#EP164 - The Scale Up Season: B2B Marketing Strategies, Richard George - London Stock Exchange Group

Welcome to episode 164 of the Marketing Freaks Podcast and the next episode in the scale up season.

In this episode, Jon is joined by Richard George, Global Head of Business Marketing at the London Stock Exchange (LSEG) to the unique challenges of B2B marketing in the highly regulated financial sector.

He shares insights from his 17-year career, From aligning marketing with business goals and driving revenue, to overcoming tracking challenges and simplifying complex products, Richard provides practical advice for marketers in highly regulated industries.

• Learn how to align marketing objectives with business goals, focusing on revenue, brand, and customer experience as key performance indicators in B2B marketing.
• Discover practical strategies for creating strong cross-team alignment and ensuring leadership clarity, including fostering accountability and consistent communication.
• Gain insight into the challenges of tracking and attribution in B2B marketing, and how customer data platforms (CDPs) and CRM integration can help overcome these obstacles.
• Explore the importance of balancing brand awareness with direct response efforts, especially in industries where the line between brand and performance marketing is often blurred.
• Understand how to simplify complex product offerings and navigate regulatory constraints, with examples of innovative marketing tactics like VR experiences used at LSEG.

To learn more about scaling your B2B business, download our free B2B business outcomes guide here: https://bit.ly/3XWhWie

Transcript

0:10: Hello and welcome back to the marketing freaks podcast. 
 0:13: This week's episode We're talking about B to B marketing in the financial sector. 
 0:18: Could there be a better organisation to get behind the scenes on as an example than the London Stock Exchange Group? 
 0:25: So my guest this week is Richard George Global head of business marketing at L S E. 
 0:31: The London Stock Exchange Group. 
 0:33: And we talk about the challenges of marketing within a highly regulated sector, aligning your marketing with sales and a whole tub more so I very much hope you find this episode useful. 
 0:44: If you do, please come and subscribe. 
 0:46: Spotify, Apple podcasts all the usual places. 
 0:49: It's always massively appreciated. 
 0:52: , if you could do that anyway, let's get started with the episode, off we go. 
 0:59: Welcome to the podcast. 
 1:01: Awesome. 
 1:01: Well, thanks for having me here. 
 1:02: Absolutely welcome. 
 1:03: I think if anyone's listening to the audio, they absolutely have to check out the video because this backdrop is just insane. 
 1:12: It's phenomenal. 
 1:13: Really phenomenal. 
 1:14: We're on the 58th floor overlooking Manhattan. 
 1:18: Yeah, it's Yeah. 
 1:19: Mind blowing. 
 1:20: It's mind blowing. 
 1:22:  OK, great. 
 1:23: So we're gonna be talking about B to B marketing, , in the financial sector and kind of what that involves. 
 1:30: And I guess just your take on it. 
 1:32: Really? 
 1:32: And some advice that you might have too. 
 1:35: So first off, do you want to start off with You know who you are? 
 1:38: What you do, give us the give us the overview. 
 1:41: Yeah. 
 1:41: So, , I've spent the last 17 years owning and driving, marketing and communication strategies, customer experience, transformation programmes. 
 1:49: And I've done that for large global B to B and B to C organisations in financial services, but also in retail telco media. 
 1:58: , the company that I work for is sick. 
 2:01: , you probably know it as London Stock Exchange. 
 2:04: , so we are a $72 billion market cap, financial markets, infrastructure and data service provider. 
 2:10: , and I lead our business marketing team. 
 2:12: So this is a team of 100 people, and our mission is to create the marketing strategy, drive all the content creation and deliver on the global, , marketing plans across our eight different businesses. 
 2:25: Amazing. 
 2:25: So it's it's quite a complex business to be marketing for. 
 2:29: Yes, exactly. 
 2:30: Yeah. 
 2:31: So we're gonna talk a bit about kind of how you how you market creatively and how you push what you're doing in the marketing realm and keep moving forwards in a world where there's restrictions, obviously big brand considerations and everything like that. 
 2:45: But you know how How did you find, like, the transition from, I guess a more B to C, , slightly less restrictive world into the world of finance. 
 2:59: Like, How did you find that? 
 3:01: Yeah, my journey was quite interesting because I started in retail, which obviously isn't isn't regulated, you know, apart from privacy regulation for customers. 
