Richard Lane:
Welcome to the Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds in marketing and sales one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane. I’m Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at durhamlane, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Alexandre Aime, VP of Global Marketing and Communication at Hexagon.

Our focus for today’s episode is all around marketing as a revenue driver, and we’re going to focus on both Alex’s career and his time at Hexagon. So Alex, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for being with us. In terms of getting started, before we dive in, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Hexagon.

Alexandre Aime:
Sure. Thanks, Richard. Pleasure to be with you. And with the pressure, I hope that it will be interesting—no pressure, no pressure. So, about myself: a career in marketing in IT, energy management, and now in high-precision measurement with Hexagon. I had several positions in digital asset management, e-commerce, marketing strategy, and field marketing as well.

I spent seven years of my career in Asia, in Beijing and Hong Kong, and then a couple of years in France, and travelling quite a lot in the U.S. as well. And very happy to go through the different geographies and to meet different markets, different cultures, different people.

About Hexagon: Hexagon is a Swedish company, one of these Swedish successful companies. We are 25,000 people. We do €5 billion revenue across 50 countries, and we mainly do high-precision measurement for where we live. So we digitise land, cities, buildings, and also for what we produce. It means that we are playing into the manufacturing area for key markets like automotive, aerospace, electronics, energy.

And with the data—with our hardware—we capture and generate data that our customers use to improve the quality and the manufacturing of what they produce, but also to do reverse engineering to help the design of components. So that’s mainly what we do.

Richard Lane:
Excellent. Well, thank you again for being with us. And it’s great to have a Swedish HQ’d business on the Insiders podcast, so that’s fantastic. Just to get us started then, Alex: when we’re thinking about marketing as a revenue driver, you’ve switched recently to an external BDR—business development representative—model. What were your main reasons behind that choice?

Alexandre Aime:
Two main reasons: backlog and conversion rate.

We didn’t switch the entire BDR organisation. We had a fairly good BDR organisation. But looking at what we were generating as the amount of leads—and we have a marketing team, a marketing machine, that works pretty well, seeing the top of the funnel pretty well, having year over year and quarter over quarter more and more leads—I noticed that we had more and more backlog of leads that was untouched, and then, moving forward, opportunities that were untouched, and then it was impacting badly the bottom of the funnel.

So the conversion rate to warm opportunities. And I wanted to—because there is one thing at Hexagon that is great: there is a very good collaboration, or at least relationship, between marketing and sales. It’s not that often, but there is good collaboration. But then we had this conversion rate, and I wanted to find out why. I mean, we have this bad conversion rate. Even going through the process and through the stages that were very rational, I couldn’t figure it out.

So I said, OK, why not—what if we have an external element that will show us or help us to go through the root causes? Maybe it’s in the process. Maybe it’s that some steps are missing, or the questions that we ask. Maybe it’s in the leads that we generate. Because at the end of the day, I couldn’t really tell if it’s good or bad quality leads and quality opportunities, because my goal is really to make sure that when sales accept an opportunity, he or she spends the least amount of time to close it, to make sure they start to gain trust in the opportunity. So it was really these two elements.

Richard Lane:
OK. And great to hear that your sales and marketing teams work together. That’s a crusade that I’ve been on; if you listen to this podcast, it’s something we talk about a lot. Have you found that some of those root causes have been uncovered? How has that visibility been helped by engaging with an external partner?

Alexandre Aime:
I think so. We are now six months, seven months into the process. On average—bare minimum—we need three to four months to close the lead. So really, from lead to won: bare minimum four months. So we should start to see an improvement in our conversion rate. I don’t have my final conclusions, but I have a few ideas.

One of the basic, one-on-one sales operations things that I think we are missing is really local sales governance, or sales operations governance and sales opportunity governance, due to the size of the organisation. Also the challenge to have accounts everywhere—which is everybody’s challenge. We might need to have somebody who, on a weekly basis, goes through all the opportunities and asks where we stand, and so on. It’s basic, very granular, but I noticed it doesn’t happen.

Doing that, I could challenge either services organisation or you guys, saying, it’s not mature enough; it’s not a ready-to-pass opportunity. We’ve also done an analysis of the closed and cancelled opportunities that had been accepted but then closed. Then I could start to design some root causes: sometimes it’s just a customer support question that we thought was an opportunity. Sometimes it’s an already-existing opportunity. When it’s an already-existing opportunity, then we shouldn’t close it, but send it to the influenced box in an attribution model. Then sometimes, by lack of sales training, the salesperson closes it but then reopens it a few weeks later. That’s more education and training we need to look at.

Upstream, on the qualification side, maybe I need one more question in the process. Today there are the three famous questions: budget, timing, and project. I know I need one more to be a bit more precise—to know if the customer knows exactly our product, or if the customer needs further discussion. So we need to nurture the opportunity a little bit.

