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.

Richard Lane:

Simon and I were joined by Jamie Mackenzie, CMO at Sodexo Engage for this episode. As a valued durhamlane customer, I like to think we know Sodexo well, and I wasn’t surprised, therefore, to be impressed by Jamie’s knowledge and his deep marketing experience.

If you’re interested in three key areas to consider when launching a product globally, B2B and B2C buying behaviors, and four drivers that support sales and marketing alignment, then this episode’s for you. Finally, Jamie shared a phrase or maybe a mantra that I loved and I think it goes way beyond marketing. In fact, it’s relevant for anyone making their way in business. Storytelling with impact. I hope you enjoy this episode, and thanks as always for listening.

Simon Hazeldine:

Hello and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast giving you the inside track on all things B2B sales and marketing. I’m your host Simon Hazeldine. I’m an author, sales expert, and keynote speaker on all things sales and negotiation.

I’m joined by my co-host, the CCO and co-founder of durhamlane, Richard Lane. Richard, great to be back with you for another Insiders episode. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about durhamlane before you introduce our guest?

Richard Lane:

Hi Simon. Thank you. And yes, great to be back as always. Well, just very briefly, durhamlane, we’re an integrated sales and marketing agency. What do I mean by that? Well, essentially we help our customers create always on channels of meaningful, well qualified sales opportunities the business development teams love to close. So we are friends to the sales and marketing teams of our customers.

We’re thrilled to be joined today by Jamie Mackenzie. Jamie is the CMO for Sodexo Engage. So Jamie, welcome, really looking forward to the conversation today. I’m going to hand back to Simon who will get us started.

Simon Hazeldine:

Lovely, Richard. Thank you very much. And yeah, Jamie, good to have you with us. What we normally do at the start of each episode is just ask you just to give us a little bit of background so you can introduce yourself to the listeners and they get to know who you are. So over to you Jamie. Give us a little bit of background.

Jamie Mackenzie:

Oh, well look, firstly, thanks very much Simon and Richard for inviting me onto the podcast. It’s a pleasure to speak to you and to the listeners as well.

Crikey, a little bit about me. Well, I live by the seaside. I live by the beach with my family. Actually, I relocated here with my wife and two boys during the pandemic reflection on life. And certainly the sea air has made a big, big difference to me as an individual over the last couple of years.

But that’s a very recent thing. I mean, my path to kind of what I do now is a little story that involves 28 bags of sprouts that I sold on Christmas Eve at my local Green Grocers. You might be thinking, well, it must be about the product, the marketing, the commercial engagement.

But it wasn’t actually because a few years later I was being interviewed for a placement role at Toshiba as part of my university placement, which at the time I thought was the Japanese car firm. So it just shows that I didn’t do my research. But they interviewed me and subsequently I got the role in their marketing department. I asked them, “What was the reason for you guys choosing me?” And my two bosses at the time turned around and said, “Jamie, it was your story about the sprouts that convinced us that you would be a great fit for our marketing team.”

And really since then I sort of joined the Toshiba marketing department. I did a number of product roles there. Then I moved across to Samsung and I did a number of commercial and go-to-market positions. So kind of broadening out from let’s say more traditional product management, product marketing.

And then nine years ago I moved across to Sodexo Engage and I joined them as marketing director. And really since then, my role has evolved significantly into kind of the CMO position today. I was asked in an interview the other day for a role in my team that I was doing, and they said, “Jamie, what do you do? What’s your role as the CMO?” I couldn’t really answer the question, but it just shows the diversity of the role now.

I touch a number of different areas, Simon, in terms of strategy through to product development to product go-to-market, branding, communications, performance marketing in the B2B space, performance marketing in a B2C space. I’m also privileged to actually have a really talented internal design team, design studio as well. So kind of a real full service marketing.

My path has kind of gone through time and I’ve kind of worked through that. Heaven forbid it’s been 20 years. I’ve always had big leadership positions and I love leading teams. I love people, I love diversity in role. It’s not a path that you say, “I want to do this.” It’s just kind of what you follow, what you enjoy, what you love. And then eventually I think if it balances out well, then that’s where you are. It is about the sprouts. And I do encourage anyone wanting to learn about life to work in a Green Grocers.

