Building an Incredibly Powerful Sales and Marketing Engine with Caroline Hodson

Mike (00:00.686)
Caroline, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higall the BTB Sales Club podcast. Very good to see you. Pleasure. So yes, I'm really looking forward to this because obviously it's a complex topic around marketing.

Caroline Hodson (00:11.796)
No problem.

Caroline Hodson (00:21.952)
Thanks for watching me.

Mike (00:29.92)
Impact on sales and measurement etc. But before we do that obviously for the audience, who are you? What do you do and something news about yourself?

Caroline Hodson (00:37.312)
Yeah, so Caroline Hodson, I'm the MD and founder of Wolf Hodson. And we define ourselves as marketing engineers. So how do we actually look at the world of marketing and sales in terms of the levers and pulleys we've got? And how do we make that engine work as sweetly as possible, if you like? And a lot of that is around the data and the technology, but also the processes, the people, we bring them together.

Mike (01:05.966)
accent.

Caroline Hodson (01:07.23)
Something a little bit interesting about me, what a lot of people don't know, I grew up on a farm in the middle of Devon, a very long way from everyone, and I can milk a cow by hand. Which I used to do before school every morning. So that's the bit in our business world these days, those things don't often get used, but you never know when that's a useful skill to have.

Mike (01:15.95)
Wow!

Very- wow, what time was that?

Mike (01:28.386)
Correct. As we go back to the land, that will become a more important skill probably, I expect. What time are you getting up in the morning to milk cows, by the way?

Caroline Hodson (01:32.831)
Hahaha.

Back then, I can't even remember. I think it's gone so far back in the memory. But it was a cold house. It was an old house. was very cold. We probably wanted to get up, to be honest.

Mike (01:41.634)
You've erased it.

Exactly. Now, I talk to clients all the time about sales and marketing engines and the need for an agency or obviously a brand or anyone to have a sales and marketing engine. And then they say to me, what do you mean by that? So rather than having my explanation, what's your view before we kick off into the bigger topic, just describe what does a sales and marketing engine mean in your terms?

Caroline Hodson (02:13.696)
Okay, so if you, like all engines, there are component parts to it. So if I take, you the purpose of an engine is to take your business and your sales and marketing strategy and operationalize it so that you deliver the right outcomes. And those outcomes might be a relevant customer experience, it might be accelerated revenue, operational efficiency, or informed decision-making.

Mike (02:19.042)
Yep.

Caroline Hodson (02:41.47)
The pillars that go into that engine are, in the center, you have to have data and technology because that's the of the fuel that works down. But if you break that down, it's so what data are you capturing? How are you capturing it? Do you have a single view across all of your entities? And do you have smarter insights coming out of it? Because without those things, actually, the ability to feed and start delivering to outcomes is very difficult.

That then, the way we look at it, that looks two ways. On one side, you have the use of the role of automated processes that enable new capabilities. And those capabilities might be, you know, lead opportunity management, that whole lifecycle management, the customer lifecycle. It may be personalized interventions. It may be audience selection and targeting for different things. So a whole range of capabilities that sit.

that need to be enabled by that technology and data inside SAC. And then on the other side, it's about how you embed tools so that people and change can make the most of those new capabilities. So people and change, and that might be new ways of working, that might be just confidence and knowledge of being able to use those tools and how those things fit together. So a lot of it is, as I say, it's very good to have all this

great technology and technology is clever these days, let's be honest. You've got to have the data to fuel it and you've got to know what you want it to do. So it has to be informed by the strategy at the top. But then those capabilities, again, very clever automation of processes and the oncoming growth of AI and the role that can take, really good. But if you forget the people and change side and you forget in terms of how it gets adopted, how it evolves,

then you can have, you know, it's a bit like, you know, having the engine in a brand new car and you forgot to put a steering wheel and a seat in it, you know, so it ain't going to go anywhere. So those are the pieces that we look at in terms of that engine and how do they all work together and how do you ensure that actually sometimes we look at the whole thing, sometimes we'll come down, we'll kind of swoop in because the client will say, I've got this specific problem, they've got this blocker, this isn't working. And that could be in any of those

Mike (04:39.635)
Yes.

Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (05:03.314)
any of those buckets. still dream about the day when I work with a client and I ask the question, you know, let's talk about data and they go, data is great. Our data is in a really good place. It was a rare occurrence. that's so that's my quick description of what I would say is in that sales and marketing engine.

Mike (05:16.139)
It's a rare recurrence.

Mike (05:24.503)
Perfect. So as a broad topic to discuss in the next kind of 20 minutes, what's happened in the B2B marketing landscape such that now they're kind of consistently being asked to evidence the influence and more importantly, the impact that their work has on sales outcomes and what can they do about it? So broadly kind of what's been going on because there's definitely a lot more pressure I know for a fact on CMOs.

to demonstrate value, a lot more pressure to join up the thinking between sales and marketing, a move with some organizations to put marketing under sales, good or bad. So what broadly from your view has been going on?

Caroline Hodson (06:10.976)
A I'll answer that to start with. A lot. I think rightly there's increasing demand for the CMO to become accountable for revenue. That is without doubt. And that's right. I know most CMOs want that and they want to be seen as a key tenet in the driver of growth. But that is becoming an increasing demand. And that revenue is direct and indirect.

Mike (06:12.237)
Good.

Caroline Hodson (06:39.902)
depending on the market they're in. That's coupled with the challenge of the ever expanding size and complexity of buyer groups. So if you look at the average length of a sales cycle, if you look at the average number of people involved in that sales cycle, clearly a good salesperson is going to focus on core decision makers. There's this whole influencer.

Mike (07:07.127)
there is

Caroline Hodson (07:07.136)
group that sits beside it, that come in and out of a sales cycle. So clearly marketing have to be able to identify how they're reaching those people, how they're engaging with those people. And it doesn't stop. There used to be this whole view of sales and marketing alignment and there was this relay and you handed the baton over. That doesn't happen anymore. have to, everybody has to have a role all the way down through the sales cycle. COVID changed that.

It can it up the change, I would say, and you'll never go back. So again, you've suddenly got not only direct accountability for revenue, but you've also got this whole point of more people, more complex, longer. And then you've got the role of technology. So the marketing, the CMO now is quite responsible for a whole marketing stack, the market stack. We all know it's got more and more complicated. But what that does is there

is an expectation of operational efficiencies that come out of that. So if as a business you're saying, you've got all this marketing technology, we expect some payback from it. We expect to be able to see both operational efficiencies, but also effectiveness. We want better visibility, better transparency, better this, better that. And then alongside all of that, you've got customers who now expectations have gone through the roof. Personalization,

real-time experiences, know, all of that by default. And that requires data. data has got bigger and bigger, more and more of it, but also sometimes harder and harder to pinpoint what's happening.

Mike (08:42.263)
So why?

Mike (08:52.589)
So why has the B2B customer market changed so much? And we know it, we definitely know it has. mean, what you've talked about, the research I've seen, all the sales people I talked to, the work that Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna have done on Jolt, you know, we know now categorically that the buy side has changed. Why, without going into a big research piece, but what do you think has been the main driver of that change over the last kind of

Caroline Hodson (09:12.746)
Totally.

Mike (09:22.155)
I would say 10 years.

Caroline Hodson (09:24.16)
And I think it's quite... If you look at sort of cause and effect a bit, if you go back to the recall, I think it's quite straightforward. We're all consumers. The world has changed. We expect people to know, you know, what we're interested in, what we're not interested in. We expect if you say, don't speak to me about this, we don't get spoken to about this. We live in a world of Amazon. We live in a world of, you know, just instant gratification, if you like. You can't...

Mike (09:29.186)
Yeah.

Mike (09:33.313)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (09:50.54)
Yep.

Caroline Hodson (09:53.076)
Forget that the minute you walk into a business role.

Mike (09:56.408)
See, that's very interesting. So you look at Netflix, we're big Netflix watchers, our son's 12, so we watch lot of films and dramas. It's no surprise that the home screen that we get is tailored towards the content that we watch. The algorithm is unbelievably smart and it recommends things that actually are relevant. It doesn't always get it right, but it's pretty good. And that's a good example.

Caroline Hodson (09:59.306)
Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (10:14.463)
Exactly.

