Speaker 1:

Hi, and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, where we get perspectives from industry thought leaders about strategies that are unifying marketing and sales cycles to help accelerate growth inside your world.

Simon Hazeldine:

Welcome to The Insiders sales and marketing podcast. I’m Simon Hazeldine. I’m a Sales Transformation Strategist and Sales Performance Consultant, helping my clients get more sales more often with more margin. I’m also a keynote speaker and author of seven books on sales and negotiation. I’m your host, along with my co-host, the one and only Richard Lane, who is Co-Founder of durhamlane. Durhamlane are an inside sales partner that help businesses to grow their revenue through an integrated sales and marketing methodology. And Richard, you have the privilege of introducing our guest for this episode, so over to you, Sir.

Richard Lane:

Great. Thank you, Simon. Great to be back in The Insider’s podcast studio. Thrilled to be joined today by Emma Roffey. Emma is VP for Marketing in EMEAR and also Global Advocacy at Cisco, so a name I’m sure everybody recognizes for a brand, and really excited to be chatting to Emma today about all things sales and marketing. Simon, back to you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Lovely. Thanks, Richard. So, Emma, welcome to The Insiders. Great to have you with us. And the first question we normally ask all of our guests is, just so our listeners can get to know you a little bit, could you just give us a little bit of background about how you came to be in your current role?

Emma Roffey:

Yeah, sure. I always like to say I grew up in sales, so I never started my career in marketing, but as quite a few people do, you end up there, which was a natural fit anyway, so quite excited. So I’ve been at Cisco now, it’s horrible to say the amount of years, it’s scary, but almost 18 years. And probably each year have a slightly different role, but primarily most of that time has been in marketing. And then it was about three years ago where I got my dream job that I wanted to, which was running marketing in EMEAR, as Richard said. And also, I have a global role looking after customer and partner advocacy, and really emphasizing the voice of the customer more, which I’m very passionate about that area.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. It’s interesting, a marketeer who came up through sales, because Richard and I often have a conversation with people about how they came into sales, so we refer to it as ‘the happy trip-up club.’ It’s not normally a career people have identified, for example, when they’re growing up or they’re at university, so they ended up in marketing that way. How has your background in sales influenced your approach and your philosophy towards marketing?

Emma Roffey:

The things I’ve noticed, whether you’re in sales or whether you’re in marketing, you have to put the customer first. And there’s one thing I look at and I say, what’s the difference between sales and marketing? What is the one difference? What is the one word that you could say is the difference between sales and marketing? And that one word for me is scale. So that’s what I always think about, marketing scales what sales are trying to achieve, but always with the customer first in mind. So, if we’re thinking more about the customer, you do if you’re in sales, and all the preparation you’re doing for a sales call or a sales meeting, it’s exactly the same for marketing. So, if you’ve got that customer-first mantra, then that’s going to lead to success.

Emma Roffey:

The other thing I’ve noticed, when I first went into marketing, were a couple of things, and I’m sure we can talk about that. It was the first time ever I didn’t at the time, I do now, but didn’t have any metrics, didn’t have any goals, didn’t have any targets. So, it was very difficult. I remember the first week looking around, and I’m that age, but there were no boards or what we’ve got to achieve or hit for the moon or anything. And then you finished the first week, and it was really bizarre in marketing because I thought, how do we know whether we’ve done well or not really? And it took me a while to get used to that, actually. And at first, I started to relax, I was like: this is really nice. I don’t have this pressure. But then I missed that. And I think as over the years marketing has transformed more, it’s now far more KPI, far more ROI, far more impact based, which is good.

