THE HIGHLIGHTS
How marketers can transform their brands to benefit customers
Driving change in organisations is never easy, but there are strategies marketers can adopt to make their efforts more effective
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Marketing leaders are increasingly being asked to help drive significant change in their organisations and ensure best practice is followed to achieve lasting results.
Ariel Kelman, chief marketing officer at Oracle, has implemented big marketing and sales transformations at Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and now at Oracle, where the sales team have moved from selling products to selling solutions.
At the Festival of Marketing, he revealed the role he thinks marketers can play in ensuring large-scale and disruptive strategic and operational changes are managed effectively.
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watch ‘Driving Transformational Change in Large
Organisations’ at the Festival of Marketing on demand
Find out more about how to create change and deliver for customers. Watch Oracle’s sessions, ‘Driving Transformational Change in Large Organisations’ and
‘How to put CX at the heart of your business strategy’, at the Festival of Marketing on demand now.
• Have an uncompromising attitude
“Be uncompromising about the end vision you have. At Oracle we had to move to selling and marketing solutions, and the primary thing was to present case studies where customers are using lots of products. So no compromise on that, but you can be flexible on how you get there.”
• You need clarity of purpose
“It is critical to define for yourself what is clear success or failure. Be passionate throughout about the purpose of, and benefits from, the transformation being implemented.”
• Recruit from your network
“Recruit from inside or outside the company. Be positive, optimistic and excited about the change initiative so you feel comfortable about hiring the best people from your network. If you are not passionate about the change, you may not be the best person to drive it.”
Kelman has four top tips:
Kelman added that change only happens if you can demonstrate clearly why it is needed, and can explain the outcome by walking people through the detail of what will happen and what may or may not work.
“You need to prioritise, focus on critical areas and have attention to detail,” he said. “There is no room for ‘yes’ men. You want people to push back on the leaders if things are going wrong. You also want leaders brought in early to solve issues if different teams are fighting to solve problems.” Kelman said one of the most important things he has learned is that it is crucial to put the right people in the right roles when planning a big change.
“If there is something that is important and difficult it should be someone’s full-time job to drive it. Give that person control over the resources they need to be effective. It is also vital individuals are clear about their own role so there is no overlapping when it comes to responsibility.”
• Get executive sponsorship
“Have explicit conversations with key executives so they are aware of all the details of any change, including what people might not like and what complaints there might be,” he said. “It is best to have the difficult conversations with the CEO up-front and be transparent, so the change is something they still want to do.”
The importance of customer experience
In a separate session, Oracle’s global marketing leader for customer experience (CX), Nate Skinner, outlined how marketing leaders must manage the changes brought about by the current pandemic, and review how they measure success in a virtual world.
“You cannot use year on year growth as a metric when comparing 2020 to 2019 so we have to reimagine what it means to be successful,” he said. “The metrics we can control are online.”
watch ‘How to put CX at the heart of your business strategy’
at the Festival of Marketing on demand
He added that CX can be a differentiator for brands, so it is important to invest in it to retain and win new customers, ready for when the economy improves.
“You have to make customer interactions meaningful and keep up with their demands virtually. When you think about how you can stand out in a virtual world, it is all about CX.”
Skinner said leaders must also empower people within their organisation because the customer journey is not a linear one.
“People find their way to your business and brand in lots of different ways, through customer service or browsing the website, so whoever gets to the customer first should be empowered to make that interaction impactful.”■
THE HIGHLIGHTS