Martin Häring explains how to sidestep the common pitfalls of B2B marketing.
As CMO of Temenos, a world-leader in banking software, as CMO of Temenos, a world-leader in banking software, Martin knows a thing or two about the B2B space. He marketing and how marketers need to innovate constantly but more than anything, need to be focused on the customer experience.
Three things Martin recommends:
- Don’t think about leads, think about your customer
- Don’t think about B2B, think about B2H or to B2P (Business to Human or Business to People)
- Don’t invest in push marketing, instead focus on pull marketing
To connect with Martin, find him on LinkedIn and to learn more about Temenos, visit their website: https://www.temenos.com/
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
If you prefer to watch this episode, visit (and subscribe!) to Rival’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
Martin: In the last five to 10 years, I really push hard to convert marketing departments more into customer-centric departments and less product centric or sales centric departments.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing Lessons from Leading brands and Brains, rewriting the Rule book from Scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Martin Häring, chief marketing officer of Temenos If you don't know those in the financial services world, will though is a provider of banking software systems with 67 offices in 40 countries. Temenos serves over 3000 financial institutions in 145 countries worldwide. So Martin and I as the wide range of conversations, a lot of it really focuses on customer centricity, the role of marketing and making an organization more customer-centric, and how you actually build a team and deliver work that is more customer-centric. So Martin talks about this concept of customer lifecycle marketing that he's been very vocal about and has built, put out a lot of content on this topic on LinkedIn, and I do recommend that you go follow him to read it and also to see more of the stuff that he's putting out. He talks about his 30% rule for leading marketing teams.
He also has a five R strategy framework that'll let him explain to you, and we get into the nitty gritty of actually specific things that you can do differently to make yourself and your marketing team more customer. He also has a lot of opinions about the future of the CMO role, and I thought I'd leave you with a quote from one of his recent articles as a segue into the actual conversation with him. So he says, if you want to be a truly transformational leader in cmo, you need to leave that thinking behind. You have to convince your board that marketing is more than just awareness and demand gen, and instead should be the driver for true customer centricity in your organization. So I will leave you with that thought. And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Martin Häring of Temenos. Hey Martin, how you doing? Thanks so much for joining me.
Martin: It's a pleasure to be with you. Eric,
Eric: How are things in Munich today?
Martin: Well, snowy, I would say unexpected snowy.
Eric: Wow. It's almost mid-April. Crazy. We actually just had snow in London last week at the end of March, which I think is even more crazy because it hardly ever snows in London.
Great. Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've read a lot of the content that you have been putting out, and I think as we were talking about just before we press record, it dovetails very nicely with some of the things that I believe and some of the work that we do here at Rival. So I'm excited for this one. Before we get into it, for the people that don't know, you're of course chief marketing officer of Temenos, can you just give a little bit of perspective on Temenos, what it is, the industry that you're in, kind of where you're coming at this conversation from?
Martin: So Temenos is in the market for 29 years. We have a worldwide around 3000 customers. Our focus is core banking, digital banking payments wealth management and we have presence in around 150 countries around the globe.
Eric: Great. And obviously I know you and Temenos from the time that I spent at 11:FS, so I have a little bit of perspective on the industry and I think it's a fascinating one for this type of conversation because as you know, what we are interested in is kind of how challengers disrupt categories, and there's so much going on that I saw firsthand at 11 Fs with Foundry, but so much going on with how challengers are starting to come into the core banking space. And so I think it's really interesting to get your perspective on what you're doing in one of the biggest companies in this sector right now. So I know that we have a lot to talk about. I would love to first get your perspective on a brand that you are fascinated by right now and why
Martin: It's, it's probably not just one brand probably two or three. The biggest one because I'm also a technology at heart is Apple. I think since they came to the market with this wonderful tagline, think different, I just love them. They are creating almost a puzzle of effect for me. Whenever I see the Apple brand or I walk past by a Apple shop, I have the tendency to go in and see what's new and I'm really disappointed if I can't buy something. So it's such a pull effect. It's fascinating. On the other hand, I like Adobe a lot as a brand because of their creativity. When I visit their website I always want to get more of it really, I think they deliver wonderful creativity. They're inspiring. It's a brand that I love for many, many years. And the last one is more a recent one over the last 10 years. Netflix I admire them really for what they built, how they challenge the whole video industry and what they deliver today is for me, the perfect customer experience. So probably these are the three brands that I admire most.
