 and welcome to today's webcast. There's no doubt that it's an incredibly exciting time to be a marketer. We've got access to state-of-the-art technology, a wealth of tools right at our fingertips and we're also impacting every single touch point that a customer has interaction with. But boy is it really getting complex. Along with educating ourselves on the new shiny tools that seem to be popping up daily, we also have to manage our teams, push out content faster than ever before and sometimes even justify our jobs. With all this going on we're definitely feeling the pain. Today I'm joined by Rob Brown, Education Director at SIMPLE. Rob is a well-known keynote speaker both locally and internationally. He's a high-profile marketing consultant, acquisition expert and also a board member. Together we're going to address the top 10 pain points that marketers feel. How are you today Rob? I'm very well thank you Sarah for the intro. Look and it's a bit of a controversial topic for some marketers and before we get into the webcast I want to say that I love marketing. I'm a passionate marketer. And look I really hope that the couple of hundred people that have signed up for today's webcast that most of them do work in the marketing department because you know in most organizations and certainly some of the organizations I've worked in there are you know there are people in accounts, there are people in finance, there are people in procurement who hate marketing and hate marketers as well and you know marketing has been through a bit of an identity crisis I think over the last sort of few years where nobody kind of knows what the marketing department does you know they make the pretty brochure that comes out once a year but the marketing director and his managers or her managers are always off at product launches or long lunches and what do they actually you know what value do they actually add to the business and so I think you know marketers haven't really had a tool or the tools the tool set if you like to justify what they actually do and I think that's part of that part of the identity crisis and obviously that's changed and today they do have that and we'll talk more about that at the end but I think it's there's never been a better time to be a marketer there are more channels than we've ever had before but we're going through a transition and marketers do need to be more accountable than they've ever been today and so I think it's it's you know and that that transition is causing some pain and I guess those pain points are what we're going to talk about today great so we're going to go through the top 10 pain points please feel free to interact with us by asking us questions to do with any type of pain point I'm going to throw them over to Rob he's going to do his best to answer them which I'm sure he will and also feel free to tweet the hashtag is on the slides things I had about marketing so number one spreadsheets now we've got a quote here from people and it's the whole thing about marketers and spreadsheets and do they mix do they work but what's the issue with marketers and spreadsheets oh look I think the issues there is it's it's a left brain right brain thing I mean most marketers are sort of right brain creative types who like to you know invent come up with campaign themes titles you know imagery and spreadsheets obviously are a logical left brain you know they belong very much in that department and I think not all marketers but a lot of us have really really struggled you know really struggled with with just just sort of communicating what we're trying to communicate through spreadsheets and I mean some of the worst spreadsheets I've ever seen in my life have come from the keyboard of a marketer sometimes my keyboard and you know you see some spreadsheets they just make your skin crawl they'd make Elvis turn turn in his grave so I think you know it's a bit like asking you know a spreadsheet jockey in the accounts department to come up with a you know whiz bang brochure or flyer you know landing page concept that you know you can imagine the result so I think that's that's where the pain has really so what can we do about it because I think the reason why marketers do use spreadsheets is because they've got the data there they need something to put the data on there's a recent report that actually came out of the US today and it's the state of a state of marketing and one of the things that came out of that is only 12% of marketers feel like they're meeting expectations when it comes to justifying what they're doing so we know what we need to do we don't have many tools there the only thing we can use is Excel so how do we alleviate this pain point well I think the first thing that most marketers can do is uninstall Excel or stop using Google spreadsheets now I know that's that's a that's a simplified of course you can't do that but I think you know before you brief something in on on an Excel spreadsheet or you know ask yourself is there is there a better tool is there another way to do this and I think there are several cloud paced you know centralized marketing calendars that show exactly what's going on I mean your marketing plan typically is an Excel spreadsheet but there are some awesome tools and obviously you know simple is you know has that functionality we'll talk about that at the end but it's not just that I mean I think if you if you're moving away from from spreadsheets you can really ensure that your campaigns are sort of on time on budget on brand as you know a spreadsheet is a is a point in time it's not a living thing it's got to be updated you know constantly so I think a web based solution is you know is one way to avoid that that point obviously we can share that around as not just working on something so I just want to talk about briefing for a little bit because I think briefing is a huge challenge for a lot of marketers to get right and I think there's a lot of clarity more often than not and there's a lot of you know a lot of the times briefs take on this life of their own essentially and then you've got the whole okay I want you to do this well what's the brief let's just make it pretty or let's just make it sexy which is what you spoke about before so this is something we all face every single day and we've heard at least once and I can sort of picture people nodding their heads