Simon Hazeldine:

It is a great experience, isn’t it, of consumer engagement I suppose, Jamie, if nothing else. So definitely sprouts appear to be the secret of your success. So anyway, thanks for joining us on the Insiders.

No, no, I’m sure we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into your background, so from a land of 1,000 roundabouts that is Milton Keynes to the seaside. But along the way you’ve been involved in several global product launches, probably not sprouts I’m guessing, although, do correct me if I’m wrong. But what would you say are the key success lessons you’ve learned from that? Because that that’s a challenging project. It’s a challenging thing to do.

Jamie Mackenzie:

Yeah, and it’s really interesting when we talk about global product launches because across the three organizations I’ve worked through, it’s been a real combination of hardware and software products, different channels to market, and of course different markets.

When we talk about global, we think about so many different environments, cultures, and countries you can launch to, and everyone brings a different element to it. I think when I reflect back on global product launches, for me there are probably three areas or three key things that I would take away and share. They’re not revolutionary. They’re not something super intellectual. They are real three basics actually.

The first is that know your marketplace. I think at times if you are given a challenge of a global product launch, if you’re given a challenge of any product launch, when you’re in your domestic market, you automatically through your authenticity of being in that market, you understand a lot more.

When you look at global markets, you have to spend so much more time understanding that marketplace, especially if you’re operating independently, if you haven’t got anyone with you, seconded to you, you don’t have primary or secondary research that is enriching your understanding of that marketplace, you can fail very, very quickly.

I’ve been involved in a couple of scenarios whereby I’ve seen failure of a product entry into the market. And the big failure there was we did not understand that market well enough. We made a number of assumptions and we should have done a lot more work in that to see a better end result.

Where we were very successful in knowing our market was a particular product launch at Samsung. We took the decision to second individuals from the individual markets into a core project team. Automatically and straight away there is an immediate understanding of the marketplace. Assumptions were there, cultural elements were there, and we could already start to have a good base and foundation of that market.

And then we would use other primary and secondary research to enrich our knowledge of that marketplace, because when you overlay culture, competitors’ reactions to pricing, buyers’ behaviors, there are so many different elements and 1% is in there that can make a difference between a successful introduction and not. So not revolutionary, but number one is know your market, because in the global market, you need to know a lot more than in a domestic.

I think that the second one for me, which it should be an obvious one, is know your product. And what I mean by that, and I’ll really simplify it down, hardware versus software, knowing your product is super important. I think when organizations, could be big corporates, look to enter a new emerging marketplace, if we look at VCs looking to invest in startups to penetrate or start in a marketplace, you need to bring resource in, you need to bring people in with knowledge.

Sometimes you can bring in people with global product launching, but in the wrong specific sector or product sector that you’re looking for. Bringing a hardware product to a market is very different to bringing a software product to a market. And knowing those experiences of the people you bring in to lead that is absolutely, for me, it’s absolutely crucial.

Why is that? The wow moment of introduction, you call principles of understanding need, building proposition, delivering a product against that is quite similar actually. The approaches, the process you follow is quite similar. Your wow moment of introduction can be quite similar. But then when you start to look at the deployment into market, the physicality completely changes the game in terms of time to market, in terms of how you reach, in terms of how you deploy your product in the global market.

So really understanding the product is important. I’ve introduced new phones to a new global market at Samsung. I’ve also introduced new brand and software to a global market in my current organization. The buildup to the launch can be similar. The deployment is completely different. And so it’s a key second key principle for me.

First is know your marketplace. Second is know your product. And the third one for me is about know your channels. What I mean by that is that when you launch a product into a global market and you look at the place you are going to, there’s two ways in which you engage with that traditionally.

You either have a direct existing operation in place in that country that you can leverage to bring your product to market, and there are many corporates that have that, or you have no operation in that marketplace. That’s where you need to start building an indirect channel if you move down that route, if you don’t want to establish a direct channel. That’s where you have to use third parties to bring your products and services to market.

I take a particular example. Again, this was at Toshiba actually, towards the end of my time at Toshiba. We opened into a new market and we didn’t have any direct operations and that was okay, but we wanted to start indirect. So what we needed was a reseller network. We needed a distribution network. We needed agents to facilitate the introduction. That’s a completely different launching model than if you have a direct operation in place as well.