Eric: It is interesting, the Adobe one because I think that B2B marketing often gets a bad rap. It's kind of seen as the ugly stepchild to B2C marketing. B2C marketing is where all the budgets go and all the sexy campaigns are and where all the, I don't know bigwig CMOs come from, but actually, and I was talking to someone a very senior Fortune 50 C M O, who was judging a set of B B2B awards recently. I can't remember which ones they were, but he was saying he was just blown away by the level of creativity that was coming out of some of these brands and some of these agencies doing B2B work. And we do here at Rival, we do a lot of B2B work. And part of why I'm passionate about that is because I sometimes think that the bar can sometimes be lower because so many B2B organizations are sales led instead of marketing led with how they grow. And therefore marketing is often a underutilized, underdeveloped muscle within these organizations. And so if you can bring in the right talent, bring in the right leadership, bring in the right structure, and inject a little bit of creativity, you can really do amazing things. And I think Adobe is an example of that.
Martin: Absolutely. And by the way, I think to classify between B2B and B2C is also a bit outdated. I think the modern marketing is around B2 P business to people because this is, I think the way we should think in the context also of what I call custom lifecycle marketing. So you orchestrate your marketing around the personas, the people, and these people have different roles throughout the day. So it's more how do you tackle them throughout the day with your messages. I think the best ideas probably really stem from B2C area and have now a huge influence on b2b. But going forward, I think these two categories are just fading away and are replaced by just being customer obsessed and hitting the customer at the end of the day at the right moment with the right message to attract them for their product.
Eric: Yeah, you're right, it is a very product or business-centric way of thinking about things B2B versus B2C if you're more customer-centric, which of course is a topic that we are going to unpack and talk about at length today. It's just people, Dean Aragon, who's the chief brand officer at Shell who's an advisor for us at Rival, he talks about this concept of business to human marketing and humanizing marketing within business. And I think the Netflix example is actually a good one because I always hold them up as an example of you don't separate the experiences that you have as a business buyer and as a consumer. And so the brands and the products and services that are creating better experiences for us as consumers like Netflix, particularly the level of personalization that they offer, that raises the bar for what I expect from a business when I'm buying from a business as well. And so you need to understand the experience, the context, the culture, the technology, the media around the customer, be customer centric, which is of course a big thing that you're pushing and that you're leading with at Teos. I think that's always going to lead you in the right direction. And it's definitely a big part of how to think about marketing as well.
Martin: When you look in today's world there are normally three things that make people buy something. It's either product price or customer experience driven. And there's this magic, what I call the 30% rule. So if you are 30% better on a price on a product feature or on the customer experience side, you will win the customer below. It's hard to win them. But in a world where products and pricing is under heavy competition the real differentiator at the end of the cycle is other people, is the customer experience. So I think that absolutely the new battleground for marketing is that custom experience.
Eric: So let's dive into things from there because I think that's a great segue to some of the topics that you've been very vocal about recently and that I really want to talk to you about today. So you've been a marketing leader for 30 years now. You've obviously seen a lot, you've been in a lot of different organizations. I'd love to get your perspective on what you think has changed during that period, and probably even more importantly for people listening who are building careers, building businesses and brands in the space now. Where do you see the future of marketing leadership going?