Richard Lane:
We’re 15 years into durhamlane and we’ve seen a lot of customer projects, and partnership is such an important word—particularly when it comes to reporting and CRM and making sure that an opportunity is showing right and working through the system. It does take a lot of effort and a lot of work, and I think both sides have responsibility to make sure that happens.

From a systems point of view—we may talk about this later—I think that’s working really well in terms of our use of Salesforce and Salesloft and how that’s playing through. We might come back to that later.

Just moving on a little bit: in your intro you mentioned you’ve worked in many different parts of the world—seven years in Asia. It would be really interesting to understand what lessons you’ve learnt from that international experience and how that’s shaped your thinking around go-to-market today.

Alexandre Aime:
You need to be humble when you work in different geographies, because there is no one-size-fits-all in the way people work. Also the way, for example, people call a reseller or partner is not at all the same in different geographies, and even in different industries, even if we’re all doing B2B. That’s as simple as that.

As I say to my teams, even if we speak—or at least I try to speak—English, we are almost lost in translation. The same word can mean a lot of different things.

If I look at high-level differences: in the U.S., there’s a culture of inside sales and BDR. They know how it works; they’re used to it. The challenge is more the quality of opportunities, the quality of leads, and gaining the trust of sales on that side of the business. In Asia, it’s not a model that is used much so far. I’m not speaking about call centres in the Philippines or whatever; I’m thinking within the way to do business. In Europe, it really depends on the country and the type of business. Obviously, the challenge is to make sure you have BDRs that speak proper local language, because you need accurate business terminology and to understand the customers and their issues. That’s one of the main characteristics I’ve seen across regions.

Richard Lane:
We’ve really found through our European delivery that it’s not enough to just speak the language; you have to be a native of that country. That seems to play out no matter where we work.

When you think about aligning global sales and marketing functions—you’ve got a global responsibility within Hexagon—do you roll out different programmes to different regions, or do you have an overriding programme that everybody gets on board with? How do you use local differences to create success?

Alexandre Aime:
We need to have what I’d call air cover—global programmes to educate or to tell certain industries that Hexagon plays there and has solutions for aerospace or automotive and so on—to raise the level of awareness. Then, when we go down to the granularity of a specific market, we need to be much more product-driven. We need to be pragmatic, to make sure the leads and opportunities we generate start focused early on the specific solution and product.

Account management is a bit different, because we know we can have a longer and wider discussion with an account. When we do air cover, we need to be very precise and specific because the sales organisation might not have time to nurture—so it has to happen during the BDR stage, but the BDR needs to have this product knowledge.

That’s been the discussion in the past two years with the field marketing team and the global marketing team: we know what each has to do, but where do we meet in the funnel? Where do we meet to make sure we generate top of the funnel and educate, but also stay pragmatic at country and regional level?

Richard Lane:
And is that different per geography? Does that change per region?

Alexandre Aime:
I thought yes, and finally—not so much. It’s just the timing that is different. Opportunities are everywhere, even in a niche marine segment or a very specific area. What we in marketing always pay attention to is whether we have the sales support—do we have sales individuals ready to support it?

A simple example: there is one country where the watch industry is very important—Switzerland. That’s not a myth; it’s Switzerland. We are very present in this market and we do ongoing campaigns in Switzerland. But for marine, you have marine in India, Nordics, a bit in Mediterranean countries, a bit in Korea. You need to make sure you have a sales organisation ready to speak to those customers. Otherwise we’re just generating leads and opportunities that will not go anywhere. It’s not only a waste of money; it’s a bad customer experience, and we’re just working for the competition because we’re educating and creating awareness for them.

Richard Lane:
Yes, exactly. And you have leads sitting in CRM that never get responded to and customers thinking, why have I not had a reply?

Which leads us nicely to our next question—something we’ve talked a lot about here on The Insiders—the importance of marketing being a revenue-generating function rather than a cost centre, which certainly when I started working, it was very much seen as a cost centre. How is marketing seen within Hexagon, if you’re allowed to tell me?

Alexandre Aime:
It’s not only Hexagon. In companies that are mainly B2B—our core companies—when we say marketing, most of the time people think communication and colour of the catalogue. It used to be brochures, catalogues, events, brochures. I don’t exaggerate when I say that. But as we know, marketing is much more complex.

With the team, we tried to change the marketing perception. It was really to not discuss the shopping list of execution, but to talk about the priorities of our business stakeholders. Instead of asking them, “What do you want us to do?” it’s, “What do you need to achieve for your business?” From what they need to achieve, we say, OK, we will build a marketing plan and strategy—that’s our job—and then we present it.

So the first education was: it’s not for you to tell me which event or catalogue to produce; tell me what you want to achieve in terms of business, leads, revenue, and we’ll give you the best route.

The second step was to go into the rationale of how much business we need to generate for you to reach a certain contribution. We started to see if we had measurement of marketing’s contribution to revenue and to truly speak their language.

