Why Sales & Marketing Still Aren’t Aligned (And How to Fix It) with Michelle Michaux

Today I'm joined by Michelle Michaux, who shares how her unconventional career journey (from banking operations to marketing) gave her a front row seat to how large complex organisations can bridge the gaps between marketing, sales, and delivery.

Michelle brings a refreshingly honest perspective on what marketing should be doing inside organisations, why alignment with sales is still one of the biggest challenges in B2B, and why marketers need to get better at articulating their value at the leadership table.

Together, Emma and Michelle explore the realities of working inside complex global organisations like Fujitsu, the cultural nuances that shape business decisions, and how marketing can move beyond execution to become a genuine driver of growth.

If you care about career growth, influence, strategic thinking and the future of marketing, this episode will give you both practical insight and plenty to reflect on.

To connect with Michelle:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-michaux/

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:22 Michelle's Career Journey
02:07 Transition to Marketing
03:11 Running Her Own Consultancy
04:10 Operations Experience and Its Impact
06:59 Sales and Marketing Dynamics
11:21 Challenges in B2B Marketing
15:32 Global Marketing Complexities
18:41 Cultural Insights from Fujitsu
22:58 Personal Anecdotes and Cultural Reflections
24:06 Understanding Cultural Differences
25:02 Marketing's Role in Business Strategy
25:50 Challenges in B2B Marketing
28:06 The Importance of Customer Insight
30:00 The Role of Chief Customer Officers
32:19 Aligning Marketing with Business Goals
34:11 Articulating Marketing Value
43:28 Final Thoughts and Reflections

Can you also find episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EmmaGrahamCareerCoach/videos

Your host, Emma Graham, Career Coach and ex-recruiter, is here to help you with:

 💡 Gain clarity on what’s important to you
 💡 Confidently communicate your value
 💡 Build a personal brand and a strong network
 💡 Take a strategic approach to your next move
 💡 Navigate the job market effectively
 💡 Build career confidence with a repeatable success blueprint

🌐 Explore my coaching programs and free resources:
 Website: https://www.egconsulting.au/
 LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/emmajgraham
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmagrahamcareercoach/

🎁 Free Resources:
 📄 CV Development Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/cv-advice
 📄 LinkedIn Profile Optimisation Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/linkedin-profile-guide

📅 Book Your FREE Career Strategy Discovery Call:
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Transcript

Emma 0:00

Hello and welcome to Your Career Journey, the podcast designed to be your compass through the twists and turns of career development. Today I'm joined by Michelle Michaud to talk about what she's learned working in large complex B2B organisations and how using that knowledge she now helps smaller businesses to bridge the gaps between marketing, sales and delivery. So I'm joined on the podcast today by Michelle. Michelle Masseau, how are you? Well, thanks Emma, how are you? Very well, thank you, and thank you for joining me. Before we get into talking about implementation and how sales and marketing can work more effectively together, Michelle, I'd love to understand a little bit more about your career journey, how you came to be doing what you're doing today and your journey into marketing. Take me, take me back. Where did it all start?

Michelle 1:00

I started my career in operations in a bank. And I had I had left school, I'd started a science degree and discovered I was going to be a terrible scientist. So I'd left school and I started working in the bank. And then I just kept working my way through different roles within the bank, mostly in operations. Eventually I sort of wound my way around into sort of sales and marketing functions. I was selling accounts, payable and receivable outsourcing services. And at that point, I decided to go back to university. And I did a degree in business with a major in marketing and finance. And you know, finance obviously because I was working with financial services. But then I kind of also discovered that, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s, banking was quite male dominated and there was no way I was going to own an account. And I I really had, I couldn't have articulated it in this way at the time, but I wanted to own the customer. And so I went and worked, I found a role at Telstra. I worked my way through sales there up into running key accounts. Um, in the meantime, all the while sort of still doing my degree in the background. And the marketing subjects that I thought were the easy subjects or the bludge subjects to just tick the boxes and get, you know, as a mature age student to just get through. I kind of once I I I got I wound my way around Telstra in different roles as well, and I ended up running the product marketing team for the enterprise and government section. And I discovered that it wasn't easy subjects, it's just that I really got it. Like I really understood it. It was, it was there in my DNA kind of thing. And so from there I just proceeded to focus on marketing and different aspects of marketing as part of my career because I know that it's just innate and I love it and I I just I just get it. I just want to do it all the time. I think about it all the time. It's a bit tragic, really. There's no getting away from it. No, no. So and then I went from Telstra to uh Fujitsu and I ran the Voice a Customer program, all of CX kind of function within that business. And then I went to Computer Share where I was head of marketing for their print and mail house for five countries. Now I run my own consultancy.