Martin: So I think over the years I have experienced a lot of I would call it strange perceptions about marketing from other functions. People seem to think it's about nice ads, great events, webinars, more leads, more opportunities, but that world has fundamentally changed. So it's not a surprise that in the past, marketing has been purely measured over almost the last decade on awareness leads and opportunities and pipelines. That was the measurement. And I think this is really thinking almost from the nineties I personally push a framework which I call the five R strategy framework, which is about five hours. These five Rs are reach, relevance, revenue, relationships, and reputation, and that is centered around the customer. So reach means how do you reach to millions of eyeballs every day with your marketing message? How do you then convert that reach with a relevant information into consideration?So how do you create relevance through thought leadership, through inspiring content through stuff where the customer would say, I want to know more. The third is this revenue. How do you convert that consideration than in opportunity? That is the classic one, but the last to us, our relationship, how do you create more context more relations with partners? How do you build larger ecosystems around your solution? And finally, how do you create a world-class, not just with present analyst, but also how do you turn around your partners and customers and advocates for your company? So for me, this is what modern marketing is all about, focusing and arranging all the marketing function behind that one topic customer centricity. And therefore in that context, I think old models where you do push marketing in every channel. So you push mails, you call up customers or have large telemarketing centers, or you push content to a website expecting that the customers hopefully will visit that website. I think that all is over because this is not customer-centric for me, customer-centric is when you approach and go to a pool marketing where you opt in into the channels that your customers will use to get entertained, to get informed to get inspired. If you don't know those channels you fall flat, you will not succeed. So all of that I think is the way forward that at least I have experienced. And in the last five to 10 years, I really push hard to convert marketing departments more into customer centric departments and less product centric or sales centric departments.
Eric: So there's like seven things I want to unpack from that, just last minute or two of what you said. But let's start with, so you have a five hours framework, which I think is really interesting. And then also at the end there, you said kind of over the last three decades how you've transformed marketing departments, et cetera. I'm always curious to take the theory and actually get under the hood of what does it look like in practice, actionable advice for the people listening. So whichever direction you want to take it, whether it's, I was originally going to ask, well, how do you actually embed the five Rs in your team? So it's something that people are thinking and doing and everybody's rowing that boat in the same direction towards the five Rs. Or maybe you could talk about a case study of how you have transformed a marketing department that you've worked at in the past, so wherever you want to take it. But I guess my question is how do you take this theory of building a customer-centric modern marketing organization and actually put it into practice in a way that people listening can take and apply to their own roles?
Martin: Okay, so I think there are two roads to that. One is internally marketing. How do you structure marketing around that and measure and incentivise people around that? And the second thing, how do to bring customer centricity into the rest of the company? Because I'm a big ambassador that the role of the C M O should be not just marketing led, but the C M O should almost be the new chief customer officer going forward and influence many more decisions across different department and functions. But let's stress first, the first topic, how to drive this inside marketing. When you look at the five Rs reach, relevance, revenue, relationships and reputation, almost all these five Rs are attached to certain departments. So how do you create reach in a modern world? And the answer is clearly social channels. So it's all about digital and social because that doesn't cost a lot and you reach the people that you really want and you don't have to worry about your database quality inside the company because in social, people want to opt in into your channel and your communication channel. And once they opted in, they it's your friend and family. So you don't struggle to get the right message to the right person. Everyone that is connected to you wants to listen to you or the probability is much higher that they're listening to you. So reach is all about digital marketing and social marketing one department. The next one is about relevance. So what you send out resonates with that person at that moment in time. So this is all about persona based solution marketing, what is the right solution for a certain persona in a bank? And the department that should care about that is solution marketing. They create the value proposition that should be focused on a certain persona in a bank revenue, turning that interest and awareness then in leads and opportunities and hard-hitting pipeline, that is the role of the department that does the last mile to the customer, which is field marketing. These are the people that are sitting in all the different countries that we have presence in and trying to convert all these pieces that are coming from solution marketing into the last mile