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:

Hello, and welcome to The Insiders sales and marketing podcast. I’m Simon Hazeldine, 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 an 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 the co-founder of durhamlane, who is an inside sales partner, helping businesses to grow their revenue through an integrated sales and marketing methodology. Richard, great to be back in the Insiders’ studio with you again, and would also be great if you could introduce our guest for this episode, please.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, sure. Hi, Simon. And I agree, great to be back. I’m thrilled to be able to introduce our guest to our listeners today. Joining us today on The Insiders is Ivy Petit. Ivy is the Global Growth Marketing Director at Veolia Water Technology. Ivy, very much a big welcome to you, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful, Richard. Thank you very much. Ivy, what we normally ask our guests to do is just provide a little bit of background so our listeners can get to know you a little bit and how you came to be in the role that you are in currently.

Ivy Petit:

Yes. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Simon. I’m very happy to be with you today. I’ve been working in marketing for 20 years now. It’s a long time. After business school, I jumped into the marketing world, and in particular in the business intelligence function. I worked also for a big French construction company. And I joined Veolia Water Technologies nine years ago in Singapore. At this time I was marketing director for the Asia Pacific region. I stayed there for five years. It was a super, super experience. And after, I came back to France to take the lead of the marketing for the digital business unit, which was also a fantastic digital journey. It was a new role. And I came to this current role that you presented, Richard, as growth marketing director in Paris, so it’s a global role. And my focus is to support Veolia Water Technologies’ top-line growth with the support of my team here in the HQ, and also with the support of the marketing zone lead in all the zones in all continents for Veolia Water Technologies.

Simon Hazeldine:

Fantastic. Wow. That’s a track record and a half, Ivy. Thank you very much. Well listen, I’d be really interested to dive into the first question. As a marketing professional of 20 plus years and also working for the world’s largest supplier of water services, which is going to be a very, very large organization. As a marketing professional, how do you create your marketing narrative so that it resonates with your customers, but it also fits within the context of a very large global company?

Ivy Petit:

Yes, interesting question. As you know, the marketing narrative is really the basis of what we do as marketing leaders. I consider this position really as a crossroads to give direction to the teams at all levels: from sales, after-sales etc. I’m also working with the innovation team, communication for sure, and also with the top management. All these teams are part of my network internally. For building this marketing narrative I follow, let’s say a key principle that we learn in business school, which are simple bases like the value proposition canvas. We really precisely help us to define this storytelling. We work on customer profiles, and also the most important component of this offers that we are selling to know more about the challenge that our customers are fighting with, against the benefits that we are creating through this offer.

Ivy Petit:

When we do this mapping, we adjust the value proposition, based really on the insights that we get from the voice of the customer to make sure that at the end, because this is the objective or marketing narrative, we achieve this product-market fit. This storytelling is really coming from the market. All value of our offer is coming from the market is just what I said, but it’s really to catch what are their current challenge of our customer, the driver, the pain points, and also moving on for the business model definition, what is the willingness to pay for this solution and associated services? What are also the competitive advantage that we have from their point of view. We take this time really to catch all input that we get from our customer, in order really to get this input, we need also contribution from the team and thanks to our team which are based in all continents, we have, let’s say, easily access to our customer and we get a lot of information.

Ivy Petit:

We have marketing champion in north America, in Asia Pacific, in Middle East, in Europe, in LATAM, everywhere they have access to customer. It’s a way of facilitating the voice of customer to collect this marketing narrative. Once you get all this information, because it could be as mentioned quite wide, we need to structure this information in link with our priority offer and market. And once we get it all structured, we share it internally following different step of the process to engage the team. As mentioned, voice of customer is important the way we are doing that in term of asking the question to collect this information. But what I would like to highlight, because for my experience, what is very important is also to do that in the co-construction approach, meaning that it’s coming from the customer, but it’s also thanks to the marketing and the sales team and building really the value proposition as a marketing narrative is really a challenge.

