 Hello and welcome to today's Key Insight webinar on building a career as a modern marketer and focusing on your career development. My name is James Delf. I'm the Sims Head of PR and External Affairs and I'll be the host for today's webinar. Before we get started I'd just like to go over a few items so you know how to participate. The presentation will last approximately 40 minutes. During this time you'll be able to send text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the chat box of the control panel. You may send in your question any time during the presentation and we'll collect them and address as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. Unfortunately we don't send out slides of the presentation, however the webinar will be available to watch on demand via our content hub exchange in the next couple of working days. So I'd now like to hand over to Scott Allen, our guest speaker today. Scott spent four and a half years as Microsoft CMO where he's responsible for leading marketing for both the consumer and commercial sectors. He now holds a title of Global Marketing, Development and Strategy Director. Over to you Scott. Thank you James and good afternoon everybody. So yeah my name's Scott Allen, as James said I previously was the CMO for Microsoft UK running both consumer and commercial marketing and more recently over the last of the 10 months or so I've moved into the Microsoft Headquarters team and I am part of the team that is basically leading the global B2B transformation for Microsoft. So let me start off with a slide. I think the first one is about is transformation and whether it's your company, whether it's you personally, we're all transforming at the moment and there's a lot of talk at the moment about companies digitally transforming. And in order to transform, we as marketers have to do the same. So today I'm going to focus on model marketing transformation to set the scene and then I'll go more into sort of personal development and growth which I'm hoping you'll find useful. I'll be using questions I regularly get asked and calling upon situations I've had been in over the last 25 years or so within marketing and that's everything from through being a marketing assistant when I first started out in my career all the way through to be in the UK CMO at Microsoft. So first and foremost, digital transformation and why digital transformation, why essentially every organisation and when they're different in Microsoft are being confronted by what we're calling four major shifts that a digital revolution brings. And even someone like Microsoft who are 47 years old despite our long history we've also faced the same challenges that you will be facing within your businesses and that's things such as the acceleration of innovation with things such as the cloud, the data revolution and AI, new consumer behaviours that are more volatile, their consumers are more demanding and they're more connected than they ever were before and also the disruption of business models in all areas that requires addressing markets differently. We're seeing many organisations now popping up and disrupting the norm across travel, retail, financial utilities etc. And then finally as we engage in new tech as organisations we have a new set of responsibilities and that's responsibilities in terms of our development ethics, respect for privacy and also the environmental impact as well. So these four major shifts are meaning that we as organisations have to digitally transform. So what does that mean for us as marketers? Well let's talk about what we what we describe as modern marketing and really for me modern marketing if I go into the next slide Modern marketing is essentially about three different things are all connected people, processes, technology, tools and it's important to think about the three together rather than individually because if you think about them individually then you're not going to get to where you need to in terms of your modern marketing transformation. So as marketers we definitely do need to change we need to invest in people and we need to invest in process and we need to invest in tools and we need to get to a place where we don't just talk about digital marketing we talk about marketing that has digital at the heart of it. We still very much compartmentalise digital as being a part of marketing when really getting it at the heart of what you do as a marketer is going to be really really critical as we go forward. So first of all we need to take a natural position of being strong in our marketing planning and the execution and that means that you have to re-look at the processes you've got. What processes do you have in place? Do they need update in and if so how do they need update in especially when it comes to marketing planning? Secondly it's about investing in people and culture and that's investing personally in yourself but also organisations investing in their people and the culture. Building a team that feels it can learn and grow and transform which is embracing modern marketing and has members in that team who want to be part and support the transformation and culture of an organisation that's changing and then and only then the third bit is about developing a strategy around the marketing technology stack and the required processes alongside it. It's not about just bringing technology in because you can it's about understanding why you need to bring technology into organisation what is it going to do how is it going to help you have a much more first-class customer centric marketing approach and that leads quite nicely then on to the next slide which is about essentially making sure that once and for all we put the customer first by realising the value of every interaction. It's very easy to say we're a customer first customer centric organisation but now is the time to really start to put that into action and modern marketing is really about putting the customer first and we've been on our own transformation with Microsoft over the last four years or so and it's been about customer first that's everything that we've invested in is about the customer first piece and we now live in a world where any touch point during a customer journey can impact the lifetime value of that customer so the importance of the customer experience and failing to realise the value of every interaction means you could miss opportunities and lose out in future revenue and what I see from dealing with lots of different organisations is those that lead