to the customer and deciding should we do this through social or webinars or solution round tables or event participation? What else? The fourth thing is relationships. So for me, that is account-based marketing introduced almost 10 years ago now, but still I think in an infant stage in many companies. But I'm a big believer that especially in high investments areas like banking, a B M is the way to grow and to grow the share of wallet in large accounts. And finally, reputation is analyst relations is press relations, is customer advocacy. So more or less you can map the customer life cycle and five Rs almost to departments. And this is how we also have structured marketing at Temenos. Then on a larger context, how do you drive customer centricity into the company? And that is a much more complex thing because what you have to think around customer centricity is you have throughout the customer life cycle, the buying side of probably 10 to 12 different touchpoints within the company. It starts from marketing, but then you have pre-sales, have sales, you have legal, you have professional services, you have support services, you have the training department and so on and so on. How can you make sure that every touchpoint is kind of creating a moment of delight for the customer? And even if you just miss that level of delight in two or three cases, the customer is starting to get annoyed. It doesn't give you a good NPSs rating and things like that. So one thing that I have introduced in a former company was a methodology which I called the customer health index. So the customer health index was using a metrics for 12 different touchpoints in a customer life cycle and measured just KPIs if the customer is happy about that. So for example, when you have a KPI around professional services, the only three things that are relevant for the customer is, was the project delivered on time in budget? And with the right functionality? Simple three questions, are you happy on these three? And if you do these KPIs for every touchpoint in the company and you've measured that and track that in real time in a system, then you are not surprised suddenly by bad NPS ratings because you can see it coming. And with that, attaching it also to different functions in a company, you have clear responsibility and accountability to fix it. The downside of an NPS today is that NPS is looking into the back mirror. It's a reflection of the past. You can't predict the future based on that. It's hard. But with a real time tracking of customer health, you can do it. You can see it coming. If a customer is now annoyed about the support services or they had a bad sales experience, they might not buy again. And therefore, I think these are the two things that I drive from a strategic perspective, how do you implement customer centricity on a cross-functional basis, but then also on the marketing side.
Eric: So what does the future CMO look like with everything that's going on with this need to build customer, customer-centric organizations to be able to drive this effective change, roll out effective strategies and tactics around poll communication, not push communication. What does a transformational CMO look like to you over the next kind of decade? What is that? What are those people going to look like?
Martin: Probably three things. First you need to be a constant challenger. You can't be happy with the status quo. Every morning I wake up, I think, is the marketing that I do today fit for purpose for tomorrow? Is it best in class? And who are other companies that I can compare with? You need to be an innovator and you need to be curious. You need to have a learning mentality, especially as a CMO. A lot of CMOs have the attitude, oh, I'm 30 years in marketing, I know my stuff. But marketing is changing so fast especially in the last five to 10 years. The whole digital trends. And if you are not curious, if you don't listen to the street, if you don't learn constantly you are not up for being a modern marketing manager. The second thing is you need to be almost p, yeah p passionate and obsessed on customer centricity. If the customer is not at the forefront, if you still count leads and opportunities and think that is world-class marketing, you are completely missing the point. So in a modern marketing organization, you need to be the customer advocate and you need to have the ability to create larger ecosystems, especially when you're in tech. So think of this, you can always run your own show with your own products, but as a company, you only grow linear with the amount of people you hire, the amount of new sales reps or the capacity in marketing, you grow linear. But when you start to build ecosystems, ecosystems that build solutions on top of your own technology, you start to scale. That is the network effect. That is why software companies that have a platform strategy are much more successful than if you just sell standalone software. So creating, having a customer focus and being an ecosystem builder.Second, and probably the last one that I will tell my team is don't focus on activities, focus on impact. A lot of marketers in the past when I see their KPIs and scorecard, they are activity driven. How many events have you done? How many round tables, how many Google ads, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. It's activity driven but not impact driven. So at the end of the day, you have to show an roi and you have to show that you contributed more than you cost the company. So I think these three togethers probably are the essence, what I would call a modern cmo.
Eric: Let's talk about this concept of customer lifecycle marketing. Can you unpack that for us? What it means to you, how you implement it at Teos, why it's so important for people listening?
