Unlocking the Power of Marsales Alignment

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:

Welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds of marketing and sales, one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane, I’m Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of durhamlane. We’re a revenue acceleration agency and we help enterprise customers create always on channels of meaningful and well-qualified sales opportunities.

Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Antti Nykänen. Antti is Head of Marketing for the Infrastructure Division at AFRY, an international engineering design and advisory company that drives digitalization and sustainability for energy infrastructure and industrial sectors on a global basis. Antti, it’s great to have you on the show and thank you for being with us.

Antti Nykänen:

Thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure. At least I got to know this podcast, I’ve listened to it in several episodes now. I’m indeed really glad to be here.

Richard Lane:

Excellent. As a way to get started, perhaps you could introduce yourself to our listeners so they get a better understanding of who you are before we get into the detail of today’s discussion.

Antti Nykänen:

My name is Antti Nykänen and I’m living in Finland and worked in marketing roughly 20 years on mobile solutions to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Also being now at AFRY quite a few years. How long, actually, it depends slightly how you count it. Years back I was a marketing manager in an architectural agency, which grew then to be the biggest one in Finland, and one day the company was acquired by Pöyry, a global engineering consulting company and then one day Pöyry was acquired by ÅF, and as a result of that merger then came AFRY.

AFRY, we are an engineering company. In our division we work a lot with infra and real estate sector customers. We do not have many full-time salespeople, but instead it’s the department managers, section managers, business unit heads and so on who do the sales. Richard, this can bring advantages but also challenges this setup. And our people rarely have joined AFRY because they want to sell. It’s more like, how to say, they are there to design the world’s best buildings and bridges and tunnels, you name it. Rarely people like cold calling, but maybe our people less than average and that’s the number one thing for me is how to make a cold call warmer. If we can do that, then marketing has done its job well.

Richard Lane:

Well, perfect. That’s a great way for us to get into the main content for today’s episode of The Insiders, Antti, so thank you for that. I also wonder whether the podcast should be focused on how to make your way through many acquisitions and stay in the same company from your experience, but maybe we can leave that for another day. As co-founder of durhamlane, we’re a demand and lead generation business, something that I’ve always been passionate about is, like you, the cooperation and the togetherness or not of marketing and sales and it’s something that we have to work really hard on and a lot of The Insiders podcast is about that connection between marketing and sales. In your experience through AFRY and other iterations of the business, what are the biggest challenges that you’ve seen in the connection between those two departments?

Antti Nykänen:

I think overall, you can say that the main three barriers, if you like, are the organizational structure or silos, then the second one, perhaps the attitude and the third one is, how to say, the lack of strategic alignment. Meaning the strategic targets are not sufficiently broken down due to sales and marketing specific joint targets and incentives. I would say these are the three main concerns that typically are going to hinder the good, for example, handling of the sales leads.

Richard Lane:

Okay. Silos, the attitude, maybe I’m a marketeer or I’m a salesperson, and then really importantly, the strategy. I guess there are two things there aren’t there? There’s the leadership from the top, but also then the day-to-day activities from people doing the work at all levels of the business. Demand and lead generation is interesting because you could say it sits towards the top of the sales funnel. What are your thoughts around how we link sales and marketing together through the lead generation process?

Antti Nykänen:

There’s quite a few things that, of course, you could address and the organization is, of course, something that you can do something, you can’t do something. One of the things, if not go into organizational structure as such, but at least to create the circumstances and responsibilities for lead handling. Sometimes, and this maybe comes also to the attitude side, so it’s easy for us as marketeers to think that we now have this campaign up and running and we just measure it by page views and that’s the end of story. Or then a salesperson is thinking that they are only interested in leads which they themselves find.

If we have at least some loose themes that have some kind of a joint target, so that would be one thing. How we address this challenge at AFRY it’s been now 12 months as the way it is so we set some responsible people in the organization who are looking after the needs in this area will be handled. Not necessarily being handling them themselves, but just taking care and making sure that it will happen only by having this responsible person somewhere lead it. If we now look back, so the net sales coming from the leads compared to what it was last year, so it was two and a half times bigger.