So understanding those two differences and nuances will change your preparations. It will change how you introduce price, the commercial model that you build behind it, the enablement tools that you need to facilitate, the training and education that you do. It really does change so many different factors of the launch process.

So reflecting back on those three, I think know your marketplace, do the research well, understand the market you’re going to, don’t be scared to ask for support. Don’t be scared to second people I think. I think secondments are really underrated sometimes and there’s some brilliant benefit that you can get from that project approach.

The second is know your product, hardware versus software. Really understand the nuances of the product, how you position it, how you deploy it into market. And then the third is really understand your channel or maybe distribution of your product to market, because whether you have a direct operation or an indirect operation will change the way in which you plan, you prepare, and you execute the launching activity.

Simon Hazeldine:

Thank you for that. That’s been really, really interesting insight. I think it’s just made me just think that if sometimes somebody was to say, “Hey, what’s the secret? Or what’s the magic? What’s the secret magic?” And you sort of go, “Actually, it’s these sort of fundamentals of the discipline and the hard work.” You can almost feel somebody going, “Oh gosh, is that it?” And you go, “Yeah, that is it. That’s the quote, unquote secret.” People I think are always looking for that little hack, clever shortcut. They just don’t exist sometimes, do they?

Jamie Mackenzie:

Do you know what, it’s funny because when I was listening to your question and coming up with the answer, I’m thinking, “God, there’s really basic answers, Jamie.” But you can see so many examples of where it’s wrong. And do you know what, many organizations’ investors want a hack, want it fast, want it to happen sooner, and you want to hack the process.

Sometimes you can’t hack the process. If you hack it, you’ll get it wrong and you miss an important step. Once you’ve got the fundamentals right, then maybe you can find hacks or other points of added value in the process that make the difference.

Richard Lane:

It’s one of the biggest challenges we come up against at durhamlane because [inaudible] sales people are engaging us because they want qualified opportunities and they want them fast. And then we’re saying, “Well, we need a bit of Steven Covey, Begin With the End in Mind, onboarding. It’s at least four weeks. This is what we go through. It’s proven.”

Can we not do it quicker? And actually the answer is no. We can’t do it quicker because we do it once, we do it right, and then we go and we’re successful. If you don’t invest in that, then typically it doesn’t work.

Jamie Mackenzie:

There’s this real balance between pace and quality. And there’s always a balance. You’re not going to get outstanding pace and outstanding quality because you have to compromise somewhere. To your point, Richard, doing the hard yards at the start, typically you’ll get better payoff at the backend.

And sometimes when you look at these launches, when you get the return back over what period, take more of a strategic view on it, more a plan view beyond a quarter typically you will find you’ll get a balanced and better result. But it comes back to the ability to make decisions on the strategic lens. That may be a conversation for later in the podcast, but I think that’s also a key point.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Richard, I was guessing you would have a very firm opinion on this because of the work that you do, but you’re durhamlane, aren’t you, with your entire approach, you have some sort of core principles and practices that you adhere to.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. We’re coming to the end of our 12th year. We’ve learned what works. It’s really easy to be swayed by the clients asking for it to quicker. Therefore, it has to be quicker. And we want it to be as quick as possible, by the way. My challenge to our team is always, well, how can we onboard more rapidly? How do we get to results more rapidly? I mean, that should be our everlasting task, but we have to do it the right way, otherwise it’s false economy and you end up with short term relationships, which isn’t what we’re looking for.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, Jamie, I think that your pace quality consideration is absolutely critical. You mentioned B2B and B2C. Now, you work across both. Key considerations and differences from a marketing effectiveness perspective?

Jamie Mackenzie:

It’s interesting because at the moment when I look at the responsibility I have, to your point, I’ve done B2B and B2C in the past, but actually I take the nature of the product we offer today, which is engagement tools for people, great products. We have to do two jobs in marketing. Number one, we have to pitch, sell, and convince the HR community to buy, and then we have to support the HR community to get the employees to use. That’s a B2B marketing effort. And then it is a sort of consumer, let’s say, a marketing effort. So it’s like a double principle.