in webinar land so what's this all about look first of all before I mean this is a real pain point for me and I'm sorry to use a photo of your fiance there Sarah and yeah okay but the briefs I mean I used to run a big marketing operation for a big education group and you know we would have global education we would have briefs coming from all over the world from you know the Europe and North America and you know Pakistan and Hong Kong and all these kind of places and you know every every other day we were getting briefs can you just make me you know a brochure like the one you did last year just just change the change the date and you know it's all can you make me a fly like the competitors have got but absolutely no no details and the back and forth that that is required just to get clarification on what that person actually wants it's just it's just a time-waster and it used to eat into the there so much of my team's weeks just sort of seeking clarification on what there what was actually being required so pain point for me so obviously we need a pain point a process then yeah we see we need to communicate that so what are the some tips because obviously like you said if you are working with a national team yeah you do get Chinese whispers come through and it's a lot harder to manage those things so what are some tips for managing briefs look I mean there's a there's a there's a training piece there immediately there there you know and I think a briefing process needs to be non-negotiable it needs to be template-based there needs to be a format and yes it might take you longer it might take you 20 minutes to brief in a job or a campaign initially whereas it takes you two minutes or two seconds to write a can you do me a flyer for you know the end of the day but the amount of time that's saved as a result of having that clarity and having those forcing people with obligatory fields that you have to fill in this piece we can't we can't you can't submit this brief and you can only really do that through it through a through an online form so I think you know setting up a briefing form or process feel for your marketing team and just force it you know there will be some people you'll have to they'll go you know kicking and screaming down that path and I've you know I've had many conversations even recently you know we're talking about simple with with marketing teams and I say yeah but our teams will never they just won't do it well they've got to do it you know it's it's who's in charge and the time saving to the organization I think is you know certainly from my experience is significant so I think you need to centralize synchronize your briefs so that you can store and reuse critical information you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time so do me a fly like you did last year well you've actually got the brief there in your system you can just resurface it make your modifications and there's a huge time saving there too just want to touch on the training beat and just get your opinion on this so I think you know we can have the best systems in place but if people aren't actually trained on how to use them properly then obviously they fall through the cracks so would you agree that these days it's best not to assume that everyone knows how to write briefs and I think you know that skill of coming into a marketing team and knowing how to write briefs or even you know assuming that people all have marketing degree is where I've worked in big teams before we need to be careful that we don't have that assumption and we actually do provide people with the right training as opposed to letting them just go and figure it out on their own yeah I totally agree I mean I think that's it's to assume that people know how to write briefs is even getting further I think most you know assume that people even know how to write yeah to communicate their ideas in writing I mean you know we're most organizations there are very few people who are really really good writers yeah so being able to you know communicate what you're trying to communicate in a you know it's why I think training and that tight tight briefing form is absolutely critical and yes it's change it requires some change management but at the end of the day if you don't do that you're going to struggle you're gonna be pushing uphill forever in a day let's talk about priorities because I think one of my favorite things is to remember you know there's a difference between time and priority a lot of people use the time excuse when actually something isn't really a priority so when we go into the third pain point we're talking essentially about these priority project prioritization let me get that out ping pong so how can we stop this going back and forth because obviously it's perception right and what I think is important may not be as important to you so how do we deal with this and what's his pain point well I think I mean you know you start your week and you know you've got your priorities you've got certain things that you've got even your day you've got certain things that you absolutely have to get through and so you sort of naturally you know as humans we we sort of organize things in our own mind and prioritize and that the I guess we could have called this pain point cue jumping because there are so many people in most organizations and you know it's a dynamic environment there are things happening there are you know you're dealing with humans that's the problem and humans are generally not very organized and so it might be your boss or you know the boss of another department suddenly comes in say I need this by closer business today can you just drop everything this is now the priority and it's like well you know I've got other priorities so I think you know it's a pain point that most marketers can you know this this sort of just constantly shuffling sort of list of priorities but they're not always just your priorities the other people just jumping in and imposing their priorities on you and there's this whole concept of by COB today yeah before we get into this just a question from Catherine so just a reminder if anyone has any questions to type them in so Catherine said I get the whole issue with prioritization and it does come up quite frequently however how do you combat this with people asking from the entire organization so this is even