Yes.

Caroline Hodson (10:25.972)
It's another example, but therefore we can't be surprised that B2B marketing has changed because we are all consumers. We have these experiences. We have this. know that things can be that good and therefore you expect...

Mike (10:30.614)
Exactly.

Mike (10:38.891)
Yeah, so our expectation in work is it's the same.

Caroline Hodson (10:43.456)
And also data, we know the data. We know people are collecting our data. We know that we go into businesses and the first thing they want us to do is either subscribe to things or do the preference centre or fill in all of this information. Well, if I give you this information, I expect you to respond accordingly. I'm not just giving you data for nothing. So I think it's awareness.

Mike (11:06.22)
Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (11:13.408)
at an individual level. It's increasing, I mean, let's be honest, the economic geopolitical, you know, the world is tough. It's a difficult place out there. So if you put those two things together in terms of expectation, what we know is possible, and then on the other side, you have an increasingly competitive marketplace where people are kind of going, well, actually,

everything I purchase, on one side are we going to go back to the old world of nobody's going to get fired for buying IBM type of thing. Because it's increasingly the risk within a business environment is getting higher and higher. And therefore the risk of getting things wrong, the risk of reputation, individual and business reputation get higher and higher. actually, decision making, you want more people involved in it.

Mike (11:51.821)
Mike (12:04.17)
Absolutely.

Mike (12:10.7)
Yep.

Caroline Hodson (12:10.898)
It's going to take longer because nobody wants the one name on the bottom to be their name. So you put all those things together and you have this what you have where we are today. That's what you have.

Mike (12:15.039)
Exactly. To blame. Yep.

Mike (12:24.557)
Because actually in B2B, if you're a director accountable for some kind of change program that the board's decided it wants to embark on, the status quo may not be great, but the status quo is kind of working. You may as that accountable director go, I'm better off tinkering with it and getting it a bit better. And I won't get praised, but I probably won't get fired.

rather than doing something transformational quickly for half a million dollars, it not working and then I'll definitely get fired.

Caroline Hodson (13:02.112)
Well, it's interesting. So I did a joint session with a client recently and we were talking about change. They're going through a big transformational change program. we were saying that actually going through a change program is a bit like having a kitchen renovated. It's messy. It takes longer than you want it to. It tends to cost more than you want to. There are so many opportunities for misinterpretation of

Mike (13:19.605)
Right. Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (13:31.518)
requirements and outcomes at the end of it. However, at the end of it is worth it. It is worth it because if you want to be, I mean, we've just talked about the things that have gone on in the world over the last couple of years. You can't just adapt and shift and there's too much. You have to make some changes. And if you look at the meaning, the definition of the word transformation.

Mike (13:34.402)
Thorough.

Caroline Hodson (14:01.056)
is constant and ongoing change. So that's the world we're in now. We're in a world of constant and ongoing change. on one side, you could say we're all in a transformational state all the time. That's kind of where we are. So it's interesting. I understand why over the last couple of years, there has definitely been a pullback from some of those larger programs. The challenge you've got now

Mike (14:03.351)
Right.

Mike (14:24.961)
to have.

Caroline Hodson (14:27.808)
is they're all starting to move again and they have to. Not just for the short term here and now. Going back to a conversation we were having earlier about data. If you don't get your data in a better state now, you cannot even think about exploiting the potential opportunity that AI can deliver. Because AI runs on data.

Mike (14:54.423)
So let's, all right, so let's dig into this. This would be great, perfect. So when you say get your data in a better state, just can I just talk about that a little bit? What does that practically mean?

Caroline Hodson (14:59.193)
Hahaha!

Caroline Hodson (15:09.492)
Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (15:13.236)
Well, so the way we talk about this is data is a very difficult topic. It's a very emotive topic and it's a hard topic because it means different things to different people. So to start with, you have to break down what data. That's the first point because it's too hard to tackle in any organization data because nobody owns data. You'll have the finance.

Mike (15:35.915)
Yeah. Well, I've got operational data, I've got finance data, I've got sales data, marketing data. And also in the data, there's no common key. If you look at that data set and you try and read across it, there's often no common key and certainly no single view of the truth.

