October 29, 2024 • 41 mins
In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, Graham Wylie joins Dom to challenge the conventional view of marketing.
Wylie argues that marketing shouldn’t be confined to a single department but should be a company-wide responsibility. He explains the importance of aligning marketing promises with product delivery and encourages organisations to involve every team member in creating a consistent customer experience.
Key points:
- Marketing as a company-wide responsibility rather than a department function.
- The risks of inconsistent brand promises when marketing efforts are siloed.
- Leveraging market disruptions to drive change and opportunity.
- Engaging every stakeholder across the business for a unified marketing approach.
Listen now to learn how to break marketing out of its silo and drive growth across your organisation.
About Graham Wylie
Is Graham the world's foremost authority on marketing in organisations going through change? Possibly ;)
With three decades in B2B marketing, across vastly different geographies and industries; Agency, VC, PE and Corporate environments, and always at an inflection point for the business, there is real depth and breadth to his experience. Combine that with a nerd-level curiosity about how marketing actually works, and why businesses struggle with go-to-market, you get a rare combination of cutting edge theory, innovative practice and real world pragmatism that delivers results.
As we recorded this podcast Graham was wrapping up a large corporate transformation and by the time you listen to it he will have started as Chief Marketing Officer for activpayroll.
Links
Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk
Watch episode: https://youtu.be/CNdB6sGzYJs
LinkedIn: Graham Wylie | Dom Hawes
Website: activpayroll
Sponsor: Selbey Anderson
Other items referenced in this episode:
The Unicorny Marketing Show: April Dunford
80. The Unicorny Marketing Manifesto: What marketing is
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
How many times in your lifehas the brand promise that a marketing
function made beendisappointed by the client service
experience or the productreality? First, advice for a marketer
is never waste a crisis,right? If you've got a disruption
happening in your market,those are all opportunities to start
approaching the stakeholders.
(00:28):
Today we are exploring a topicthat may just change the way you
think about how marketing getsdone. Now, we've mentioned it before
at a very conceptual level onthis show, but we've never really
got into the weeds and todaywe're going to do just that. And
here's the what if marketing abusiness wasn't just the responsibility
of the marketing department?What if it was something that everybody
(00:49):
in your organization should beinvolved in? Now, in most companies,
there seems to be anassumption that only the marketing
department does marketing.After all, it's seen as a separate
function responsible forthings like promotions campaigns
while generally getting theword out. But as we keep banging
on about on this, the unicornymarketing show, there is more to
promotional marketing thanadvertising. And there's more to
(01:13):
marketing than promotion.Marketing is actually the whole process
of taking a business, aproduct or a service to market. Now,
my guest today is GrahamWiley. He's an extraordinarily seasoned
marketing executive and allround business strategist and guru.
And he believes that themindset that marketing belongs in
the marketing departmentdepartment is outdated and is joining
(01:34):
us today to challenge that. Hebelieves marketing is so important
it can't just be left tomarketers. It has to involve everybody.
As he says, marketing abusiness is everybody's business.
So whether you're an MD, aCEO, a CFO, head of operations or
in internal audit, thisepisode is for you. Today we are
(01:54):
going to explore how marketingcan and should be a driving force
across your wholeorganization. Let's get straight
to the studio and meet Graham Wiley.
Pleasure to be here. Lookingforward to the conversation. I've
listened to a number of theprevious podcasts. You've got a good
cross section of guests and abreadth of opinion.
I hope so. Well, when we'regoing to add to that today, why don't
we start? By the words ofCinder Black, maybe you could tell
(02:16):
us who you are and whereyou're from.
So I'm Graham Wiley and Irather like the way April Dunford
talks about positioning. So Iwas thinking about this this morning
and I thought the world'sforemost authority on marketing and
organizations going throughchange. So three decades in b, two
b, marketing for organizationsthat are an inflection point. So
whether that's a growth,growth or a turnaround, whether it's
(02:37):
VCP or corporateorganizations, cross section of industries,
cross section of marketers. Sorather been there, done that, got.
The t shirt, just theinteresting bits. Then when it gets
like normal, I.
Have a low boredom threshold.
I don't really do normal forunicorns. You may not know, but before
every interview that you hearon the podcast, we have a pre meet.