Emma Roffey:

But to go back to answer your question, the other thing that stood out for me, which I think has helped me in marketing, that you had to be very good at this in sales, is responsiveness. If a customer was upset or a customer needed you, then I was very fast to react, damp out fires or motivate them or whatever it was. And I’ve really taken that into marketing as well. The speed of execution, the speed of understanding the customer, the speed of the customer journey, but getting the right message, right time, to the right person. And that’s where the synergy is between sales and marketing as well. So very, very similar roles, just the one difference, the scaling.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. And it’s interesting, your comment, that sense of urgency that I think any sales professional listening in will identify with, because love or hate them and disagree about whether sales targets should be there or not, they do create a certain sense of urgency. And if you do have that customer-first mentality, the first thing you do is respond to your customer, don’t you? Not just when things are wrong, but also to keep things moving forward.

Emma Roffey:

Yes. And I think I noticed that going from a relatively small, medium-sized company to a large corporate, where everyone knows corporates are a lot slower sometimes to respond, and that I just vividly remember. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m reacting now, we’ve got to get onto this now, and respond.” Because the customer. So that doesn’t go away. That’s always there.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, which is great. And you mentioned the metrics piece, the KPI and that’s come in more. I’ll be interested in your thoughts on what are effective metrics for marketing, then? Sales, I guess we can debate this, but they’re probably reasonably well understood what they look like, but marketing?

Emma Roffey:

Even on the sales side, some of them are changing, especially more software driven. But on the marketing side, it’s a really good question. And have we nailed it yet? No. And the reason I say that is because, when I’m in the sales meetings or sales and marketing meetings, it’s very hard, and I’m sure a lot of marketeers would agree, it’s very hard to actually quantify your impact in marketing that sales can really relate to. What they want is a coin operated machine. Certainly in Cisco. In other words, they’re making investment decisions. Do I put a dollar here? If I invest in another salesperson, they’ve got a target on their head, therefore I know the return. If I give you X dollars, Emma, what’s the output? Straight away leading to the net result. And it’s like, it doesn’t necessarily work like that in marketing.

Emma Roffey:

That’s the dilemma we have, is building the metrics that a sales led company like Cisco, sales and engineering led and a sales-led company to get them to understand the ROI and that impact that relates to… Okay, so I won’t invest in another salesperson necessarily, I’ll invest in marketing, and I’ll get 10 times the return that I would from a salesperson, for example. So every marketeer probably is in this position right now. I think the market is shifting from measuring MQLs, SQLs, the funnel, some of that is there, but we’re really looking at the impact of marketing across an account for a lot longer period. What is all the activities we’re doing to get it to a certain stage? What close them? So multi-attribution touch modeling, looking at different channels. Yes, we look at the bookings, we look at the contribution, but we’re looking at the impact on the pipeline, and then we’re looking before that all of the engagements, and which accounts are highly engaged, which are significantly engaged, which are not that gives us early warning to where we’ve got no opportunities but we’re seeing high engagement, or we’ve got high engagement and nothing coming down the pipe. So, lots of different metrics.

Emma Roffey:

But then the trick is how do we… Because you’ve got, which again I’m sure relate to, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data points. And it’s, how do you make sense? And I like to say, you’ve got data that leads to insights, but you need those insights to lead to wisdom. And if you don’t have the wisdom, then you can’t act on it. So, the trick is then getting a dashboard or metrics that give you that wisdom.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s that more complex, subtle approach to metrics, isn’t it? Avoiding drowning in data, which I guess is awfully easy for us now, because we have so much of it. And Richard, durhamlane, as an organization will outsource to you, you’ll be their inside sales partner, you’ve got to prove your worth, haven’t you, to your customer, to your client? So how do you approach that from your perspective?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, I totally resonate with a lot of the things Emma said already, scale, speed, impact. I think the stats of MQL to SQL conversion, if after 10 minutes of someone saying they’re interested, if there’s no follow-up, then the opportunity to follow up falls off a cliff dramatically. So we make it our business to be the speed provider. That sounds wrong, doesn’t it? But you know what I mean. I love the data insight and wisdom as well, so we talk a lot about input, outputs, outcomes, and insights. You’ll have heard me say that on this podcast before, Simon, but that wisdom probably is the next phase on again.

