Welcome to the Listen perspective. I'm your host, Rebecca Hastings. I've spent over a decade working with executives in the tech sector, and help successful companies build their leadership teams and scale. During my career, I've been lucky to have the privilege of learning from many exceptional leaders. In these conversations, you'll get perspectives from peers, be inspired, and learn what it takes to become one of the best. This is your chance to listen to experts talking about the challenges, solutions, and the vital insights they've gained in their careers to date. When you start finding it easier, and your business development reps are finding it easier to portray your points of difference, you know that you're in a good place because you say we are definitely the best seo platform for this group of people. We have seen some great growth off the back of that. I'm joined by Sophie mill. Sophie started her career in Clarks and acquisition, marketing, and eventually led SEO and her own team. At this point, she was partnering with her current company PI data metrics, pi asked her to move to them as their head of marketing. And after five years in that role, so he took a really interesting career jump, she took on the role of head of product and marketing in 2021, which is something I just can't wait to find out more about. Sophie, it would be great if you could just tell me a bit about your career in marketing, and how it created the foundations for you taking responsibility for product. Yeah, of course. So my first job in marketing, as you said, Rebecca was at Clarke shoes. I started off as a marketing executive there and grew into an acquisition role where I was managing the affiliate display and search channels. Search is obviously a huge thing for all ecommerce businesses. And that was kind of the digital channel that I really resonated towards. And I found really interesting. And it wasn't so much the kind of optimization side of SEO, that was interesting me, it was the huge amount of data that there is around what people are searching for, not at a micro kind of detailed level, personal level. But at a macro level, what are people searching for at what times of year, and I just found it incredibly fascinating. I found relative search hugely fascinating. So things where the weather will impact what people are searching, or the news will impact or people are searching. And you can see these huge macro shifts and people's behavior, obviously limited within a shoe kind of environment. So it changed quite a lot with the weather, obviously, of what types of shoes people were searching for. So the search team gradually started pulling this data and sending it to the product team at Clark's, which they loved because whilst they haven't getting a huge amount of intelligence from other sources, it took quite a long time to process all of that customer intent data. Whereas we could show them and go to the product team and say, searches for wide calf boots, for example, are just going up and up every year, or searches for a certain color children's shoe was going up, we'd feed that through to the product team. And that would help dictate what products they were creating, which was quite a unique use of search data at the time. But they loved it. And we loved it as a result as well, because we felt like we were really impacting, you know what products, this huge international built up business was creating, as well as helping optimize the website to perform for those search terms as well. So that's really where I started enjoying the product world as well as the marketing world. That's really interesting to hear about how they were using that kind of like marketing data, not just to sell to them, but to think, you know, how do we make them actually happier? How do we make the right products that are going to sell year on year, a lot of people don't take that long term view with their search data. It was we found it fascinating. And we used to run sessions with different departments and clerks to try and educate them on the value of this search data. And one of the one of the kinds of teams that we ran it with was the Store team. So people who were senior running all of Clark's shoe stores. And they said that it was interesting to see that the reflection what people were searching for online was really similar to what people were coming into store and asking for and those kinds of patterns. Obviously if there's a certain trend, you know, leopard print shoes that's come out in London Fashion Week or something, people will search for it online, but they will go into a store and ask for it as well. But the store staff didn't have that data to pass through because it was conversational. So I found the whole thing really fascinating. And what other things like from that you know, core marketing background do you think of a did you I think when you start off in digital marketing, and particularly 10 years ago, when I was working in E commerce, you, you do spend a lot of your time working across different teams to try and educate them as to the bag of both digital marketing. And as I was talking about before, the intent data of customers, and working with different teams across brand and more traditional marketing channels and product, like I was saying, bringing those teams together to try and get some kind of cohesive strategy that's going to improve performance. So not necessarily a pure marketing skill, but I think the communication skills, and the stakeholder influencing skills you gain when you're working in digital marketing, have helped me later in my career, getting the best outcome from multiple different teams and party to metrics where I work now. Totally, I can see how marketing, you're gonna have that really strong communication aspect. And yeah, the ability to influence is key to get anything done. Yeah. Definitely. I