 3:10: Then I went to Telco, which does have some regulations in what you can and can't do and then into financial services. 
 3:16: And I think what's really interesting about financial services is it's not just one regulation that covers what you can do as a marketer for that business. 
 3:24: It's often very nuanced between businesses within the business, which makes it even more complex in terms of that transition. 
 3:32: , I think it's just around. 
 3:33: You get used to it, you know, you understand what you can and can't do. 
 3:37: You're obviously learning from people who've been in the business for many years, and it just becomes sort of part of the day to day process. 
 3:44: Yeah, I can, I can imagine. 
 3:47: It's for some people that adjustments hard. 
 3:49: And for others, it's,  it's It's a bit kind of smoother and easier, , going on to that B to B point and like your background in retail. 
 4:00: , I think there's humongous differences in approach from B to C to B to B like what? 
 4:08: What do you think those biggest differences are? 
 4:11: So I think we could call out three. 
 4:14: I think the first one is around the ability to drive direct revenue or contribution, especially, you know, when you've got channels like, , e commerce now, which are often a big proportion, if not the biggest channel within an organisation. 
 4:29:  The second piece is around the budgets that you're dealing with Because of that direct contribution, you're often dealing with direct marketing budgets that are larger, and then the final piece is around. 
 4:41: The competition, like B to C, tends to be very, very competitive as a marketer, you know, in terms of what you're trying to do and the impact you're trying to have in the market. 
 4:51: B to B Businesses are more conservative in their approach, which means that it's a little less competitive as a marketer. 
 4:59: But the businesses are obviously incredibly competitive, you know, as they're competing against each other. 
 5:04: Yeah, definitely, I think I think one of the biggest differences is that is the direct feedback. 
 5:11: So with ECOM, you know you run, I don't know. 
 5:14: So you're running Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever your channel is. 
 5:18: You know pretty quickly if it's going well or not, and you've got instant data coming back and you can adjust with B to B, particularly a large enterprise where you're going after larger contracts with a longer sales cycle and everything else, you might have to wait 18 months to really understand if what you're doing is working. 
 5:39: How do you deal with that? 
 5:42: so I think you're right. 
 5:44: In terms of that, I'd sum it all up in the word complexity. 
 5:47: OK, so when you think about what we have to do as B to B marketers, we're dealing with product complexity, trying to make very  , , Expansive financial products. 
 5:59: The story simple. 
 6:00: When they can be applied in a lot of ways, think about geographical complexity. 
 6:04: Think about account complexity. 
 6:06: , and in terms of pulling that together into a narrative and a story that makes sense, , you have to understand the customer and how they want to receive that message. 
 6:17: And you also have to understand how the business goes to market and make sure you align to those because you could be telling the product story, you could be telling the account story. 
 6:25: You could be telling the story for the geography, and those stories need to come together in a coherent way. 
 6:31: But you also need to be able to tell them with those particular lenses, Have you got any advice on, like actually how you go about that process? 
 6:39: So obviously, you identify and understand who your customer is, but really trying to understand how to simplify your message to to a point where they understand exactly what it is you do in a very succinct way is often a lot harder than it sounds. 
 6:58: How, like, how do you go about doing that? 
 7:01: Particularly in a very complex business with lots of different products and services. 
 7:06: , I imagine it's a challenge. 
 7:09: So the first bit of advice is, don't get lost in that complexity. 
 7:14: So don't try and solve everything all you know, all at the beginning. 
 7:18: I think you need to understand how the business goes to market because that should be reflective of how the customer wants to buy buy from the business, especially with with how your sales team engages with them and start with that story. 
 7:30: So it might be a product led story. 
 7:32: Or it might be an industry led story, i e. 
 7:34: You know the difference between the story for a hedge fund versus a corporate, and then, once you build out that overall top top narrative value proposition, reasons to believe the key messages that flow from that you can then start to tweak that and adapt that to other parts. 
 7:50: If the other point I'd make is if you've got a complex business, those bits have to come together in some way, and that's normally your brand that does that in terms of creating that glue between them. 
 8:00: Yeah, it's it's quite I think it's very difficult to actually do that. 
 8:04: Well, really, really difficult, particularly, yeah, in a big company as well, where you've got lots of different teams, lots of different markets. 
 8:12: To have that coherent message is really, really tough. 