bigger yeah it's not just people marketing team we've got people from different departments saying this yeah yeah and I think again it comes from me it comes down to a lack of visibility of what the marketing team is working on because it's just to send it to marketing they'll do your brochure they'll do your flyer certainly a flyer in a day I mean it's just a flyer a couple of pictures and a couple of lines of text so I think you know and I mean you know if you've got visibility over what the marketing team is doing if you can see what's in their queue if everybody in the organization I know that's a bit of a hype dream at some you know in some organizing especially big organizations but I think if you've got that lens of this is what they've got on their play people might hesitate before they ask or they might at least understand that there's a notion of a queue and the jobs actually have to join a queue and they have to be allocated and that you know Simon's on holiday this week and I can see that Mary's got her play absolutely full so I think visibility for me Sarah is the is the is the solution and this probably goes back to pain point when having that calendar or that one place of you know that source of truth where you can have everything there but don't just have that within the marketing team actually filter that throughout the entire organization absolutely absolutely and the entire organization don't all need to be you know having access to whichever system that you're using or Mary's using but they need visibility over that system so yeah I word that I'm actually quite sick of but I know that it is collaboration so I think it's important that we talk about the chaos that collaboration can sometimes make happen because I think a lot of the times there's this whole thing of you know we need to collaborate but we don't know how but we're not communicating but then we forget and we've got these emails going back and forth so what is this pain point relating to look I mean I think email is the is the you know the biggest culprit and you know email is not going to go away anytime soon I mean we're seeing new new collaboration tools enter the workforce and certainly into the marketing the marketing team you know Trello Slack those kind of tools which people are you know are resonating with people because they realize it's just easier than email and and you don't have information falling between chairs and but the collaboration on a marketing you know a marketing assignment or a campaign or a job where you've got 10 people copied in on an email and nobody kind of nobody's really you know a lot of those people are only paying you know attention out of the corner their eye to that email it comes through that very often they're not reading it and so that's where that's where the problem really you know really happens and that could be you know at an approval level it could be at a I thought John was doing this this was was gonna go and source the stock imagery imagery I thought you know Julie was gonna write the text so it's just chaos and that that is you know reflective of so many marketing teams around the world where we know that email is still the primary source of communication especially in the you know the the the world we live in today where you got people working from home and working remotely and in other countries and you know so I am you picked up here on a workflow management tool so can you just elaborate on what that is or even you know how that would work within a marketing team yeah look a workflow management tool is you know so let's say you've got that central central eye that central lens central source of truth on what's going on so campaigns and jobs are being briefed into this central central system and then tasks have been allocated just by you know by by out tagging people so at tag John Smith at tag Mary you know Mary Meeker at tag whoever and they are basically then notified by email that they've been assigned to a job and then as the as the team manager you can then see exactly what people are doing who's working on what how much they've got on their plate and you can see you can track the progress of that job all the way through from briefing through to execution delivery and then approval so you know I mean certainly you know in my from my experience I couldn't imagine running any marketing team without this kind of this kind of tool being able to see what you know because I used to and I used to run marketing teams without that visibility and then when you suddenly can see everything from a central perspective it's like you know you've been groping around on the stage in the dark and then somebody switches the stage lights on it's like oh my god it's like the first time you saw Google Analytics you know it's like oh man that's awesome yeah so I think for me that's that's absolutely critical and being able to communicate who's doing who's doing what when's it got to go out the door you know show me what's late show me what's you know what's what's in my you know I think that's that for me yeah I think what I'm picking up is we we have to stop going around and trying to chase all this information we need to have it there yeah and I think that feedback loop absolutely yeah I'm just on that we're at the halfway mark now but as we get towards the end please fill out your feedback in the survey speaking feedback see what I did there yeah absolutely okay so let's talk about rules because we all have rules there for a reason we don't like to break them some of us like to sort of sway on either side of them but this whole approval thing with legal and compliance you know this is when we're really talking about different departments within the organization you know some people do just make up the rules as they go yeah and you know as a marketer yeah it can be quite frustrating because it's like oh God you know yeah we just get this done yeah can you talk a little bit about this I'm especially dealing with those legal risk and compliance departments look I mean it's the age we live in isn't it you know and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute with approvals but you know unfortunately and again marketers it's not just the people outside the marketing department it's people inside the marketing department who very very often make up the rules I mean I've worked with people who you