think also just that continuous push to remind the business that the customer is central to everything that we're doing, you know, everybody can always we're all guilty of it getting stuck in internal processes. But I think marketing has that real responsibility to ensure that the customer is just absolutely central to everything that we're delivering. And if we're not in tune with those customer needs, or those future customer needs, then the products that we're creating, or the communications that we're putting out there just aren't gonna resonate. And ultimately, that that won't help us lead to any kind of growth. Yeah. So like listening to speak, it really highlights that kind of like, really positive impact that marketing and product can have on each other. So Talk Talk me through your transition from marketing to product, I just want to make sure that I understand how that came about. Because there's a really interesting, yeah, so it wasn't really one that I was ever planning actively to make to be honest, but worked at a product company PI data metrics for five years, PI data metrics as a enterprise SEO platform. So it provides software to help people monitor their visibility online, and helps them optimize that, that visibility and that performance. So I'm working with customers who are doing the job that I did when I was at Clarks. So from the offset, I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of what their use cases were and what their pain points were, obviously, you have to keep up to date with that, because the digital world changes so quickly, as we all know, but as it bases, the people that we're marketing to, we're doing the same job that I was doing at Clark's. And so having done the marketing role for five years, our head of products, left the business for another opportunity. And I was having a conversation with our CEO about how I could take on some more responsibilities for product marketing. So some of the educational videos, some of the onboarding. And the conversation kind of went into the fact that why don't I try taking on the full product responsibility. I think there was the acknowledgement that the voice of the customer potentially wasn't as strong through the product team as it as it should have been. And whilst you know, our old had a product was incredibly technical, he could speak to the developers on their level about what they were building. And they were building amazing things, there was the general kind of sentiment that potentially they weren't building the things that the customers were really needing and wanting. And the things that we were putting out, there wasn't one, the products and features, you know, weren't necessarily resonating as strongly as they could have with our customer base. It's a really easy trap for businesses to fall into to think that they know more than their customer. Yeah. Yeah. And is an is a trap for, you know, the internal people to fall into as well. Because these people know how to build products. They're incredibly talented at their jobs, they know what they're doing. And you know, that there is the risk that marketing teams can can turn into advertising teams so they can get handed something to go and sell. Rather than doing that full piece of work from start to finish and helping the business understand. Who is your audience? Who are you really trying to solve this problem for? What do they need? And what can we what can we build them that's really going to help them do their job better? And I think quite frequently, you know, work with a lot of people in marketing. That's something that you have to push through the business so so you don't necessarily just get handed things to go and sell which is obviously more of just a pure advertising role. So I took on the head of product and marketing role and yeah, the first thing that we started doing which is talking to the customers all the time, started setting up customer advisory board Setting up lunches setting up calls. And to begin with, obviously, that's challenging because these people have busy lives, and they don't necessarily know who you are, and you're asking something of them and their time. But over time, you do start building relationships with these people, and they're happy to meet up with you and talk to you. And they've seen that their inputs, is making a difference in the product and making a better product for them. And they start getting more and more responsive. So yeah, so I'm interested, how did you go about bringing the teams together? Was that something you did? The tie? Did you get that kind of like cohesion bit like, between marketing and product? So you kind of realize those benefits? Yeah, well, it was something I had to do really not just with marketing and product, but with other teams across the business, because I didn't have the skill set to answer all the questions that I needed answering within that head of product roles. So I wouldn't be able to do my job in product without talking continuously to the customer team, the CSMs on the sales team. There, they're just an absolute goldmine of knowledge of what the customers are after and what the market needs. So we set up internal product advisory boards, with, you know, champions, from the customer team, from the sales team, from the marketing team, as well from the data analytics team. And, you know, they have such a diverse view on what we should be doing with the product, because the customer represent customer team representative is obviously talking about current customers pain point with the weather. So that's one thing, and then the sales team. And the sales champions are talking about, you know, things that are going to help us acquire new customers, which can sometimes be quite different things. Yeah, it was kind of non optional, I had to have these people in the room because