 8:16: , so I guess on to, like, marketing and pushing what you're doing forwards. 
 8:26: Because the world moves quite quickly and particularly digital, like the platform's changing all the time. 
 8:31: What works now is not what worked 12 months ago, et cetera, et cetera. 
 8:35: When you're in a larger organisation, , that has restrictions around it. 
 8:41: How do you make sure that you're not stuck kind of standing still getting left behind, but also balancing that with the requirements that you have? 
 8:51: Yeah, it's You need to be very mindful about how you innovate in a safe way, and I think that you can. 
 8:58: You sort of do innovation at two levels. 
 9:00: You do big innovation, you know, big customer experience, transformation programmes, multi year and then you do small innovation, which is more around innovation and your tactics that make your your marketing campaigns more effective. 
 9:12: If I think about the small innovation and just give you an example of something we did recently. 
 9:16: So we,  there's a conference called WIC, and that was this week in Austin, which is a big data conference. 
 9:21: And we have a booth there. 
 9:22: We're a sponsor. 
 9:24: And as part of that conference, we put in place a V R experience on our booth using the Apple Vision pro. 
 9:31: And it was a game where you caught the data from our data universe. 
 9:35: And the idea being our unique selling point is that we sell data across the latency spectrum at different speeds. 
 9:41: So you went into this game and you caught data at different speeds. 
 9:43: You got a score and you got a prize. 
 9:45: If you're successful, that's a great way of really reinforcing our cool narrative. 
 9:50: But through an innovative new tactic that's really cool, it elevates our brand a little by having it as part of our stand. 
 9:57: That's really, really cool, because I think a lot of times it's very easy to forget that you have to not necessarily entertain people. 
 10:04: But what you're doing does have to be interesting. 
 10:07: That's a great example of making it like That's fun fun. 
 10:12: It's within the regulation, you know, it's within the the red lines that we operate in and it goes through various checks and we've got a workflow. 
 10:20: And as long as you've got that workflow, those checks that relationship with legal compliance in place, you'll be fine. 
 10:25: You just need to understand what the lay of the land is. 
 10:27: Yeah, that makes loads of sense in terms of your, I guess, like activity mix, so events. 
 10:35: , What else? 
 10:36: What does the what does the landscape look like in terms of marketing activity? 
 10:41: Yeah, So we have a broad tactic mix cross owned, earned and paid. 
 10:49: , so you know, everything from white papers and blogs. 
 10:53: You know what we're doing on our website and sales enablement materials? 
 10:56: The lesson I think we've really learned, especially over the last few years, is how they come together and feel like one, especially for our businesses, rather than you know, different creative and different messaging for different parts of the same business. 
 11:12: We've made a concerted effort to bring those tactics together. 
 11:16: They now have a shared, shared creative, and I have messaging, which really ladder. 
 11:21: It comes back to your point earlier, but I think that takes a level of organisation, and it takes a level of rigour to make sure that every time you're doing something new, you're adding something. 
 11:31: You're innovating. 
 11:32: It feels like it is part of something and not just an add on. 
 11:36: Yeah, definitely. 
 11:37: And that point around sales is interesting because often so I think if you look at content and marketing activity in the B to B World but you you start with sales. 
 11:52: You go. 
 11:52: What? 
 11:52: What? 
 11:53: What what content does the sales team need or could do with to help convince someone that this is a good option, or to help nurture a lead or to help, you know, move that deal through the pipeline? 
 12:05: And if you're thinking of content in that way first it completely changes like you. 
 12:11: Your, , like your your view on what content is needed and you're no longer just creating stuff because it looks nice or or or anything like that. 
 12:20: So I think I think that's a really good way of doing it. 
 12:22: But then so many organisations, marketing and sales are like at odds. 
 12:28: like golf in between. 
 12:31: I agree. 
 12:31: I agree, like the and that works because the sales team is normally closest to the customer in the no in A B to b organisation, so they understand what the needs are. 
 12:43: And if you can reflect those in your marketing, you you start one step ahead of most. 
 12:48: Yeah, and they can tell. 
 12:49: Like here are the objections people are having. 
 12:51: Here's what's putting people off or here's what's really like getting people over the line or it's just gold. 
 12:57: It's gold, but it it's so often missed, completely agree on that point. 
 13:04: Right? 