know send an email to you know you know 20,000 people and when you say but you know Susan why did you do that it's like you know there are rules oh look I was rushing out the door I had to go and pick up my kids from kindy and it's like you can't do that you know so look I mean the reality is this this this reality is not going to go away you know rules are going to get tighter and tighter and tighter so it's just as marketers we've just got to accept them set that fact but how do we make it easier to sort of manage around those rules and work you know work within the within you know swim in our swim lanes if you like so I think you know job templates are you know having those job templates are one of the key sort of you know key solutions to this and again that central system where everybody everybody works in the same everybody swims in the same swimming pool even if they're in their lanes they're all in the same they're all in the big pool they're all in the 50 meter pool you haven't got people swimming off in the the kids pool and the 25-minute pool they're all there and then just that visibility of a workflows I think is absolutely critical you know it's you know so as a team manager you can see what's going on and what's not going on in some cases definitely that visibility piece okay um so number six the police the Paul so here we're sticking to the theme of rules here and you're always going to have those people who are sticklers for process and you're going to have those people who don't assume do follow the processes so you know the fact that we understand that it'll be a good starting point that we do have two different types of people in this world and in your teams but you know this is obviously a pain point for marketers and why do you think it is such a big pain point oh look again it's it's it's that left-brain right-brain thing I mean the process police have been after me for years so I mean I've had what they've had wanted you know my team it's like wanted literally wanted posters you know Rob Brown where you know for not following process and it's just like I know I've got to log into the system every morning I know I've got so I'm supposed to be and it's like I've always been used to doing it on email yeah you know like we said at the beginning we've got all these different shiny tools and all these different like how many passwords do you had to log into something yeah of course and you just make them all the same and then you get in trouble for having the same passwords and that's right all these processes don't introduce another screen in my life you know I've always I've already got like four screens five that's about as much as I can manage it's like the apps on your phone you know you through it for absolute maximum five most people even though they've got 60 or 70 on their phone it's the same with all your marketing tools you know just just keep it you know minimize the amount of screens so I think you know this this you know comes back to this these these campaign playbooks that you can you know the templates that you can just go to so just make it easy take out friction you know take out steps if you can take out steps and make it easy for me then you're gonna it's more likely that I'm gonna follow the process and the process please we'll get off my back because as I say I'm the biggest culprit of this and I think a lot of marketers can relate to this out there just let me create let me come up with I don't want to be following process but we have to you know with other departments and and and there are more and more marketers who are much more process driven today and have come from a much tighter sort of education system where you know this is this is you're not allowed to do that you've got to follow process and now you you know you're collaborating in a much bigger thing so conscious of the fact that a lot of these stuff has to come from the top down yeah if you're at the top and you're not doing it then obviously it's not going to yeah what's this point number three yeah we talk about champions a champions program or super users is that sort of creating this tribe and recognizing people's skills and getting them to sort of become the police yeah look I mean a police is probably the wrong word because it's it's we shouldn't need if our systems are set up properly we shouldn't need the police okay and in every marketing team whether you're a team of three or your team of 53 there's always somebody who is good at this okay and I think identifying that person it might be it might be somebody who's been with you been in the team for six months it might be somebody who's been there who is just super reliable super organized that's your champion yeah and I think you know and it's definitely not necessarily the head of the team okay and again I think a lot of people on this webcast can you know relate to that it's like my boss is terrible at that yeah or I'm terrible at that but there's always somebody in the team who is much much better at it than than most of the others and that's that's your champion so I think giving them the license to come up with a process come up with training whatever is that one of the keys to success and they'll thrive with that won't they yeah more often than not okay the Department of Business Prevention now I want to be careful that we don't get too many people off site when we talk about this depending on who we are talking to so this is where we really talk we're really talking about your blockers and your bottlenecks aren't we so I think in the past we've defined you know the blocker as that colleague who's always flat out on an urgent project and everything's really really urgent but then you can never pin them down on any detail and then you've got also the people or the CMO who tells you that they'll get back to you by the end of the day then they go to a conference they don't approve anything you just in there going oh my god what is happening this person's a massive bottleneck so I think we've all been there at least once in our time and probably other departments have as well so this is a pain point what can we do we obviously need these legal and risk compliance teams but what do we do look I think by its very nature marketing is market facing so it's the external sort of facade of the company you know or a product that the company produces or a service