(02:57):
On this occasion, what Inormally do is I ask our guest to
identify one topic they reallywant to talk about. And while we
were talking to Graham on thatcall, he said something really profound,
which is that marketing's tooimportant to be left solely to marketers.
And that made me step back alittle bit. But actually it's kind
of in thinking with some ofthe themes we've been developing
(03:18):
on this podcast. But I don'tthink I've heard anyone express it
like so clearly. Maybe youcould explain what you mean by it
and why you think that thatconcept is important for any organization
looking to transform.
There's a lot of discussion,always has been, within marketing,
about its place inside theorganization. And it seems to lurch
from crisis to crisis. Shouldbe living in a golden age of marketing
(03:41):
when you think about howchallenging the market environment
is, how empowered the buyersare, but there still seems to be
a sense that marketing is anidea, is challenged and in some areas
failing. And looking at that,I think actually marketing is probably
the most successful idea ofthe 20th century. How you think about
the structure of a marketorientation, approaching the market
and driving more than thetransactional sales engagement. But
(04:05):
it's the marketing departmentwhen it's confined to a department
that seems to be strugglingfor its definition and its scope.
I simply think that the ideaof marketing has been so successful
that it has outgrown thelimitations of a silo. And so the
marketing leadership rolebegins to evolve from the doing of
marketing in a dedicated siloto the orchestration of a whole company
(04:27):
effort to deliver that promisethat marketing makes to the end consumer
or to the end user in abusiness to business context.
I get the concept because Ithink what I've seen is that so often
now in organizations, theyseem to think the battle for marketing
is territorial rather thanideological. And so you get marketers
who are trying to hold ontomore and more of the function and
(04:49):
being less successful at doingit. Which then is why I think there
are organizations who wouldtell you that particularly in business
to business, marketing is incrisis. Marketing is just fine. I
love the way you phrase thatthe most successful idea of the 20th
century.
I've seen all the differentmodels and conversations, so you
can think about it and you dothe academic study, and we were talking
(05:10):
earlier about studying thetheory of marketing. There's a point.
Either the academics have itwrong around the application of marketing,
or the marketers are doing itwrong, or the business simply isn't
understanding. And you canbreak down the challenge of marketing
under those three kind ofumbrellas and look at it in granular
detail. And what you find isthat actually marketing isn't the
(05:31):
same in any two organizations.There's different functions doing
different things, but it setsout the same objective. I know you've
spent time thinking about whatis marketing and episode when you
were talking about thedefinition of marketing. Well, if
you bring that into acorporate or business to business
environment, it needs to betailored for what that business is
trying to achieve and theresources and institutions it has.
But in theory, marketing ownseverything. But in practice, in so
(05:55):
many different organizations,it doesn't own product, it doesn't
have a say on pricing, it'sbeing directed by others on how it
does communication. It'sdifferent in every organization,
which of course means everyorganization can change and tailor
and evolve the way theyapproach marketing. Typically that
happens at a point ofinflection when they're going through
a change.
Do you think the fact it isdifferent is a problem though?
(06:17):
No, I think it's what makes itstrong. I think if you take the principle
of building around thecustomer and targeting the customer
and providing a level of valueto that customer, that should be
a whole company effort. Howmany times in your life has the brand
promise that a marketingfunction made been disappointed by
(06:37):
the client service experienceor the product reality? And if marketing
doesn't have an input orreview across that, or isn't shaping
how the whole organizationthinks about it, you end up with
almost a schizophrenicorganization where it thinks it's
one thing, but it's promisingsomething else to the market.
That's really common as well,I think. Interesting, I'm working
up a new episode. It'll be amonologue, I think again about something
(06:59):
that's totally overlooked,certainly in software companies,
which is that the relationshipbetween customer and supplier is
captured in a contract andmarketing never gets to think about
the terms of those contractsand say you've got a lot of SaaS
companies now who are trappingpeople in contracts with auto renew
dates. And if ever there was apromise to the customer that gets
(07:21):
broken, it's broken in thatdocument. And again, I'm not saying
marketing should be writingthose documents. If culture is what
you do and your brand promisesis how you interact and behave with
your customers, it seems to methat it comes to documenting those
relationships. Maybe moreeffort needs to be given to it.