I didn't have the answers. And I didn't have those original relationships with the customers. And they enjoyed it. Because there it was, it was a more diverse role for them to have in the business rather than pure sales. They enjoy having an input on what the product is going to look like. And obviously, when you have a salesperson who's helping you understand what the market needs, you take that on board, you put that into your product roadmap, and you build it, they go out there with a huge amount of confidence to go and sell that feature all that tool, because, you know, they've they've helped contribute towards the building of it. Yeah. And it's, it's really powerful to then be able to go and say to a customer, you said if I built this, you'd buy it here at it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we've got you on record saying it. So you have to sign this contract now. It's really interesting. But I You seem so customer focused in your approach. Can you tell me more about how you get close to your customers? And bit more about those advisory boards? Yeah, definitely. So when I took on the role in November 2021, it was actually one of the first things I did was organized customer advisory board session, mainly because I just wanted to hear what people really thought was missing from the platform, and what they what they would like to see from it. We had data around this, we knew that one of the things our platform needed to improve on was around the UX and UI. But obviously, it's one thing knowing what that problem is, it's another thing knowing how you can improve that with, with something that the customers are really going to like seeing. So we we invited a very specific group of customers to a customer advisory board. We've done our research around our our best performing customers, the people that stayed with us the longest, the people that are that engaged most with the platform, the people that we sold best to and had the highest conversion rates with and they were actually a very specific group of people. Ecommerce, people who worked in E commerce at kind of a mid to senior level, we worked out there was there were enough people in that market for us to hit our growth goals by you know, the E commerce market is big enough for us. So we invited that specific set of people to a customer advisory board. And you know, from lunch and beers and made it sound really fun. So it's not just kind of a boring workshop. And we offered a talk from one of our search experts, John Shaw, who people love hearing to speak so we you know, we offer those customers value as well saying, come along and hear John speak and we'll you know, we'll put on lunch or put on bears. And we'd love to hear from you about how we can improve the product. And I think what was really important in these sessions is it's not just a free for all of everybody. Just talking and having an opinion. It was a very structured session. We had framework we had worksheets, we separated people out into groups. We knew the question that we wanted answered before we went into into the session which was around how we can improve the UX the eye of the platform. So it was very much like, go away and brainstorm, come back to steal and continue that process. And what we got out of it, which was super interesting was that people thought that pi our product had everything that you needed in it to create amazing reports for the business. But it took them a good few hours to pull it from all the different places in the product. And there was a general consensus among all of the customers that day that what we needed was a central place of all of those key figures in. So out of that session, we developed a reporting dashboard, which brought all of those key metrics to the front of the product, and produce the customer reporting time, from a few hours to you know, seeing, seeing all the data they needed instantly. The benefit of having a very specific group of users in that session was that they all had the same use case. And they all discussed and agreed on what those key metrics should be for reporting back to the business. So that was kind of a really great when that came out of the first customer advisory board session. And it's similar to the internal product advisory board. Once they'd seen those dashboards come out, which was something that they'd helped design, they, you know, they love it, it's really exciting to them, and they want to come along to the next customer advisory board session, that's really interesting about that, like, the focus that you had about who your ideal customer and their persona was, and that you were going to double down that a lot of people end up being quite sales driven about their growth, and go kind of like where they think that the last person has told them to. And you know, this is something that I think lots of us are at risk of doing just now, you know, as the economy maybe is like contract like slowing down a little bit or growth is slowing down, investment in tech is getting a bit tighter, everyone's under pressure to make that exit happen. It's very easy to go where you think the money is, rather than focus on what you can do to maximize your existing product. And be clear about you know, your mission, your purpose, this is who you're serving. And not everyone is ideal customer. Yeah, definitely. And I think I thought about that a lot more in the product, rather than I ever did in the marketing role, I think I definitely was guilty of being too guilty with our target audience when I was in a pure marketing role at pi. Because you get excited and passionate about your product, and you think it will be useful to so many different types of people. And obviously, it's attractive when you're working in marketing and sales to expand that target audience as much as possible. That's transitioning over to