Successful marketing requires more than just a strong brand and a compelling message. Companies must be customer-obsessed, and have a cross-functional approach that involves all aspects of the organization.

If you missed this panel at our London event, don’t worry! You can catch up right here by reading all the incredible insights from our speakers:

đź”· Chris Hooper, Global Director of Content Marketing and Creative at Veriff

đź”· Keith Povey, Director of Revenue Marketing at Panaseer

Read their thoughts on cross-functional and customer-obsessed marketing, including:

  • Organizational structures and relationships
  • The importance of customer empathy and obsession
  • Why marketing needs to shed its subservient role
  • Shifting mindsets towards revenue alignment and unified customer understanding
  • Strategic marketing and putting the customer at the center

Organizational structures and relationships

Keith Povey: Hello everyone, I’m Keith Povey, I run a team of 10 in a series B cybersecurity startup with ridiculously unrealistic growth goals on a quarterly basis that keeps me awake at night.

Chris Hooper: I'm Chris Hooper, I work for a company called Veriff, which is a global IDV, identity, and verification specialist. We primarily sell to financial services companies.

My role is primarily around content, I look after our global content team. I've worked most recently for a company called GoCardless, in the FinTech space. And then prior to that, I was working at consultancy capacity for very big tech companies, the big cloud providers.

So I've seen both sides of things from that big multi-faceted, organizational way, through to something that's a bit more manageable and growing. So, let’s start with the cross-functional bit first.

Keith Povey: I think it's come up so many times, the words alignment and sales. The nemesis/best friend of all of us. The closet marketers, because it's so easy to be a marketer, right? Because everybody in sales can tell you how to do it. We’ve all felt those pains.

But cross-functional probably needs to go a lot wider than that, particularly if you're not connected to product. Are your messages on point and up to date? If you're not talking to customer success, are your ICP and your persona as accurate as they should be?

If I'm not talking to some of the SEs, for instance, am I really understanding the message around our solution that's actually being communicated in meaningful sales meetings? Does that match what I'm asking my team of development reps to do? And does that match the proof points at the very high end that I'm putting in campaign messaging or an ABM?

I strongly believe marketing is the hub to all those spokes. Because we speak to customers, to prospects, we should be speaking to everybody inside our business. And we're the amalgamation of all those different points of view.

And that's why we're normally very empathetic people because we have to listen to all those points of view and then convert them into something that we then deliver to a prospect. So I think it has to be cross-functional.

Chris Hooper: I totally agree. How you manage that relationship between marketing and sales shows that there's a dysfunction to a certain extent, because they are essentially two sides of the same coin, and they should be the same thing.

From an organizational design perspective, we've certainly had that in my previous role at GoCardless, we essentially scrapped the marketing team and created something called the growth team, which was an amalgamation of marketing and sales. Lots of mini-alignments around customer groupings were what we were basing things on.

It was an exciting approach I've never done it before and it's something I've taken across to my role here because I feel like having the SDRs for example, is the first front line of sales who were doing those initial outreach calls.

Having them reporting into what was marketing is just in itself a huge leap because you've all of a sudden got access to a new sales channel at the very beginning of the sales process, which is something that was lacking before.

So I think the way that you structure the organization is really, really important, and I fully appreciate that, but not everybody is going to be in the same situation. If you’re a huge behemoth of an organization, changing that is a conversation that's gonna take years.

But the luxury that we have as organizations of our size is that we can put a stamp on it and say: “This is the way it should be structured.” And then you can picture it as you grow as an organization.

Keith Povey: Yeah, definitely. And I think that's why some of us that ended up working in startups keep going back to startups because we see the value in shaping it.

And you've probably gone through some pretty horrific pain. But then you've learned a lesson, even though every organization is unique, you've learned a lesson to come back through and do it a little bit better each time.

People think startups grow steadily over time, but it’s actually more sporadic. They reach points where they go: “Okay, now we need to change”, and then there are huge amounts of radical change, and then there's a settling period, and then there's another.

I've made mistakes about being cross-functional, or what my relationship with sales might be, and stuff like that. And I don't want to go through that again.

Chris Hooper: Yeah. So as I said not everyone is going to be in that fortunate situation where you can mold the organization and make it look like what you want it to look like and have that best practice.