Ivy Petit:

It’s really not easy, it’s depending on the geography, on the customer persona as well. And especially related to my business, to Veolia Water Technology in terms of what challenges, we know pretty well water, but there is so many constraints in term of water scarcity, industry challenges, and all this parameter has to be also considered in the marketing narrative. You are sharing stories, and to create this impact with your customer, they should ring the bell to them. It’s very important to build these stories in link with your local context.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think it’s fascinating that you have the champion in each geography kind of representing those customers and feeding back. And I think also your comment about these are key principles that people, for example, learn at business school, don’t they, and it’s often quite fascinating that they sometimes get neglected. You mention something to a group of people and they’ll all go, “Yeah, I know that.” But there’s knowing and there’s doing, I think, and I think you’re doing the doing here Ivy, which is really, really interesting. In terms of that voice of the customer, you mentioned also your sales colleagues, like they’re listening also to the voice of sales, a common theme that we explore at the Insiders is the integration of sales or marketing, or unfortunately in some cases the lack of that, or the division of that. How do you personally work with your sales colleagues when you are creating these value propositions and other things?

Ivy Petit:

Yes. As mentioned sales are a great contributor for the voice of sales and they are an important part of the value proposition process. For example, before reaching to customer, we work with the sales team because they know them, but also they have strong expertise in markets, in projects and also in customer relationship. They have a lot of inputs to share with us. Generally what we do, we do workshop together. We work on customer questionnaire, we map together as mentioned previously drivers, pain points, just to check that we are aligned on what we will ask to customer. And we define together a profile of end user. Generally what we do, we let them speak as part of workshop, questionnaire. This is really the first step of the value proposition. I call it the voice of sales, the first step for building the value proposition.

Ivy Petit:

It’s very important to involve them at the beginning of the process. To have this process in place for sure, but it’s also very important to involve them on a regular basis. But also as part of the marketing roadmap, I share a lot of information with them to make sure that they’re aware of it like that when I will involve them in the process of building a voice of customer on a specific market and reaching to their customer, they will be prepared and they will be more and more familiar with the process. Our role as marketing leaders, it’s to, for sure map the value proposition, but also to involve the sales team. It’s very, very important. I can say that it’s not always easy because sometimes especially when you do like voice of sales and after you reach to customer, you see that there is some gaps between the customer perception and the sales perception, which sometimes be very funny, especially when you have to explain that to your sales team.

Richard Lane:

Yeah.

Ivy Petit:

And especially when it’s related, for example, for pricing, service skills. You have some difference and some gap, but it could even happen within the same industry where you have different big gap in the same company between different persona. And it’s where our marketing value will come. And you have to also, you talk about marketing narrative for your value proposition. But sometimes I do also marketing narrative for the sales team to make sure that they understand the principle, the gaps, because it’s also part of the foundation for the sales enablement and the sales engagement, because they are selling ideas and so you need to explain.

Simon Hazeldine:

That is a fantastic process. I’ve got this view of all of these different perceptions coming together, and when they’re combined together, you’re getting something very powerful, but the gaps and speaking as a salesperson by background, we’re not always fond of admitting there might be some gaps in our knowledge. I think that’s always an interesting, must be a very interesting conversation to have sometimes. Richard, your thoughts on that sort of process that Ivy follows.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. It sounds amazing Simon. I think the word I kept hearing was partnership. And I spend a lot of time talking about the link or the connection between the worlds of marketing and sales and quite often it’s a broken link. But I think with what Ivy’s explained there, using some frameworks and toolkits as the infrastructure, it sounds like you are really nicely pulling together those different perspectives into one narrative. I think a question I’m interested in Ivy if I may, is you have a global responsibility. And I imagine that the challenges of your customers are probably similar from country to country, region to region, but they will also be slightly different. Perhaps just slightly off topic, but I’m interested to know whether, is it an 80/20? Is 80% of the problem, the same for everyone, and 20% is regional, or is it closer than that or…?