I would caution against such abroad, sweeping statement that marketing
(07:42):
never gets to look at thecustomer contract because there are
organizations where themarketing team is involved in that
conversation. There are partsof the organization where you rethink
a product proposition andyou're changing a product proposition.
You have to think about thewhole product solution and some of
that is how you're going tocontract. Are you going to drive
market share and growth bymaking it easier to do business with
(08:02):
you than somebody else? So wetend to default to. It's not common.
I'll agree it's not common formarketing to be in there, but there
are great marketers working onthe detail of public sector contract
and tendering processes andI've worked with some of them and
they do great work in thatspecific process.
Well I'm very pleased to becorrected on that one, but I am going
to call out some bad companieswhen that episode comes. I've briefed
(08:25):
the lawyers to stand by. So ifmarketing is too important to be
left solely to marketers in anorganization, who else is doing the
marketing and how do wecategorize them or how do you try
and embrace them?
So if you, as you didrecently, take a step back and think
what do we mean by marketing?And I think the CIM's earlier definition
was profitably meeting theneeds of a customer. So the whole
(08:46):
organization is involved inprofitably meeting the needs of a
customer. From my perspective,actually understanding who's owning
and delivering those touchpoints and what's their guiding principle,
you know, is the operationbeing driven to reduce cost and eliminate
customer touch points whilstthe salespeople are being driven
to deliver a white gloveexperience and it's finding those
disconnects and looking forthat continuity through the buying
(09:10):
journey that allows you toactually work out. Is this consistent?
In which case, terrific.Everybody's working in separate functions,
but they're orchestrated anddelivering the same promise. Or are
there inconsistencies? And arethose inconsistencies impacting the
business adversely? So I sayI've got a track record coming into
companies when they're goingthrough change. Typically that's
looking at theinconsistencies. It's we've got a
(09:32):
pipeline problem or a salesclose problem actually. Maybe youve
got the right quality of dealsin, but the salesperson isnt executing
effectively, or youve got aproduct market fit problem, or you
think youre selling x andactually the audience is trying to
buy y. So that framework ofauditing the existing business and
then saying, okay, where areactually the real challenges? Where
(09:53):
are the things were going toprioritize to make a change that
allows you to pick where theinconsistencies are and then focus
on those, and then go to thepeople who are currently delivering
and working on those tounderstand first why there are inconsistencies,
and then secondly, whethersomething they're doing needs to
change or if they've got itright all along, because they're
maybe closest to the customerand it's what's going on upstream
(10:15):
that needs to change in orderto create that consistent value.
Raoul so either way, the pointof change or that moment of inflection
implies there's going to besome conflict because someone's going
to have to change what they'redoing. And people do get, they like
to get territorial about that.How does an organization, or how
does a marketing organizationget buy in from EO and fo ideological
(10:36):
with the EO and assetallocation with the fO to make the
kind of transformation you'retalking about?
I'll speak from oneperspective, which is I've tended
to work with organizationsthat are going through change. The
reason I do that is it givesme the opportunity to affect that
change. There are a great manyvery smart marketers in large and
small organizations thatalready have a fixed mindset that
they're never going to affectthat change, because marketing isn't
(10:58):
going to drive that change. Ifthe company's making its number,
if it's investing in line withits priorities, it's not looking
to unsettle the business. Soyou're looking for those points where
the business is beingunsettled externally and then finding
out how you lean into those.So first, advice for a marketer is
never waste a crisis. Ifyou've got a disruption happening
in your market, a competitorentry, a change in the regulatory
(11:21):
landscape, a change in acompetitor's offering, those are
all opportunities to startapproaching the stakeholders and
then actually understandingthat those stakeholders have typically
a very limited view of themarketing function and what it has
done historically. So I saidearlier that the cause for that marketing
is being challenged is eitherthe academics have it wrong, the
(11:42):
marketers are doing it badly,or the C suite doesn't understand
what it needs. All models arewrong, but some are more useful than
others. Yes, there aremarketers who are doing it wrong,
but there's marketers that'sdoing it brilliantly. Yes, marketing
tends to be quite inwardlooking and chewing over itself on
the different priorities. Butthe biggest obstacle you've got right
off the bat is that the Csuite doesn't necessarily understand
(12:03):
that marketing can be part ofthe solution. And the CEO, Ben Horowitz,
and the hard thing about hardthings has this lovely idea about
being a wartime CEO or apeacetime CEO. That's the first job
for the marketer. Understandwhat CEO you've got and what priorities
and challenges they're facing.And then Rory Sutherland did a lovely
piece recently about CFOmindset and stability and predictability
(12:26):
above everything else. So ifyoure going to a wartime CEO who
has a CFO whos based onpredictability and stability, and
you have an inflection pointin your market now youre in an interesting
conversation, right. And thatopens all kinds of doors to doing
things differently. But if youhave a steady state, peacetime CEO,
Peacetime CFO, a highfunctioning organization thats delivering
(12:47):
its numbers, the organizationwont naturally be looking for change.