the way hold every touch point of the customer to account they got that they understand the signals the layers of the opportunities when to talk to the customer how to talk to them and the opportunity to monetise at the right time and that really comes down into what I would call three different distinct areas and that's the first one is finding new ways of working so in most organisations marketing has now taken a centralised role and is responsible for managing the customer experience more so than ever before therefore finding new ways of working is important for you as individuals and as a team so that you can collaborate better and you can collaborate not just as a marketing team but also with the rest of the organisation for example by leading on internal collaboration the marketing team can be the ones that can manage the internal flow of all customer insights and content right across the organisation making sure that everybody's on the same page and also the importance of providing employees with the opportunity to work anywhere from any device will give more flexibility in the working day but also what I found is that by having a good strong digital approach means that you as marketers can collaborate much easier and you don't always have to be in person face to face in order to do that. The second bit is about making moments that matter and a moment can be anything from discovering a new TV show, watching your favourite football team on the TV, going to shopping online at your favourite store. These moments are times when customers are indulging in experience their choice but could also be open to brand engagement and this works in both a B2C and a B2B world and we now have a multi-screen at home approach with the average household having around 11 internet connected devices and therefore brands need to now think about creating their own moments and making those moments matter and as marketers we need to understand what is the right time to touch a person when they are consuming and how should we do that and then the final bit is this bit about monetising every customer interaction and that really is monetising every interaction is about how an organisation will build up layers of interaction with their customers, increase the number of signs of transactions with that customer over their lifetime and again to do this marketers need to unleash the power of big data and they need to extrapolate the right insights. I think a lot of organisations still have lots of data but they are rich on data and poor on insight and now about serving insights up and using insights to make forward making market decisions is definitely going to be the way to go. That all leads quite nicely to really what does the marketing transformation look like and this sort of diagram is about how do you move from the left hand side of the traditional way to the right hand side. At Microsoft we've been on this journey for over four years now and I'd say that we're in a pretty good position across all the blue boxes now on the right hand side. We're not perfect in all of them but we've come a long way from really changing how we do our marketing and how we approach it and again with the customer first approach that I talked about this is meant that we need to do things like move into a bio driven multi-channel journey and purchase process not a sales one. We need to move away from one and done campaigns where you're doing one campaign another one and another one and another one and actually move into connected always on campaigns. Ensuring that if you've got a quarter marketing team and a field marketing team that they're working hand in hand they're connected in sync so that the maximum impact is being put in place. And also then it's about bringing in the right tools for the right reasons and unleashing the power of the data that I mentioned so that you will have a very insight led approach to how you do your market term which will allow you to be much more better in terms of the four main decisions you make but also where to invest your valuable marketing dollars as well. So if this sort of move into the left moving to the right it's really really important. There's lots of good organizations out there that are doing that. A lot of them are will be members of the of the CIM. So then the next one is then about what about the team? What about the marketing team itself? So what I would say is our role as a as a market here has got wider and wider more important over the last few years. And here in this particular slide you can see the three key components of our job as marketers across the customer journey. I always talk about our job really goes from minus 20% of the customer journey all the way through to 100% where customers bought from us but also then the post purchase usage and consumption piece is also important as well for a lot of our organization to our selling products and services. And you should think about this as being very much a circular motion rather than a linear one and the days have gone now where we as marketers are just about the middle box there around generating demands. We should think differently about leads in what is now a multi-touch world. Our job is to make markets and take markets and therefore we need to be good at reputation building or commercial intent if you're in the B2B world generating interactions and demands but also helping support the sales journey through to purchase. So no longer are we just about generating leads and demands we have to do one to three. What that essentially means is that how we hire as a marketing team in this sort of new world of modern marketing is very very different. And this is what you know a modern marketing organization looks like. It mirrors very nicely you know the roles that we have within Microsoft and it sort of says how do we hire now versus say five years ago. The modern marketing team is really about two types of persona part scientists and part creators. And if you put these two together that's when you get a stronger team. And by part scientists this can mean data analytics also financial analysts who tie activity to revenue objectives and really understand performance related demands. And also having tech savvy marketers who understand automation and web production. In marketing it's also important to report how performance is tracking against established goals of the business. So it's also important that as marketers now we deliver a simple and clear analysis on how things are going whether that's good or not so