Emma 3:28

Nice. Kind of come come full circle background to to working for yourself.

Michelle 3:34

Yes, yes, which I'm absolutely loving.

Emma 3:36

There's a lot to be said for it, I have to say. I mean, I guess it's like all things, isn't it? There's pros and cons to everything, but there ain't yeah, but I I think the the pros certainly from my perspective, and it sounds like yours as well, outweigh the outweigh the cons.

Michelle 3:50

My my friends who are still gaining fully employed and can't and don't, you know, can't contemplate or can't imagine themselves doing this, keep sending me roles to apply for because they feel like you know, yeah, look, I know this setting up my business is kind of hard and it's kind of not the salary I was maybe used to, but actually I love it, you know. I really, I really enjoy it. And I love that I can help multiple businesses. I can go in all different directions with it.

Emma 4:20

Do you think in hindsight, although it sounds like it's not something that you purposefully did at the time, but do you think starting your career and operations kind of then coloured what came later? Do you feel it gave you a level of understanding of the mechanics, shall we say, of of how businesses kind of go about things?

Michelle 4:40

Absolutely. So to understand so the part of the business I was working in when I worked for the bank was the check processing division, right? So when checks were big, and you know, we were literally an office-based factory kind of, you know, we were scanning things, we were processing things, we were swapping them with other banks. Like physically, you would take checks to you know the basement car park at the NAB in this in East Melbourne, and you'd swap bags and then you'd take them back to your bank to process them, right? It's a very manual. I know, I know, you know, when when people learn about writing things across the ledger, we literally had a ledger, we wrote things across, right? It's not, it wasn't all in the computer like it is now. So it's a it was a a very physical manifestation of the business, and you understood the practicality. It wasn't just a theoretical something going through the computer screen, it was a very physical manifestation of the business and understanding how those operations functioned, how to get efficiency through them. You know, like my brain loves process-driven efficiency. And so I could look at the processes and figure out how I could become more efficient as a machinist, and then how a team could become more efficient. And, you know, you know, early in my career managing a relatively large operations team, like you know, 16 people in one operations group, you know, it really showed me a lot about the human behaviour in groups and how those teams could be the most efficient and could get and could be the most effective. And so that all still comes through into marketing because you know that taught me a lot about just the human psychology of managing young people and understanding how to grow them and develop them, you know, it's still that human element is is marketing.

Emma 6:34

One of the things I've heard so many times over the years, there's there's two that really stick out, things I used to hear all the time in in my recruitment days, you know, when people would come and say, Oh, you know, can you help me? I'm looking for a new role. And the two reasons that they were unhappy in their current businesses. One was the business doesn't really understand marketing and and you know, they were constantly having to sell marketing internally to get anything done. That one was super prevalent. The other one that was always really prevalent, particularly for those people that were coming from the the B2B space, is that sales and marketing just don't understand each other and they just don't work well together. And that's the space that you've spent again a lot of time in. And I wonder perhaps having come through the sales side of it in the same way as the operation side of it, I'd imagine it gave you some some really interesting insights. Small question, Michelle, but what why is that? Like, why do sales and marketing struggle to work together effectively? Easy question.

Michelle 7:40

Yes, yes, and it varies depending on the business you're in. So I would like to think that as a marketer, having been in sales, I approach it with that sales-led mindset and that my marketing is a reflection of being able to enable a sales team in a B2B environment to really deliver in a meaningful way. It doesn't mean that you're not doing the same marketing things, it just means that maybe you're articulating them differently and why why they don't align. Like honestly, I think when the business measures marketing, it measures volume. It's always looking at how many leads you're bringing in, how fast you can bring them in. Um, you know, what's the value of the leads? And it's really looking at volume. But when you measure sales, you're measuring close rates, and there's not really necessarily a correlation. You know, you'd hope there's a correlation, but there's no correlation in the way those things are measured. And so therefore, just that very that that very foundational measure that you have in the two teams, then just proceeds to send them further and further apart as you, you know, then the the as the clash or the you ladder that up, it becomes more disparate.