 13:04: , can you just give a give a view on your team structure and I guess, like where that sits inside the business? 
 13:11: Yes, so and now we have a centralised marketing team, but particularly my team is aligned to our different businesses. 
 13:19: So we sit within those businesses, understand the objectives of those businesses, and then build our marketing plans that are reflective of those. 
 13:27: So we're very much hopefully understand what the drivers of that business are. 
 13:34: And then how we reflect that in our marketing? 
 13:37: Yeah. 
 13:37: And then how many people are on your Team 100. 
 13:41: you got 100 people on the business marketing team? 
 13:44:  how many different geographies do you look after? 
 13:48: So we're a global team, so yeah, so we operate in 100 countries and we sell into 170 countries. 
 13:56: So we're truly a global organisation, and our marketing has to reflect that, and we work with our various centres of excellence. 
 14:04: One of them is field marketing, and they provide really great insight to what works on the ground in those particular geographies. 
 14:11: But when we build our plans and we build our campaigns, we start with a global campaign. 
 14:16: And then we build tactics into that to make it relevant to the various geographies. 
 14:21: Got you. 
 14:22: But with 100 people on the business marketing team, and then we've we've talked about kind of sales alignment and simplifying a message and make making sure that all, like, directly talks to the customer. 
 14:35: How how do you make sure that every one of those 100 people knows exactly what's going on? 
 14:41: Knows exactly what you're doing, Why you're doing it, What the message is if the message gets tweaked, What that gets tweaked to How what? 
 14:50: How do you do that? 
 14:51: So those those 100 people are aligned by business line. 
 14:54: So for our eight different businesses that operate across our company, those people are allocated accordingly. 
 15:00: So the most important aspect is making sure that those people that align to that particular business line understand the messaging house, the approach, the plan and what's happening for that particular business. 
 15:14: And then we build those connections between them at a leadership level. 
 15:19: So I think that's the key is make sure that you give people accountability for areas that they can control and influence, and then sort of create the glue in the right way between between the different areas. 
 15:33: Have you got Have you got advice like us from your career on like practically making that happen, Right? 
 15:40: So is it lots of kind of like team conferences? 
 15:44: Is it as much face time as you can get like, What do you think? 
 15:47: The actual, like best method of getting your teams or your team leaders or business unit leaders aligned So? 
 15:56: And I can apply this to the role I did before, which was almost an enable an execution role. 
 16:00: It's called Integrated Marketing that had 150 people that were spread across the 30 countries at that point where we had marketers and that the approach is the same. 
 16:09: You've got to start by being clear on what the vision is. 
 16:12: What do you want your marketing team to do and to do? 
 16:16: To do that, you need to get people to buy into it. 
 16:19: You need people's fingerprints on it. 
 16:20: So whether it's stakeholders or whether it's, , team members, they need to feed in and understand the direction of travel. 
 16:28: And that's the most important thing. 
 16:29: Have a North Star. 
 16:30: Yeah, I totally agree on that point. 
 16:33: Let's talk a bit about objectives and k p. 
 16:35: I s Obviously the end goal is driving business. 
 16:39: Yeah, right, because that's why we exist. 
 16:43: , but when you've got long sales cycles, what your k p I s in between that. 
 16:49: Like, how do you know if you run an event or if you put a white paper out and you get people clicking on it? 
 16:56: Get people looking at it, downloading it, all that type of great stuff. 
 17:00: How do you know that is contributing towards that end goal like, what do you report on and what do you look at to give you a guide, so I think this applies to any organisation. 
 17:10: But it's key. 
 17:10: The marketing metrics reflect those of the business, so there's no point talking about click throughs, and, you know, number of interactions, like people just don't care. 
 17:22: They care about revenue. 
 17:25: You know, brand monitors, customer experience monitors. 
 17:28: So we try and align as closely to those as possible. 
 17:31: I think in general, my advice would be direct. 
 17:34: Contribution is core metric engaged revenue where you can't measure direct contribution. 
 17:39: But you have. 
 17:40: You're involved in driving deals where they're not going to be filling out a lead form or m Q. 
 17:47: L driven. 
 17:47: That's often larger accounts and then have your brand metrics and your customer experience metrics. 
 17:52: If you can tie everything into those and things like followers and click through, they're part of the input factors to those so you can measure it more daily. 