good. So this part scientific bit is sort of new to marketing but I've been hiring in my CMO role lots of different skill sets on the left hand side. And then on the on the right hand side the part creator this is some of the traditional marketing world mixed in with a new world. And also even roles that existed previously have changed content marketers who know how to tell stories and can create and amplify very accessible written content. You've got socially active members of the team who engage in the right channels. It's no longer just about tweeting or posting information it's about interacting with humans on the other side running community. So the role of a social market here has definitely changed as well. And then events that's even a change as well. Physical events are still important but it's now not just about showing up and showcasing the product it's about the experience that you deliver at an event and also before it and after it. And also connecting physical events to digital to the right digital channels. So this is sort of part scientific part creative is really what what a modern marketing organization looks like. And then finally on this section what about the modern market here and how that's changed. So a modern market leader has really changed. You can see the sort of the left to the right here of what it was like to what it's like now. And I personally have seen this shift happen in my own career. So all of this stuff on the right hand side resonates with me quite a lot. Particularly the customer focus element and the difference between now being a talent recruiter arriving from being a talent recruiter previously to now being a talent developer. New ones but really really important you know people have choice about which companies they join nowadays. Therefore the leader developing your talent and making sure that they're coming with you on the journey is very very important and you are making sure they've got the right skills to do that. This sort of modern leader modern marketing approach leads quite nicely to the rest of the presentation. So what I'm going to do for the for the remains of the presentation is I'm going to switch gears and talk a little bit more about stuff that that I have been asked over a number of years and try to sort of help answer some of the questions that that have come through. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to sort of address a number of different questions and then just give sort of my take on it which hopefully will will give you some some help as you think about your careers. So the first one is how do you figure out what you want to do marketing career-wise out of university. So I'm an example of someone that did that actually coming from Bournemouth University many many years ago I left uni with a marketing degree and I also had my CIM qualification at the same time and when you're leaving uni it's very very tempting and maybe from a financial perspective critical to apply for as many marketing roles as possible so that you have more chance of landing a role. This does make sense but my advice would be to plan early before you get to the job application stage. So for me I was deliberate in choosing an industry that I wanted to go into an area that I wanted to go into and then manage to get some free advice from employees managers within companies within the area that I'd identified. This particular case I was looking at the telco sector it was when telecoms was moving from analog to digital so it was an area that really really interests me and even better I was able to do some some free work experience at one of the tech telecom firms and that allowed me to really get an understanding of whether that was the right area to go into and then I started to apply to a number of organizations that were in the telco sector and I was I was lucky enough to land a marketing assistant role. Next question what are the top five KPIs that a marketeer should include? I would call these personal KPIs rather than your company business objective KPIs because that can vary by company by company and there's a number of you on the call so I'm not going to try to address company KPIs but if I talk about personal KPIs mine have been very much around being bold feeling that I'm in a transformation mindset so being transformative always thinking about what what to do next what's the important thing to change to become better year to to learn and be better so I'm always in a sort of a learning cycle even now I definitely don't know at all so I'm always learning I'm always understanding what else I need to know and I think most critically in this band age and you can do it now with with data now being able to be served up is have an insights mindset so that you can start to use insights to make decisions but also insights to coach and educate the rest of the organization you maybe don't believe in marketing and then finally people make business and succeed so I very much have the mindset of helping to be part of the change that you want to see in your business so that's the gospel culture the approach and not be the person that is resistant to change so that's sort of what I would call the five personal kti the next one is how do you convince someone your marketing plan is the right thing to do I get asked this question quite a lot because obviously we do have resistance when it comes to to marketing plans so again I'm going to touch on the insights bit it's all about using insights based on data it is a much better conversation to have with your sales team or with your hierarchy within an organization if you're using insights facts rather than just opinion for example we should do this event because of xxxx insights such as this is the propensity of the customer who is going to buy from us this is the location those customers are in these are the types of roles in that customer that will buy let's do an event with these customers in this particular region with these job roles rather than let's go and do an event because we've done it over the last three years and it seems to work so very much insights use insights facts to have conversations with your stakeholders the next one is when is it safe to move more towards strategy and leave the tactical behind without jeopardizing your value as a marketer to your organization this one is interesting one it's obviously a fine balance of course there is a need for you to be playing a role in hitting the near-term company objectives and the revenue targets because that's