When I look at that, when I look at the process that we go through as a team or what I’ve seen to achieve that, actually the process is quite similar. You’ve got a buyer journey, you’ve got different touchpoints. At each touchpoint, you want to inspire an action. To inspire an action, you need to provide content creation, you need to provide a driver to make an action.

Now, whether you’re a B2B buyer buying the platform and software that’s provided, or then whether you’re an employee choosing to use that and to be inspired to use that, the process, the journey is very, very similar. I’ve always got this great belief that if I’m a buyer of a product or I’m a user of a product, I’m still the same human being. I don’t change in terms of my nature and my style.

But to your point, Simon, there are differences. So I think there’s a lot of similarities in process of marketeers. There are some differences between the two. If I use an example with yourself, Simon, so you walk into a supermarket and you may choose to impulse buy something in that supermarket. I won’t make any judgment or assumptions here, but you buy 50% off cabbage that they’re sitting in the vegetable aisle. You’re not predetermined on the ingredients you need, but you find this wonderful cabbage and you buy it’s 50% off. Fantastic. You made that purchase decision,

Richard Lane:

Sprouts would’ve been a better [inaudible].

Jamie Mackenzie:

Sprouts, sorry. Actually, Richard, that’s a great one. Sprouts as an example. Use sprouts. They are the new talking point in case study. I’ll tell you sprout. At the same time, Simon, for you and what you do or businesses you engage with, recommendations you make, buying a CRM system that is a fully integrated product that allows you to manage your portfolio, prospect, bring in real great data and insights through AI on the performance, your decision to buy that is very different.

Now, ultimately the end result is, I need Simon to make a transaction. He’s either transacting for a 50% off cabbage or he is transacting for a rather complex enterprise system. Those two transaction decision points need to happen, need to influence in a way. I think this is where you find the difference in B2B and B2C.

What I certainly see or have seen is that in B2B it’s much longer cycles for decision making, for discovery process. Ticket values are much higher. And typically as well in B2B, you’re not the only decision maker. You might be the final individual signing, but you need to influence your peer community. You’re made to influence finance, HR, commercial, the CEO, all the types of decision makers to make a transaction.

In the B2C focus, you’re making that decision on your own and you’re buying on impulse, you’re buying on immediate need or an unknown need that you’re responding to by the way in which you’re marketing to. Typically the type of engagement, the impact, the regularity, the speed at which that needs to happen, the environment that it’s in, certainly if it’s a retail store or from an online perspective.

There are differences between the two. But if I bring the differences down to theme them to three key themes that can be seen here, for me, number one, it’s the product. The product provides that level of differentiation between B2B and B2C. The second is the discovery and decision time that is needed in a B2B or B2C environment.

And the third element is who is the decision maker? Who decides? Do you decide on your own to buy the sprouts, or is there someone with you say, “That’s a great deal, Simon. You should get those sprouts.” Actually I didn’t realize that. Yeah, I’ll get those sprouts.

So those three key elements, the product decision and discovery time and the decision maker, I think those three elements pivot I think how you operate and you market in those two channels. Don’t get me wrong, the metrics that you’re using to measure success in both are different.

My example with the team right now, when I sit down with our head of B2B marketing, I sit down with the head of B2C marketing, B2B marketing, I’m looking total leads. What’s unqualified? What’s now marketing qualified? What’s now sales qualified? What is now an opportunity? What is now a closed one? Why did we win? Why did we lose? We’re working through that specific marketing funnel.

If I look at B2C marketing, I’m talking about how many active users do we have, how many of them are engaging, how regularly, what’s the average transaction value? How regular is that transaction value? It’s different types of metrics, but you’re still driving a transaction.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. Those kind of things under those three areas focus and consider what will be those crucial drivers. You mentioned metrics. In our pre-interview before we became on air, I wrote down the phrase, you said, “I have an issue with marketers not being commercial.” I’d be really interested as we’ve just touched on metrics, Jamie, why is that sort of important? Why is that a bugbear, I guess?

Jamie Mackenzie:

How much longer have you got the recording? I could go on for hours. No, I don’t want any listener to think, oh my goodness, Jamie is about to land into marketers. That’s not the case. But I think I do have a big issue with marketers not being commercial. I think if there’s one thing that your listeners can take away from this podcast, just one thing is this, please work on storytelling with impact because that comes back to the topic of marketeers being commercial and understanding how their actions make impacts to businesses.