Richard Lane:

And our job really, as doing what we do for our customers operating at the front end of the top of the funnel, then our job really we see it is to provide back some of that insight, make sense of some of the data that we’re leveraging, and then help our customers with finding that wisdom. And I think that just the other point there that Emma’s talking about, the shift from MQL to SQL measures to impact across accounts. It’s a long-term game, Emma. Long term game, isn’t it?

Emma Roffey:

Yeah. And I’m sure for you, Richard, as well… When I used to run… When I first joined Cisco, I ran our contact center, or a better description “operation”, and I remember, it was a long time ago, but they asked me to go in. I was consulting for Cisco at the time. And I think I was up in Liverpool where we had the contact center, and I don’t know, say there were ten people. I can’t remember the numbers to be honest. Ten people, and it was the first time in many years that Cisco is going to spend money on marketing again. So they wanted me to check out, because I knew what you could achieve on the phone, having grown up in telesales and all of this.

Emma Roffey:

And I vividly remember, I went along to the contact center and people were calling in luxury. I’ve been in years banging out cold calling. People are calling in, and I just remember that the agents at the time called themselves web navigators, and were answering the calls, and they put the phone down, and I’m like, “You didn’t find out who that person was. You didn’t get their name, you didn’t get their telephone number.” They were just there to help the customer or prospect get to the right bit on the website. It’s like, no, no, no, no. Stop. Phones down, everyone. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And then had to really capture what you can get from the inbound.

Emma Roffey:

And then obviously you have downtime. And that’s when I said, “Right, we’re doing outbound as well.” So the quality of the data that you have to work with, Richard, again, it’s that right time, because nothing’s more annoying when a customer may have responded to something, a prospect may have responded to something, and they’re like “no, I don’t want you to call me now, I’m not ready now”, where others are ready, and you’re not calling them. But I grew that in the end, I think we had 10 to about 120 agents in the end, doing outbound and literally targeted on how many leads per day, per hour, et cetera. But it always is the quality of the data and the intent of the data is crucial there. And that’s where marketeers are getting better and better and better, and we do it – feeding that right data at the appropriate time.

Richard Lane:

And that’s how we see these two worlds becoming much more and better connected. And I think that data sits in the middle, doesn’t it, in terms of making sure that we’re all able to deliver the best value.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’ve got visions of some of our listeners cringing, Emma, at the thought of customers phoning in and then you don’t necessarily maximize it.

Emma Roffey:

I tell you, over my years of experience doing a mail order, that has happened more times than I’ve probably had hot dinners.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? When you step back, you sometimes see the opportunities. And picking up on your comments earlier about marketing, quantifying your input in a way that sales can relate to, and Richard’s comments about data straddling the divide that sometimes exists between sales and marketing, some large corporates still struggle with aligning the sales or marketing functions. What’s your perspective from your experience on that?

Emma Roffey:

The alignment is key. So, I report into a centralized marketing organization. I’m sure everyone’s been in different models, where a few years ago I reported into the sales leader of the EMEAR region, but that’s different. But the leader matters, because Wendy Mars, for example, who runs EMEAR, she treats me as part of her virtual team and part of our leadership team. So, I’m sat in all those meetings and all the forecast calls, so I’m heavily involved and heavily understand the dynamics from the sales. And then we have various sales leaders that I partner with. They’re my peers, I partner with them, I understand their issues, they understand mine, and then we can agree plans together. If you don’t have that at the leadership level… Because it starts from the top. It absolutely starts from the top, and then that cascades down. So I expect my direct reports to peer with their sales leaders, and then everyone has that understanding. So that’s really important.

Emma Roffey:

The culture is key as well. And there’s a mutual respect to what we do, and the differences, and the value that we can bring. So I think it starts at the top, for sure. There has to be an alignment. There has to be an opportunity, I believe, for marketing, and there has to be patience for marketing. Because when I’m presenting, it’s not all necessarily the numbers that they’re used to. There’s an education as well as a demonstration of what we’re doing and the impact. And you can only do that if you have good relationships and you have the opportunity to align, you do regular QBRs or reviews, and you just have it at every level of the sales organization and every level of the marketing organization.