Martin: So customer lifecycle marketing is just a concept where you rep all the marketing functions around the customer lifecycle, the buying journey of a customer. Because in many other business it's very simple. Create happy customers for life because happy customers buy more, consume more, stick with you, more pro and promote you more. And like I said at the beginning, there are three drivers for customer happiness. It's if you deliver a world-class product that has the best features and outperforms the rest of the competition, if your product is better priced and than that of the competition. And if the company has the best in class people that you want to work with on a day-to-day basis. And the differentiator is no longer really on product and pricing because this is adopted very quickly and the competition is speak. So all vendors in our software space are plus minus 20%. So the customer is not selecting based on price and also product functionality. Even if you are a little ahead this year, the next year you might be lagging a bit. But the third point is what makes the difference? It's the people you work with. And for me, this is where really see customer lifecycle marketing or C l M kicks in. It's about making every CU customer interaction a joyous moment. A moment of what I called unexpected delight. I think this word comes initially from Apple. You want to create that moment of unexpected delight from awareness generation to negotiation, to contract closure, implementation, support, every touchpoint you have that moment of, wow, this is nice to work with Taos because people think different. They pick me up in certain moments where I wouldn't expect it. It's a bit an adoption from the B2C area. When you think about Amazon or Netflix, you log in and they say, Hey, Martin, herring based on your buying behavior, we have these new fancy products for you at a special price today. Or you watch these kind of series what about this new series? You just think, oh, it's nice. They think of me as Martin Herring. And that moment of unexpected surprise makes stickiness. And that's more or less all about customer lifecycle marketing.
Eric: Yeah, one of the things I think about a lot is just how much of our day-to-day experiences, I mean in general, but certainly with the brands that we buy from or are exposed to, so much of those experiences are expected. And unexceptional, I say, right, and that's just the norm. It's like you get what you pay for and that's about it. But occasionally, rarely there are brands and businesses that deliver an unexpected and exceptional experience. And those stand out so much, especially in industries where that's not the dorm when it comes to C P G or when it comes to retailer, when it comes to video streaming, maybe expected a little bit more to get an unexpected and exceptional, exceptional experience. But I think of airlines or probably core banking technology, most people are not expecting an exceptional experience from their vendor and their partner. And it's one of the things I would throw out there for any marketer in any industry, if you sit down for 30 minutes and do a brainstorm with your team on, Hey, what are 10 things we could do for our customers today or tomorrow, that would be unexpected and exceptional. One, I think people really like thinking outside the box like that because so much of what we do as marketers is kind of the expected and exceptional. So let them go outside the box, let them use their creative juices a little bit. But it's amazing how a little bit of that kind of magic can go a long way. So I think we definitely line up in thinking about that. And it's an actionable thing that I'm hoping some people listening will actually go do differently based on this conversation between us, because I think it can really have a big impact.
Martin: I totally agree. And banking industry is probably the worst in creating these unexpected moments of delight. And it is not that hard. I, I'll just give you an example. Something that I tried to drive right now at demos is really the digital customer life cycle marketing. So when you think normally you would get an email that routes you to a webinar, you attend this webinar and then that's it, right? But how many people in these times really want to go to a webinar anymore? We are saturated, we don't like it anymore. We stand in front of our monitors all day long. So the last you want is another webinar that costs you three or four hours. So when you look on the other side what we are trying to drive is now really social marketing where the social post routes back to a lending page where you have a video explaining you something. A 45 second video tells you more than 45 pages of PowerPoint and video is attractive. So I think every modern company needs to almost convert into a media company entertaining people instead of just driving texts and PowerPoints and things like that. And after you have watched this 45 second video, it routes you immediately to, Hey, and by the way, do you want to watch a demo of that product? Again, a demo, a good made three minute demo tells you more than 30 minutes of PowerPoint talk, and that leads to something inspiring. Something that you download is an ebook or something like that. And the only thing you want to give is for the download is your email address, nothing else. And within three steps, completely driven by social and digital, you have an email address of a customer that thinks it was worth to give my email address because what you guys do here in just three steps gave me that moment of unexpected surprise. I would not have thought about this from a core banking vendor. And these are the little things that make finally the difference where you outmarket the competition just based on these kind of tactics.