the product role, and seeing what our competitors are putting out there. I mean, SEO isn't it is an incredibly saturated market, and we have some wildly well funded and big American competitors. And if we tried to compete with them on the breadth of those products and features that they were putting out there, I mean, we just would be going nowhere, really. But to find an a specific group of customers in that niche that we can really deeply solve their problems for them and build a product that's kind of specialist for them. You can go to those competitors, customers with confidence and say, we've built this product specifically for you. And we know that it's better for you than these more generalized products. But it you know, it takes quite a lot of attrition within a business to gain confidence behind that kind of strategy. Like I said, you just go back to data, you go back to looking at who your best customers are. And it makes sense, you know, the shorter time to close in the pipeline, higher conversion rate, higher lifetime value, you can start to see who your really good customers are. And then if you do the market research and realize that there's enough people like that out there for you to achieve the growth you want. It makes everything easier. It makes you more focused in your product development cycles. It also helps better sales enablement, because there's one consistent story of your business development reps and your sales teams to be talking through rather than having to learn, you know, multiple different stories. So it's worked really well for us at pi. It sounds like it's been a bit of a game changer. Yeah, I mean, I think so I think it probably took a year to be honest. It's not something that happens overnight. Like it took a year for us to get everyone really behind that strategy and start seeing the results. But I think when you start finding it easier and your business development reps are finding it easier to portray your points of difference, you know that you're in a good place because you say we are definitely the best seo platform for this group of people. Well, we have seen some great growth off the back of that. Obviously people are going to buy into this like mutual success, but they don't see instantly so So how did you get people on board with these changes? Because it is a big change for a company to be focused that way on the customers. And, you know, really driven by them. Yeah, definitely, especially with that narrowing the target audience, you can see that as if you're being, you know, less ambitious, because you're, you're not trying to service as many different groups of people. But I think what it really comes down to is doing small things well, and seeing the results, and communicating those successes back to the business. And then you gain trust from the stakeholders within the business. That's you should go and do the next thing on that journey. I think it massively helped having the buy in from the different teams who were then championing what we were doing. And the processes we were applying, they were championing that within their own teams and with their team heads, they were excited about it. But I think after the customer advisory board, and the the initial feedback we got from that, and the work that came out of that, you know, people did start to gain confidence in what we were doing. That it was, what came out of the customer advisory board was actually quite different to what the original plan for the product was. So that took quite a lot of convincing to say, you know, we have this roadmap here that was developed, you know, not necessarily in line with customers, but we think we should scrap the whole thing, and do this instead. But it was just one thing at a time, it was just saying, Okay, let's try and do this one thing, first, see how it works, and then do the next thing. And now we're in a place where the roadmap is completely customer driven. You've seen a lot of growth in the company, while you've been there, what what's helped to drive this? Yes. So I think what's, you know, a lot of people that work for pie, because it is a nice place to work, they stay there for a very long time. And we will have to take some responsibility for seeking external knowledge and bringing that back into the company to help keep what we're doing, you know, fresh and in line with, in line with what the market is doing. So I'm really lucky, I had a mentor, Matt little from Blue Ocean insight. So when I started my product role, obviously, I'd never worked in product at all. And whilst I had my marketing skills, I didn't know anything about product processes, or product development cycles or anything. So trying to find experts outside of the company to help inform what you're doing is invaluable. I mean, everything, you know, the customer advisory boards, and our product development processes came out of that external help marketing teams the same. So they they're continuously trying to improve their knowledge and skill set through all the HubSpot Academy things, there's so many things out there online, that that help them do their jobs better. I know the customer success team are the same at pi on the development team. So trying to not be an echo chamber within your own company. And just and just, you know, knowing what you know, and hoping that you're going to grow that way. But seeking that external knowledge and every single function, bringing it back to the company. And learning from it, I think has been incredibly important for us. I think as we covered briefly before, you know, narrowing down that target audience and being really specific as to who you're selling to, like you said, that was that has been a game changer for us. Otherwise, you're kind of flapping around in the wind a little bit, but really defining who you're selling to what their workflows