Caroline Hodson (15:40.768)
So let's talk about marketing data.

Caroline Hodson (15:55.776)
which is why in the middle of my engine, you have this box called single view, because that is critical. But, and I'll come back to the but, you know, when you're talking about a sales and marketing environment, you have to be quite, quite careful, because you can't eat the elephant, you absolutely can't. So you start sort of looking at it and go, well, okay, we've got customer data. And then you start looking at it and go, okay, what data do we actually need to achieve our targets?

Mike (15:59.97)
Right.

Caroline Hodson (16:25.236)
And we do it through use cases because it's too hard a topic. So we work with sales and marketing leaders and teams and go, okay, let's look, I've just had a marketing data workshop this morning with a client, you know, and we start with the use cases. Okay, how do you want to target audiences? How do you want to select audiences? How do you want to personalize your content and interventions? How do you want, you know, what's your approach to consent and...

Mike (16:27.233)
Yes, exactly. Correct.

Caroline Hodson (16:52.224)
compliance and how does that fit with it? What reporting and insights do you want to get out? So you have to break it into use cases because otherwise there's this mountain in front of you, and you've got a pair of flip-flops on and you're going to go, well, I can't do it. I can't see. No. So you have to break it down. So that's the part. So actually, what data do we really need?

Mike (17:00.962)
Yes.

Mike (17:08.301)
can't go mountaineering in a pair of flip-flops.

Caroline Hodson (17:20.138)
How are we collecting that data and how it being processed? How do we then enrich it? So that's all of our first party data. Do we need to enrich it with account information, intent information? And where does that happen and how does that happen and how does that come back into the point? And then you can start to go, OK, let's have a look at what we've got now. And then you can start to prioritise, you know, what's the completeness? What's the quality? What's the source? Where's it stored? Is it accessible?

Can people, because you can have a lot of data sitting in a data lake somewhere, but it's not accessible. Your marketers who are trying to put a campaign and select an audience are not going to be people that are going to go right back into the data lake, start doing queries and running queries. It's got to be accessible.

Mike (18:08.045)
I think also, mean, even simplistically, Caroline, going a step back, what's the business outcome we're trying to achieve? So we want incremental sales uplift of 3 % on the same cost base as we've got today. And we also want increased brand awareness over the long term so that customers keep us front of mind. And then we're back and go, well, what are the lead indicators?

Caroline Hodson (18:16.46)
Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (18:37.44)
Exactly. What are your performance indicators to that? but that's almost when you start coming into that use cases around reporting. You know, we look at it as a kind of framework. So you've got performance indicators and performance metrics are all different. So you have to kind of, you have to go, you're absolutely right. If brand recognition is an indicator, then what are you doing about it? Brand ratings and position in some brand, that's fine. That's a metric, but you've got to go back.

Mike (18:37.471)
against those lag indicators. Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (19:07.712)
and say, what matters? What do you want? So you're absolutely right. And then you can start looking at how do we link that to outcomes? And there aren't, you again, you have to boil it down to the simplistic thing. You know, there aren't that many business outcomes. They either involve the customer and the customer experience and revenue, speed to revenue, volume of revenue, growth, operational efficiency. It has to be.

Mike (19:09.717)
Exactly.

Mike (19:26.293)
Exactly. Yeah.

Yep.

profit.

Caroline Hodson (19:37.886)
And then you've got the whole world of insights and reporting that informs future decisioning. So going back to the first point of, know, why is it important that marketing is able to be very specific and very robust about the impact it makes on sales outcomes? Because depending on those business outcomes you want and being able to dial it up and dial your engine, you've got to know what's working.

and what's not working and what is delivering what? Not just this brand campaign delivered this, but actually this brand campaign delivered this on these different segments, at this different relationship status we have with them. And therefore, if we want to progress, you know, if we want to progress a customer base that has, you know, buys one product from us and our big thing is expanding our footprint.

Mike (20:05.727)
Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (20:34.336)
We have to go along and go, okay, so what are the tactics and what are the activities we do that are the best at moving people from knowing this about us to this about us? You've got to be that forensic about it, which is why it comes back to this engineering mindset. You've got to look at it in that way because it's not enough anymore. know, marketers, see how much they're fighting for investment.