Richard Lane:

Okay. You’ve set up some dedicated people that are responsible for taking the lead and nurturing it and getting it what I would call sales ready. You mentioned at the beginning of the episode that AFRY has lots of salespeople that didn’t join the business to sell maybe, but they joined the business to design and to build relationships. Have you created a link between the lead and those individuals?

Antti Nykänen:

Yes, and I think what I would say that there’s a lot work to be done still, so we could be much, much better in all aspects. But I think what works sometimes really, really well is that when we have the responsibility on the right level, when the person is really aware about the expertise within AFRY in that specific customer segment or geography, so it’s easier for her or him to assign the leads to the right person, say that, “Hey, Antti, you are an expert of this topic, why don’t you pick this one up?” And then hope it also makes life easier in this case for Antti. Okay, this is an area that I do know a lot about, it is easier for me to contact that particular customer instead of somebody just randomly throwing you a 10 name list saying, “Call this.”

Richard Lane:

Yes. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I guess it sounds like you’re on this journey, but I know marketing used to be very focused on brand and collateral. I think we talked that in our pre-discussion that marketing was seen to be brand and the collateral that you might give a interested customer, but these days the buying journey has changed dramatically, it’s become much more digital and marketeers are becoming more focused on revenue. Is that something that is happening inside of AFRY?

Antti Nykänen:

I would say yes, absolutely. And in short, I think it’s a great development, it forces us as the marketeers to show the value for the rest of the organization, if you like. Teaches us to speak the language that is understood in the corner office. It’s the topics like return on marketing investment, the value of marketing generated leads, and it’s becoming now actually possible to measure all this, which was not possible say 10 years ago. I think it’s absolutely good development that marketing nowadays increasingly is measured by the outcome. The way I see it, the development can raise the value of us as marketeers, top line growth. It can show that marketing is not only about the icing of the cake. I think this has helped to make the marketing work much, much more interesting, being the frontline, if you like, crafting the competitive advantage, bringing the customer inside the sales, contributing price and be part of those business critical decisions.

Richard Lane:

Do you find that that is helping with the integration between marketing and sales, Antti, within AFRY? Has that shift in mindset or expectation, has that brought the various departments closer together?

Antti Nykänen:

I would say yes. In a way now if I think about my own work, for instance, compared to past, so it feels like we are much, much more now onto the core of the business, like you said, as opposed to only producing the collateral. It’s like now we much, much have a bigger role what marketing can impact. But of course it’s not something that nobody’s giving that bigger role to you but focus on the revenue and the ability to show the results. That’s something that helps, of course, making this. But then there’s of course the other side of the coin and I think we discussed it, it’s perhaps not always only focusing on the short term, it’s also the branding part of it. You just can’t ignore it and if you try to optimize the return on investment on short term, you probably run into problems in the longer run.

Richard Lane:

I think it’s a really interesting balance from a marketing perspective because if you only focus on activities that lead to immediate revenue, then there’ll be activities that need to be done from a brand build, from a recognition, reputation point of view that in the medium and long-term will affect you negatively. It’s about value attribution and we regularly inside of durhamlane have discussions around where we spend our time and where we spend our focus and our money and you have to get that balance right between the tactical and the strategic initiatives, and it has to be connected.

Antti Nykänen:

Indeed, and maybe it’s one of the things that helps to do that is to keep your eyes on the customer and on the customer journey. When we keep our eyes on the customer needs, so we are able to keep this, as you say, very, very delicate balance.

Richard Lane:

Interesting. And clearly you’re a global business, so I’m talking from a durhamlane perspective and we operate in, I think, 76 countries around the world for our customers, but we’re predominantly a UK operation. When you become a global business, I think it becomes much more complicated. One thing that we’re interested in The Insiders is how you operate in a global construct as well. Clearly this goes beyond just sales and marketing, but to the whole organization telling that one story, whether you’re in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Americas, et cetera. Do you have experiences of that in the work that you’ve done with AFRY?