 18:01: That's fine, but when you're reporting to the business and you're reporting up, you need metrics that definitely engaged. 
 18:10: Revenue is that kind of looking at. 
 18:14: , like the brands and the people that are interacting with your marketing that are directly leading to revenue or or are already in the pipeline or spending. 
 18:24: Yeah, I'll talk about this in my broader experience rather than talking about specifically. 
 18:28: But, , it's about creating a model where you can see using your C R M or your CD p. 
 18:34: What customers are interacting with your marketing for a particular account that's engaged in a sales process. 
 18:40: And you able to then say from you normally set a threshold of the number of interactions that they would have. 
 18:47: And then you can say you're engaging a client that's about to sign a deal. 
 18:51: That's million. 
 18:54: That's really so if you've got I don't know I think for Business Day. 
 19:02: Let's call it B. 
 19:03: That's that's always the safest Bob's Bob's Bank Bob's bank is in. 
 19:08: Your pipeline is at stage six and his 70% likely to sign, and you then go well, actually. 
 19:17: Bob's. 
 19:18: Bob's Bank has engaged with this piece of content that piece of content, that piece of content, that piece of content and is now moving through the pipeline that bit quicker. 
 19:28: Or, you know the conversations are better and you can prove a contribution to that pipeline journey. 
 19:34: Yes, exactly. 
 19:35: And you know that Bob's Bank. 
 19:38: good old Bob's Bank. 
 19:39: You know that Bob's Bank, they've got an account manager. 
 19:42: They're not going to go onto your website and fill out a form. 
 19:45: They're not going to ring your gen team, so you're never gonna get that lead? 
 19:51: Yes. 
 19:51: So that's why the engage revenue model is so key. 
 19:54: I love that because so often the expectation well, particularly with LA large, large deal sizes with, , you know, big contract terms and everything else. 
 20:08: Not many people are gonna click on an ad and fill out a form and turn into a you know, humongous customer doesn't really work like that. 
 20:18: So I think that's a really, really interesting point, like it's this really, really good. 
 20:24: The technically doing that, I think, is getting harder with people working remotely working from home because it used to be tech like, , lead forensics. 
 20:35: I don't know if you've worked with them before, but where they'll kind of look at the IP s and people that come into the site and tell you which brands visiting. 
 20:41: Then you can use that to measure your brand interactions. 
 20:44: Have you got any tech recommendations on making that engaged revenue or engaged customer metric work? 
 20:53: So So I think it's quite this is where I find my background useful because I grew up as a digital marketer as opposed to a brand or a product marketer, and there's no right way to grow up I feel like I'm really lean into that when sort of talking about and answering these challenges. 
 21:10: , you obviously need to be clear on your requirements, so it varies by business. 
 21:14: You need to understand what the value is that you're trying to measure how your business operates, but you ideally need some kind of CD p a customer data platform. 
 21:23: If you've got a platform that's taking data in and is able to build profiles of customers, obviously within all of the privacy regulations, then you're able to see the customers in a particular account and the interactions they have with you. 
 21:36: And then you're able to model off that. 
 21:38: So CD p s are quite critical to be able to do this. 
 21:41: Yeah, it's I think it's such an interesting way of viewing it. 
 21:47: I think the getting the text stack correct to make that happen is really difficult. 
 21:54: , because you got to get your C R M to line up with your your CD P. 
 21:59: Then all your digital activities got to be tracked correctly. 
 22:02: The website's got to work correctly from that perspective, but once you get to that and as you know these lovely walled gardens that we're faced with with Facebook and Google and LinkedIn. 
 22:14: That data isn't easy to ingest into those kind of models, so there are restrictions, but then they're almost restricting themselves because you're not gonna be. 
 22:23: It'll show that, you know, when you start doing attribution models off the back of this kind of engaged revenue, you're probably gonna be putting less money there because it's less trackable in terms of your overall engaged revenue. 
 22:35: I think on that it's so easy to make the wrong decision. 
 22:38: Yeah, with with where you're investing, because if you don't have that complete picture, you could easily turn something off. 
 22:48: That's really contributing kind of top of funnel activity and putting people through and vice versa. 
 22:54: And you get a real like sticky spot and where we started with B to C. 
 23:00: The beauty and brilliance and amazing part of B to C is it's measurable. 