Mike (20:49.718)
Exactly.

Mike (20:58.795)
I was talking to...

Yeah, exactly.

Caroline Hodson (21:02.9)
You and they are, you've got your CMO, you've got your sales director, you've got your customer experience, everybody's fighting for the same tight pots of money. So you need to be able to stand up and go, if you give me an extra million dollars, this is what I'm going to do with it. And this is the return you're going to get.

Mike (21:26.189)
Exactly. So we'll come back to outcomes in a second as well. I was talking to a very good friend of mine about AI and he's a very deep AI expert, guy called Henry. And I think there is a bit of a myth in the business world, not across everyone, but across quite a lot of people, that's like, well, I can just point an AI LLM, a foundation model, at my data.

in a private environment and make sure it's all secure and it will work it out. And we were just talking and he said, look Mike, it's a bit like having an intern. If you gave an intern a job of saying, there's a whole lake of data there, we'd like you to get some insights out of it. But we don't know really what the data looks like. We don't know, there's no real taxonomy. Just go and work it out.

Well, if the intern can't work it out, if they can't build a model and they can't use the data and they can't work out what the attribution elements are of that model, they'll come back and say, it's uncorrelated data. I can't do anything with it. It's unstructured. And AI is going to do the, it's not magic. It's not a magic tool that just looks at data and says, I've got these brilliant insights because it needs some kind of way of navigating the data.

Caroline Hodson (22:35.392)
It's unstructured. There's a lot of it is unstructured.

Caroline Hodson (22:46.72)
Wuh-wuh.

Caroline Hodson (22:51.124)
Yeah, mean, let's not pretend that AI is a thing. AI is many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many things. And it's not a... We don't have all the answers. So are there things called LLMs that can be trained over time to learn things? Yes. But there are not... There has not been the breakthrough yet that says they are...

Mike (22:59.778)
Yeah.

Mike (23:12.481)
Yes, absolutely.

Caroline Hodson (23:20.69)
independent, the projective decision makers. They don't have that rationale that you and I have where you can look at something and go, okay, I'm going to have these four considerations on it and I'm going to make this judgment. There's no judgment in there. Therefore, because data is data and data, most data can be read different ways and tell the story you want it to tell. They get it wrong. You know, they can get it wrong. So

Mike (23:24.886)
Not yet, no.

Mike (23:30.37)
Yeah.

Mike (23:41.677)
Yep.

Caroline Hodson (23:48.582)
Will it get to a point where some of those sort of that rationale is baked? Of course it will. And but we're not there yet. And there is also the, you know, I equate the AI to the Internet. It's as broad as that. It's that big a breakthrough. But the Internet isn't one thing. It's a whole bunch of things. And AI will be the same. So it's about working out as a business. What's what do you want it to do and how much are you willing to invest? Now, some of the

Mike (23:54.581)
Absolutely

Caroline Hodson (24:18.544)
Some of the ways we look at it is we look at it again, if you go back to that customer journey and go, what are all the key decision points and pivot points where we have to join things together and we have to make assumptions that enable us to progress and move it forward? And it might be a lot of it is around operational efficiency at the moment. Let's be clear that that's the big thing and maybe some informed decision making. Customer experience, I'm not convinced that's...

Mike (24:39.647)
It is. Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (24:47.56)
there, know, customers don't chat bots we can deal with too much more than that. We'll get irritated with phone calls that go, hello, how are you today? you think, no, no. So it's about picking the spot of which you say, OK, let's look at, you know, interest qualification. Always a good one. know, marketers want to be able to capture interest, qualify that interest and pass it to sales at the right time when it

Mike (25:06.348)
Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (25:15.912)
All those things, sales want it to be ready, wrapped up, bow on top. Off you go. We don't live in a perfect world, but let's go down that happy path.

Mike (25:24.469)
No, and I think then also they'd be called order takers rather than salespeople.

Caroline Hodson (25:28.46)
Exactly, exactly. But are there things that the techniques that this thing called AI is opening up for us that start to open new opportunities? Definitely. Is it at a point yet where we can say, you know, all of those, that rational decision making can be done? No. However, it will get there. So if you don't,

Mike (25:40.897)
Yeah, absolutely.

