document, or just one central thing, but keep it as simple as you possibly can, because as we’ve all said, you can go super sophisticated and automated and workflow managed and then you just end up being almost a slave to the tool, not getting the job done.
Katy Howell: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I’m not suggesting for one minute the tools don’t help. I am just saying I wouldn’t fixate on them. I’d fixate more on getting your plans done. And I think as we wrap up, I would say that, you know, when we talk about getting the basics, it is giving yourself, if you’re leading your marketing team, a chance to step back. Make sure you have a strategy. Do the plan? Look at where tools like AI might be able to help you, and how they might be able to help you, and stick to the basics, because I think that that will help clarify. So, if there was, as we pop part ways with our audience, is there one thing you think marketeers should focus on for this year?
Scott Stockwell: Okay, I would write down the strategy, one succinct statement that I could see every day, so that every decision I made, I could look at that and think is that getting me there, every decision, what planning tool I’m going to use, what test I’m going to do, what social post I’m going to write, is it getting us as an organisation there? Because I trust that that strategy is solving problems for our customers with what we’re all about. That would be my one.
Tejal Patel: Actually, I was going to say something different, but now I think I’m going to build on what Scott has said, which is a term I came across recently, which is, will it make the boat go faster? If you are clear, it’s exactly as Scott has just said. If you really clear about what success looks like, or what your purpose is, or what that one thing is that you’ve got to get done. And I think it’s a great book out there, by the way, called: Will it make the boat go fast? And there’s a whole story there about the Australian rowing team for the Olympics a long time ago. But every question that gets asked in whatever you doing with your day, is it going to make the boat go faster? And if the question answer is, well, no or don’t know, then why are you doing it? So that would be my advice.
Katy Howell: Love it. And I think Alison’s just put up a little comment, which I think is also very valid, and that is a purposeful pause is key, and building that time in is crucial. If you want to get this done, you actually have to step back a little bit. I would definitely advocate for that clear your mind. Thank you very much. We’ve done a whole hour. Thank you to Tejal. Thank you, Scott. You as always, I feel like, oh, 50 questions to ask. Thank you very much, and thank you to our audience for all the brilliant questions.