that the company so it's you know from if you're sitting in the legal team marketing is the one of the big red flags you know it's like you know I need to keep a special eye on marketing and I need to pay more attention to what's going out the door because we've been burnt before and I got a slap on the wrist and you know the CEO said you know deliver someone's head on a on a platter and so everybody's been burnt by this so people are more and more careful so you know something an approval request will go through the legal team and from marketing and it's like people just you know naturally just sit on things and it's like let me think about that one for a couple of days but from the marketing team's perspective that doesn't work because I've got to get this this campaign to market I've got to get this out there so I think being able to identify your blockers and and your bottlenecks is is one of the you know one of the keys but having having an approval system where legal can you know legal and notified legal are also on notice that they need to approve this this is not a verbal oh I'm going to send you something there's a there's a chain of command and in many cases there's a hierarchy needs to be approved by it might be the CEO second or the you know the the managing director and legal last or it might be that legal need to approve it first and then you know then there's a hierarchical sort of approvals process if you've got a system like that that's streamlined I think it's it's you know it really it's such a time saver and from a marketing you know marketing director's perspective or a marketing manager's perspective it's just like I know there's accountability on their front too to get this approved and get it turned around quickly I'm being able to report on that how long did that take to to approve you know what's the average approvals time I think you know it gives you sort of an argument to take back to legal or where you know your boss in the marketing department who's who is the bottleneck and just say look this is this is this is holding back the business and I guess stuff like this really does become so much bigger than what it is because it impacts culture yeah and then that ties into brand and then the mark like it all just it's just like this vicious circle isn't it and just on that let's slowly segue into approval tennis because I think this is also something and you know love you more hate him we all have our curious moments every now and then where we just chuck the racket we've had enough done with this we just can't get anything through it's going back and forth so how does this sit with you have you had any experience in this or am I asking oh yeah I mean you know nightmare and I think it comes back to that email thing as well you know an approval approval request is sent off to six different people all all in the the main two field on the email people don't know what you know who's is is Sarah gonna approve this or is Rob gonna approve it or you know I've seen so many examples of that and it's just back and forth who's supposed to approve this can you please clarify Rob what you you know what needs to be approved or who on this list of 10 people that you've sent it to actually needs to approve it so it's just back and forth back and forth back and forth so I think for me Sarah one of the one of the keys is getting approvals off email again because you know we've all again experienced who the hell approved this I didn't see it you know or I how did that how did that campaign how did that fly get into the market or into the newspaper without me signing off on it you know that's how you use you've used our old logo you know now I've got to justify that upstairs so you know up the tree to the CEO who wants my head on a platter it's like who approved it well I sent the email it was sent to five people yeah again information fell between chairs so I think if you can move approvals off email that's the that's the biggest thing for me and and to do that you need an approval still yeah what I want to do now we had a question come through about 20 minutes ago from Simon and he's asking about data and the fact you know what are our thoughts around big data and the fact that we've got so much to work with so let's go into the data bit now and I have been waiting to get to this to answer your question Simon and I think the biggest thing you know it's is data becoming a dirty word because you've heard so much it's like the whole collaboration thing but a lot of the times we just want to know what we have who clicked what who did what and then bring it all together and talking back to that report that came out that we mentioned at the beginning in there one the stats said that 64 percent of marketers actually say they don't have time to actually do anything with their data because they've just exported everything and there's stuff here here and everywhere so back to Simon's question what are your thoughts on data and how relevant is it today and are we getting to caught up in the way that we're using it and what are the pain points associated with data because I feel like there's a lot happening well I think I think if you look at the sales department in any organization the data metrics you know on sales are so much clearer just black and white it's that's my pipeline that's my you know that's my that's my number of opportunities that's the percentage that's the close that's the close one close last whatever whatever CRM language you speak so the sales metrics have always been much clearer at the end of the day there's a customer or there's a product sale that's happened at the end of there with marketing I think part of the problem when it comes to data Sarah is that there's never been a consensus on what marketing metrics should should be and so how do you measure the marketing department and we've been I think distracted with a lot of vanity metrics like Google Analytics and suddenly marketers can go into the website and they can pull out a report which has got some really pretty graphs which are then presented to the C-suite or to the management team and you know as the CEO and you would probably be the same it's like what the hell has you know time on site got to do with the sales the end of the day I'm interested in sales I'm not interested in these vanity metrics so I think that's I think we've been