In our marketing QBRs, we don’t speak about marketing functional KPIs. We don’t speak about heat maps, booth visitors, projects done. We speak about website traffic—but for another reason. I’ve set up what I call the Golden KPIs: marketing-generated revenue, marketing-generated opportunities, marketing-influenced revenue, marketing ROI, and share of voice (a combination of brand awareness and SOV). I wanted to speak the language of the QBR, and you don’t have tons of time, so you need to be precise. If you come from a marketing angle and start to speak about the millions that you generate, people will listen. If you represent 8, 10, 15% of the revenue that is generated, people start to consider you because you start to represent a small-country size.

Richard Lane:
It’s clear you’re very focused on marketing being a driver of growth for the business, working back from strategy and goals so the marketing strategy links to provide growth. I love the idea of Golden KPIs. Is that a global measure for you? And do you do that in each country as well?

Alexandre Aime:
Yes, it’s a global measure. I can cascade it by industry and by country. It’s also KPIs that are kind of unfair for marketing people, because we have very poor influence on generated revenue after we hand over—that’s not us anymore. Very poor influence on influenced revenue and others—that’s OK. But I really wanted it, and it was my discussion with the team: to ask for KPIs that represent a workforce, a business influence power in the company.

Richard Lane:
Thinking about your go-to-market: it’s been a turbulent economy these last couple of years. You’re a global organisation and there’s a lot of uncertainty, which definitely affects B2B. Have you had to make changes over the last few years in terms of ICP, or adjusting the focus of your BDR teams or marketing programmes, to adapt? Or are you fixed on a course?

Alexandre Aime:
The ICP in our industry is pretty stable. People in manufacturing who work on quality assurance and measurement—the metrologists, the shop-floor management, manufacturing management—are really stable.

What changes quite a lot are the megatrends and problem-solving—the goals they need to achieve within these ICPs. The personas are kind of the same, but the ICP feels different if you look at industries. For example, the automotive industry is in tremendous transformation. I’m not even speaking about electric vehicles; I’m speaking about the amount of vehicles that need to be produced, which is decreasing in some areas. If you look at some economies like Germany—driven mainly by automotive—they need to adapt and adjust.

There is a boom in electronics—not only in China, but in the rest of Asia. Aerospace is working very well, because even if we speak about CO₂ reduction and the challenges of the aerospace industry in global warming, we work with these companies that look for solutions to reduce emissions and have more innovation. That’s where we help them: to help trigger innovation with our solutions.

So the types of jobs are still the same; their focus might change, and the way we help them might change. This is why, for example, we’ve released this “Quality for Life” positioning for the manufacturing area. I believe we should help them deliver the promise they make to their customers—not only the tool, not only measurement, but helping their customers fly in a most comfortable way, drive a nice car, use their electronics the way they want, and so on. That changes the relationship and the way we interact.

Richard Lane:
So similar ICP, similar personas, but slightly different messaging and a bigger goal that you’re driving toward.

Alexandre Aime:
Yes.

Richard Lane:
Talking about disruption and change—what professional podcast would be here without mentioning AI. As a final question: looking ahead, how do you see AI and digital transformation influencing go-to-market strategies and the role of marketing in driving revenue?

Alexandre Aime:
Big, big, big question. Some first thoughts. We’re lucky because we work in industries that are very close to new technologies. As individuals, we’re likely not to be lost in understanding how to use these. I could draw parallels with cybersecurity or blockchain a few years ago—we’ve been close enough to understand what it is and how to use it.

For AI: first, we use more and more AI in our own products—in the way our software interprets data. We also released, over the summer, our first humanoid robot called the Aeon, using AI because it’s an autonomous robot.

In marketing, a few things. I always mention to the team that AI has to be a tool. It’s the way to augment our capacities. It could be perceived as replacing some tasks we do, but we need to see it as an additional resource—like a super assistant. In communications—studios and so on—it’s a way to accelerate what we produce in imagery and content. In the marketing funnel, it sustains the conversation we have with customers online—the way we understand customers when they arrive on our website and guide them to the right product or solution. It’s also how we better understand customer data and improve targeting.

We’ve already included and are using AI—just as any tool. You need dedicated resources to make the most of it, because getting the tool is fairly easy. You need to associate the tool with the right education, the right training, and sometimes the right driver to make it work.

Richard Lane:
My view is: make sure there’s a problem to be solved before you go out and buy some AI to do the work. Everyone’s jumping on “I need to buy this” without thinking hard enough about what they’re trying to solve. Probably an entire podcast in itself, Alex, but we’re going to wrap up there.

So firstly, thank you so much for joining us on The Insiders and for sharing your journey and your work at Hexagon. Much appreciated, and thank you to everyone listening. Really appreciate you joining us for this episode. I’m Richard Lane, I’ve been your host. If you’d like to hear more from us, please find us on your favourite podcasting site such as Spotify and all the others. And if you’d like to know more about durhamlane, you can see how we’re more than just SDR outsourcing at durhamlane.com. Until next time, we will see you then. Alex, thanks again, and everyone have a great day.