obviously super critical however it is important to think about marketing doing free things building reputation or commercial intent in the B2B world generating demand and enabling the sales journey so depending on where you invest will affect whether you make a market and talk about making a market that's planning on moving into a market where you're not yet known or taking a market which is a market you're already in and you need to generate more opportunities and revenue for the here and now depending on whether you're in the make market or take market is then whether you have these objectives or these objectives so there is a difference between the two because obviously making a market means you've got to go and build reputation so your measurement is going to be different if you're taking a market where you're generating leads I think also importantly in this area is whatever you do make sure you discuss and agree and plan it with key stakeholders right up front your sales teams your product groups your finance teams bring them along on what you're trying to achieve so that there are no surprises down the line the next one how do you manage your marketing career in a company that is very short-term focused we've all been there I've been in many organizations it's very short-term focused and you know there are challenges because we have to get revenue for the door so it's always a challenge but it's easy to get into the mode of short-term short-term short-term and end up doing things that stakeholders are asking for without actually any purpose or strategies to the why we just do them because we're asked to and we think it's going to help us get some revenue for the door this is where you need to get stakeholders into your way of thinking and talk to them about the notion of the make market and take market if you're building a reputation plan to take a market the ROI measurements are going to be very different compared to say if you are making them up maybe taking a market even where you have to generate more traditional leads opportunities and revenue objectives so set those objectives up front ensure everyone buys into those objectives and also the measures of success and then again as mentioned before there are no surprises down the line the next one how important is it to have a marketing mentor mentor and why well I personally think this is a very very important thing to do and I I personally benefit so much from having a mentor and I've probably got two tips here if you have a mentor who is has a marketing background then pick someone outside your company and even better outside your industry and when you do go to see them don't see them to discuss your day-to-day job but use them more to help them advise you on your future career progression how to maybe show up better in a situation and also discuss any particular tough situations that may be on the horizon for you that's what mentors are really good at doing rather than sort of telling you about your day-to-day campaign you're trying to get out the door I also have a mentor who has no marketing background but is a CTO and this is something I can highly recommend as well because having a mentor who is not a marketer they can give you a lot of more objective thinking but also you're not tempted to get into just marketing speak all the time with that mentor and then finally you may want to look at a peer mentor that's someone who's not more senior to you in the organisation and therefore is therefore close to your day-to-day job and has an understanding of what your job's all about it's a great way to have more dedicated focus time to talk through certain areas and situations specific to your job and also a peer mentor could be in your company or it could be someone doing a similar role in another company so think about sort of a more senior mentor but also potentially a peer mentor as well. Next question how to move into a role when you have potential versus all the required experience again sometimes you have your CTO role come up that you want to apply for and your your first feeling is I won't apply because I'm not I don't tick all the boxes don't have all the experience a lot of organisations aren't always looking for that they're looking for a mix of someone who is what they can grow into versus what they already can can bring to the table now and I think this happens when you think so I've placed many people in a role with the opportunity for them to learn and grow into it and I think it's important as a hiring manager not to expect candidates to know everything moving into a role as this is actually unrealistic encourage for me encourage a learning culture as we are always learning these things I'm always making sure that I learn stuff week on week so that we get better at what we do and I think if you can demonstrate an attitude and approach to want to continue learning and not pretend you know anything then this will absolutely give you a great advantage in in going for a role next question what experience do you need to make the move from a manager to director or head of marketing role this one there's probably no blanket answer to this because obviously it depends on the size of the company where they are in their growth cycle and also whether they're a B2B or B2C organisation but what we say is the passion to continue developing as a person in your career as a must do rather than getting into a situation where you're in retrain mode so continually make sure that you're keeping up to date with the latest trends continue to understand you know where your role is potentially going and where the next role that you might apply for is going as well rather than getting to a situation where you want to go for a manager role but you don't fully have the skills or the knowledge and you're in a massive sort of retrain I need to understand I need to understand trying to cram in all the stuff that you could have learned over a period of time so I would say try to get practical experience alongside the theory either by doing side projects in your company is there an opportunity to go and if your manager lets you go and spend some time on another project that maybe isn't so related to your role or seeing if maybe you can do skills exchanges with other companies in Microsoft we do skills exchanges all the time it works really well for example our social team might go and spend the day with the social team from one of our customers and they just exchange ideas and different working practices between them and that often