So its going to be a longerterm process for a marketer to orchestrate
more broadly across the business.
I would also argue if allthose things are going well, it doesn't
need change.
Yeah, you're probably tweakingaround the edges, although it's interesting,
even some of the bestexamples, and you look at the world
(13:08):
of BTC and the FE awards, theyalways start with, everything was
going great until, andeverything had been going great,
whether it's a soap powder orwhether it's a chocolate bar. It
had owned its category untiltypically takes an organization quite
a long time to catch on thatthings are not going well. A marketer
should be at the forefront ofthat. They will be hearing it from
(13:28):
sales. They will be seeing itin the market data. They will be
hearing it from thecompetition in the market. And they
should be bringing thatcustomer perspective into the organization
to say, I know the lastquarter was fabulous. I'm looking
four, five, six quarters out,and I think we have some things that
we can do better.
That's always, my caveat,actually, is that things can be going
very well, therefore thebusiness could be doing it well.
(13:49):
But is it sustainable? And weknow that plateau inevitably leads
to decline. If you're notgrowing, you are going to decline.
There is going to be thatmoment where things go wrong.
And that problem with thelevel of C suite understanding and
marketing being the mostsuccessful idea of the 20th century
people believe it's a reallyweird situation. They believe that
marketing can do anything,that I can come to you in the final
(14:12):
quarter when the numbers arelow with money I found down the back
of the sofa and say, can youfix this situation for sales two
months later at the beginningof the fiscal year? There's no money
available because it's notvisible or tangible results that
we delivered. So if thatplateau is left and if you wait for
the inflection point, themarketing organization is going to
(14:33):
be under pressure to do justthe short term quick fix. The time
to have those toughconversations, the time to think
about broadening the influenceof the marketing organization, is
when you can see the changecoming down the pipe, but it hasn't
yet hit the business in ameaningful way. And that's the nuance
of then engaging with theexecutive senior leadership team
to say, okay, this is what'sgoing to happen. This is the way
(14:56):
the market's developing. Do weall agree that you have a conversation
about the market and thatdrives towards outcomes? If you walk
in there and go, hey, wemarketing function have done research
and we see this, everybodywill be like, it's not there in our
data. We don't see it becausethe business is performing well.
And you've mentioned italready, though the time from action
to reaction can be enormouslylong when you're trying to affect
(15:16):
change. So short term resultspossibly can be tinkered with normally
at the expense of the futurebecause you're probably dragging
demand forwards. But if youactually want to instrumenthouse
a proper change, it takes along time to turn things around.
Yes, in a lot of organizationsthat change often gets hooked on
a product cycle. So you are inthe conversation where you're saying,
(15:39):
hey, okay, so there's newmarket players or there's a different
buyer need, and the defaultresponse is, well, we'll fix that
in the next release. We'llhave that feature or we'll have that
functionality. And that'swhere having marketing in the room
as the product conversationstarts to develop, which I know we've
talked about in the pre call,that becomes incredibly important
(15:59):
because so much energy and somuch of the cadence of an organization
gets tied up in the producttimetable and the product launch
process, that if you're notbringing that market change into
the room with the product team612, 18 months ahead of when it's
going to happen, then you'restuck again, further out of sync
with the market.
So when we were talking aboutproduct, you mentioned stage gates
(16:21):
in product development.Explain this to me a little bit help
me understand how marketingcan influence those.