backing up the wrong tree to be honest with when it comes to data and marketers in many cases and I think if you actually if you can define what the marketing team actually does and then you can report on it and you can put on the the amount of stuff going through the team most people in in most organizations have no idea of the volume of stuff that's going through a marketing team but the marketing team as I said at the start has never been able to really define what it does well we do brochures and we do flyers no you do a lot lot more than that and to put a brochure together or an EDM together there are all sorts of components so I think for me and to answer Simon's question that's the problem is around definition of what the marketing department does and I think we need we need a paradigm shift to coin a cliche on what metrics are important and if I'm managing a team of 40 people so I've got 40 salaries as a line item on the you know on the P&L you know what do these people actually do and I think if we can define that then we can we can we can get to you know get to a point where marketing becomes much more credible so it's no idea yeah no idea that you guys did that you guys even do the annual report I didn't know that you know oh I thought it came from just the sky yeah I think is there you know some true to the fact that we've almost shot ourselves in the foot because we have this stuff there but we've never actually communicated not only the metrics that we need but also the so what who cares it's like I can give you all these numbers but what does this actually mean and how does this impact the bottom line is that what we need to do to sort of just trip it all back make sure we've got those metrics make sure we know what we're communicating but then also tell people why that's important yeah I can so I think if you can identify two or three key metrics um that's that's really important but again it comes the problem it's not going to change the fact that sales is at the front of the queue marketing stands behind them and the first thing the the head of any company is going to look at is the sales the sales metrics it's like how are we tracking this month this quarter because I got to report to the shareholders on the market or whatever and so I think that that problem is not going to go away but there are so many key marketing like really sort of actionable actionable insights that marketers can pull out of the the tools that they currently use even you know like metrics like lead score for example lead score if it's if it means something can be a super powerful metric for the sales team knowing at what point somebody you know a marketing qualified lead is likely to turn into a customer based on their aggregate lead score you know that's what are your top three lead score would definitely be one of them um I think the the the number of um number of jobs that you know the the the output of the team I think is another one definitely um what a another another key metric yeah I mean I think um the you know the turnaround time on jobs is is really you know the productivity of the marketing team what do these guys do they're working faster and faster and their output is greater and greater I think those are the kind of metrics that that that I really you know home in them yeah okay so up to number 10 now we all have this fear um how important is it to make sure that we have something there to sort of you know make sure there's none of this blame game because I feel like there's a lot of that happening it's all about you know this person's blaming this person there's people disagreeing there's no single source of truth so let's go through number 10 oh look I mean everyone can relate to this no matter if you're a marketer or not all right yeah yeah because everybody's literally covering their proverbial and um it's and that's just the culture of blame the culture of compliance that we live in that's not going to get again that's not going to go away it's going to get it's going to get it's going to get tighter and tighter and tighter um and so I think you know it comes back to visibility accountability it's like I can sleep at night you know um anybody who's you know working in a marketing department where there are for example idioms yeah going out to large lists of people you know most of the managers of those departments those managing managers you know have nights where they wake up in you know in a cold sweat and go oh my god what about if you know Barbara or John sends it to the wrong person and and why do we feel like that because this happened before so I think if you've if you've got a central source of truth that marketing lens that is is you know you are everybody you're comfortable that you're in control of your team okay you you can see what's going on yeah you sleep easier at night and I said so for me that is the solution just having that visibility whereas you walk in you've got a marketing team working there and you don't you don't have visibility of what they're over what they're doing and I think that is that is that is where the fear of you know those proverbial um f ups come from yeah so for me that's that really is the key and I've had that before and after experience where you've worked in that environment where you had no visibility and then you've worked in a team where you had not complete visibility because you can't see what everyone's working on or browsing on there but you can see the progress of jobs you can see that workflow you can see what's going out the door you can see what's late you can see who's got capacity and for me that's that's that's that's a critical thing okay so up to number 10 now we've got a bonus one and I think this one is something that just wraps everything up as a whole I think you know we've all heard about these whole arts and crafts thing in the past and the fact that we have to actually justify what we do as marketers you know speaking of Barbara this is a situation that Barbara or most of us find ourselves in you know it's all about having that nice power point at the end it's all about okay guys we actually do more than just animations and power points so before we get to questions and we've got some coming through now so please type the rest in let's just wrap this all up and you know what does this mean how can we get away from it and you know what