works well as well if there's an opportunity to do that next question what technical skills are needed to jump to a director position I think all director positions vary so what I would say here is that I wouldn't necessarily talk about technical skills what I would say is developing a personal vision for me has been important as that is the deepest expression of where you want to go in your life so I've really sort of made sure that I've had a personal vision that I am trying to work to as I've gone through my career and it might seem deep in some of the questions but you know you need to ask yourself questions such as what are the most important elements of your personal vision what do you want and dream of most think of the areas in your life where you're you're happy and where you want to make sure that you and still are able to do the things you want to do personally think about where you want to get to in terms of you know career and money and how high do you want to go asking yourself all those questions so that you don't feel you're just caught in a moment of going through your career you've got an idea of where you want to get to and where you may want to stop in terms of how far up the ladder you go and then you know really start to think about what would my main achievements be in the next of the five to ten years how do you want to spend your time in the business do you want to be more internally focused you want to be more customer focused you want to spend more time at you know events and being more out dealing with customers and partners day to day and also you know what would a really good year look like in the in a particular role that you're into so I think having that personal vision and how far you want to go because I found when I was sort of in my 20s I was getting caught up in the well I need to be a marketing manager then I need to be ahead of marketing and I need to be a marketing director and it felt like I just wanted to do these different jobs but actually there might have been a situation where I could have gone sideways to get to here to get to there to get to there so it's having to think about how you do that next one is what's the most valuable lesson you've learned in marketing business and how did it come about so I think for me the most valuable lesson I've learned is don't get left behind and I've sort of touched on this marketing is changing constantly and and it will continue to so while some of the key principles of marketing will remain the same how we approach it from strategy and execution will continue to change and this is very very true in the digital world we talk a lot about digital transformation but it is important that as a person you transform personally too and I felt a number years back that I was not on top of all the new trends and approaches that were coming so I decided there and then that I would make sure I keep on top of what is coming and therefore keep reinventing myself as I needed to but in the moment rather than as a sort of desperation because I had to so I'd say I probably reinvented myself at least three times my skills in my career and that never stopped so if I try to do marketing now like a bit 10 years ago then I would fail and I would struggle to to get any meaningful role so making sure you don't get left behind would be my my biggest tip next one with the pressures of general life how do you manage the work life balance and how important is that in today's society well work life balance is really really important to me and I know that in our day-to-day jobs we get very very busy but it's important that you do have that mix of work and life balance because important to me are me but also my family and the colleagues if I'm working too hard I'm not going to show up too well in front of my colleagues if I'm working too many hours I'm not going to show up in front of my family so I'm a bigger advocate that we have to have the right work and life balance mix in a world that is always on I'm lucky that Microsoft is a big advocate of this too and I know not every organisation may be quite where Microsoft is but it's important that you really think about how your work life balance works and I'm strong about when I have downtime important to me that I have rest and recovery if I don't then I'm not going to be very good at the job that I do and therefore I won't be any good to anyone and my performance would definitely be impacted so I therefore got very good at switching off when I have family time or leisure time this starts with not being tempted to keep picking up my phone and checking what is happening people can live without you for a few hours in business unless you've got a super critical deadline that's been here and also I make sure that I'm in the room in the moment it might sound obvious but if your body is also telling you to sleep as well go to sleep and leave that piece of work until the morning I got into a real mode 15 years ago where I would work to very very early hours because I had to get something done whereas if I just left it and got up earlier the next morning I would have done a much better job so you know I think that it can mean that you know sometimes you need to to work in the moment into an evening to do something but also make sure you get that rest of recovery back so you've got the right sort of mix built in and then to close off there's sort of four four sort of quick fire questions first one is I get asked how did you get into your car position and do you like it I think I have what could be described as a staircase career I went to uni I was then a marketing assistant a marketing manager a marketing director etc etc so I've gone very staircase in my career development which is not necessarily the way you need to go especially not in this this day and age where you know you can flip between different roles as needed so it's not a blueprint for how to do it how I've done it but I think key along all of this was I was clear where I wanted to end up and where I wanted to go which I've touched on earlier even if I didn't know particularly what the role sequence might be and I was clear what drive my passions and what gives me energy and what doesn't and I think also my first for learning and also thinking customer first means I'm very good at sort of being able to translate internal thinking that often the organisation has into an external viewpoint and that's allowed me to be the more external focus to sort of you know try and then move up to to head up a marketing team