 Felly, mae'n gwybod i'n gwybod i gael i'r sgol Llywyddyn ni'n ei ddweud i'r ysgol sy'n lleol yma i'r CIM north east. Efallai chi'n dechrau sgol yn ysgol gyda'i webynor, rwy'n gweithio i'r CIM markyteng oeddiwyr, ac mae'n ddweud i chi'n gwybod i'r llai gyda'r tres o'r cynnabodau i'r cwm ysgol yn cwm ysgol. Ieithio'r ce ficio'r cyfan o'r cwr cwr o'r pethau y garfodd y改-es, a yr hyffordd hyn yw eitem y sit yn dahl i'r cyfan o'r cyffredin CIM. Oŵr ydych chi'n gweithio i'n iawn i Nicola Rherving, hyderrwch i'r cyffredin strategiol i gweithio ar gyfer peisio ar gyfer y mae'r cyffredin Cymru'u nefyd. Yn gyfrifio i Reilla? Yn gyfrifio ydyn ni, Cymre'n gweithio ar gyfer cyffredin Cymre, I'm really pleased to be here today to share some thoughts and ideas around B2B marketing. It's an area of marketing that I think is often overlooked and sometimes misunderstood too, and during the next 30 minutes or so, I'd like to share a case study with you from the company that I work for, PACE Engineering, and I hope it excites any students who perhaps haven't decided which way to take their marketing career and encourages them to get involved in B2B, perhaps bust some of the thoughts that I had about B2B when I was a student, and I hope that for those of you who are more established in your careers and are perhaps already part of a B2B environment, that our case study just gives you some thoughts and ideas and figures some thoughts that might help you a little bit. I'm sure you've all read the blurb that currently is this session, or I guess you wouldn't be here, but I'm going to set the scene a little bit, just who I am, where I work, just to give you a little bit of a background, and then I'll be having a little bit of a focus on PACE Engineering and what we've learned in the past year or so, not going to dwell on COVID and that sort of thing specifically, much more about what we've learned about localising our activities when that hasn't been possible and what that means for the future as well, so increasingly digital markets, more virtual communications, a greater emphasis on environmentalism and not travelling as much, and what we'll carry forward with us. So, very briefly, a little bit about major so you know where this is coming from. I graduated from Newcastle University in 2011 with a degree in French and Spanish with German, so I'm not a marketing background at all, but it was during my mandatory year abroad that I really fell for marketing and I'm a real marketing nut now, and I was working for an agency in Paris for six months and we were supporting arts venues around the world and yeah, I really got into it from that point. Since then I have forged a career in marketing with the support of CIM qualifications, my degree was in a different language, so I had to bolster my education really so that I could move into marketing, and I've worked in different areas of different types of businesses, so I've worked in agencies and I've worked in-house, but the largest proportion of my career has been in Pearson Engineering, which is in the defence sector, and there are some interesting peculiarities that come with that, which have led to some of these thoughts, and I hope that that's been for you today. So just moving on, so this is Pearson Engineering, we help on forces to defend, move and survive, we're based in Newcastle upon time, the accent might give that away a little bit, and we've got customers all over the world, so we work with friendly forces, I have to say, in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, India throughout Asia and Australia too, so it's very much a global company, and this is where this issue of how do you localise, how do you be present in those markets when you can't necessarily be physically there. There's only 78 of us in the company, we're a business development team of nine, and the marketing team of two as part of that, so we have some challenges as well as some opportunities as well. Just to give you a little bit more background, I know defences is an area that's not necessarily familiar to lots of people. We produce equipment that helps armoured vehicles to move really in a defensive capacity, so we provide bridges, a bridge launch mechanism, sorry, like you see in the middle image there, to help vehicles to cross rivers, we make excavator arms to move equipment and to move earth and other obstacles, so all those which help to overcome explosives, you might have heard when lots of troops were in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were facing improvised explosive devices, we worked to overcome that, and plows to move land mines as well and other types of ornaments. Our route to market, and this is sort of the B bit, our route to market is predominantly through the providers of the armoured vehicles themselves, so they're like BMW or Ford, for example, of the defence world, not those brands specifically, just an example of car manufacture, but specific to the events. Our sales cycle is between three and five years, which brings some interesting concepts with it as well in how we keep people engaged. It's a really complex environment with lots of stakeholders, so we'll be working with the soldiers who use the equipment, decision makers within the army, civil servants looking at budgets, ministers approving budgets and the political angle and embassies as well who give us some support. Typically high value, typically long sale cycle, typically quite complex. So that's just a little bit of background and I'll come back to context of that in a little bit and what that means for us and where we've had to take some of our lessons from and apply certain marketing tactics in the last year. But together started predominantly with the B2B piece. I'd like to invite you to consider using B2B marketing means. I've included here a picture of a TV show, The