Mike (25:52.737)
It will.

Caroline Hodson (25:55.462)
sort your data out now and in the future world it will be able to deal with structured and unstructured data. It'll be able to look at first party and third party and pull in and you know we're all excited about the opportunity but if your data is not in a good place it can't work. It can't work. So you have to tackle it but going back to the whole thing just now you can't eat the elephant so

Mike (26:14.048)
Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (26:21.022)
You've got to start breaking it down and go, but what do we need? How do we want to select our audiences? How do we want to, what experience do we want them to have? What is important to them? How do you capture interest and build on that interest? There is so many components to it, but there's a time and place now. And again, it does tend to come down to the CMO coming back to their increasing expansion. But if you have to do some transformative work,

going back to that conversation to say, can't, the data has to be sorted out. The data structure doesn't work. It's not in the right architecture in there. It's not accessible for the right people. It's not labelled, it's not categorised. You can't then use it. It's got to, so now's the time to sort it out is my point really, because unless you pull it together, I mean, there's many conversations about the source of truth and all those things, but

Mike (27:01.185)
Yep. It's not labeled.

Caroline Hodson (27:17.832)
Again, I kind of look at it from the sales and marketing world that says, I still believe that the CRM has to be our kind of source of truth and therefore what goes in and out of it. But, you know, it is doable now. You can absolutely tackle this thing. And if you don't tackle it now, my concern for marketing leaders is that give it another couple of years, two, three years, you're going to be on the back foot.

Mike (27:45.358)
Exactly. So key message, sort your data. And if you don't know what sort your data means, talk to Caroline, because she'll help. Exactly. there's another, I'm conscious of time, at 20, 25 minutes, roughly. So just in like another two, kind of two or three minutes, you mentioned on a prerecord about the sales and marketing alignment myth. What did you mean by that?

Caroline Hodson (27:53.056)
That would be lovely. I can talk this all day, you know me.

Yes.

Caroline Hodson (28:13.76)
So I think, and I'll try and be succinct on this, sales and marketing alignment is a myth. you know, that might be a controversial statement. And I think that it has been bandied about for a long time now, 10 years, 12 years, 15 years. I think what that fails to understand is that by design, a sales and a marketing person are very, different beings. So there has to be...

Mike (28:27.147)
It has.

Caroline Hodson (28:40.734)
You know, you can't tell people to align, you can't expect technology to align them. You can't expect those things. What you've got to do is build up a point of collaboration. And the point that you've both got in common is revenue and growth. That is what is there. So it is about common goals. It is about, you know, so this alignment point, and I've used the term for many years, so, you know, I'm having myself here. Really, what is it? What does it mean?

It's a very passive statement. It's got to be much more proactive. so an active statement like collaboration, planning, it's got to be much more forward looking. This alignment is very bland. So that's why I tend to kind of say as a statement, really, what do we mean by it? And it seems to be technology vendors have used it. Sort out your CRM and you'll have marketing and sales alignment. Really?

Really? that technology's going to do that for me?

Mike (29:40.493)
You might have a better view of the single view of the truth, but what you do with it is entirely different.

Caroline Hodson (29:44.736)
You might. Exactly. So it is much more about the way you're going to get accelerated revenue growth is through collaboration, joint planning, joint goals, know, align, you know, and properly, I'm even slipping into that word of myself now, but it starts at the CMO level, you know, the CMO sales director, do they have shared goals? Do they have shared ambitions?

Mike (30:04.204)
Yeah.

Mike (30:07.917)
Well, I would say it starts at the board level of saying, of like, yeah.

Caroline Hodson (30:11.84)
Well, that board level, if you've got shared goals at that point, then it makes sense. Comes back to the whole thing about why is, you know, why the marketing leaders, why do they have to be able to demonstrate impact on sales outcomes? Because that's the joint ambition. if the business ambition is growth, new content, know, expanding your footprints within existing, you've got to both own that.

Mike (30:30.146)
Yes.

Mike (30:40.406)
Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (30:40.488)
and then shape it down. So I laugh at myself on the word alignment. It's too passive. It doesn't say enough and it doesn't do enough. It just says there's going to be some magic here where you're all going to hold hands at some point. What is it really?