Eric: And that's the beauty and the brilliance of the pull communication versus the push communication. And that to me is very similar to the whole idea of brands thinking and acting like media companies, which as you know, is a religion that I subscribe to. And that's just it. And to me, I think the biggest difference and the thing, the way that I talk about it, but actually it'd be good. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about how you talk about and work with your teams on pull communication versus push communication. Cause I think we probably end up in the same spot, but maybe the terminology is different is to me it all comes down to value. Are you thinking about adding value to your customers or are you thinking about extracting value from customers? But a bit to what you were talking about earlier, I think there's also a change with how you need to think about attention. In the world of push communication, you expected to have your audience's attention for as long as you wanted to serve them an ad or whatever the communication was that you wanted to put out there. Now in today's world where every brand is a media company, whether they are taking advantage of that model or not, the competition for attention, especially if you're focused on digital and social channels, is such that only good content will get paid attention to, which means only good content, only pull communication will have the opportunity to deliver the marketing message that you actually want to put out there. So I guess I don't have a specific question, but I just want to, as we've talked about a little bit before, I think the media company model and how you talk about poll communication is very, very similar. So maybe let's take that down a level. What does the ethos of poll communication look like when you get down to the level of what are you actually doing differently with your marketing strategy, with your teams, etc?
Martin: When I give you, there's this old-fashioned thinking of poor communication, of push communication. Still, I see many companies doing classical newsletters. Well, newsletters, you have to build them. They are, there's a lot of work to do this. You send them out on a quarterly basis and it's probably when you send them out, the news is already outdated in that communication newsletter. So it's like reading the newspaper from yesterday, it's just boring and it doesn't hit the target audience in the way you want. And one newsletter can never, ever fulfill the demand for different persona groups. So it's like, again, reading a newspaper where you just take the sports area or the economical news out and you drop the rest of the newspaper, it's a worse waste of resources. But still a lot of marketing departments are doing this. It's again that thinking that if you push something to your website or automatically, your audience will look at it. Now, we all know that you are no longer going straight to the vendor website. You go to sites where you have comparisons, where you want insights from other companies, where you have rating of softwares. So maybe the last 10% of your information hunger is then when you go really to the vendor website. So this new world of pool communication is let the market find the information that the market really wants and try to find out in which channels you need to be to hit your target audience. And again, the best way is social. When you link into Taos, you want to be on the LinkedIn channel of Temenos, you show interest, you want to be informed by Taos. If you opt in or be a follower of Martin Harig, you want to know what Martin Herring has to tell you on a day-to-day basis. If you opt in into other channels Facebook, Instagram, whatever, you show interest in something. And that kind of interest for that persona needs to be fulfilled by vendors. And therefore this whole it's not just push communication, it's push marketing is completely outdated and needs to roll into a pool marketing.
Eric: So there's another, I knew we would run out of time there's so much that we didn't get to, but I know we only had a couple minutes left and there's a whole other area of discussion that we haven't touched on, and I want to do that briefly. So you've talked a lot about let's call it organizational design, how modern marketing functions need to be structured, the type of talent that they need, how they need to work together, how you introduce Agile into the marketing function. So I'd love to use the last few minutes that we have to just give you time to talk about organizational design, culture and capability within a marketing function within the context of everything. Sure that you've already talked about.