are, what their use cases are, what their pain points are, you know, has has kind of distilled all of our processes to be a lot more efficient. And we've seen some nice growth off the back of that. And just surrounding yourself with really talented people to be honest, I mean, I'm lucky, I've got amazing people in well across the business, but marketing and products. You know, there's some amazing people on my team. And it was actually the original reason I wanted to make the move from clucks to pi, when I was a customer of Pi was because I just thought they were a really talented bunch of people that I wanted to go and learn from so. So lots of internal sources to learn from an external sources. It's interesting that you mentioned Matt, because we've previously had him on as a guest to talk about product as well. Beyond things like HubSpot, and you know, those kinds of tools. What other kind of like external sources, would you recommend? Were there any blogs or books that you found useful in helping you move and more into product or to you know, build the knowledge gaps that you had? Yes, definitely. So there's a couple more business, like broad business books as one could get to great, which was a massive influence of me in you know, the whole premise of that is find out what you do well and do that really well rather than trying to do everything and So that was a huge takeaway tip from good to great, that helps with, you know, the whole strategy of narrowing down our target audience. And that's, you know, more broader business strategy. And there are two books, again, that might recommend it to us inspired and empowered, which my predecessor also read from cover to cover, I did and I had a head of development did as well, you know, it just helps cover off all of those processes we were talking about, about bringing the customer central to your product roadmap, building confidence, through those product development processes, prioritizing things, they were just invaluable. And I still have them on my desk, because you know, reference points with loads of sticky posters. And so it's not, you know, a read and pocket, they're kind of reference books as well. Those are really good recommendations, so good to great and inspired and empowered, I'll make sure that they're mentioned in the show notes, if anyone's looking to read them. So it sounds like you were doing a lot of learning to make yourself better to drive the growth. And the other area that really helped drive the growth was to kind of focus in on that target audience. Is that fair to say? Yeah, definitely. And I think you know, anyone that wants to work in digital marketing or product, they have to have a learning first mentality, because even if you're an expert, you won't be tomorrow. And I think there isn't a single course out there you could do that would keep you in forms. At the point he needed to be for your job, you have to be proactive, and you have to be seeking education all the time. Otherwise, your knowledge is just outdated, so quickly. So there's lots of people here in marketing, who want to get more involved into product. So I've got a couple of questions about this. So like the first one, because because we've covered a lot of the like, personal side of like what you did, but what kind of business types or business conditions do you think make having product and marketing under one liter? Like an excellent strategic move for growth? Because it's probably not going to be for every company? But I'm sure you've maybe thought, Oh, I think it would work really well there. So be keen to hear your thoughts? Yeah, well, I think for SAS products as a whole, to be honest, I think it works really well, because it's not necessarily that one on one customer interaction, it's identifying groups of people with a common pain point, or a common use case that you're going to build a product around. So I think that is a big area where I think it works really well, because you're using all those market research skills to try and identify your ICP or right target audience. And, and see if that's, you know, enough of a market for you to hit your growth goals, and then try and deeply understand what they're, you know, what their use cases are, and what product you should be building for them. I think, you know, there are lots of products out there where it is more tailored, and, you know, it needs an expert in that sector to build that product, rather than just the marketing person doing the market research. Yeah, definitely some niche ecommerce businesses, I can see it would work really well. Yeah, exactly. And my next question, so like, some people will assume that product is, you know, maybe just a little bit more technical than marketing, you know, I would say is just slightly different technicalities than marketing. But like, what were the big things, do that help build your self confidence in that area? Because, like, for me, I imagine if I were to take on a whole area of business that I hadn't worked in, it would be a little bit daunting. So yeah. How did you deal with that? I mean, it was incredibly daunting. And I remember sitting in the first sprint review with our development team, and just feeling like the world's biggest charlatan, and thinking, you know, they're all thinking, why on earth is she here? She somehow works in product, obviously, you know, they weren't thinking that, that that's how you feel when you're in that position. I think working really closely with our Head of Development helped a lot, because at the start, I think, you know, we were both almost questioning why I was there, to be honest. But when he started seeing some of the Intel, we were pulling around our best customers, customer types and help helping, you know, work together and understanding what the overall business strategy should be for growth. You know, they do start