Mike (30:49.794)
Yeah.

Mike (30:56.503)
No, I think it is a very good point. think, and if you look just again, practically at even so take marketing agencies, take, yeah, even like quite big marketing agencies, know, 100, 200, 300 people within the sales team, the new business team, apparently agencies hate calling it sales. Whereas I'm like, well, just describe it as it is, it's sales.

Caroline Hodson (31:07.296)
Hmm? Nope.

Caroline Hodson (31:21.536)
Absolutely.

Mike (31:21.613)
new business development is the term they prefer. I'd say, it's you're selling, you're basically selling. But in that sales team, you'll only have maybe two or three people. And in the marketing team in a B2B agency, you might only have again, two or three people. So the alignment actually is you've got maybe six people. And the key thing is, have we got shared goals? Do we have a common understanding of what the business is trying to achieve? And if you've got that, then you can go

Caroline Hodson (31:27.392)
That's it.

Caroline Hodson (31:43.604)
Yes. Yep. Yes.

Mike (31:50.466)
How do we help each other achieve that goal? And they might have different reporting lines. They both might report into the CEO, but without shared goals and objectives and a way of measuring.

Caroline Hodson (31:53.063)
Exactly.

Caroline Hodson (32:04.0)
and a shared vision of where you're trying to go. Exactly. You're going nowhere. And just, you can say you're aligned. Yep, we're all aligned.

Mike (32:06.079)
Exactly. Then you're going nowhere.

Mike (32:13.355)
Yeah, they talk every week. But that doesn't mean that we've got the same goals and that we're heading in the same direction. Definitely. So conscious of the time, just kind of pulling things together. So one last kind of big topic, and then we'll just summarize with maybe three points. So in your mind, just prepare like kind of the three takeaways for anyone that's kind of listening. But the brand and performance debate.

Caroline Hodson (32:15.654)
Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

Mike (32:40.969)
What's your view on the brand versus performance marketing debate that goes on forever and ever and ever?

Caroline Hodson (32:49.952)
It does go on forever and ever and ever. I come back to this point of, know, if you are going to... Most businesses need everything. You know, it isn't an either or, isn't a, you know, but you have to be able to track the impact. You have to have clarity of what it is you're trying to do. So clearly brand is important because brand equals not only...

awareness, you know, but reputation, you know, and that's critical. You can't you can't ever undermine. But you have to know what it is that you want it to do. If you're doing a brand campaign, but actually what you're what you're driving for is incremental growth or an increase in average order value, it's probably not the right thing to put your dollars into. However.

Mike (33:21.995)
Yep, exactly.

Mike (33:44.619)
Yeah, I mean at the extreme, brand and no sales is pointless, and sales and no brand is pretty pointless.

Caroline Hodson (33:52.48)
Completely, completely. It's all about a blend. But as businesses, depending on the position of that business and what the overall business objective, I come back to the whole point. What we're doing here is operationalising a business strategy. Depending what that business strategy is, you've got a whole bunch of tactics and mechanisms at your disposal. And the whole magic happens when you get the combination right. But you need all of it.

Mike (34:06.38)
Yeah.

Mike (34:20.203)
Yes.

Caroline Hodson (34:22.142)
You can't just say we don't need brand that ridiculous statement. You also can't say brand does everything because brand doesn't do everything. And it's not attributable. And that is really challenging as well. You come back to this, the forensic nature of being able to say this delivered this. An awful lot of brand activity lives in an unknown world. You can say this many people and this many this. You know, we've moved up the rankings in this way. Critical.

Mike (34:25.567)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (34:51.828)
But it depends what it is you're doing. So it's all about a blend. I mean, it's all and any much it's like it's like everything, isn't it, about the balance. And you shift the balance depending on what the business objectives are at any given time. So they have to live together. mean, the brand is a critical part of the mix because it's the umbrella under which everything sits.

Mike (35:02.208)
Exactly.

Mike (35:17.559)
Yeah, as is performance, because without performance marketing, then sales would have to in certain B2B environments, sales would struggle to hit their targets. So it has to be a blend. It's got to be a blend.

