Episode 249 / Patrick Janssen / Cisco / Partner Marketing Manager
Aligning Sales & Marketing - An Essential, Overlooked Key to Unlocking Value
With a 20+ year experience in marketing for the IT industry, Patrick Janssen has learnt the importance of an essential, yet often overlooked element - that sales and marketing need to be in alignment for both functions to work well.
Stakeholder Relevance Is Key
Whatever you’re presenting internally, Patrick has learnt the hard way that it needs to be 100% relevant to your stakeholders’ jobs and priorities. There is no point talking to the C-suite about endless data points if they don’t translate into why these are relevant to them. Instead, “take the time to translate your message in terms of relevance for your stakeholders.”
Aligning Strategies for Effective Execution
Aligning sales and marketing objectives, KPIs, buyer personas and strategies is essential for effective campaign execution. This ensures all teams are working towards the same goals. “It’s a no brainer, and sales and marketing peers agree it’s the way to go, but hardly any of them do so.”
Improving Collaboration through Alignment
Patrick's focus on sales and marketing alignment aims to improve collaboration so marketing can truly function as a business partner, not just another department that needs to be worked with. As he puts it: “Be a growth driver, be a business partner instead of just a marketer that the rest of the organisation needs to collaborate with.”
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Patrick Janssen 0:00
Be a growth driver, be a business partner, the marketing department or the marketeers if you like, to be a business partner to the other stakeholders, whether that be sales, finance or what have you, instead of the marketeer that we need to collaborate with.
Tom Ollerton 0:19
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders. This week is no different: I'm on a call with Patrick Janssen, who is a Partner Marketing Manager at Cisco. Patrick, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Can you give us a bit of background?
Patrick Janssen 0:47
Absolutely, Tom, and thanks for having me on your podcast, it's a really inspiring podcast, listening to the previous episodes. So great to be here. So yeah, so my name is Patrick Janssen, living in the Netherlands and working for Cisco now for about 11 years, started off as the marketing lead, you know, responsible for the marketing strategy and execution in Netherlands. And then, for the last five years, I've been focusing on, as we call it, partner marketing, which means I'm covering five of the top 10 partners in the Netherlands with whom we work, those are partners that we sell our products and solutions. And for an example Vodafone, which is one of the service provider that I closely work with, with whom we drive marketing to through the channel to our end users.
Before I've worked in various marketing roles for you know, varying from enterprise marketing, product marketing companies, such as Microsoft, which I spent a lot of time when I was covering some of the office products for Microsoft OneNote at that time, still a popular option I hope. And I also worked for Symantec Security company, Ricoh documents solution, so always working for about 23 years in the IT industry in a marketing role.
Tom Ollerton 2:12
Fantastic. So impressive career, lots of big names, lots of success, but I want to go to the dark side. Tell me about a time where you really made a mess of it, where you were totally embarrassed Chang faced head in hands and thought you wanted the world to swallow you up. But despite how bad it was, it made you better. Tell me about that moment.
Patrick Janssen 2:34
Yeah, absolutely. I still remember that that one. The other day, Tom. So that was when I, I just joined Cisco when I was about 11 years ago. And I had my one of my first management team meetings that I joined. At that time, we, we just started to really push the digital marketing strategy from a marketing organization globally through to the countries to the market. And that was very important to us as a marketeer. And we got these great dashboards explaining all the you know, nitty gritty details on the click through rates and the views per page. And all these details that we're all familiar with. And I thought it was important, and I presented it as if it was also important for the rest of the audience, meaning their local management team. And I think the power of nonverbal communication then was really shown to me, and I felt miserable, to be honest. And also after the meeting, a number of management team members told me like, Okay, this was a once and never again, presentation, because you need to know what's relevant to you, and what's relevant to us. And you know, from that time on, I, you know, whenever I have a meeting, or presentation, or whatever, I really take time to, let's say, translate the content, or the message that I want to share in terms into, let's say, the relevance for the listening audience. And that can be you know, local stakeholders, or you not customers, but really trying to say, what's relevant, and, you know, keep the rest as is.
Tom Ollerton 4:19
So how do you do that now? So we've got all of the data that we have from the platforms, the ones and zeros, the dashboards, the marketing, three letter acronyms, but you got to talk upstairs, you got to talk to the business, maybe not the CEO every week, but you got to talk some senior people who don't work in marketing, how do you go about translating our world into theirs?
Patrick Janssen 4:36
Yeah. So I always try to keep it in maximum of three steps, or three steps, three, three points that I want to make clear, which always start with you know, the relevance for their for that job role. And if you look at, for instance, the environment of Cisco that I work in, or the IT tech industry, if you like, it's very, you know, I'm driven by sales. And so I try to avoid to talk about, you know, leads that we generate, or pipeline that we generate. And the numbers behind that. I try to focus on. Okay, what do we deliver to the bookings? So the marketing source bookings, as we call that, how many, you know, touch points, did we have a certain deal that was converted at the end, to really show off the relevance of marketing to the sales cycle, and that's more talking about the revenue and the booking side, instead of the, you know, the leads that we generate, so let's say, top of the funnel, if you like, and really focusing on the revenue and well, the language that you know, in this case, the sales team speak. So that's what I tried to do. And always keep it simple. Try to avoid the acronyms as you say, and try to tell a story instead of a marketing well, PowerPoint so to speak.