Ivy Petit:

No, this is a interesting question. Sometime I have the question also from other marketing team internally, how can we create partners within this market for selling this software. And it reminds me when I was a kid, we use partners to learn about the colour and the mathematics, but the way you are selecting your partners is so different from one child to another. This is exactly the same principle here, because if you take oil and gas industry, mining industry, food and municipal industry, and so on, for sure they will have, let’s say similar challenge, which are related, let’s say to operation, production and even the product they are manufacturing, but here we are talking about water.

Ivy Petit:

And water you’d have different challenge in different countries. I mentioned water scarcity. You could have difficulty the price of water, the price of energy and so on. It really impacts also the way we are mapping our offer in term of high level of reuse, for example of water in certain country like Australia, for example, it could be impacted by the regulation and regulation could be different from one continent to another, from one country to another. It’s what we try. We try to harmonize, but we have also to consider local specifications, especially when it comes to sustainability, water, energy, and utilities.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Thank you. And you had mentioned your roadmap and in our pre-call, before we recorded this episode, you were telling us a little bit about you mapped the road to the market, and then you identify the gaps that exist. And then you see that as sales enablement role to then fill those gaps. Could you tell us how you see the role of sales enablement?

Ivy Petit:

My point of view first is that I really can’t imagine that marketing and sales team are working separately, addressing different challenge with different call. We have to be aligned. First, really sales enablement effective approach is really based on making sure that we are creating effective content together, which is for me related to the first question that you asked about marketing narrative. It’s really our biggest responsibility in term of sales enablement. We create content for sales to share with potential customers. And this content could be from white papers because we have also some expertise to share with customers. It could be through blogs, landing page. It could be emails that we prepare for the sales in order to nurture a specific type of leads. We really support them in the buyer journey.

Ivy Petit:

Forgetting success in the sales enablement, we could also implement technology that power the strategy, as well as creating great content, which should facilitate salespeople to find the content they need. For me, it’s the step after the marketing narrative, making sure that they self-find easily this content, find this content suitable for their market. And they are, let’s say confident enough to pitch this content in direct mode with the person. And also in term of marketing, put all this content in suitable way for them to… When they have a meeting, when they do a cold calling or when they are in a trade show, for example, they can easily address customer needs, thanks to what we prepare to them.

Simon Hazeldine:

I was going to say, so you make sure it’s at their fingertips almost so very easy to find an access.

Ivy Petit:

Exactly. And I think the right content also for their purpose. Yes. I really see my role as a facilitator and I think, the right tool is definitely a good thing as well.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Your philosophy of facilitation is coming through very strongly as a concept. I think about the way you are aligning and involving and collaborating with people, which I think is really interesting for other marketing professionals to consider. And also when we were speaking prior to the recording, you told us as well, you’re very strong on having an end to end process. You think that’s absolutely key and there’s three key critical elements of that are obviously the process, but also the team and the tools. Could you give us an insight into each of those, what do you think are the most important factors?

Ivy Petit:

Indeed. Regarding the process. It’s almost what I explained at the beginning. Working on value definition, it’s coming from, let’s say internal and external capabilities. We need to have this job done to have a common methodology to facilitate the implementation and the engagement of the team, especially when you are working in a global organization, we don’t do everything centrally. We are also decentralized. Supporting marketing in the zone to do the same activities. It’s why process is important because the local team there really contributes to the value creation definition also, because they have access to end user. We have to make sure that this process is strong enough to be also not modular, but also easily accessible from the local team, from the marketing and the sales team. We have also as part of the process, let’s say a customer questionnaire or sales questionnaire, which is also a key step like that at the end, we can gather, we do some data crunching and we have also more than process.