Caroline Hodson (35:19.444)
as his performance.

Caroline Hodson (35:28.128)
Oh gosh, without a without a doubt, without a doubt. And I would say just as a sort of a point here is, maybe it's one of the wrap up points as well, is that for the CMO, they have to be able to demonstrate what they're delivering. Because in too many cases, they are doing way, way more than anyone recognizes. There is so much good work that is done.

But if you don't have robust reporting that stands up to CFO scrutiny, then you're doing yourself a disservice.

Mike (36:01.442)
Yep.

Mike (36:05.801)
And that's maybe why there's such a high turnover of sales directors and marketing directors.

Caroline Hodson (36:11.872)
Absolutely. But because if you can point and go, we've done this and look, this is the trending, this is the thing, you know, then actually, you know, we have clients where you go, but you are influencing probably four times as much revenue as you can report on because this is not connected and this is not joined up. Join up these dots and actually suddenly, the impact you're having on the business goes shooting up.

Mike (36:16.706)
Yeah.

Mike (36:26.047)
Exactly.

Mike (36:38.765)
I mean, as an aside, in my old role in procurement, the reason that, you know, we often stick around and we're valuable is we deliver a direct saving. We can prove with the CFO what the saving is each year. Now, there's a strong argument to say, well, that's probably the wrong goal. That actually the suppliers you work with should be seen as an investment, not as a cost to minimize. And so there's a different debate.

Caroline Hodson (36:53.426)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike (37:08.813)
but I can see how it's easier for procurement finance operations to show the bottom line benefit they deliver. Whereas often with marketing, it can be much harder. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but it can be much harder to demonstrate the bottom line value. But again, if you're in doubt as a CMO, I'd talk to Caroline if I were you. Anyway, as a summary, if you were a B2B services company, 500 people,

Caroline Hodson (37:15.124)
Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline Hodson (37:29.792)
Very nice. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Mike (37:37.811)
and you're looking at growth and what's on your mind is as the CEO, what do I do about sales and marketing, integration, alignment, common objectives, where do I start? What are your kind of three takeaways from this conversation?

Caroline Hodson (37:53.13)
So the first thing is you have to have a single view. That is the center of everything because actually if you've got parts of your organization looking at different views of the customer, and I'm sort of talking about the customer, the view of the customer here, then you're going to get different answers, but it's very straight. So that is the first thing. The second thing is you have to, as the CEO, be looking and saying,

Mike (38:05.399)
Yep.

Caroline Hodson (38:22.548)
prove to me what you are delivering and what you are impacting. And the CMO wants to be able to answer that. And I think I go back to that, maybe it's a separate point. Attribution is possible. I think we've had this holy grail of this word called attribution. It need to be for so long, but I think many CMOs have kind of almost given up the hope. It's too hard.

It is possible and you don't have to rip the floorboards up and do a transformational effort. If you've got decent data and decent system, you need to think it through and it's not necessarily a straight line, but it is possible. So don't give up on it. Make sure that you are able to attribute the influence and impact of what you do.

Mike (39:15.757)
So a single view of the truth, attribution, what's the third thing that you'd recommend to the CEO? Right.

Caroline Hodson (39:20.03)
Well, the thing that goes into both of those is data. Don't put off facing the data challenge. The time is now. Don't put it off any longer. Just hit it head on.

Mike (39:25.633)
Yep, the time is now.

So now we mean quarter one 2025. Now is the time to get your data sorted because with the advancement of the foundation models, the advancement of AI, it...

Caroline Hodson (39:36.608)
Well, it so is. It so is.

Caroline Hodson (39:45.216)
And you can't, you're not going to be able to exploit that opportunity unless you sort it out.

Mike (39:49.931)
You won't exactly. Caroline, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much indeed. Where can people find out more about you? Where can people find out more about you?

Caroline Hodson (39:53.418)
Welcome, I enjoyed it. Lovely, thanks very much. come and visit on the website is www.WolfHodson.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Be delighted to hear from anyone.

Mike (40:04.29)
and on LinkedIn. Perfect. Caroline, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. And we're out. So let me just stop recording.

Caroline Hodson (40:09.93)
Thank you.