Office. I'm not sure of the demographic of the audience here today. The Office is a TV show where the tagline was where life is stationary and I had a vision when I was quite young and just studying languages and thinking about translation and that type of thing when I was a student. B2B business was really sedentary, really stationary as their tagline goes. Really transactional, very data driven and not really much about relationships, not really much about people. It's about moving commodities around and I was really quite wrong. There was a local company to us that dealt with gas canisters and I just had this vision of working somewhere like that in a B2B environment and in it just being the most boring place on it. Same as engineering, didn't really appeal. Now I think it's really, it offers so much and like I said at the beginning, if I can encourage anybody who's listening here to have to choose a career in that route then I'll be happy. This was kind of what my vision of B2B is and I hope I'll kind of change some ideas perhaps if you share something similar to that as part of this. It's been a while, it's been a place in engineering that I've really learned about the power of relationships and people. I came into this role still thinking it's B2B but I was really attracted by, I'm a motor sports fan and I like cars and that type of thing and the ability to work around what are essentially big cars in a sort of international environment with purpose as well. There's a sort of political peacekeeping kind of angle to it as well. I was really attracted to that and was going to put the rest sort of aside but since I've been here that's where I've really got into the relationship angle and when your sales cycle is three to five years long how do you keep conversations alive? How do you maintain your position? How do you keep opportunities moving along a funnel? Without being able to keep people on the hook via little tactics it has to be about those relationships and I think there's some key skills that come with that and there are undoubtedly skills that I'm sure are shared by other types of businesses as well. I think this is just a mix that really supports this type of relationship marketing based up and you may or may not agree with this I know it's often a contentious issue I believe in the full integration of business development teams with marketing and sales together and as I go through these skills that I think are represented by those four pictures there and I'll explain them in a minute I think they have to work really closely together in order to serve customers to understand relationships and to keep everything moving along together there's too much information to not be. So the four skills that I think are predominant and I'm sure other people have different ideas as well but the marketing must be an investigator they need to understand what's going on in the world know what's likely to impact the stakeholders and have a really high level and tempo of internal communications to keep that moving around you need to be able to brief different departments there are lots of different types of materials whether it's open source or directly from those sales team and I kind of consider it as you're in a relationship with those customers over a long period of time and you need to be involved in what they care about so that's the kind of investigation angle I also think you need to be a behaviourist, not sure if that's the right word but with such a longevity of a relationship I think you need to really understand the buying behaviour what might move quickly what might move slowly and what can affect it in a world event certainly in our business and what's going to affect the purchase decision along the way we don't get quick wins, there's nothing that we can do that helps us to keep people on the hook along the way it really has to be about strength of relationship and belief in the brand we can't do an A B test with a voucher to see what works best and then go down that route it has to be over a longer period of time and it has to be about the people and the strength of those conversations and that there's a activity in helping the sales people to be involved in those must be a strategist, I guess that can apply it a lot but it's certainly about the long game for us not the quick wins as I just said it seems like different constraints can come out of different areas really quickly in that sort of environment so if you are in a 3-5 years sales cycle competitive and really easy in that time develop something that can dislodge the conversation and move things on so we have to really plan ahead we have to understand negotiation points, see what might be coming and then really work to communicate our value when understanding what we're pitched against so that we can understand what's often described as hot buttons for customers and make sure that we can stay with them all the way through despite whatever might be thrown at us and then finally I think the market needs to be a reporter as well so there's lots of different influences that can impact a buying decision in our world they may be political so a political party so they're going to invest in the armed forces for example they might be budgetary in terms of COVID it's had a big impact recently lots of government money being spent on infrastructure rather than other things there's that type of thing and the importance of a pestle analysis is really underline for us certainly taking the academic side and then applying it to the business we do it regularly to understand what's happening and then communicate it around as well and I think one of the biggest things that we've changed recently has been our level of internal communications I'll come onto that in a little bit in terms of the lessons of the last year what happens to these skills along