Ivy Petit:

It’s also, I call it communication process, meaning regular meeting with key stakeholders, sales team, market offer experts, as long as the duration of the project, because to me, communication is very important. And most of the time we have to be agile and working on the agile project based on a iterative process. The more we share, the more we will have people well confident and also fitting what we are expecting with clear objective, all align together. This is the first one I talk about the process. The second one, which is for me, really the core, the key element of the job is your team. We have to make sure that before starting everything, we have the right people at the right place for this project, as say, working on an agile mode is very important, which have, or push them to have a collaborative mindset is for sure is the best, especially internally, this is really important.

Ivy Petit:

It involves marketing, but it involves all team which are impacted by the offer. Sales, design, technical team, service team. All these teams are… It’s not just the marketing. It’s very important to be also open to other expertise. This was the second one, the last one. Yes, you’re right. I mentioned last time about the tool. There is no specific tool, really as part of the value in offer initiative, but on the other end, it is very important to have, let’s say, a solution or tools which are scalable and even proven, especially when you have to manage your follow up action plan. This is the most important because we need collaborative tools to support for example, eLearning, we talked before about sharing input with the sales team. eLearning is also an important part of that. And also all tools related to sales enablement to share the content and also all marketing automation at the end, which are part also of this initiative, because it’s end to end in order to generate leads and new opportunities for the sales team.

Simon Hazeldine:

The collaboration piece again, is it clear… You can clearly see it’s a priority for you. And then I guess a follow up question in terms of technology like marketing automation, what do you think marketers should consider when choosing technology or using technology? Because there is so much available now.

Ivy Petit:

Yes, you’re right. And you have a lot of technologies. This definitely. And also there is a challenge, especially I used to work for global companies. I can tell you that every time you want to implement a new tool or technology or platform, it’s a project by itself. I think what I consider the most important is to define first your business objective, what will you like to achieve? And making sure that what you will select after will be in line with your business objective. This is really what I consider the most important you have also to consider your organization. How do you work with your team and involve this marketing network, for example, in the process and what you would like this technology to achieve, is it for boosting collaboration? Is it for sharing content? Et cetera.

Ivy Petit:

It is important to have a clear view of what you would like to achieve your business needs and also the maturity of your team. Because the technology it’s what I consider, should make your life easier not the opposite. Definitely, it has to be something smooth, easy to implement ideally. And it should be, for example, if I take the example of marketing automation, it should be an accelerator of lead generation and inbound marketing and support you and facilitate your cooperation with your team. Yes, definitely align that with your business strategy and the objective. Really, as I mentioned for lead generation related to marketing automation, we have to be clear on what we would like to achieve with that. For example, my objective, if I’m supporting the growth, the growth will be to create high qualified leads.

Ivy Petit:

I mean, sales-ready leads. That at the end should be also integrated with the theory really to provide full picture of lead transformation and also provide ROI of what you do of your marketing and sales campaign. This is for example, what I would like to have, it’s a nice to have and must have as part of the technology. I’m collaborating with the team to decide, “Okay, what would we like to achieve? What do we need? Et cetera.” And also what will be the benefits of this technology? Again, if I take example of marketing automation, how this platform or tool will help us to connect with prospects, with through customized content that we have built and how we do the term into customer and let’s say, and boost customer retention. Also a level that we consider as part of the selection and of marketing automation and making sure that linked to our activity, making sure that we are keeping track of our marketing effort, meaning that keeping track of sales pipeline, keeping track of CRM utilization with the sales team.

Ivy Petit:

And sometimes it requires also discipline. You can create as much as a lot of possible advanced workflow as part of the marketing automation. But if at the end there is no commitment or even engagement from your system with the CRM, as you mentioned, there is a break in the process. It’s complicated.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Gotcha. And Richard, you must have a perspective on this. I know this is a topic close to your heart, particularly if it’s related to lead generation, or the MQL to SQL conversion, that sort of aspect.