Now, every marketeer that listens to this and every marketeer that will listen to this in the future without any question, they make impacts, but their ability to [inaudible] the impacts I think is absolutely key. It comes back to commerciality. I think marketeers have that responsibility.

When I look at CVs that I get from people wanting to join the team, I’m very fortunate, we’re on a good recruitment drive at the moment, the word count is crazy on the CV. But there is a very much a lack of what they’ve done. That’s good. I can see what they’ve done, but what’s the impact? I think for me that is a more important thing.

When you look at marketeers now to enable their roles, what do they need? They need investment. They need investment in a new product. They need investment in primary research, secondary research. They need investment to pay for PPC. They need investment to improve their search engine marketing. They need investment in marketing systems. They need investment in digital tools to allow them to reach their target audience.

All of that takes time and costs money. And in any organization, with any investor, any startup, you need to convince someone to provide your investment to get return. And so I think the more that marketeers understand that, bring that into their narrative, it’ll make a massive difference, not just to them and their perception of themselves as individuals in any environment, but also how they can help the business moving forward as well. I’ve probably compressed about five hours of an answer there.

Richard Lane:

Jamie, I think it’s an excellent point. And just to maybe try and bring it even more real for our listeners, so storytelling with impact, I would argue that’s just a mantra that goes way beyond marketing.

I’ll give you a real example. I saw a weekly report that one of our sales execs sent over to a customer last week. No commentary. So part of the challenge, I think with systems and technology, which make our life easier and help us to report more accurately and provide more insight, you still need to tell the story behind it.

And so my feedback was, look, you sort of missed a great opportunity here because there are some great results, there are some things that didn’t happen. So draw out the great results and provide some rationale as to why the things didn’t happen. And then you’re sharing the story and bring it to life rather than then just letting the customer do all the work themselves. So I love that. That’s a brilliant mantra.

Jamie Mackenzie:

Absolutely. If we skip forward 5, 10 years, AI is going to help human beings to bring real rich information to the front, but you still need that human to human element.

Richard Lane:

100%.

Jamie Mackenzie:

That you’ll never lose. There’s a skill in that I think as you say, Richard, fully agree is transversal of anyone needs to be able to storytell of impact.

Simon Hazeldine:

I guess linking to that, you mentioned previously, again in our pre-interview, you felt it was important that marketing as a function was a strategic leader in a business and linking, I guess to that sort of storytelling with impact. Give us a little bit of insight into what that means.

Jamie Mackenzie:

Yeah, a lot of this comes back to the business that you’re in, the business you’re working for. Because I do genuinely believe that an organization, whether it be small, medium, large enterprise, has a decision to make about the functions it has and the responsibility those certain functions have, the accountability on a day-to-day basis.

I mean, marketing is a wonderful opportunity whereby you have a department or a group that can be tasked with taking a step back and reflecting on your environment for reflecting on all the elements that contribute to your operation as a company, your customers, your product, the market trends, what your competitors are doing, what the tomorrow says about how things can happen, the macro, the micro factors. All of these elements that influence how you navigate a business moving forward, the types of pricing, the types of operating models you want to use.

I think marketing is well positioned to support that for a business, to support that reflection, to support that storytelling of what the data is telling us and to support strongly with recommendations, not as an individual department, but working with business empathy with other departments around a business, around an organization.

If I take a couple of live examples, because I think that’s really important as well during the period of uncertainty, which I think is every day to be honest, at the moment now moving forward, if I take our example at Sodexo Engage during the pandemic, we had a situation whereby we were asking ourselves, a couple of our product lines were kind of seizing up because of the nature of the situation and what do we do? We approached it with a strong leadership in the marketing team. We identified an opportunity with central government.

From that approach, from the way in which we managed that, we secured the business case with a global business, we deployed in the UK, we rolled out a digital voucher scheme that supported the rollout of free school meals during the pandemic to support parents and children that couldn’t afford, couldn’t get to schools, and they could use those digital vouchers to redeem for supermarket food essentially, and to offset that. But secondly was to support the Office of National Statistics in rolling out COVID testing program for households throughout the UK in order to assess the behavior virus and to respond accordingly.