the way but it's really kind of reporting what's happening and sharing it so that we can collectively work towards the same goal that's really been important and most of that activity investigating the market, understanding the customers making plans and seeing what's happening has generally been done with extensive travel localising activities things like exhibitions, demos events, direct sales lots of people based account management that kind of thing and defence is quite traditional so being face to face has been really important so the question we were faced with is how do you understand the world and how do you communicate it when you can't actually be there and you can't talk to people there's only one headline in the news and it's really hard to get information and we face communication challenges our audience and our customers are very security sensitive as you might imagine how do you get in touch with them and make sure that you both listen and share at the same time to really help the direction of the business we first looked we got values and value there the first thing we did when we knew things would need to change was to look within the business first and to really understand what our customers cared about and what we cared about so what we're good at what lies at the heart of activities and really what our purpose was I think it's very easy to get distracted when your normal activities are forced in a different direction and to maybe panic to adopt certain activities to reach those people but we looked inside ourselves face reminded ourselves of why we've been successful over the years and then looked to repeat that in some way and to bolster it so we know that our customers value us for always being there for the end user and it's about the application not the sale for example it's about helping to keep soldiers safe it's about helping them to move to where they need to be to overcome different obstacles and so we doubled down in those areas focused on R&D shared educational content looked at ways to be there even if we couldn't physically be there at exhibitions and demos and that came out in basically adopting all types of communication channels in order to meet the best one for the particular customer because they all had different approaches they all had firewalls within their organizations and that kind of thing and after looking in our own values and our purpose and what we were really here to do and making sure we focused on that the next thing we did was to look at what our value is in the eyes of our customers and look on ways to build on that as well so we refreshed our segmentation understood what the pains, gains and goals were for each persona, how they might have changed over the course of the year and what their challenges might be in a different environment and we looked at how we could be there again in person so that we were able to carry on those conversations regardless and it came down to relationships again so we enhanced our relationships with our local advisors we've got a community of people who are sort of like distributors but they're not sort of arrangement with them but they represent us in those countries we really focused on those people we really focused on enhancing their knowledge helping them to help us making sure they were kept up to date on a weekly basis on changes in their business that was a real step change in how we approached the market where they would typically support us rather than being the sort of the leading entity in conversations and we also refreshed our brand as well so it was a big thing to do and it wasn't done just because of what was going on last year but it certainly gave us an opportunity to re-engage and communicate a new way of thinking and a new way of communicating and that's been really, really positive for us in the last couple of months and then the next thing we did was to put ourselves, and this is represented by the perspective, the peace there put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and considered what their experience was not ours I've seen this a couple of times where there's been events and a company would perhaps fill their diary with meetings, virtual meetings and they're feeling like they're at an event because they're busy, they're meeting lots of different people but actually if you think about an exhibition a person might walk past the stand that you're on gather a little bit of information go in, think about it, come back the next day find out a little bit more they've talked to one of their colleagues or their boss or something like that and come back for more information and dig a bit deeper and dig a bit deeper and we looked at ways that we could replicate that rather than just filling our own diaries with meetings and from a marketing point of view looking for leads for meetings and that sort of thing it was much more about what their experience would have been and trying to replicate that side of things and finally just as I mentioned before we enhanced our internal communications software, newsletters, forums just to make sure that we could keep moving around that information and to make sure that when things have been more difficult and it's been more difficult to get information and to to share that information that we had ways and means of doing it so on to my last slide which was hopefully a little bit amusing with a llama peaking through fence it might be a little bit of a charm for some of you you can't hide behind when it's such a big area of development in marketing, new communication methods new ways of collecting data which is often talked about being data focused and I think the last years certainly facilitated the shift towards that but I have a little bit of a fear that it can become a little bit of a distraction particularly in a people oriented business and