Emma 8:58

And I suppose as well, sort of on top of that, maybe the same point, but the attribution part of, you know, sales saying, well, we did this, this is our sale, and marketing saying, well, no, actually, that came from us, that's actually our sales. So then even how you attribute an ultimately, you know, positive outcome, we got the customer, we got the sale, what percentage of that sale gets attributed across? And it's really hard to know.

Michelle 9:25

It's really hard to, and especially in B2B, you know, the sales cycles are long, the relationships are complex. And although we like to think that B2B buyers buy on a rational in a rational way, they still buy emotionally. And sales would like to argue that they've had these great relationships that have brought that around and they would have. Um, but marketing had to create the right environment for the customer to trust and to be able to buy, um, or to be able to get over that emotional hurdle. Now, sometimes the emotional hurdle is in a relationship. So, you know, if sales has the good enough relationship, then that is the emotional thing. Sometimes it's the brand trust that allows the customer to have that emotional hurdle, you know, to get over that emotional hurdle of wanting to buy from you. And sometimes it's, you know, there's a myriad of factors that can impact whether a customer wants to buy from you or not. But regardless, it it is a very complex environment to attribute what one person or one thing was the game changer that brought that customer over the line. And so it needs to be looked at as a team sport, and and you can't you can't divide, well, I did this and I did that. It's we did everything, and and it takes a lot to get that right, to influence all the right parties in the buying group, to make sure that your messaging's right, to make sure you've got the brand trust, to make sure you've got the relationship depth. You know, there's a lot of layers in a B2B sale, especially in the size of the organizations that I worked in, where you're dealing with multi-million dollar sales, or sometimes tens of million dollar sales. You know, it's very, very complex.

Emma 11:21

It's interesting there. You said, you know, it's it's a it's a team sport, you know, we need to come together to deliver this to get the customer. And the thing that came into my mind is that that kind of goes against some of the instincts of really great salespeople, because great salespeople are competitive. They want to, I won, I got the customer, I got the commission, you know, go me. And we're not gonna be then. Yeah, exactly. Like then, how do you factor that into? Well, hang on, no, we're actually all in this together, we're all pulling in the same direction. There's a there's an immediate kind of inbuilt challenge culturally there as well, I'd imagine.

Michelle 11:59

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, I was never a hunter, that's not my sales style. I'm always the farmer. I solve the problem first, build the trust, sell the product later, and and I sell the product to solve a problem, and I can prove the problem, the outcome to the customer. So I yeah, I'm not a hunter, but everybody needs hunters, you need BDMs in your business. You've you're going to have those guys, girls working for you. And you have to find a way to collaborate in a way that's meaningful, and it doesn't mean that marketing needs to take a back seat or be subordinate to them. It's about how you create the right collaborations and create the right level of understanding of you can't do this without us. So let's do it together. And we don't, we're not trying to take your glory, you can still have the big ring the bell moment in the in the office. That's that's cool, you know. So it's it's about trying to bridge those relationships. And in in it depends on the size of the organization, obviously, but often you can build those one by one where you know that those people are need the glory because that's a part of their psyche. You know, you you're treating it as a marketing exercise, but an internal one to say, yeah, it's okay, we're not gonna take your glory, but we need to do this together. And these are the things that you're gonna get out of this.

Emma 13:30

The other, the other thing that I would imagine is a is a I was gonna say unique challenge, and I think it probably is certainly in the B2B space, in some of those bigger organizations, you know, you mentioned Telstra and you know, selling to government, is time. I I'd imagine some of those sales cycles are years potentially. And that is also, I think, must be quite quite an interesting and unique marketing challenge. But again, to the point of how you kind of keep that sales and marketing relationship going on one customer over that period of time must be yeah, challenging.

Michelle 14:08

And so that's where a a lot of you know, in those organizations where sales cycles are very long and contracts might be for a decade, that you need to play a long game, but you need to just create all of those foundational assets and the foundational messaging that continually builds trust. You know, you need to be putting out white papers, turning up at events, doing all of the things to make yourself seen, known, trusted, because those foundational activities as marketing are what build the trust that allows you to then have the door open or have the opportunity you know, for the salespeople to have the opportunity to have the conversation. And without those foundational services, and and they're it's really hard because oftentimes you can't measure the outcome of those things unless you're measuring, you know, brand trackers and things like that. But even still, that's not necessarily the right indicator. A lot of it is just creating the right sales enablement for them to have meaningful conversations, creating the right messaging so that you're building trust in your brand and creating the right opportunities for people to be seen in the places they need to be seen.