Antti Nykänen:

Yeah, I think it’s absolutely the very, very crucial part here and a story about how not to do this because I’ve also learned this the hard way if you like.

Richard Lane:

We often learn the best from the horror stories, don’t we?

Antti Nykänen:

It is a bit like that. Years ago, I think it was six years ago, then the marketing automation platforms were really a new thing. And then I was super convinced that no, yes, we need a marketing automation platform. And this was the time when marketing automation was mostly unknown for most people. I started to talk about it with the business management and with colleagues and so on. The typical response was, “Oh, but that’s not perhaps very relevant for our business because our business is so unique.” I bet many have heard these words before. Just talked about that and didn’t get any traction. But anyhow, then I purchased it and I was then struggling with the fact that we are going to implement something which nobody really knows and nobody really wants, and how the hell are we going to manage this or basically how I am going to manage this? And we really, really scratched our head with it.

And I know that it’s going to help us not only in marketing but also in sales and even more in sales actually, but how can we really get into it? And it was a very, very tool focused approach. And if I’m thinking back today, you just can’t emphasize enough the fact, answering the question why. We have all this good change management frameworks such as Adkar or anything [inaudible 00:13:32] has said and all that, but how is it that even we know it in the back of our heads, we still are not putting that into action?

And I know this is only one example, this type tool focus, but even today all this talk about marketing technology stack and all. There are great tools available out there, but in the end of the day it’s all about change management and then people and processes to help to do the right thing. And at least, like you said, we are a pretty big organization with somewhere around 17,000 people so the technology is enabler, but the foundations is then laid with people doing the right things every day. You can have an expensive Ferrari, but if you don’t have the skills to drive it, so then the end result will be outright dangerous even. Or you buy a Ferrari and then you can’t afford to buy the fuel part, so then you can’t drive.

Richard Lane:

And the question that myself and I’m sure our listeners will have is, did you renew your expensive piece of marketing technology the following year?

Antti Nykänen:

No, actually not because luckily in the middle I realized that, okay, this is not going to work now. We need to approach it in a slightly different way. Again, we started to approach it from the customer point of view, how can we help the customer in all touchpoints? And then this was the story that we were telling internally that this is how we can impact in these spaces. End result, happier customer, the other end result moving these potential customers forward in the funnel. And that became the story of it and not mention the technology as such. It’s an enabler in the background but it is the thing that why we are doing it. Of course then you need to put it also and build strategic targets where at the time we had very ambitious growth targets. And for example, that resulted heavy targets on sales, this many [inaudible 00:15:36] this many calls, this much sales.

And then how we then connected to it that, hey, okay, guys you have now the target. It is not only that there is the target, but we also here to help you to reach that target and that’s how we are doing by bringing good quality leads. I’ve worked also in sales and it wasn’t the nicest feeling when you have the target to have seven meetings per week or have contacted seven leads and you need to present that on Monday morning meeting and then on Sunday evening you realize that, oh, I have only five, what can I do?

It was more or less focusing that how can we help our people to sell? It was not an internal marketing effort to do something that we can send emails faster, for instance. But it’s also true, like you said, that there are differences between different geographies and that of course one needs to respect. I can see for example, maybe talking about differences between Finns and Swedes. In Sweden, and now this is very rough generalization, but I can see that people perhaps sometimes in marketing are more forward leaning and seeing the opportunities, whereas when you tell a Finn that what could possibly go wrong and here are all the things that can go wrong, then the Finn is happy, Yes, good, they have thought about all these downsides.

Richard Lane:

Absolutely. Well, so many cultural differences, that’s something else that needs to be thought very, very clearly about when you’re building any campaign or running any program, isn’t it? A story there of what not to do, Antti. In terms of we’re very keen to enable our listeners to go away with some actions from our conversations. What’s the one thing that you can share that our audience can take away and action immediately?