 23:06: Often it's measurable, not always, and you know, not always at the brand level, but you can do stuff that's very measurable. 
 23:12: If you have that same kind of, , measurement in a B to B context with engaged revenue and with direct contribution because they complement each other. 
 23:21: Then it just makes just justify the spend a lot easier. 
 23:23: Yeah, that's really, really good. 
 23:25: It's really good. 
 23:26: The as a digital marketer, do you still dabble? 
 23:31: I guess you probably can't in your role. 
 23:33: Not Not really. 
 23:34: No, not as much as you miss it. 
 23:36: The hands on? 
 23:37: Yeah, definitely. 
 23:38: Yeah. 
 23:39: Yeah. 
 23:39: I like to think that I can dabble, but you know, the world The world has moved on a little bit. 
 23:46: I remember Omniture. 
 23:48: Oh, yeah, Yeah. 
 23:49: To be a real with Ni Oh, wow, that's Yeah, that's a blast from the Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's all like Google ads is so different to what it used to be. 
 24:00: And do you find that that really helps you push new like digital channels in what you're doing? 
 24:07: So like it, you know, and actually this whole conversation around, making sure your marketing is moving forwards, that must be a really good help. 
 24:16: Yeah, it's that mindset rather than the technical skills. 
 24:20: That's the value. 
 24:21: Like thinking about a new thing. 
 24:22: Thinking about an innovation, thinking about a new channel, thinking about how we measure. 
 24:26: That's the area of my past I can lean into because, you know, as technical skills fade quite quickly, , so and and nobody wants me to be like running analytics reports, that's not what I'm paid for. 
 24:39: It, , you know, try and work out how we can make our marketing better overall. 
 24:43: Definitely. 
 24:44: So what sort of channels do you run like, What kind of you you don't obviously don't go into detail you can't go into. 
 24:52: But in terms like the marketing mix events like you doing things like spending on LinkedIn ads are you doing anything on Google or you like, what do you spend on for awareness versus kind of a direct response? 
 25:06: That what's what's the mix like? 
 25:08: Yeah, so we truly have a,  you know, you could probably name any channel, maybe a few of the social channels from an organic or pay perspective. 
 25:17: We double less in, but but the rest of the mix we we cover, you know, we have a heavy presence at events both proprietary, but also, , third party events. 
 25:28: , we, you know, advertise across the large advertisers being programmatic. 
 25:34: It comes back to that point before, like, just needs to connect together. 
 25:40: And is there a right balance between you know what? 
 25:43: You're spending at a brand level versus a performance level, I think with B to B, because of what we've talked about with engaged revenue. 
 25:51: And, you know, normally it's difficult to track. 
 25:55: , you know, you haven't got the same direct contribution as you have in other industries. 
 25:59: It means that it's a little bit more hazy about where the brand line ends and the performance line starts. 
 26:05: Do you think sometimes but there's probably a there's. 
 26:09: I don't know whether there's an actual actually a professional answer to this question, But sometimes do you think you have to go with your gut a bit and you lean on your experience to say, Well, look, I know this type of activity works. 
 26:22: It's not gonna be directly trackable for a while, but it's almost like no brainer activity. 
 26:29: Is that Do you think that kind of? 
 26:31: Because you do develop a sense over time as to what's going to work and what might not work? 
 26:37: Yeah. 
 26:37: Oh, for sure. 
 26:38: You have to have a yeah, you have to have, like, a almost common sense check of the data you're seeing because you could look at an event that you ran, you know, a small round table in in, you know, part of, , some part of the world. 
 26:53: And it could have driven a tonne of revenue. 
 26:55: But that was one deal, and it was, you know, like it had been attributed to that event. 
 27:00: , so you do need to make sure that there's, like, a sense check on what you're doing, and I think sort of like you gotta make sure you're not driven by opinion. 
 27:08: But you can't just be driven by the data because the data isn't perfect. 
 27:12: Because you can't see all of the the outcomes, the sales outcomes that are happening from what you're doing because you haven't. 
 27:19: You can do engage revenue, but you haven't got that direct contribution for everything. 
 27:24: Yeah, I was talking to, , , Natasha from crack and yesterday, right, And she was saying how some of the stuff they're doing at events and actually one of the one of the k p I s is if they do something really interesting, the CEO normally gets a text from someone going. 