second question is what are the most important skills that you want to see if you are looking to hire someone I mean obviously there's the there's the clear checking the experience and qualifications are aligned to the role but for me it's also massively about the personal fit that someone has so I look for one key thing in somebody and that's are they curious do they have curiosity I really like working with people that want to investigate they want to learn they want to think about new things and they want to do things differently in Microsoft we have a culture of growth mindset and being curious aligned to that very well so somebody who's curious will will ask the right type of questions but also maybe just want to be a little bit different to the other candidates really are the ones that that I'm looking for once they've been qualified in from the experience point of view and then the last two is what is the most valuable marketing skill you can have I think personally it is this notion of being customer centric and thinking from the customer's point of view particularly when you have an internal discussions or creating that next marketing plan and bridge it's really good to be in a meeting where you are the one thinking well what would the customer think how would that land with the customer and keep then using that lens to then give feedback in the meetings that you're in especially if you're with your sales team or or others who are maybe a little bit more internally focused and then the final one is what advice have you received from your mentor that made the most impact might sound simple but it was keep on learning and don't try to be the smartest person in the room it's fine to not know everything and ask questions and trust me I may be 25 years marketing but I am not scared of asking the very very simple questions in the meeting regardless of who's in there even if it's my boss's boss's boss so keep on learning don't feel you need to be knowing everything can be the smartest person in the room and then finally to close off these are sort of my five sort of takeaways that I've had from personally developing my career and first one is really understand what model marketing is and how it can benefit your organisation you know what how quickly do your model marketing journey have to go what are the things you need to focus on first because you can't do it all at once it takes time the second thing is from a personal perspective think about what your development plan is and put it down write it down too often people talk about what they want to do but they don't write it down and then they don't have a clear vision of where they want to get to third one is about this piece of learn it learn all approach rather than being a know it all and we we and Microsoft have really taken that notion our CEO setting Adela talks about having a learning culture and not being know it all so I really really do align to that particular vision the fourth one is really important spend time with peers and senior marketers from other industries that is the best way to learn and hear what others are up to and maybe get some best practice ideas but also to make future contacts for maybe future future roles but also more importantly for future ideas so when you are signed up for that breakfast webinar in London and you wake up and you don't really want to go and you end up not going force yourself out of bed and go to that breakfast webinar because I said a seminar because that's probably where you're going to meet someone that you can learn from but also a lot of the contacts I now have are people that I've met from making sure that I go out and spend time with peers and with other marketers and then finally not just saying this because I'm on a CIM webinar but I've now been a member of the CIM for 20 plus years and they've been a really key part of where I've gone in terms of how can we keep relevant keeping up to date with my knowledge and my skills so really make use of the CIM and the resources that they have there often you can under use the resources they've got there's a wealth of them so I would definitely recommend making sure you take advantage of the CIM and the resources and everything that they offer and that was everything from me James Perfect thank you so much Scott and we're now going to answer questions that have been submitted as a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the attendee control panel and Scott our first question is around how do you keep up to date in the market how do you keep up to date in marketing and not get left behind Yeah, yeah it's a good question and it's very easy to get left behind because you're so busy in your day-to-day job so I've got very strict on the social channels that I use so the typical one is I don't get caught up now so much more things like Facebook reading sort of ends of stuff of what people are up to I've used LinkedIn and Twitter and I use them as being able to keep up to date in terms of articles being posted videos being posted I love LinkedIn and I love LinkedIn because if you've connected with the right types of people they are posting really good rich content all the time and that's a good way of just keeping up to date with trends and stats and skills related information so be very strict on which social channels you use but then make sure you invest time in not just scrolling through but actually clicking on articles and links and going to do that as well I'm also very very strong at going to the right types of events and you can go to an event every day in marketing you probably go to five events every day in marketing but picking ones where I know I'm going to go and learn something so this week for example I went to the B2B online connect conference that was taking place and in the room were 60 senior marketers and I had two days of my I took two days out of my job to go and spend time with them but I got to learn what other organisations are doing but also just got to have personal one-to-one time with lots of other senior marketers now that was quite a sort of a two-day event and there's a bit of a bigger event in terms of organisation but there are so many breakfast seminars even the events that are being run where you can go and keep up to date so I would say they're my two main areas and it hasn't done me bad so far obviously there are often times I can learn internally from people in the roles that I've been in but actually those social sites plus the events of the two that have kept me very honest