But I think even then there are some small steps that you can take to move in this direction. It’s also the luck factor. If you suddenly just hit upon something that works, which is completely out of the blue.

You can engineer that a little bit by experimenting, and just trying something and taking a very small team, focusing it on something, and maybe making that your little cross-functional pilot, where you have:

  • Sales,
  • Products,
  • Your classic marketing functions,
  • Maybe business intelligence,
  • And whoever else needs to be involved in that.

It’s a very small pilot program you can run, just to show that it works.

Where I found it to be most successful is aligning it around the customer part of this conversation. Sometimes you can take that small team and say: “This is a particular customer or grouping of customers that we're going to go after.” And then that's your pilot because then all of a sudden you can attribute metrics to it.

You can test whether it was a success or failure. Did we win this deal? Did we not? Did we get more business out of them? So I think having that customer-centricity is probably the same angle to this conversation. But it's just the underlying piece about how you build that foundation in the first place.

The importance of customer empathy and obsession

Keith Povey: If you've got cross-functional hubs, you're able to take feedback. So if you're customer-obsessed, for instance, is it your ideal customer profile? Or is it actually people that you've sold to that you want to retain?

So, for instance, what we sell is six figures a year, and a minimum of a three-year contract. It’s really complicated, and it's sticky. It’s a 12 to 18-month sales cycle. So I have to wait a year and a half before I see any value.

So we've got customers that we've onboarded, even in the last nine months, they're not really ready to tell me what they feel about the platform because they haven't used it for a year yet. So getting advocacy and getting feedback is tough.

We've only got 20 or so customers. On any given day three or four of them might be annoyed for some reason, because customers like to get annoyed with us, right? And then you've got five or six that we've only added in the last nine months, they can't really help me.

So now my pool of customers that can give me valuable feedback is only about eight. And then those eight get badgered by customer success, by upsell, by product, by beta releases, by all of these things. And then there's me in the back going: “Can you just tell me how I sell to other people like you in the future?” They haven't got that time.

So being customer-obsessed is about delving into the world that you want to be in contact with. Relentlessly trying to align your tactics to your persona at every single step. Be obsessed with whether what you do meets the person you want to meet at the other end.

I think we're all guilty sometimes of firing the odd thing out that you think might hit a little bit, but also might miss but you're comfortable with that because the thing needs to get done. Whereas actually, whether you're HSBC or Veriff, you can't afford that waste of your time and effort.

Chris Hooper: Yeah, it's very true. And I think there's no finish line with that stuff. Even with your persona developer, for example, it's constantly evolving, almost like a living organism. The more information that's coming in every six months or every quarter, that persona is altering ever so slightly, and the needs of it and how it's responding to external stimuli and so on.

Keith Povey: Definitely. I got the persona equivalent of a kick on the shin about two or three months ago when I actually got to speak to two or three chief information security officers. I was chatting with them, and I just came out and went: “What do you read?” And all three of them from different sizes and types of organizations said: “We don't have time.”

One of them said: “I get easily 300 to 400 emails a day from someone like you, or organizations like you. And I don't even have time to delete them. So I have rules in my outbox.

“People I know and people I don’t know, and if I don't know who you are, you go out, you're wasting your time. I don't have time to watch a full webinar, I don't have time to read a full white paper. I don't even really normally have time to scroll through LinkedIn. Because can you imagine what my inbox looks like on a daily basis?”

And I said: “So how do I get to speak to you guys and girls?” And he said: “Like this, you need to catch us in a place where we're probably surrounded by our own peers. And don't sell us anything. Because we've been assaulted 400 times a day, every day, every week, every month, all year.

“Don't sell us anything. Ask us questions, learn about us, and then walk away. Because we're all intelligent enough to know that when we want you, we’ll come and get you, and we’ll remember you for not selling to us more than we’ll remember you for being in my inbox 12 times.”

Chris Hooper: There are two really good points in there. The first one is about how customer obsession really is what it means, that you have to have an understanding and empathy with that customer, right?

So you understand the problem they've got, in this instance, that they've got 400 emails coming in every day. So how do we cut through that? And how do we build a relationship with them that enables us to grow together?