Tom Ollerton 5:59
Can I tell you my favorite, my favorite acronym?
Patrick Janssen 6:02
Please, go.
Tom Ollerton 6:03
TLA.
Patrick Janssen 6:04
Which stands for?
Tom Ollerton 6:06
Three letter acronym.
Patrick Janssen 6:11
That's a good one.
Tom Ollerton 6:14
So I've been, I've been waiting to say that on this podcast for several years.
So let's get into some serious advice here. Like what I'm looking for is a bit of data driven marketing advice, when someone told you like, I'll try that and it works straightaway, that bit of advice that you share with your team is the thing that you always go back to that, you know, that always works.
Patrick Janssen 6:41
So for me, what always works is, before even starting to talk about or execute data driven marketing is to really understand the relevance that it has to the stakeholder, you know, that you're working with, or for whom you're executing this. So that can be sales, can be finance, it can be engineering in our industry, but really understanding the relevance. So, for example, we, we are very focusing on on our Account Based Marketing Strategy within Cisco, which means that we have a lot of data, which, you know, points out the opportunities in various verticals, well, you know, as detailed as possible. And we tend to, let's say, share this information with in this case, again, the sales teams are saying, Okay, this is a really big opportunity, certain product solution, you know, that, that has big opportunity, you know, according to the data that we have, but we had a number of experiences where that was not the case for the sales teams, even though the numbers match, but they were like, Okay, this does not have focus at, you know, these top accounts that we manage, or this does not have focus at these top partners with whom we work, because, you know, they are not, they don't have the certifications to even implement these products or solutions as an example. So then, you know, purely looking at the data, we were thinking like, Hey, this is the number one switch, both are the green, green fields that we need to engage. But then talking to the sales teams, you know, in this case, when Cisco, we really got the mirror like, okay, it can be the data, but it's not the reality. So, always try to really understand the relevance of you know, what you're trying to bring in terms of data relevant marketing, to the stakeholders that you're collaborating with or that you need to execute for.
Tom Ollerton 8:57
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So we're gonna talk now about your shiny new object, which is sales and marketing alignment. Now we've had lots of different shiny objects on this podcast, and some of them are more obvious than others. And I think this is self self evident. But what I'd like to know is it Why is sales and marketing alignment your shiny new object because it's not really anything new, but what is it about that alignment is going to change that you're passionate about?
Patrick Janssen 9:56
Yeah, so I've been really focused on this subject for a time, a long time now, and also specifically, you know, the last years working at Cisco, but also, you know, talking about this subject, which students, for instance, you know, when I do some, some lectures at business schools, or when our partners in terms of community meetings that we have, where we don't talk about, let's say, the business as usual, but really, we talk with the marketeers of our business partners, about specific marketing topics that are trending or that are relevant to all of us. And sales marketing alignment is, let's say, the key topic for the last months, or half a year that we have discussed with them. And it's, it's key, and it's what I'm passionate about, because it sounds like like a no brainer, right? So before we start writing marketing, we need to have this alignment with sales in terms of the KPIs in terms of, you know, the messaging and all what have you. But when talking to, to the sales peers, or to my marketing peers, or to, you know, customers, even, I often get the feedback that it's, you know, yes, it's, it's, it's the way to go, but hardly any of them do so. So with that, I thought, okay, let's focus on this point, you know, in my work, because it's an easy win, or easy, quote, unquote, but it's an important win that we that we need to that we need to win, to drive successful marketing execution strategies. So, you know, for example, I can give you some examples. You know, we had a case where we wanted to drive focus on we call it the business decision maker, another acronym, the BDM, which is, you know, an important one in the IT industry, because we normally tend to focus on the technical decision makers. So we had all this data collected, and we had this buyer persona, you know, all written all out to share with the sales teams. But they really came back to us like, Okay, this is really good information really nice to have, but not now, because, you know, I need to make my number for the next quarter for the next half year. So please, give me more, you know, technical decision makers within either a certain account, or, you know, at a certain new opportunity, but don't bring me this business decision maker information and data, that yes, I know it's relevant, but on the long term, but, you know, if we need to focus on those new target audiences, it takes too much time, it's a too long term investment that we don't have the time now, to do so because of the, you know, focus on the business. So that was a learning that we got to really, firstly align with the sales teams before then moving into execution. It's the same with the sales and marketing objectives, you know, mostly, at least in my experience, you know, these are two silos that, you know, have their own objectives and KPIs. And we really needed to align that before we could go to our for instance, to our business board and say, Okay, this is the strategy that we're going to work at. So what we do at the moment is really first, you know, take the time, and efforts to create these templates of joint, you know, sales marketing strategies, where we talk about the same KPIs, the same buyer persona, as well, all the same objectives that we need to, to make before even, you know, talking about planning and, and the content, for instance. So that's what we do and what we've learned within Cisco, and it helps a lot. And it's, you know, it doesn't cost that much besides energy and time to really drive a more effective marketing strategy. And it also includes data driven marketing, I would say.