are your final thoughts on this whole topic I know so many CMOs and marketing directors and marketing managers who instead of leading the team and inspiring the team spend their lives sitting in steering committee meetings and committee you know departmental meetings just showing and telling via a power point presentation that somebody spent five hours putting together once a week or once a month I mean some organizations do this every week Sarah it's just like this is what we're working on this week and here's my beautiful power point presentation and they spend their lives just reporting on what their team's doing and I think that is a fundamental flaw of the system in which we so we have so many of us find ourselves operating so I think for me you know visibility is the is the key and and getting those metrics right Sarah it's it's what do the marketing team actually do okay and if you can define that and then report on it and provide access to those reports in a in an accessible you know nice looking dashboards with meaningful metrics then I think you're going to bring a whole heap of credibility back to the marketing department yep and once again I think it's just that visibility yeah isn't it having that visibility having access instant and removing that need for that whole show and telling just having access to something and then we can start doing as opposed to just talking about it without doing that okay well that brings us close towards the end what I want to do before we get to questions is just refer people to complete the feedback survey if you do need to leave also refer down to the resource tab we've got some great resources in there for you to take a look at including our blog which is full of insights interviews and some very interesting reads from some other fellow marketers that we've spoken to in the past also if anyone is interested in looking for a single source of truth that removes complexity from your organization and makes you feel completely in control and more effective look no further than simple there's also a link in the bottom of the resources and take a look at that because the whole idea is to help everyone out there plan create and optimize everything they're currently doing there's a sales pitch but as we go forward to the questions keep them coming we do understand some of you do have to leave but if you do complete the survey in the feedback tab we will actually send you a copy of the recording so you can forward it onto your teams or send it to your CEO to sort of justify everything that we've just spoken about so we do have some questions now so the first one is from Christine so Christine do you have any advice on sales and marketing alignment this is also a big one that has come up recently so you know it's it's it and there are so many people who have attempted to answer this question i think again i know it sounds like a cliche but it's it's like you've got one department that speaks greek and another that speaks spanish and they don't trust each other because they don't because there's no visibility over the you know particularly i think and i've sat on both sides of the fence and i'm involved on both sides of the fence but i think particularly the sales you know the sales guys look at marketing and they go you guys just you know you're in you get in our way rather than enable us and you know the leads you're throwing over the fence and no good and that's why you know that's putting pressure on us we're not going to hit our target we're not going to hit our bonus you know so i think that's it's and i think you know coming from i mean i've i've done a lot of a lot of work in the marketing automation space and it's the same you know again what do marketing marketing actually do and i think comes down to that visibility those metrics you know as i mentioned one of my favorite metrics is is lead score done well and interesting moments you know those kind of things that sales guys just go oh my god marketing actually do something they set who set this up yeah wow so i think the alignment between sales and marketing look we all know as well as marketers and everybody on this on this webcast knows that you know marketing the customer or the prospective customer is needing to speak to sales a lot later in the process if at all in some cases and that marketing sort of share of that funnel if you like to coin another marketing cliche is getting larger and larger and larger so i think there's going to have to be you know there is going to have to be more alignment but i think you know visibility if sales could see what marketing we're working on just as if the CEO could see what marketing would work on they would maybe hold back from criticizing go i didn't know you guys you know we just thought you guys were always out at lunch and always you know you know making pretty pictures and pretty brochures so i think for me that's the that's the thing let them into your system show them your system got nothing to hide sales force most marketers have a login to sales force they can see the pipeline but the sales guys can't see what market you know so i think that's the for me that's the key final question from everyone we've got 60 seconds to go so i understand there are platforms like this available like you just mentioned what is the minimum amount of team members that you need to actually put in something like this oh look i mean at a minimum level i would say around about five yep at a minimal level but it's not i mean i you know i was talking to somebody yesterday who said we've only got one product do we need a system like this i was saying you've got one product but you advertise in all these channels you've got a hell of a lot of campaigns going out the door for this one product so i don't think it's so much about team size um it's it's about efficiencies and and time saving but but five i would say to answer the question is the is the minimum that i would you know yeah there you go you heard it from the man himself thank you rob i think if anything the three key things that i've picked up today has been visibility feedback and communication so much like life i think you need those three things to make it all happen don't you absolutely thanks for joining us today we hope to see you at future events please complete the survey and keep a lookout for the recording bye for now thank you