Martin: I think we need to walk away from a classical marketing setup where you have the comms department and you have a product marketing department, and you have the field marketing organization. Because what you create within marketing are silos that are sometimes even not really connected. So you are not even thinking about silos within your whole company. You are thinking about silos in your own marketing department, which sometimes are hard to overcome. It is this typical discussion when you have a very centralistic marketing organization. It's the discussion between, oh, the headquarter doesn't understand what the field wants. Or the headquarter would say, oh, the field doesn't get it and doesn't adapt all my ideas. So I am these discussions between decentralized marketing models and centralized marketing models. Again, were a discussion of the last decade where you either decided to go in one of those direction, modern marketing organization, but also I think modern organization overall should adopt the agile methodology. So you come together with a defined business case with a challenge that you have. Maybe you want to enter a new market in a certain region, and you don't know how to do this in the best way. Instead of having a staff function that would look at the strategy you would expect that maybe two or three people are so genius that they would know how to tackle this new market. But the fact is that the base knows much more about this market. So why not create an agile team of eight or nine people that come together just in a 14, two weeks timeframe to discuss based on the business challenge, what needs to be done. And you contribute into this team from many functions. So there must be representatives from awareness, from reputation, from relationship, also salespeople chief strategists, sometimes even people from the outside that are bringing you new ideas. So you form that team, you give them a concrete task, you give them just two weeks to wrestle on that business topic. And what you get is so much better than what you would have designed on a centralistic basis. So I think whenever you tackle major business problems, if you don't have an open leadership culture that has the philosophy that the best ideas come from the base and you collect those ideas through those kind of agile teams, I think you're missing a big trick and you will not produce the best outcome for the company. So we just had recently at Tainos one case where we looked at our engagement survey. Every year Tainos does an engagement survey with employees, and we identified three or four difficult touch points that we need to work on. Now I can go back and say with my management team, how do we execute on that? How do we get better? But now we said, that doesn't make sense. The problems are seen by the base, by our people. So let them work on solutions and propose them back to the management and make creative and agile teams based out on that. We just gave them two weeks and the output they created were just amazing. We would never ever get to that kind of results in a traditional way. So I just think the introduction of that agile methodology that initially came from the software industry is a very nice one also for the whole company and for marketing and some companies out there. One company that I was part of in the past, redhead is driving this as a role model. I could tell you this notion of open leadership style and agile teams is extremely driven, and it was very beneficial. Now in the role that I have now,
Eric: Yeah, I think you're going to see it a lot more in large organizations. And one of the things we're fascinated by, what is it about successful challenger businesses that allows them to disrupt the category that they're in? And then also having worked in startups most of my career, but always had clients that were bigger enterprise organizations. I'm also interested in the contrast between how challengers and startups do things and how large organizations do things. And a lot of it comes down to size, of course. But if you look cut open the leadership teams, the people dynamics, the culture of challengers and startups, it would be much more like what you're talking about. And often a lot of this stuff can come from big consultancies and it can come from big research studies and all that. That's fine. But actually one of the big opportunities I think if you're in a large organization, is to look at what a lot of the challengers are doing in their space. And they might not call it agile, and they might not call it these frameworks that are out there that allow for more skill, but they kind of do it naturally. And I think there's a big opportunity in that.
Eric: So Martin, we definitely ran out of time. We could have used another 40 minutes. But before we wrap, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you think is really important for our listeners to hear? And maybe I can just give you a minute or two on that.
Martin: Maybe. What is my final advice to modern marketers? I think there are three things. First thing is don't think about leads. Think about your customer, number one. Second is don't think about B2B or b2c. Think about B two H, like you said, the human or b2 P, how I called it the business to people. And the last one is, don't invest any longer in push marketing, but pull marketing.
Eric: Great. All right, Martin, well, I think that we will leave it there. Thank you so much again for joining us. If people want to connect with you, hear more about your perspective on things, I'm assuming LinkedIn is the best place for them to do that, knowing that that's where I found most of your content. All right. So we'll put a link, put link to your LinkedIn in the show notes as well as as a link to Tek so that they can see the output of the brand and the marketing that you're doing. And I think that's it. So thank you so much for joining me, and I hope you have a great rest of your snowy day in Munich,
Martin: <laugh>. Thanks, Eric. It was a pleasure.
Eric: Take care.
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