where those relationships are so important don't get me wrong the team here at Pearson Engineering are we're looking into the data, we're looking into the numbers we're looking into the communications methods and new ways to reach people but it has to be integrated with the relationship work and that's number one and I think it always will be, who knows what will change but I think it always will be in the type of business we work in it has to be about relationships and we talk a lot in the defence sector about AI about official intelligence and always having a human in the loop so in a defence context that's about making sure that weapons aren't firing without a person having made that decision or vehicles aren't going to a certain location without someone having made that decision in the same way we're really trying to make sure that we have the human in the loop decision making and putting the person and the relationship at the heart of our decision making and there's certain things that are possibly quite specific to us but we can't use google analytics for our own security reasons if we do sentiment analysis it comes back and tells us that it's all really terrible because we use and receive words like threat and conflict and that type of thing and I think that would send us down the wrong path if we focus on it too much we use it to guide us and our colleague who does a really great job of gathering that information and helping us to make sense of it it's something that supports the human conversation and I think most worrisome for me the reason that I got onto this topic a little while ago was that we did some work with some junior marketers some years ago for a local awards and so many of them I think it was about three quarters couldn't see any reason for further training or further career development beyond search engine marketing it's quick wins it's there and you find out what's working you find out what's not so then if you're in businesses B2B environment where you have a five year sales cycle how do you interest those people in being involved in the future and that was something that I left that event kind of stewing on a little bit and hoping that there was an opportunity to change and I think it's really about the excitement of being all people and people like people and making sure that what we do is focused on the person at the end of the conversation so I think my conclusion from the last year and what had to change for us and what we'll take moving forward is that it's actually about stronger relationships and a stronger focus on people rather than a greater focus on data or virtual means and this might be very specific to us but we will be investing more time and effort in our overseas partners we'll be focusing on the relationship with those people and the people who can influence our opportunities so the people in embassies the people in the department for defence and security exports that type of thing we'll be focusing on our brand, creating a community we're really lucky to have really great brand advocates within our customer base but we occupy a really historic facility a factory that people have a real attachment to and it's up to us to make sure that we cultivate that and keep the conversation going and it's about internal people as well I think internal communications has been one of the biggest areas of development for us and it's full circle really how do you invest more in people when you can't see them where you just have to keep investing in that relationship and in people who can help you to do that along the way being a little bit of a canter through quite a big topic very happy to take any questions and or if you want to contact me afterwards separately then please do thank you very much That's great, thanks very much Nicola for a really interesting presentation don't forget there's still time if you want to download Nicola's presentation slides and the list of additional reading resources from the hand out section and also just a little reminder that if you're enjoying today's webinar and want to post on social media you can use the hashtag so now we're going to take a short Q&A session there's still time to submit your questions if you would like to and we'll try to get through as many as we can in the next 10 to 15 minutes so first question Nicola is could you give some examples of how you would replicate the customer experience when you're not there in person It's a good question we had to do things like we accepted that we weren't going to have the level of conversation that we would have in person but it was about having lots of different types of content over the course of a week for example so there was an event that we were due to go do that was of course rightly cancelled and over the course of that week we delivered a white paper, we held a seminar we did a video demo on the multiple types of content that would help people to progress a conversation or progress a line of thought with us so it was about variety but within the constraints of what we knew that our audience would be interested in and to underpin that we had to have a good mailing list that we knew we could return to and that we could use but yeah it was just about different types of content in the same way that if somebody came to an exhibition they might talk to somebody one day they might explore around one of the products that was on display the next day they might pick up a brochure and read something or watch the video that's on the screen and just try to replicate that for them over the course of that week right that's a good answer and then similar thing I mean I don't know if you've been involved in any hybrid of what virtual B2B events but have you got any best practice recommendations a couple of top tips that you could offer ooh yes we did a hybrid event in Abu Dhabi in