Simon Hazeldine:

That patience is sometimes, I think, is rethinking the timeline, which I suppose is the other side to the sales urgency. Close the month, close the quarter, close the year. Things like account-based marketing, social selling, or even strategic account management, you have to have parallel timelines, don’t you? Short, medium, and longer term, or else you get caught up in the urgency. All are important.

Emma Roffey:

Yeah. And that’s, I suppose, the biggest thing. It goes back to this back coin-operated machine. If I give you $10, what are you going to get? And it’s not what you’re going to get, it’s what you’re going to get now. And you’re like “no, it doesn’t quite work like that.” There is a good understanding in Cisco, but I’ve used that word… Interesting, I’ve used that. But there is patience that’s needed.

Simon Hazeldine:

It’s the first time somebody’s mentioned patience, and I think it’s a really important insight in terms of modern, more complicated customer relationships that organizations have.

Richard Lane:

It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because if you truly put the customer in the middle, and you put the customer first, you have to have patience, because you’re working to their timelines and not your own. And I love that phrase that you’ve used as well, Emma coin operated, and you totally see that, don’t you? I see that with our customers. We’re going to give you this, what do we get, and what do we get right now? And that’s always a conversation you have to have, to manage expectation. But if you have this customer-centric philosophy, then it happens at the right time for your customer, not necessarily for your quarter.

Emma Roffey:

Yeah. And I think sales are good at being patient as well. They know how long it takes to bring in a big fish. Some of our sales cycles are a long, long time. So I think we have a good understanding there, but it’s patience to understanding the different parameters and how we have to work and the influence it takes and the time it takes to influence the brand and the perception of everything.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Richard, your point I think is, why haven’t we got this closed for the quarter? Because it’s not right for the customer. And often those are the conversations I think that need to happen when managers, leaders, are coaching their sales personnel sometimes. What’s right for the customer? And then we can forecast it correctly, and not annoy the customer, or discount unnecessarily in some rather tacky attempt to get it all closed and boxed off.

Emma Roffey:

And that is where marketing is becoming more and more sophisticated, as we get more and more data in. It’s getting harder, it’s getting sophisticated, it’s getting more complex, it’s getting harder in some respect because of the amount of data input. But equally getting that customer experience right is crucial. It’s also quite hard in Cisco, so the bigger you are, the more products you have to sell, the whole portfolio. We’re quite business unit centric as well, and everyone wants to… If you take a classic, the CIO for us, every business unit, every product level, everyone wants to target the CIO. And that’s where marketing has to be true to the customer and go, “Stop. You can’t all go after this particular customer, the CIO, this particular right now with what you want to say.” And that’s when marketing has to be that guardian of that customer experience.

Simon Hazeldine:

I was consulting… We were doing some key account management work with a client, and they had, I think if I recall correctly, seven BUs, and they said at one stage all seven of them could potentially be pursuing the same person, unaware of the other six were doing the… And you can imagine the customer experience which is like, do you folks not talk to each other? And it was this very, very common silo. And you mentioned you’ve been at Cisco for 18 years. What do you do to make sure that you and your team go outside the organization, to make sure you got fresh ideas and perspectives? What an old CEO of mine used to call outside-in thinking. Because very correctly, most of the time we’re head down making things happen inside our organization. So I’d be interested in your perspective on that.

Emma Roffey:

Yeah. That’s why I say navel gazing. Stop navel gazing. Because you can be so sucked up in operational changes or budget work and everything we have to do. So always encourage our marketeers to go out on sales calls. Just ask, go out with a salesperson, or join them. So we’re always doing that, and they’re very good at doing that. We run a lot of events. So when you’re running events, it’s always good to do some speaking to the customers or our partners and getting feedback there.