seeing the value you're bringing to that team and the skill set that hasn't necessarily been there before. And I think developers want to build things that people are using, you know, no developer wants to waste their time building something that goes sits on the shelf and ghost I knew is. So once we put a few things out there, and I was using our time and the developers to not only you know, showcase what they've built but report back and say, this feature that you've built has increased adoption by x and this customer was going to to leave, but now they're not. Or we've just signed this huge American business because they specifically like this feature which you put out there, you know, it makes work more purposeful and rewarding for them as well. And I think, you know, you're all working together to increase each other's knowledge and each other's skill set across the business, which again, just makes work well, I think it makes work more enjoyable for everybody, because you're working towards this common goal, rather than just diffused kind of functions within the business. It sounds like a wonderful team environment that you have there. But from what I'm picking up, it's like you leaned into your strengths. And very quickly, people around you start to devalue that slightly different perspective. And, you know, like, like, more diverse opinion base than they've been getting previously. Yeah. And I think that's exactly it. And that was something that she might see did support me very much to do that. Don't try and do this role in the way that the previous person did it. You know, you don't have to replicate what they were doing. You don't have to have the same skill sets as them. You know, we've put you in this role because of your skill sets with communication and the marketing background that had so make sure you don't try and change your skill sets. Just lean in, like use it to what you what you are good at and see what what impact that has, that's really positive to hear. So that kind of journey, you had a lot of support and positive feedback around you by the sounds of things, which always helps. Yes, definitely. And so do you built your confidence? How high? Did you gain the confidence of the product team? Because I'm sure this wasn't the case. But I know that there would be product people listening who maybe think, oh, it might be really difficult to be managed by a marketeer. Yeah. What we do? Well, yeah, exactly. I'm, you know, they might have a point. But um, yeah, so, product team, none of the people in our product team. So I'm in a quite unique position have had that product background, our product team is made up of a UX and design expert, and data scientists are a data company and a head of development. And I think we're all we're all in acknowledgment that we were all trying to learn together, how to do this in a way that was going to be successful. So I can't necessarily offer up any experience, you know, any experience or opinions for people that are going into manager role of well versed product managers, because that wasn't the environment that I was in, I was in, in an environment where we were all trying to figure out how to do it together. And learn together. So yeah, maybe maybe a little bit of a different kind of situation. So it sounds like there's a lovely mindset. And that kind of attitude to learning is so important for having kind of like a growth mindset and in organizations. Sounds like there's a really solid base there. What, what do you think, like the key benefits are the business could get from having someone lead product to is from the marketing background? There's obviously like the customer focus, the communication, the influencing skills that may be stronger sometimes. But is there anything else that you think can help? You know, we've covered off a lot of them. The one the the one thing I would add to that is just particularly with obviously the digital marketing background, having those analytics skills and having that more commercial mindset than maybe somebody who'd worked in pure product? Because in digital marketing, you're constantly trying to look for what's working, what's performing well, and how can we scale that? And use a lot of data to do that. And I think that's completely transferable to the product world, you know, which parts of the products are working? Well, let's invest more in that which products, which parts of the products aren't working so well or our customers are struggling with? And how can we go and, you know, fix that or remove it completely. So the only additional thing I think I'd add on to that original list is just that kind of analytical mindset, which I think you know, particularly people we've worked across digital marketing are usually quite strong. And that kind of ease of comfort with data. Yeah, exactly. as well. Yeah. Makes it makes it so much easier. Well, Sophie, this has been like really fascinating. I've very much enjoyed learning from your experiences today. You know, if anyone's got any questions about it specifically, I'm sure you don't mind if they reach out to you on LinkedIn. I'll put your details in the show notes so that people can find you easily. But thanks. Thanks so much for all of your input today. No worries at all. Thanks very much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for listening to the Listen perspective. I'm Rebecca Hastings, founder and director at the Listen crib, a tech sector executive search and talent consultancy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with others post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. If you're a company looking to hire top technology leaders, or you'd like to discuss your next move, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or send me an email to Rebecca at the Listen group at dog co.uk. Thanks again for listening today.