February it was a physical event but we couldn't have anybody there so we have partners over there and so we strengthened the conversations we were having with them they represented us on site so there was a lot of refings making sure they knew about our brand how we like to behave understanding what was a good conversation what was not a bad conversation but what was a better qualified lead that's what I mean to say and we set up one tip is good partners identify them briefly make sure they understand the company the second one I would say would be we had a communication boost back to the UK we were working on Abu Dhabi time and they were available for meetings which was actually quite fruitful there were a lot of meetings to be had but the connectivity was quite a challenge so testing that I think most people would anyway but testing that would be another tip and looking at the protocols of the country that you're working in so because we were working in the UAE it had its own set of internet protocols which made some things more challenging something okay to work with and that affected us a little bit so we had to have on site AV support at the whole show we were there pretty much every day making sure that things worked it fell over a couple of times it didn't work 100% but it did the job of us being there having those meetings and progressing the conversations but I think AV and particular country challenges or changes or differences that you might not expect or useful to consider Next question touches on creativity how would you push being created with senior stakeholders who would traditionally want corporate formal marketing is there any room for that in this business in different cultures so we've been through a recent experience of something like that with our brand refresh which to many of us marketers is a very strategic activity and senior management as well but to some people is seen purely as a visual exercise or a creative exercise in how you display something and I think it's all about there's that great Simon Sainic book start with why it's underpinning why you're making those decisions so it's not creativity for creativity's sake but rather what is the challenge what does my audience need to see how do I reach it and if that's underpinned by segmentation and your personas so they have this pain this is how we can help them and this could be visualised in this way just to take a visual route or this event this sort of different activity that is outside of our traditional type of marketing this is how it's going to to reach it, this is how it's going to meet that need I would say it's about that it's about fundamentally underpinning the reason for it I think it can be a challenge when you have a more traditional mindset I think it's about demonstrating results as always so maybe asking for a one-off pass to show something to prove it prove the concept to a low level with minimal investment and show what the results were okay thank you then another question in a secretive confidential type industry how do you conduct competitor analysis or is it just down to product performance that's such a good question because it's a really really challenging area how do you find out buying yeah years to the ground so that's kind of travel when we're able to do that hearing what's going on reporting back sharing is really useful there's always chatter within a community even if it's not published online we do things like social watching social listening social listening to find out what's being talked about in different places and I think just generally watching the trajectory of certain companies so who's partnering with who who is working in which countries and then from that we can kind of build up a picture and I think it's about collecting data together as well not just individual pieces of data or individual pieces of information don't really give you an idea we have a bi-monthly market insight session where the business development team get together and we talk about what we've seen and when you collect that together you can start building a bigger picture sending the odd email here there and everywhere so it's about that but I think it's also you have to be be aware of your competitors and what they're doing but having a greater focus on your customers and what they need and making sure you're there first with the best solution and that kind of thing so probably a little bit of a balance between being really customer and user focused and collecting data would be the sort of succinct way of answering I think OK, thank you and then we've got a question do you use the support of DIT how helpful is it if so because I know they have a big presence in the northeast don't they with us being an export region do you have much direct contact with them locally or nationally Yeah, so they are one of our key I'll call them an influencer just because that's what is understood as those sort of intermediaries that can help to ease conversations and help to influence ultimately but Yeah, so the Department for International Trade in the northeast in London and by extension the Defence and Security Export Organization who are part of that we work with them a lot it's really important for us to keep them briefed on what we're up to they are connected to embassies who are on the ground who are hearing what's going on, who know the people and we invest a lot of time and energy in trying to make sure that they are aware of our developments our objectives we have a presentation later this month virtually to make sure that we can share with them what the last year has been like for us but typically we would be in and out of their offices in London we'd be seeing them at exhibitions we'd be talking to their counterparted embassies on a weekly monthly basis but I would encourage anybody going into an export or