and up to date where I'm going and also an opportunity to do courses if needed so if you're not very good at presenting and you need to present more see whether there's an opportunity for your organisation to help you attend particular courses for skill sets and it may not be just marketing-related it may be more around business-orientated I've done challenger challenge of sales and challenger marketing courses so that would be the fair piece but the sort of the free of charge stuff would be the social sites and the events perfect thank you very much Scott you talked a bit about mentoring why would you recommend someone who isn't a marketer as a mentor? Right so I've got some tips for this first of all I mentor people in Microsoft who aren't marketeers and I also have an external mentor who is a CTO as I mentioned earlier what I like about mentoring when you think about mentoring you break it down what do you want mentoring to do? Mentoring should not be about how somebody helps you with a campaign that you need to get out the door or with some messaging you need to get ready for an event that's maybe a peer mentor that you could use for that sort of idea thinking and stuff a real mentor is about advising you on where you're going in your career helping advise you at the time so maybe you've got a situation coming up where you need some advice about how to show up or maybe you're in a situation that is not a great situation and you need some advice about how to address it and get out of it often if somebody's not in marketing they won't get caught up in your day-to-day job they would advise you about how you would act wherever you're a marketer a seller, a finance person an HR person etc etc so I found that when I'm giving my mentor into sellers and product people within Microsoft they're asking me more about hey this is where I want to go next in my career or I have a big presentation to do on Friday how best to win the audience over what would be the best way to show up how many slides you think I should be using versus Q&A etc that I can give answers because I don't need to know the day-to-day job which is more based on the experience I've had so I think it's about using your mentor for your development either in the moment development or future development and if you use an external person they won't be so caught up in your day-to-day life as a marketer and I think the CTO I've been using has meant that he's given me really really sound advice especially as I started to grow up through the ladder in terms of being a manager a director and then a CMO in Microsoft thank you Scott so the next one's around SMEs that are a significant percentage of the UK businesses obviously what advice do you have for people within an SME regarding building their career as a modern marketer? yeah now my career is actually half and half so I've spent time in two startups and two organizations that are in second stage of funding so I've been in a small enterprise in my career now there's two ways of looking at it when you're in a small medium enterprise you are getting way more experience across all facets of marketing because there's not many of you in the team and therefore you're learning much more than you think I still in my job in Microsoft I still use experience I've had from being in a small medium enterprise in sort of the bigger enterprises then when I left SME I went into sort of larger enterprises what it is is sometimes that sort of how do you move from a smaller organization to a bigger one what I wouldn't do is get hung up by the fact that you're not qualified to work for a bigger big organization in a SME you have got the opportunity as I said you know there might be only one or two of you and you've got the opportunity to cover all the things of marketing and I think that there is a lot of good resources out there now on the web and some of the events that I've talked about where you can go and learn about how to make the best use of resources and the low budgets you've got I've worked in many organizations where my budget has been minuscule and that's maybe we've had to box and work much more smartly what I've done in all those organizations though is I've made sure that everybody in the business understands what the role of marketing is there to do because a lot of people if they're not in marketing just have a very very simple mindset of what it is you are the guys and ladies that will run events for us you're all about generating lots of leads for us you're about making sure that we've got the right content materials it's very basic stuff that often people think that we are there to do so spending some time on to the educating what the purpose of marketing is what the role of it is how it's going to be measured how it's changed in the world where customers are now in control the days have gone where the seller is the only person that touches the customer the customer decides when they want to speak to an organization or interact with an organization the seller doesn't make that choice for them so I think in simplistic form enjoy life being in a SME because you are getting more marketing skills across all the different facets of marketing compared to if you're in a bigger enterprise where you have a more specified discipline role bring your company along with you in the view of what marketing is there to do what it isn't there to do and continue to take advantage of interacting with peers out there who are in similar companies and again if you really go online and you start to look at some of the events that run during the course of the week just in London alone or in the North of England in Manchester in Newcastle there are lots where it is just attended by SME's and you can go and spend time with with like-minded people and some of my best ideas for marketing have come in a SME and I was able to go and implement them because I wasn't caught up with all the processes in the red tape of being in a large enterprise and then when you do move to an enterprise or look to go into an enterprise you've got a lot of skills that are transferable and a lot of enterprises will want to take you on board because you'll probably be one of the most savvy modern marketers out there because you've had to you know work with a more limited resource and budget so hopefully that helps address that one Perfect, we have just time for one more question so I've kind of bundled two together for you You see the marketing department changing much over the next 10 years and do you have any advice