 27:40: Wow, I just saw this thing and it's like, That's not your traditional k p I. 
 27:46: I thought it was really cool. 
 27:47: It's like if you if people talk about what you're doing or you're seeing more conversation or more positive conversation or I don't know, the the sales guys are getting feedback that their, , prospects are seeing marketing activity and finding it useful or that's really good stuff. 
 28:05: And the cliche says perception is reality. 
 28:08: So, you know, I'd say it's 70% about measurement and showing direct value. 
 28:14: And then it's 30% about how you make the organisation feel about your marketing and the tactics you're running. 
 28:21: Yeah, I think you can like you do an event and, , you know, if it's gone well, don't you? 
 28:30: Because there's lots of positive conversation. 
 28:32: There's lots of positive feedback, and if it doesn't go well, it just It's usually silence. 
 28:38: Yeah, exactly, exactly. 
 28:40: And usually, if nine times out of 10, if if it's the former of that i e. 
 28:45: Lots of people are talking. 
 28:46: There's lots of positive stuff going on. 
 28:47: It leads to something. 
 28:50: completely agree, completely agree and you know it's not so. 
 28:53: I think it's a real There's a really interesting balance in B to B, particularly of that kind of softer sense of kind of success, adding that to the data and kind of really looking at a full picture. 
 29:09: I'm a strong believer in momentum. 
 29:11: I think if a team has momentum, you it means that the the tactics that don't quite work are often accepted and that sort of movement forward in terms of making things better, that you've almost have natural buy into what you're doing. 
 29:27: You can really then innovate because if it doesn't quite go to plan, it's OK because you've sort of got money in the bank with those stakeholders, and the next time it'll be that even that tactic will be amazing. 
 29:40: The word momentum is one I love because you can just you can feel it and it's great. 
 29:47: And I was talk ages ago, talking to the marketing director at right move, you know he was saying how that week between Christmas and New Year. 
 29:57: That's the biggest week in terms of advertising and a spend because they find the success of the year is all based on how good January is interesting, because people, you know, like New me New Year New me, you know, all that type of stuff. 
 30:12: So if if January is really good, the rest of the year follows. 
 30:16: And if, if the week between Christmas and New Year is really strong, January is likely to be strong, like it's all about building up as much momentum at that specific point in the year as possible and then the rest of the year kind of doesn't just happen. 
 30:32: But yep, Flows. 
 30:34: But who's really talking about momentum? 
 30:36: I love that word, and it's interesting. 
 30:38: You got the momentum that's in the market. 
 30:41: You got the momentum of the stakeholders, and then that also flows into the team as well, because it lifts them up and they feel like they're moving forward. 
 30:48: And they have, you know, they're doing great stuff and that they feel like empowered to do more great stuff. 
 30:53: So momentum of the day. 
 30:55: Yeah, exactly. 
 30:57:  so to wrap up, like, what would your if you have to give one big piece of advice for someone working in a similar position to you or going into a similar position to you working in house running B to B marketing? 
 31:09: What would that be? 
 31:10: So I feel like this advice is almost cliche now, , nothing wrong with a cliche, and that is lean into a I and you know, there's obviously the A I at home that you can do and like learning how best to prompt and getting responses back. 
 31:28: But take it the next step and get involved in the enterprise. 
 31:32: A. 
 31:33: I programmes really understand what are the use cases that can make your organisation better? 
 31:38: Pretty much it's always about efficiency or impact, like that's what you want to use a I for in whatever form, whether you know, improving your translation process or whether it's improving your audience segmentation. 
 31:48: But lean into the A. 
 31:50: I hands on experience in Enterprise a I implementation design in the use cases, and that will put you in an amazing position over the next few years to get better jobs and move up keep learning. 
 32:02: Keep learning. 
 32:03: Amazing. 
 32:04: Well, look, Richard, Thank you so much. 
 32:05: That was really interesting. 
 32:07: And thanks for having me. 
 32:08: Awesome. 
 32:08: Thanks so much as well. 
 32:09: Take care. 
 32:11: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. 
 32:14: Genuinely hope you found it useful. 
 32:17: The marketing for each podcast is brought to you by overdrive Digital specialists in performance marketing. 
 32:23: If you need help improving your campaign performance, please do come and check us out at overdrive. 
 32:29: Digital dot co dot UK Thank you so much again and we'll see you on the next episode.