Emma 15:27

What's the what's the kind of the, I was gonna say global, international, uh again, I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrasing, but thinking to your time at Fujitsu and you know, huge global brands and and does that bring again an additional level of of complexity? Does that kind of bring its own special challenges? I'm imagining. Certainly does. Tell me about that.

Michelle 15:52

So obviously, when you're working inside a global brand, a lot of your um marketing materials are you know, you're essentially field marketing for some aspects of your business. So you're taking things that are global and you're localizing them or you're using them locally in a way that you know, the best way you can. And sometimes it's hard to get approval to create your own materials or your own structure because it's all done from a global level. And I understand the necessity to do that, um, but sometimes your market doesn't actually meet the like meet the global criteria or meet the globe, you know, it has a different need. So it's hard to get some of that customization across the line and some of the local specificity that you need. I remember like at Fujitsu, some of the complexities of working in a Japanese organization. And I had one instance when we were building our um Voice of the Customer program, we we wanted to name it, and we often gave projects a name that was Japanese-based, and we wanted to give it a certain name. And the name meant active listening. And every but every combination of characters in Japan usually has two meanings. And when the presentation went to so normally there was a monthly review with the president, and the president couldn't make it, and I think this the global CFO came. And unfortunately, his English wasn't as good as the president. And when he um when our CEO presented the idea to him, he misunderstood and thought it was the opposite meaning of the characters, and then he just quashed it and went, No, no, you can't use that, that's the incorrect meaning. And our like we always had a liaison from head office, and and he came out of the meeting and I said to him, What happened? What like that's not the meaning. We we got the meaning right, didn't we? And he said, No, you got the meaning right, his English wasn't good enough, but we can't say to him he got it wrong, yeah, because he's the most senior person in the room, he has to be right. And it was like, Yeah, so we just called it the voice of customer programming and because that became too. We had a logo done and everything.

Emma 18:21

So it was like just an adding level of complexity. You're already, you know, trying to push the boulder up the hill.

Michelle 18:30

Yes, and then you and then you're dealing with cultural nuance, yeah, just the cultural nuance, and as and it was delightful, and I loved it, and I learned so much, and it was such a great place to work. But yeah, there was just these cultural, these cultural layers, and things took a very long time because they change very slowly and they consider things very deeply, and so yeah, it was it was a slow moving process because of some extracultural nuances.

Emma 19:03

Did you find just as you're saying, you know, how slow moving the the process was? Do you do you think in hindsight, like did you get to a better result because of that or or or not? You know, was was there an element of of momentum losses?

Michelle 19:20

I think it had pluses and minuses, honestly.

Emma 19:24

Yeah.

Michelle 19:24

Yeah. So it's some things, yes, you had to be like you had to think deeply and you had to put a lot of effort into putting things up, but then some things they they left too long and it was a detriment, you know, because they you know, it just took too long for them to get to a point where they had to do something in a market that went against their cultural brain that they wouldn't do in Japan. And and if they had to do something in a market that was difficult, they took a long time to make that decision.

Emma 19:59

And sometimes the moment is gone. Yeah, you've missed the you've missed the window, yeah.

Michelle 20:05

Yeah, yeah. Or it's cost the business by by not. Yeah, like you either miss an opportunity or you you extend the cost of not cancelling something that you should cancel or I always think stuff like that's fascinating, actually.

Emma 20:20

Of just yeah, just how different, you know, sure, we're all people at the end of the day, but those those cultural influences, I think, particularly in those large organizations, become quite noticeable and they become kind of part of the rhythm of of how you do business, essentially. And I always think it's fascinating to to kind of understand to understand what's that, sorry, what that is like, if I can get my words out properly.