global environment to explore DIT they're so well connected whether it's connected in terms of putting you in touch with somebody or giving you the right advice or finding the right area they've been really really useful for us for sure Excellent this is quite a long question the next one but I'll read it all out because the people might identify with this I currently work for a B2B organisation you spoke about aligning closely with the sales department one of the frustrations we have in marketing is that we're viewed as the sales support department we're measured by ever increasing led lead generation targets as a result our schedule activities is dominated by repetitive short term campaigns and longer term initiatives so have you got any advice on that so that the status of marketing so that you're not viewed solely as a sales support Yeah and I think it's about to my mind marketing is about listening to the market reflecting that internally listening to the business as to how it's changing or how it's going to adapt to what it's learned from that listening activity and then reflecting it back out again and it's sort of a circular a circular piece and I think marketing can often get caught and I think what's being described here is listening to the business and explaining and just sort of sharing in that regard I think when you can start to kind of round that circle again and where the marketing department are providing market insights and helping to lead the direction of this of where the business development or sales team focus their attention and I'm certainly not saying that we do that exclusively in our team it's very much a collective effort but our marketing team has a role in looking at what's going on in the world and being that reporter and being that investigator so that the sales team can understand what's happening can see what the influencers might be make some decisions and then it becomes a sort of collaborative effort I think having insight into what your campaigns might be so we have priority campaigns and there's quite a few of them because we have product campaigns company campaigns we share that with the business with the business and the business development team with their agreement and say these are the 10 that we're working on do you agree that these are your priorities we can't do absolutely everything so that you get their buy in at that level and then we schedule out what the campaign is going to be and they have access to that as well so they can see kind of where the pinch points are when are we really busy working on this and this is really important because it reflects back to those priority campaigns where can they see that there might be a little bit of room for manoeuvre, we've got a little bit of space we could do something that helps them to get something developed but I think it's about sharing and about being transparent with what the priorities are I understand that with the same we get requests for could we do this I'm at this event or something like that and we can do that, no problem we'll support it but there's a bigger sort of strategic element to the campaign and that's what if everybody's agreed what the priority should be that's what should take primacy because there's a bigger picture at the end of it so yeah it's kind of collaboration sharing I would say excellent and I think we've got time for one more question which is how do you justify marketing spend slash return on investment for B2B? I'm going to go for your budget yeah it's it's hard because you can't say I did this and here's the result within a short amount of time we have to look at data over a longer period of time so look at how budgets might have changed or what we've invested in over years rather than weeks or months return on investment I think is seen in terms of quality of relationships and we do more detailed if I think about you do a LinkedIn campaign and you put a bit of money behind it and then show what you've got as a result of it we would report on that but we don't typically report on return on investment for example like an exhibition with a number you know we don't say this is what we got in terms of a sale because we went to this event and I think it takes the senior management team and the directors to understand that that's a constraint of this industry you have to put your best put forward your best people forward invest in what you believe in and then you make down sure that it works at the other side of it and it's just about understanding the market I think and seeing far and up ahead that you invest in the right places and that those conversations eventually become a transaction for the business but it is really hard and it depends what your board want to see whether it's I put this much money behind adverts on LinkedIn and this is how many leads we've got out of it depending on what type of business it is about that sort of depth and quality and something more qualitative rather than quantitative I think it depends on the business really I wish we could put more numbers to things I would love to be able to do but it's really really a challenge particularly in what we do That's brilliant, thanks Nicola we've had some really great questions there from the viewers so thank you for submitting those so that's all the time we have now for the webinar today thanks to Nicola for today's presentation and to CIM North East for organising the event we do hope you found it interesting and worthwhile our next webinar express where we're going we don't need cookies is on Thursday the 10th of June at 1pm hosted by CIM South East you'll find further details listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll also be able to register for the session thanks again to Nicola for a really good presentation and thank you for joining us I'll see you on Thursday, goodbye