Antti Nykänen:

I think, and this is not anything new or fancy or super expensive even, but I think it’s something that has been the best thing that I’ve done in my career and this is also related to the change management that we discussed. When we conducted a buyer persona and customer journey mapping workshop, and I think that’s what most marketing units do at some point. With that we managed to do the most difficult thing to connect the people in marketing, connect the people in sales, getting good feedback from sales that okay, this is what our customers are like. And also then after that, putting the results into practice after the workshop. That’s apparently not easy as well and a lot to achieve on that front. But I think there were good things. Recently, just recently one of my colleagues has hosted excellent workshops within marketing communications people that this is how you utilize the buyer personas in communications planning and execution and even exercises that let’s plan a Google app for this kind of persona and that kind of persona and learn to see the possibilities, how to use them in practice.

Richard Lane:

What I’m taking from that, Antti, is firstly bring the various teams together through a very specific activity around the buyer journey, so the personas and how your customers buy from you. And then as importantly, put it into action post workshop. It’s not easy bringing people together, it’s not easy running workshops and it’s not easy following up, so tackle each of those at a time and then you’ll end up creating some synergies and getting your business to work more effectively together in that quest for smarketing as you might call it.

Antti Nykänen:

Exactly.

Richard Lane:

We’ve got a new feature in The Insiders where we go out to our community and ask for some questions. I’ve got a question here from James which I think is very relevant to you and your world at AFRY, Antti. The question from James is, “How can you install a selling culture or revenue mindset into organizations that are more product or project management focused?”

Antti Nykänen:

Excellent question.

Richard Lane:

We’ll just ask him to listen to the first half of the podcast. Do you have any further thoughts on that?

Antti Nykänen:

I think I can very much relate to that because if we think about AFRY for instance, so the project management it’s very core of our company DNA. Now we really, again, come to this change management question and the first thing that comes to mind is these processes, so the sales process and the delivery process need to be very well-connected, aligned so it’s clear also from the process perspective that we all play in the same game here and there is no project execution, nobody sells the boat in a way.

And then let’s say if we think about the expert organization and how people feel the B2BB sales sometimes. Quite often it’s understood in a way that it’s not probably my thing and the salespersons, they are somewhat different, they are very gushy and aggressive and the first part is that secondhand car salesman, isn’t it? And then I think that’s totally wrong picture. And years back, we have had sales trainings for managers. We’ve been discussing a lot about what is B2B sales in an expert organization? And in the end of the day it turns out that many people are doing it already, they just don’t call it sales, it’s somehow about helping your customer. For example, you are at the customer’s construction site and you suggest some improvements when you have had your ears and eyes opened and customer’s happy, they get improvements and you get act on sales. But again, constant change management and training part of it so training is important part of it and then even more important because the management will actually then actively walk the talk after the training.

Richard Lane:

And I think the conversation we had also around marketing being a revenue generation machine as well is a key part to changing culture. If you’re measuring your various functions by their ability to create revenue, not only but as part of it, then you start to change the mindset inside of organization as well. Some good advice there. Thank you.

We’re coming to the end of our conversation, Antti. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. We’ve got one last question, often the hardest to answer, but we’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist and we ask every guest if they would like to provide us with a song that we can add to the playlist. What would you like us to add on your behalf?

Antti Nykänen:

I can understand then this is the hard question, difficult for me as well, but maybe a song by Finnish band Amorphis and it’s called House of Sleep.

Richard Lane:

House of Sleep by Amorphis. Excellent. Well, it’s great to have it by a Finnish band. I will be sure to check them out and we’ll get them added to the growing Insider Spotify playlist. Antti, it’s been a, as I said, absolute pleasure. Thank you for appearing on The Insiders, really appreciate your time today and I’m sure listeners will get a lot of value from the conversation that we’ve had.

Antti Nykänen:

Richard, thanks. It was really a pleasure to be here. I really enjoyed the discussion and also the tough questions.

Richard Lane:

Excellent. Well, thank you again and thanks to all of our listeners. Thank you for tuning into The Insiders. Please subscribe on your preferred podcasting site to ensure you are notified of all new episodes as and when they’re published. And if you’d like to learn more about durhamlane and our unique method of selling at a high level, visit durhamlane.com for more information, and see you next time.

Speaker 1:

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