Emma Roffey:

For me personally, member of many CMO networks, so it’s always good to hear peer to peer stories, because generally speaking we all have the same issues. We’re all experienced different things, maybe different times and different scale, given the size of companies. But generally… And I love hearing best practices from other organizations. I recently myself, for example… We’re looking at a new CXO community internally, as part of my global advocacy role. So I said to the sales leaders, “I want to interview directly some friendly C-suites, if you don’t mind. I can handle the non-friendly, so don’t worry, but give me some names to speak to.” So I’ve recent done about ten interviews with the C-suite, and that’s always good to get the feedback.

Emma Roffey:

But as we don’t sell direct, we sell through our partners, so building up our partner network and listening to what our partner marketers need, or the C-suite of our partners. So we have lots of opportunities to get that feedback, and you have to have that. But I think if anyone listening feels they are navel gazing too much, just stop. Get out there. Allocate some time, allocate a week, and say, do you know what? I’m going to do four or five customer meetings this week, and join my sales colleagues or something, or do some networking. Just do some networking. Because it’s never, ever, ever wasted.

Simon Hazeldine:

Reflecting back, when I was early-ish stages of my sales career, I was in fast moving consumer goods, and the marketeers who would come out with you, you built a different relationship and respect. And I think just little things, like if we had a sales conference, they’d obviously present, but then the smart ones would hang around afterwards and stay over and have a drink and get to know and listen and have conversations. And it was that… In a small way, very, very representative of what you said. But I think get out there and talk to the C-suite and find out what they’re thinking.

Emma Roffey:

It’s something I… I don’t know why from a networking point of view as well, I really advocate for that. And it’s not something I really did a lot of. I think I was so busy; you’re bringing up children, you’ve got work, I prioritize anything else as non-work related. And then it was only the last, I don’t know, five, six, seven years of consciously networking. And oh my God, do I wish I’d done that earlier. I really, really do. And this year, after lockdown, I’m saying yes to everything. I’m just going for saying and really enjoying it.

Simon Hazeldine:

The importance of networking there, I think, key takeaway for our listeners coming in. I’d be interested in… You mentioned your CXO initiative, and how do you get Cisco people inside the customer’s world? We talked about that customer first obsession, which is everybody talks about, our customers are our priority, customer first, but what do you think’s most important to actually make that become a philosophy or a culture, rather than just a statement.

Emma Roffey:

I think we do many, many tactics to do that at all levels, so we very much focus on the C-suite and hearing, and it might be in private groups or exclusive groups where it’s Chatham House Rules, so we can really, really hear across the board. But as I said at the start, I run global advocacy, and one thing we set up many years ago, which we now call Cisco insider advocates, is we set up this community precisely that so we can really hear from our customers, in all walks of life of our customers, from the engineers, all different roles. But what I wanted to do was bring those customers together to have this peer network where they could talk to each other, because people love hearing from others, like I do when I’m joining these CMO communities, I want to hear from my peers directly, all warts and all the truth. What is happening? What are you having to deal with?

Emma Roffey:

So bringing this… We use the Influitive platform. This community together, inside our advocates where they are prepared to advocate on our behalf, and that’s where you can instantly get really good feedback. So for example, I remember a few years ago, Chuck Robbins our CEO, someone was presented to him and they wanted this customer feedback. So he put this challenge the night before in what we used to call the gateways, now insider advocates, in our platform. And we put this little challenge up, I can’t remember what it was now, but overnight, say you had 30 responses from customers, pull off the press, so the next morning, there you go, straight to the CEO who wanted this. Or if any BU needed feedback or we want to promote something. And then those advocates do, they advocate on your behalf and we reward them with points, and then they can redeem prizes and stuff.