Michelle 20:45

It was really insightful into the Japanese culture, and it like it was so lovely. Things like so our CEO said he went to Japan one time, like on a on a business trip, and he was going out for dinner with some colleagues, and they weren't necessarily like executive level, they were just seeing people within the Japanese business, and they were going out for dinner, and as they're walking along, someone had been um, I don't know, hit by a car or had it, you know, fallen off their bike or something, and they were laying on the footpath, and they said, We need to stop and help this man. And a CEO said, But there's lots of people here, and the ambulance is on its way. And they said, No, he's got a Fujitsu phone. He's one of our customers. We need to help him. Like the cultural, like the ingrain of that business within the culture was so deep. Like, so there's 25 companies in Japan that are like the top 25 companies, you know, Toyota, Fujitsu, like a number of them, and they're they they are like conglomerates that they run multiple businesses. So, you know, Fujitsu in Japan does everything from um, you know, tech agricultural technology through to building submarines. They can do like a million things. And and they so yeah, that that depth of relationship to those top 25 companies is very strong. And so it was like, you know, this person has our phone. We need to help them.

Emma 22:15

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? Like your your responsibility to your customer is not just in the transaction of which they are a customer, it's their entirety.

Michelle 22:26

It's a life decision that they've made to support your business, so you'll support them. Yeah. And so yeah, there was so many lovely insights over over the five years I was there. There were so many lovely insights into Japanese culture and the way that you know they did business and the way they viewed life. It was lovely.

Emma 22:46

Yeah, fascinating.

Michelle 22:47

I must say I'm off topic here, but I had a similar experience. So my from my surname, you can tell my ex-husband is half French. And um, when I finished my degree part-time, like after seven years, we went overseas to go and investigate his family heritage. But before we did that, we started, you know, watching French movies and he went to conversational French classes because he hadn't he stopped speaking French when he was five or something. And so watching those movies also gave us an insight into French life, in that when you watch a French film, often there's like no ending. And and at first, because you're so used to the American, you know, beginning, middle, end, you know, good guy, bad guy, beginning, middle, end, everyone that's happily ever after kind of movie. When you start watching these French movies where there's no end, it's like, what the heck is this? This is so unsatisfying. But after a while, we came to the realization it's actually their philosophy on life that life is just a continual series of forks in the road, and you end on a fork because you don't really because otherwise it could be another fork, another fork, another fork. So it's just their view on life and that philosophy that they have, and it actually helped us understand his father better. Like and his, you know, the why some decisions he made or things he said were odd to our culture, but actually they made a lot of sense when you viewed them in that whole say loving kind of perspective.

Emma 24:18

It was really and actually it makes a lot of sense because if you know, in so many things there is no end, you know, it's it's a continuation of you know, choose the left fork and then see where it goes. Yeah, I really like that. I'd never noticed that actually, but as soon as you say it, it makes yeah, it makes perfect perfect sense. And it is all a bit some certainly the sort of the more American school, it's very quick cookie cutter, isn't it? You know, bad guy, good guy. Yeah, good guy, bad guy, beginning. That's obvious, you know. The the other of those things that I mentioned that I, you know, hear people say constantly, it was the you know, sales and marketing don't talk to each other. And the other one was that a lot of businesses don't really understand marketing, and and often when you kind of dig into that, it comes down to that essentially that marketing doesn't have a seat at the table, that that marketing isn't involved in strategy and only kind of gets involved right at the end. Here's our idea, here's what we want to deliver. Can you go and do a campaign? I'm oversimplifying, but you know, you know what I mean.