Tom Ollerton 14:15
So thank you for sharing a moment when that didn't work. Could you give me an example, when it did, when does it work beautifully? Or was there a story that you can tell me where that sales and marketing really came together in a brilliant way?
Patrick Janssen 14:25
Yeah, so that was an example. But thanks for asking, by the way, because that was a good example, where we were talking about content. You know, we have this new brand campaign, which is obviously still still active. It's called the bridge to possible campaign. It's a brand campaign it was created at a global head offices and that was, you know, transferred to us as countries. And we know we had this great content, you know, videos, editorials, what have you, which we wanted to share with, with our audiences and with our customers. And for that, we had this instrument and internal tool if you like, where we, you know, shared the content, and then asked our sales teams and our engineers to share and like this content, you know, to create scalability through LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and others. But we found out that the content was, you know, not shared as much as we'd hoped for, or that we've dissipated for. And it was not absorbed either at, at our content, sorry, at our customers. So we then came back a conversation with the sales teams, and we asked them like, Okay, what's the reason that you're not sharing this content? It's an easy thing to do, you know, we can create scalability, brand awareness, etc, etc. But they said like, Okay, this content is, well, let's, I'm not sure how to define it otherwise, it's pure, global corporate content, if you like, you know, it doesn't mean anything to our local customers. It's not relevant, it's to, you know, Netflix ish, if you like. So we then started to work on a story on a local initiative on a local gallery digitization plan, that was aligned to this brand campaign. So we worked on local references, and we had one influences the Port of Rotterdam, that was very relevant also for the global team. So they then created a, you know, local sub campaign, if you like, focusing on this account, that made a lot of impact, because it had this local relevancy for our market. And not only the Dutch market, also the European market. So then, what was the result was that we had a lot of customer visits from other, you know, big institutions and big customers in the Netherlands, from governments, from health care, professional services, who wanted to talk to the Port of Rotterdam, in collaboration with us to learn about, you know, how they used technology to become the biggest part of Europe and at the end of the world, which was their ambition. So just by, let's say, to summarize, tweaking the content with local relevance, we found out that it you know, it was, you know, far more successful than we thought, because it, it, it was relevant at the end, instead of just another brand campaign, but through relevance, local relevance. So that was an example of where we saw some success.
Tom Ollerton 17:42
So the creative platform was bridge to possible, right? How did you localize that in respect to Rotterdam?
Patrick Janssen 17:49
The bridge to possible payoff if you'd like, you know, the campaign, that was still the overall campaign, but this was a sub campaign that was purely targeted, and sorry, at the Port of Rotterdam, so, you know, but with local videos, local participants, you know, from the Port of Rotterdam themselves. So it was still a brand campaign, which was good. But it was a local brand campaign or brand essence that we got. And with that it was, you know, relevant to our audience. And it was received well, at our sales department. So we could create scalability, because it may well simply make sense to them and to the customers, as well.
Tom Ollerton 18:42
So I'm really interested that your data points here for your data driven marketing was the data back from the the sales team, right, you know, they weren't sharing this stuff. It wasn't it wasn't getting amplified, which is fascinating. I'm very small data set, but an important one, right? Yes. Correct. It's what do you think's coming next, for data driven marketing in terms of sales and marketing alignment? Where do you think we'll be in a couple of years time?
Patrick Janssen 19:05
I think we'll be, you know, in far better shape than today, to be honest, and that's, I'm mainly focusing on the IT industry. You know, that's always up and down in terms of, you know, the economy. And we've really started to realize that, you know, it is almost a prerequisite of thriving, successful marketing, from a marketing perspective, but also from a sales perspective, the feedback that we get back more and more is like, Okay, please, you know, be a growth driver, be a business partner instead of just a marketing department, you know, with the old fashioned perception that they have from a marketing department. So I think in a few years time, and I'm sure that there are already a lot of organizations that have, you know, come to this point. But I know that there are also a lot and I think even more organizations that have not reached this point yet. Is that a marketing department or a marketeer? If you like to be a business partner to you know, the other stakeholders, whether that be sales finance or what have you, instead of, you know, the marketeer that we that we need to collaborate with?
Tom Ollerton 20:22
Well, Patrick, unfortunately, we've got to leave it there. And thank you so much for sharing your insights. If someone wants to get in touch with you about sales and marketing alignment, or anything else we've talked about today, where is the best place to do that? And what makes a message to you that you will reply to?
Patrick Janssen 20:36
Yeah, so I've heard it from the other guests as well. And it also works for me, that's LinkedIn. That's by far the, you know, the best way to reach out, and that I've used as well to reach out to other people. But I think it's, it's good to use LinkedIn, you know, for trying to get to share knowledge with peers, and you know, to get personal professional value out of it, both from for myself and also for the recipient of the message show. Yeah, I think that that works best for me. So LinkedIn.
Tom Ollerton 21:13
Brilliant. Patrick, thanks so much for your time.
Patrick Janssen 21:14
No worries. Thank you, Tom.
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