Emma Roffey:

But more also we wanted to do prizes that money can’t buy. If we wanted to reward one of our top rock stars, as they’re called, and potentially they might want to speak on stage with us, or they might want to have lunch with Chuck for example, or another exec, then you bring these opportunities in for them. But what was really important for me was to get peers talking to peers and helping each other out. And we are not the bottleneck, as such, as we scale. And that’s been very successful.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s a great way to facilitate, and must be a great connection with your organization, and with the brand as well for them, as well as obviously bringing benefits to them as well.

Emma Roffey:

Yes, absolutely.

Simon Hazeldine:

And so Richard, from your perspective in terms of… Because your folks really have to get inside your client’s head, in terms of understanding that. And so how do you approach that from an understanding your client point of view, but also understanding the clients of your clients, I guess? Because you’re going to be one removed, aren’t you?

Richard Lane:

Yes, indeed. So I think a key piece for us through our successful programs is onboarding. So, Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. If you get the plan right up front, then you’re much more likely to be successful. So we essentially reverse engineer our new customers through our selling at a high level methodology, so we take them back through that program over typically a four week period, where we really get to understand deeply… I don’t think we need to be experts in our customers, but we need to be experts in why somebody should be interested. That’s the key. So if we can understand the triggers, the compelling reasons why someone should be interested in a certain Cisco product that we might be representing, for example, then we can through questioning qualify that into interest, and nurture it to a point where we can hand it across to the relevant BDM or whatever the structure might be, and they can have a successful next conversation and build pipeline. So that onboarding piece is really important.

Richard Lane:

And then I think, as I said earlier, the fact that we’re the front line, we’re having those conversations that you should want to be interested in the outcome from. So that insight piece is really important. So then you feed that back in, it closes the loop, allows us to then agree the strategy going forward. And I always think partnership is a two way street. A business partnership has to be two way. It can’t be one way. And when that happens, then we’re successful. When it doesn’t, then it’s really hard to be successful, I’d suggest.

Simon Hazeldine:

Emma, to loop back to that, being able to get 30 responses from what your customers think in that period of time is a fantastic relationship to have. You’re never going to wonder or have this mind game, don’t you? I wonder what the customers… They’ll probably want this. We think they’re thinking this. You don’t know. And you’ve got 30 pieces of evidence, so you must be super happy to get that voice of the customer back so fast.

Emma Roffey:

We easily can. And that’s just one example of what we’re doing. We get feedback in there. A few other communities as well, techy ones, so we’ve got a lot of people raising their hands, if you like, to want to advocate and want to help us, which is good. And that’s for all types of things, if we’ve got a big sales conference next week coming up in Vegas, our kickoff for the year, and every time we’re asked or whether we’ve got the partner summit, we need a customer on stage, we need a customer on stage who’s got a good story. So part of that is, we’re engaging with these potential customers. They don’t know, maybe a year, two years’ time, they’re going to be on stage with us, but we nurture them, like we do any lead from a marketing perspective, and then they grow in the type of advocacy that they’ll do for us.

Emma Roffey:

And they don’t think. I remember years ago saying, “You’ve got a great story there.” And they’re like, “Have we?” I went, “Yeah. The implementation, the outcomes that you’re achieving now…” Oh really? Okay.” Because sometimes these engineers are not the most vocal, or stand on stage and be the best representation. So a lot of them were nurturing. And that goes down to the value exchange and finding out, if you’re going to do this for us, what do you need from Cisco? And some of it is presentation training. You wouldn’t think a vendor like us would offer, but we do. Or the latest, when I was speaking to the C-suite, a lot of them would appreciate the media training. I’m like, “Wow, okay. That’s really good. We can do that.” So it’s really nailing that value exchange for people to spend time and advocate with us.

Simon Hazeldine:

That’s just fascinating, presentation support and media training is part of the value perception. That wouldn’t be your first… But if you don’t ask, you don’t find out, do you? And I think so powerful from my history is being at events where they get the customers at a kickoff or at the sales conference, and it is such a powerful experience.