Now, those are two particular schemes that we were able to turn around and support proactively. Why? Because we took, as a marketing function, a strategic view on it. Could have sat there and panicked and said, “What’s our next tactical campaign for the next two months to do something?” No, we didn’t. We took our time, we used the skills that we had, and we took those moments to reflect.

I do believe that marketing has a really important part to play in that. I do believe that the business leaders and decision makers need to allow a marketing team to do that in collaboration with all functions. It’s not a single leadership function. It’s with all the elements. I talk about business empathy a lot. It’s really important to me. But I think that there’s skills there that can be used for a business’s benefit.

It’s a damning statement, but I’ll say it shouldn’t be the cupcake department. It shouldn’t be the balloon department. Actually with the right skills, I think marketing can really lead and support organizations to improve and to navigate.

Simon Hazeldine:

From an overall organizational perspective, marketing’s role, just to come down to a topic that is a bit of a hot one for people who listen to the Insiders, regards to the integration of marketing and sales, in your experience, what makes that work?

Jamie Mackenzie:

Oh, wow. Yes. I don’t know if we’ll ever get an answer for that, I don’t know. But no, in my experience, first and foremost, human relationships, a core element of it. I am blessed actually that the chief commercial officer in our business, I have a brilliant relationship with him, absolutely brilliant. We challenge each other, we respect each other, we support each other. I know he’ll always have my back, I will always have his back, and we will always work together to achieve the common goal for our business.

So I think the relationship is super important, and that’s built through time. Relationships are built through winning together and losing together and having good days and bad days together. But being together, I think that relationship’s important.

The second, and I briefly mentioned there was around having a common goal. In our organization, we use OKRs, objectives key results. OKR is essentially a pyramid where you have a common goal at the top and then you work out your key results from your common objective, I should say. We share the same results. We share the same objectives.

So driving revenue, retention in our customer base, cross-sell, upsell. It’s my target, it’s the team’s target, it’s our commercial teams target, it’s one target. I think that that commonality of goal, having it communicated well, rewarding and recognizing against success is key as part of that. Relationships one, common goal number two.

I think that the teams of sales and marketing, they need to systemize their processes together. It’s not this is the marketing funnel, just going to build it over here, some clever marketeers. There we go, job done. Here’s a sales funnel, build over some clever commercial individuals, here we go. And then we connect it together.

No, you build the whole systemized process together. You respect each other’s views on it, but you build it together. I think once you have that systemized process in place, you test it, you learn it, you iterate it, but you are always doing it as a collective. I think that’s also really important.

And then the final point for me, and not much of a bugbear is the commerciality of marketeers, but the final point is that I do find sometimes when I look at marketeers or commercial individuals, there is this real lack of open mindedness and reception to feedback from each other. I’ll have a marketeer that’s like, “Oh, they can’t tell me how to write a social media post.” Why not? They write social media posts all the time as individuals and personals. There’s some brilliant storytelling in that. You haven’t taken a qualification in writing social media posts. So listen and be open to the feedback.

Similarly, on the commercial side, oh, I’m not listening to a marketeer that doesn’t have the pressure of the number every day. Why would I listen to them? Do you know what, because they might have a really strong view on that or they might have a really good view on it or just a different perceptive.

I think that ability to step out of your function, look at yourselves as human beings with great skills, great experiences, and then apply that to a problem, and typically you’ll find that actually you’ll get a better result when you come out of the end of it. So reflect back on that.

There’s four there. Got relationships. Number one, super important, having a common goal that you are all working towards, build your process together, respect the different elements that you all bring, but build it together. And finally just be open-minded and receptive to feedback and sharing the skills as a collective. I think if you work that hard, the leadership leads in that way. Then very soon you’ll have a really strong engine that you are both responsible for.

Simon Hazeldine:

We ask this question of, we’ve asked of a variety of guests, they will often, the common theme I think, Richard, that we’ve had a lot is it is the relationship between the senior leaders that is so absolutely important at the top of the various functions that creates that behavior further down and makes it happen. That certainly is a recurring thing I think we’ve seen a number of times. So Richard, your thoughts, reflections on the episode?