Richard Lane:

Aspect. Yeah. I’m loving, just listening to Ivy talk about all the things, which I totally agree with. Tools are great and can facilitate the way you work. But if you don’t have the right team in place, then they will sit unused, I think, or worse, they will end up taking more time, spending time working on the tools rather than supporting your customers or finding new ones. Automation is key and valuable, but only if you have the right team in place. I would totally agree with that. You’ve used the word agile a number of times Ivy, which I loved again, I love to hear, because I think our job is to react fast and to test, test, test, and provide value in that way. But I’m interested in the word agile and the words, big company or global corporation. And it would be lovely to hear of your experience in being agile, inside of a global corporate.

Ivy Petit:

Yeah. It’s not… We say in Frenchantinomique, it’s not impossible, but you’re right. Agile and let’s say global company could be a challenge. It’s why I mention also another word is about the process. If you look at marketing narrative, voice of customer, voice of sales and even marketing automation, there is key principle to put in place and to collaborate. I have a strong… Let’s say a commitment and link with the zone. It facilitates through really is a collaboration. And we have to be agile because as mentioned, you could have many unpredictable events coming into the game when you have to select a new solution. And it’s what I said. If at the end you prepare the best content. You select the best marketing automation, you do the best eLearning to onboard your sales team.

Ivy Petit:

But if at the end, there is no engagement and no preliminary involvement of the sales team. It’ll be a nightmare at the end because you will struggle so much to get it back in the process. It’s what I said to agile is that let’s start small, make it clear to everyone, do a first step achievement and see and scale up. It’s the way I work, it’s the way that we work here. And once you have your pilot mode prepared, validated by everyone, you can communicate and chat that internally you continue and especially it’s good because every time you do that, you receive some input from your team that support you to enrich step two, step three, step four, et cetera.

Richard Lane:

Yeah. Excellent. I mean, it does sound like your methodology is very lean startup Ivy, within a global corporate, and it’s really lovely to hear that’s proving successful. Yeah. That’s great.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Your focus on collaboration involvement, I think aside from all the other things you’ve given us, is probably a masterclass in stakeholder mapping and stakeholder management Ivy. I’ve got to say, so I think that’s clearly takes a lot of your time and focus to make those things happen. And sometimes you have to have those difficult conversations, right? There’s always tension in teams, but you either deal with it in the meeting and talk about it or it causes problems further down to the line, doesn’t it? If it’s not spoken about so, no, that was absolutely wonderful. Just very conscious of time. Absolutely some fantastic responses there and some fantastic input. Richard, any closing thoughts from you?

Richard Lane:

I’ve scribbled a few notes down as Ivy’s been talking. One was, which I loved very simple, but we create content for sales to share with customers. And I wonder how many marketers create content for their customers for sales to share. And that’s part of, I think the missing link sometimes. Supporting the buyer journey and process team and tools, those are some of my key takeaways, probably in that order actually. Process, team and tools. And tools can facilitate, help the team be successful. And the team is successful because of the process and structures and frameworks that they use. Yeah, lots of great insight Ivy. Much appreciated. Thank you.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Yeah. Ivy, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and insight with our listeners. Been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us on the insiders.

Ivy Petit:

Thanks a lot to you. It’s a very great pleasure to be there. I’m always happy to share my experience and I love people. I love projects. I really want to engage a business leader to value marketing as a great pillar of business transformation.

Richard Lane:

Absolutely.

Ivy Petit:

This is very important.

Richard Lane:

Thank you so much.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, I think you’re doing a fine job as an ambassador for that Ivy. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to all our listeners. Hopefully you’ve got some fantastic value from Ivy sharing those thoughts and ideas. And just a reminder, if you subscribe to the Insiders podcast from wherever you prefer to access your podcast, you’ll be notified of new episodes as when they’re released, which they are on a regular basis. Thank you very much. Thank you Ivy. Thank you, Richard. And thank you for listening folks.

Speaker 1:

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