Emma Roffey:

It is, but what’s important, and when I was speaking to some of them, they said, “Emma, I want the unfiltered truth. I don’t want to hear from you. I want the unfiltered truth, warts and all. We know not everything’s going to be perfect in terms of technology implementation. Let’s hear from others. Let’s hear the truth, not the sales spiel or marketing talk or ‘marketing fluff’ as sales say. But either way, what I really like about it is the unfiltered truth.” And that’s what everyone needs, because then you build up that trust. And trust is key.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. That’s a great expression, I think, to throw that challenge out to all of our listeners. You’re getting the unfiltered truth from your customers inside your organization. Might not always be easy to listen to, but it is what they’re saying about you, so better to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. I remember when I first became a sales manager, my boss at the time said, “The first decision you got to make is, do you want them to talk about topics with you in the sales meeting, or without you afterwards in the car park?” He said, “Because they’ll be talking.” And that a similar thing to let’s hear what the customer’s got to say. And you mentioned you have rock stars, which links us very nicely to our final question. We are building The Insider Spotify playlist, and we’re asking every guest to choose a song which we then add to the playlist. So Emma, put you on the spot here a little. What is your chosen song?

Emma Roffey:

I don’t think I need to be embarrassed. Harry Styles, Sign of the Times. That I just play. I love playing his album at the moment. And anyone in this house I’m in at the moment is sick. “Oh, Mum’s playing Harry Styles again.” But I just love that. Sign of the Times.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. Harry Styles, Sign of the Times it is, being added. And nobody needs to be embarrassed for their musical choice. I’m sure we’ve all got a few guilty favorites on our playlist somewhere, Emma. Richard, thoughts for you, closing thoughts? What were the standout comments and insights for you?

Richard Lane:

I’ve got loads of notes, Emma, which is a very good sign. We started off talking about customer-first and responsiveness, and I totally get that. I think the sales background in you demands responsiveness, and bringing that into marketing I think is excellent. And we talked about scale, so using marketing for scale, and I totally agree with what you’re saying there. Scale and speed. We talked about impact, and then we talked about data, which leads us to insights, which leads us to wisdom. And I like the use of the word wisdom there. We have to be connected, and it has to start at the top, so we’ve got to be aligned for cross sales, marketing, all of those C-level functions. Patience is required, particularly as we move into this account-based marketing and account-based sales world, where the customer is the center of the thinking, of the conversation.

Richard Lane:

And then who are our best sales people in an organization? They’re typically our customers that are willing to give the unfiltered truth to people that are interested in perhaps using us. And I know certainly at durhamlane, we have a couple of gates. We’re obviously a very small company compared to Cisco, Emma, but one gate is, get them in to see our office, because we’re not in a cow shed, we’ve got a really nice facility, we’re a proper company. And I had it yesterday where someone came in and went, “Wow, this looks really good.” Well, what do you expect? So that’s gate one, get to see us, that we really exist.

Richard Lane:

And gate two is: speak to some of our customers who can tell you the truth about us. So, I love that, the unfiltered truth, value exchange through advocacy, and ultimately why we’re doing it all, it’s about building trust. So, there’s my summary, but really lovely to speak, Emma, really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much.

Emma Roffey:

Thank you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. You mentioned wisdom, so Emma, thank you for sharing your wisdom with our listeners. It’s been an absolute pleasure, so thank you. I know you literally just come back off vacation, so we pounced on you on your first day back, so really appreciate you making the time for us.

Simon Hazeldine:

And to all of our listeners, we have many, many episodes in the back catalog now from The Insiders. That’s available from wherever you choose to get your podcasts. And if you subscribe, you’ll be able to access the upcoming episodes, be notified of those, and we’ve got regular episodes with some fantastic guests. As you can see the quality of conversation we’ve had with Emma and the insights today, we’ve got a whole ton of really, really great guests. So please make sure you subscribe, and we look forward to seeing you on another episode of The Insiders very soon, folks. Good luck with all your sales and marketing.

Speaker 1:

The Insiders by durhamlane. Subscribe today to never miss an episode.