Richard Lane:

Yeah, thank you Simon. So 28 bags of sprouts. Jamie, we recently recorded an episode on storytelling with Philipp Humm, and he talked exactly what you did to kick off the episode. So you can go back and have a listen to that to understand exactly what I mean.

But really loved the conversation. I think you’ve been an absolutely terrific guest, so thank you from us. Know your marketplace, know your products, know your channels. Loved the idea of secondments. We do that a lot at durhamlane. So giving people experience of other areas, it’s great for them, it’s great for the business. I think people underuse that, which I think you said as well.

We’ve talked a little bit about B2B and B2C product discovery and decision time and the decision making. I’m trying to book a family holiday at the moment, and I can tell you there are more decision makers than I thought there were in that B2C environment.

The need to think commercially. We talked about storytelling with impact. I think that’s a lovely mantra that goes way beyond marketing, but really for everybody in business, especially if you’re starting out in business, think about how do I storytell with impact.

You said another phrase, awareness, confidence, and curiosity. Loved that as well, which then touched about marketeers as leaders. And I believe that the role of marketing is becoming more and more important and it is a leadership role and it needs to be taken more seriously. I think it is, but it’s got ways to go.

And then the final piece, which is a hot topic for us here at the Insiders around sales and marketing alignment, relationships, objectives with a common goal, systems processes together. We call that rev ops here at durhamlane.

Jamie, one area that you didn’t mention, which I would add is customer success. So sales, new business, customer success and marketing, those three all working together, you create amazing things and absolutely what a great way to finish about being open-minded and learning from each other because our work is never done and someone’s always got a good idea in them, I would suggest.

So, yeah. Fabulous. Thank you so much. I think as a classic marketeer does, you recapped as we went through. So now I’ve recapped the recap of the recap, so apologies to anyone that’s already feeling a bit recapped out.

Simon Hazeldine:

No excuses to any of the listeners for not following any of the main themes. Just talking about secondments and awareness, I think one of the best things that happened to me as a sales professional was being asked to do a six-month secondment in marketing because they needed somebody to get the promotional calendar, et cetera, for distributors. Boy did I learn a whole lot and I found out that salespeople aren’t actually all experts in marketing. There is an awful lot to learn. So definitely would support that comment about secondment.

Jamie, we do have one final question for you, which is often the most challenging one for people. We’re building the Insiders Spotify playlist. It is a very, very eclectic and diverse collection of songs and music, and we ask every guest to choose a song or track, which we’ll add to the playlist. So Jamie, what is your chosen song to add?

Jamie Mackenzie:

You might need the radio edit version of this, and it’s not full of blasphemies, don’t worry, it’s not some hard rock. I’m sure you’ve got those on the playlist as well. But this one is an important song to me. Why? It’s a favorite song of my dad that sadly passed away a couple of years ago.

It’s kind of reflective of me because I’m quite a positive individual, quite optimistic. I can be formal and professional as I call it what I want to, but at the same time, I can be quite lighthearted, joking, informal. My song is Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Monty Python. Radio edit version may be more suitable for the playlist. But no, I think for me it’s a wonderful song and I think whether you’ve had a good day or a bad day, it’s a great one to listen to or make you smile and reset the mind maybe a little bit.

Richard Lane:

Awesome. Very good.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. I’m a little bit biased there, Jamie. But yeah, that’s a wonderful addition to the playlist. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Richard Lane:

I’m Brian and so is my wife.

Jamie Mackenzie:

You know what, you can have the next podcast is just quotes from Monty Python films. No, but thanks ever so much [inaudible].

Simon Hazeldine:

It’s been wonderful to have you with us. Yeah, we definitely haven’t had enough Monty Python quotes probably on the Insiders, so area for improvement. So wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much to Jamie for joining us on this episode of The Insiders by durhamlane. Thank you to my co-host, Richard, and of course, thank you for listening into this episode, folks.

Please subscribe to The Insiders Podcast on your preferred podcasting site, and you’ll be notified of new episodes when they’re released, which they are on a regular basis. And visit durhamlane.com to learn more about selling at a higher level. In the meantime, we’d just like to wish you good luck and good sales and marketing, folks.

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