Michelle 25:18

No, no, I don't think you are because sometimes it's that simple. Absolutely. So I hundred percent I agree. I think in B2B, I think it comes back to what we already talked about, which is that there's it's very hard to attribute marketing to a dollar value in the pipeline because the sales cycles are long, because really a lot of the marketing that you're doing in B2B is around building brand awareness, building trust with the customer, building resources for salespeople. And and yes, you are running campaigns and you will have funnels and you will, you know, do all of the mechanisms that a B2C company does, but in a B2C company, it is so much more obvious that a click drives a purchase, or you know, like it's so much more obvious, and there's so much more direct linkage between the marketing you do and the sale that's coming through to till. So it's much more obvious. Whereas in a B2B cycle, where especially in these really big long sales cycles that we that we've been talking about, you know, it's so much harder to attribute the direct outcome. So therefore, it it's seen as invisible a bit. Like it's like, oh yeah, just that's just marketing, right? So they so you perpetually get asked to be sales enablement, you you're perpetually asked to clean up PowerPoints, you're perpetually asked to just run a campaign. Can you just run a campaign because the pipeline's low? It's like, well, a campaign will take 12 months to flow through to your pipeline, like you know, and you're not funding it and you're not actually going to be able to deliver anything meaningful. One business I worked in, you know, had someone join as a in the sales team in another country who was he came from a much bigger organization, much than than the function that was in that country. And you know, wanted this whole qualified funnel pipeline kind of thing. Well, one, we didn't have the infrastructure to deliver it, two, we didn't have the budget to deliver it, and but but it was just perceived as, you know, well, marketing's hopeless because we don't have all of this stuff. What I could deliver her was deep insight into consumer behavior in that sector, which would then make them a you know, a resource, you know, have so we're we're a B2B to C business, and my philosophy always is if you know something about the C, then the B in the middle wants to talk to you, right? So my goal was to so I'd done, I'd started doing a longitudinal study over a number of years into consumer behavior around what we sold, so that then businesses would want to talk to us, so then we were seen as an authority, and then that opens the door to strategic selling, to you know, a lot of engagement that you would not otherwise get. And that those joining those dots was really difficult. They did not value that insight, didn't understand how to use it. You know, we tried tried education, but it was like this like constant push me pull you because they wanted a funnel and I wanted strategic selling because a funnel just was gonna do nothing for them. Like, yeah, you could I could I could funnel the crap out of that business, it was gonna go nowhere.

Emma 28:54

And and that's often it's often the thing, isn't it? And and perhaps it comes back to that point about alignment that the disconnect between you know someone senior in the business saying we need X, and the marketer saying X won't do anything, you you actually need but knock yourself out, right?

Michelle 29:12

Yeah, exactly. A LinkedIn campaign because someone's like, We need a LinkedIn campaign, and it's too hard to argue that we don't need a LinkedIn campaign, so it's like oh they're not that expensive, like whatever. Yeah, because like the argument is not worth having a lot of the time.

Emma 29:29

Do you do you think the shift to you know, focus on you you see roles, and you mentioned you had a sort of a head of customer type role or those kind of CX type roles? Do you think that has helped in in terms of marketing owns the customer, marketing is the voice of the customer, that becomes marketing seat at the table, and and that kind of becomes the joined up thinking? Do you do you think that's helped?

Michelle 29:57

In some ways it does, and in other ways it just dilutes. So I know someone approached me this year about a role, and and it was head of it was a chief customer officer role. Yeah, and I was like, well, I'll have a look at it. Um and you know, I've got a sales and a marketing background, so it's and an operations background, so it's kind of good to put that stuff together. And then when I read the actual job description, they really wanted ahead of sales and marketing, and really they wanted ahead of sales to then basically the marketing team. They it wasn't, you know, it wasn't actually a chief customer officer role. So I think where it gets put together well, it does give marketing a seat at the table and being able to own sales plus marketing plus a level of you know, customer service or delivery sort of function, that that together gives you scope to actually make change and to and to create cohesive measurements and metrics that do reflect across the business and and to own the customer. But I I think that a lot of businesses struggle to really embrace it as what it's designed to be, um, especially as you've come further down in size. Like I think the biggest businesses can probably embrace that, but then as you come down in size, I think they really struggle to embrace it, and it's probably a hiding to nothing for a lot of people.

Emma 31:36

Why is that? Why why do you think they do struggle to embrace it?

Michelle 31:40

I think in B2B, it still comes down to the fact that marketing is not well understood, and by not understanding it, um, you know, you you could I too many times I've seen customer centricity replace strategy, right? So they they don't know what strategy should be, so they focus on customer centricity. So they feel like making these chief customer officer roles is being customer centric, but it's actually in the absence of strategy.

Emma 32:11

I was thinking when you were saying that as well, that it it does seem to be one of quirks, for want of a better word, of marketing that, oh, you know, if someone comes up with a new title, oh it's you know, it's CX, we'll just call it CX or it's it's growth marketing, we'll just call it growth marketing. It's the same thing, it's the same problem, it's the same challenges. They haven't actually changed anything, they've just called it a thing and been around it long enough to know that ABM ABM is strategic marketing.