regarding monetising personal relationships between internal sales teams and customers? I might need some help on just a bit of clarification what the second part means but let me answer the first part first of all yeah I do see marketing departments changing over the next 10 years or so I think that we're in a situation now where there's an opportunity via digital to have more scalable engines that we can rely on and when I mean scalable it doesn't necessarily mean scalable across hundreds of countries although that is possible as well I think what we do as marketers is we will start to rely much more on using the right technology as part of the customer journey that can be automated and do a lot of the work for you that wasn't there previously that means as a marketer I see our jobs as being much more commercially savvy much more closer to the business much more closer to the customer understanding the customer and how they think that means that you're going to be much more aligned to the sellers in Microsoft we've worked really hard on making sure that our marketers understand the customer and therefore are often asked to go and visit the customer alongside the seller especially when it's going to meet the marketing department from a customer who are maybe one of the decision makers so in short I would say next 10 years I see digital and tech really plan a role in giving you the sort of the scalable platform and some of the programs on top that you can just sort of run day in day out and then on top of that would be extracting the insights and interpreting those and make sure you're doing the right type of marketing but also then as marketers being much more commercially savvy in terms of understanding the market, the customer and the company that you work in and I call that the three C's know your customer know your company and know your competition as well The second bit of the question how do you quantify monetized personal relationships between internal sales team members and specific customers probably needs a bit more contact from the monetized bit there if possible I think people just would I'd like to hear a little bit of advice between how you personally work with sales teams and customers to basically make sure your marketing campaigns are successful Got it, got it, yeah absolutely so one of the big things that I've been personally very strong but also I've made sure the teams that have been working with me have been on is the connected sales and marketing and we talk about connected sales and marketing a lot but never has connected sales and marketing been more true than now especially in the world where customers are in control so we always have this sort of sellers are, you know sales organizations are still out there a lot of organizations are still sales led that's actually fine but marketing now has a really key role to play because first of all we can start to serve insights up that we never could before how customers are interacting with us which ones are interacting with us who the sellers don't even know and we've got really good examples in Microsoft where we've got we can look now and we can see how many people in a customer is currently interacting with us across our different marketing activities whether that's events or webinars or content or trials etc and often you'll have like 70 people in a company who are interacting with us but the sales team only know 10 of them and that's already done a different conversation which you can start talking to the sellers about hey did you realize the HR department are currently interacting with us are you talking to the HR department so we can bring sort of more insights to the table and that is helping us you know become more important more prevalent to the sellers the other bit is about what you do as a marketer to get closer to sellers so I'm really really clear with my teams around you need to understand how a seller is paid how do they earn their revenues what it is is motivating them because you don't understand how they're motivated it's very difficult to have a relationship with them so it's important to understand you know the objectives that the sales teams have what are they you know what are they trying to you know get to by the end of the year in terms of revenue numbers but what's the product mix in order to get there because that will really help as well you start to talk their language and the other thing is don't dial up net news staff that you're expecting a seller to come and engage with sales teams already have their own rhythm of the business they have kickoffs they have sales meetings they have off sites they have probably weekly calls they have lots of different ways that they already interact together what I've done is say that sort of approach of go where they are so don't dial up a marketing meeting for sales to come to go and ask whether you can go and present in one of the already existing sales meetings a particular idea or marketing activity that you need to so that you are having a constant drum beat of communicating to the sellers but you're doing it in meetings that they're already going to turn up to otherwise you'll find that they won't turn up to the stuff that you do and also we've made sure that we've got very very close to the heads of sales in each of the departments and made sure that we are using their communication channels to communicate weekly or marketing could be a newsletter could be Yammer could be whatever you know what feed they're using but how do you maybe put a sort of two minute sound bite for marketing in the weekly newsletter that goes out or the weekly communication as one of going to sort of more full up meetings so go where they are understand what their pressures are understand how they are going to get paid and make that number at the end of the year and then talk to them in a language where they understand that marketing can help them plus take some insights with them about their accounts which they wouldn't have known previously but you've got access to because you've been able to get that from the data in the company thank you so much Scott fortunately that's all the time we have for today like I said, big thank you to Scott for presenting the webinar and thank you for everyone who attended once you leave today's webinar you will see the survey on the presentation and we'd appreciate it if you could provide us any feedback you have and on behalf of Sim thank you for joining us today and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day