Michelle 32:41

ABM, you know, ABM is just one-to-one. Like it, you know, there's no there's there's not really anything new. Like, I guess some of the some of the digital marketing has brought new ways of doing marketing, but it's still the same thing. And you're just you're able to measure more because you can measure clicks and you know, you've got metrics sitting in the back of, you know, Google and whatever else, you you know, all of the things that you've got in place in your business. But unless the metrics are driving something meaningful and heading you towards the execution of your growth strategy, they're just numbers. And I I get concerned that when as marketers, you you're being judged on the metrics you can put on your CV, and they don't necessarily equal deep thinking, they don't necessarily equal strategy, they might just be you ran a good campaign, you got some good numbers. What did that actually end up being? You know, and especially in B2B, like I would argue that I made a significant change in the business where I focused on the C to draw people back to us. And I could have run campaigns that would have given me better numbers on my CV, but I wouldn't have transformed the business. Whereas what I did was I enabled a consulting practice to be developed that couldn't have existed without the work I did.

Emma 34:21

It's a really interesting point you make and a conversation that I have often of some of the I was gonna say intangibles, and and that's the wrong word because what you did there was very tangible. It was a it was a big change, but as you say, it's not such a simple, snappy 20% increase to put on your plan, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's much more difficult to explain, it's it's much more difficult for someone to understand. And also, as as is often the challenge, you know, uh the first person reading your CV is probably not a marketer, so they actually don't understand that thing you did because they don't understand the context. Whereas a marketer reading that can go, oh wow, that that thing there, then that's huge. Like I've tried to I've tried to shift that before, or I've tried to change that before. I I understand how difficult that that thing is that that that person did. And I think it's absolutely one of the inbuilt challenges around how you how you articulate your value and and I struggle with it all the time. Yeah, it's it's not easy. And I think, you know, it's probably one of the pitfalls of of kind of the the rise of of digital, you know, whenever it was 10 years ago, maybe a bit more, when everyone was just going nuts of like digital's where it's at, everything's digital. And I think a lot of people sort of fell into that trap because of the metrics, because of the numbers, because for years they'd, you know, how how do you explain, you know, brand to a CFO who just wants to see a number and and you're trying to say, no, but we've built trust, we've you know done all these really important things, and suddenly you could show those numbers, and it kind of feels like maybe the pendulum swung too far that that people just almost got trapped into that. Well, here are the numbers, here are the numbers, here are the numbers. But as you said, if if you're not actually delivering to a strategy, and if that strategy isn't correct or meaningful or you know, yeah, angled towards what the customer wants, you could have the best metrics in the world, but doesn't mean you're gonna actually sell anything or or move towards whatever that goal is.

Michelle 36:38

Yeah, yes, exactly. Um, yeah, it's very, very difficult. And you know, strategy marketing, marketing is the part of the business that should be executing all the growth elements in your strategy. Now, obviously, there's yeah, other elements in your strategy that are operational focused or productivity focused, and they don't necessarily come through marketing. But any element of a business strategy that relates to growth, marketing should be catching that from the strategy team and then pushing it out into the rest of the business or the the front of the go-to-market. Um, so if you don't have marketing well aligned to your strategy, and and I think that's where a lot of businesses underestimate marketing, because marketing should be, you know, you should have strategy first, and then marketing should be the next step down from strategy for those elements. Obviously, finance for other things, but you know, for those elements that are growth, that's that that's the catch up, that's the catching point, the launching place.

Emma 37:41

Yeah, and so often, as I said before, it's at the end of the line, not yet, not at the start.

Michelle 37:47

Yeah, it's it's like, oh, we've decided to do this. Can you run some campaigns, pump something out on LinkedIn?

Emma 37:53

In in businesses where you've seen that done well, Michelle, either in businesses that you've worked in as a as an employee or or businesses that you've consulted to, in businesses that do that well, what's what's the difference? Is it is it the most senior marketer? Is it that they've been able to influence in a different way? Or is it process, is it structure? Like what is the thing that enables that to happen that you've you've observed?

Michelle 38:25

Emma. Sorry. Oh no, I welcome it.

Emma 38:29

It's kind of like the holy grail question, isn't it? Like, I don't how do we make it?

Michelle 38:34

I don't know that I have the answer. Like I have seen a person who I know well and who is like an astounding marketer. I I've seen her be able to take marketing and strategy and put them together and make some change. I don't know if that's the person or the businesses like the well, the one business that she got to work in where she was a chief customer officer and she did have all of that stuff together. Or is it her just being an astounding woman, like and able to do things that maybe other people haven't been able to or haven't been able to observe? But I've observed her in two organizations, one where I worked well no, I think I've observed her in three organizations actually, where I've seen her work and where I've heard of her work, and she has achieved outstanding things in all of them, but she couldn't have achieved that same thing in all of them because the organizations weren't set up to receive her ability in the same way. So I think it comes down to a combination of right organization, right leadership, and the right person.

Emma 39:55

Is that one of the things that you're particularly enjoying about your consultancy work at the moment that you do get that I I'm making an assumption, but tell me whether I'm right or not. But you get that bigger picture kind of overview of I I can see where the blockages are or or where the disconnect is. Is is that something that you A get to see and and B that you're enjoying about it?

Michelle 40:20

I love it. I love, I love, you know, like I said in the beginning, like I'm a problem solver, I want to come in and solve a problem. And I love coming in, getting that overview and taking that knowledge that I've got from those bigger businesses about structure and process and all those great things and bringing it down to that next level to the tier twos and threes, where I can actually make a difference to their business in a way that they maybe can't afford a resource that's done it at the scale that I've done it at before. So I've I feel very fulfilled in that aspect of being able to like be quite strategic, but then pragmatic in the execution to say, well, here's what I think the problem is, and here's how I think we can resolve it by doing these few things to just do a quick fix and get you on the right path.

Emma 41:12

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to that point we were making before about how you articulate value as a as a marketer. I I personally and I've worked with a number of clients on this, but personally think it's wrapped up in that. It's that actually positioning marketing and yourself as as a way to solve business problems, to actually you know work towards commercial outcomes. And and this thing we're calling marketing is it's just a toolkit. And as a marketer, you know, these are the things that I'll employ, but actually what I'm doing is solving business problems for a particular commercial outcome. And I think actually, under that cloak, if you like, it it perhaps gives a slightly different language to talk about it that I think is actually really A, really helpful, but but actually B kind of has far more weight when you're particularly when you're talking to more senior people within the organization, I think.

Michelle 42:08

Absolutely, that's what marketing is. You know, we're taking a tool there to solve a problem and pro and deliver growth, you know, and and the two things might be slightly different. So there might be a problem that the business has that you're using to resolve it, but the end outcome of resolving all those problems should be growth, or you might be just solving for growth without having a problem, but growth would then be the problem that you're solving.

Emma 42:38

Final question, Michelle. It's always the final question here, and that is what do you know now that you wish you knew then?

Michelle 42:45

So I wish that I had realized earlier that marketing weren't the bludge subjects that I actually was good at it, and I would have probably focused on it earlier. I I guess I wish I understood the value I was delivering wasn't defined by the perception of the people around me, that I understood the value. It was their perception that was wrong.

Emma 43:11

That's a really good one. I like that one. That's a really interesting and interesting framing of it because we probably all do that to some extent, don't we? Like the the value of the thing, even if we intrinsically know that we've done an amazing piece of work there, our view of it gets coloured by by those around us. And yeah, that's a great one. I like that.

Michelle 43:35

And it may have allowed me to better articulate it, to better communicate it, to better position myself or my project. It it would have given me a better, a better insight.

Emma 43:48

And and your first the first part of that is as well. I like to again, I think it's a it's a bit of a quirk of human nature, isn't it? We assume the thing that comes easy to us comes easy.

Michelle 44:00

Because it's easy, not because it means that we're really good at it.

Emma 44:07

I see that one a lot as well in my in my clients when we're you know talking about articulating value and that kind of thing, and and often the things that they almost throw away, or or kind of, you know, as a bit of an aside of oh, well, you know, a few people have told me that I may be quite good at this thing, but you know, whatever, everyone does that. Yeah, yeah. Is is absolutely the core of their value proposition and is their superpower and and this thing that they are actually really uniquely gifted at. Yeah. But I don't know, I think we all do it. We have this tendency to kind of downplay that and go, oh, it's not that I'm really good at that thing, it's that that thing's just that everyone finds it easy. Yeah, yeah. Not true. Yeah, exactly. Not true. Exactly. Thank you so much, Michelle. I I really enjoyed that. It's really interesting. Really interesting to to unpack those uh some of those things. As I say, that there's they're things that I've been hearing for years, so it's it's really interesting to yeah to hear you unpack them and and how you've encountered them in in your career. So thank you very much.

Michelle 45:16

Thank you, Emma. I really appreciate the opportunity to come and have a chat today.

Emma 45:20

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