Again, sitting across a numberof different industries, I've worked
with hardware businesses thatby default have to be really thoughtful
about what they're going todevelop, how their features are going
to build. So they've got areally tight philosophy about product
management and that productmanager's job is to build the product
and get it on the shelf to acertain set of specifications. Then
(16:44):
product marketing comes in andthey're going to take it off the
shelf and push that hardwareproduct out through a variety of
different channels, generatedemand for it and see it into the
market. In the world ofsoftware and services, everything's
much more malleable. And sowhat you can find happening is that
the conversations betweenproduct and the existing customer
base index towards certainfeature functionality. The sellers
(17:07):
are being tasked to talk to afuture customer base. The sellers
will also filter what they'rehearing based on their own experience
and they will prioritizefeatures that probably were discussed
in the last conversation withtheir biggest potential deal. That
deal probably is going toclose in the next quarter to two
quarters. The productlifecycle is possibly six months
(17:27):
to a year ahead. So there'sall kinds of disconnects and challenges
in the way that operates andproduct. People are in product by
and large because they loveproduct. They get excited about building
feature functionality. They goto great lengths to do user testing
and user work, but they'retalking to people who are using the
(17:48):
product today or the potentialfuture users. They're not talking
to the next segment that'sgoing to be the growth driver of
the business. So there is adisconnect between product, between
sales and the market. And whenthat goes wrong, you have product
building what it wants tobuild, sales, selling what it wants
to sell, and a very poorcustomer experience when they get
the product and it doesntquite deliver, even if its down to
the contract terms andconditions not being quite what the
(18:10):
buyer had expected. So puttingmarketing into that process and bringing
the customer, the futurecustomer, the future segment, the
future growth driver into thatconversation you start to drive a
much richer dialogue. But itneeds a framework because otherwise
products are going to go, no,no, no, we're under a mandate, we
got to go build this thing. Soan NPI or new product introduction
framework is a stage gatedprocess. So what that means is you
(18:34):
have to pass through cohesivestage gates before you can advance
with the work. So stage gateone typically comes in an early conversation
with product that says, can wedo this? We think we see an opportunity
in a particular geography orin a particular segment, can we be
the people who build theproduct that solves that problem
for that client? And that'stypically when you get the nice strategy
(18:56):
deck that says, hey, this is abillion dollar market. If we take
1% of this, we've paid for theR and D, by the way, we can do it
all in incredibly quick time,etcetera. You normally get to that,
can we do that? And thenthere's a second question in that
stage gate, which is should wedo that? Does that align to our core
competencies, mission andvalue as an organization? Do we have
the right skills? We can buildit, but do we have the right commercial
(19:19):
go to market? So that kind ofcan we, should we, is those first
stage gates. And that's not amarketing driven stage gate. This
is about an orchestration ofthe organizations where I've seen
it work most successfully.Product is presenting the initiative
with a product marketer who'sthinking about the whole product
solution. And the decisionmaking panel is general management,
(19:42):
operations, sales and theleadership of the business. And you
really need, depending on thesize of the business unit or the
size of the company that's apresident or chief executive buy
in that says, okay, yes, canwe, should we, right, go away past
that stage gate, come backwhen you figured out how we do it,
so that next stage you get thefirst stage gate, which is can we,
should we? Then you can go offand you can talk to all sorts of
(20:05):
customers, all sorts ofprospects. How do we take this thing
to market? How do we build it?How are we going to price it? Who's
going to be the distributionchannel? What are the opportunities?
How does it compete with thecompetition? And then you come to
another stage gate, which iswe figured out we can, we figured
out we should, we figured outhow does it stand up to the stress
test? Do we actuallyunderstand that we built the whole
product, that it deliversbuyer value at a competitive price,
(20:28):
which drives profitability forthe organization? And if you can
get through that, then you gothrough to right now we're into the
stage gate to launch. So howlong to orchestrate every department?
How long for legal to sign offthe trademarks in multiple countries?
How long for legal to put theterms and conditions in the contract
together? How long formarketing to pick the launch window?
(20:48):
How long for product marketingto train the sellers and ensure that
we're ready with enablement.That whole go to market so that you
land in market on the day thatyou go and there is a stage gate
decision for go. There is a gono go that says Yup, products ready,
we built to our mvp or ourthreshold. Sales is ready and trained
marketing is ready to launch.Then everything goes to market together.
(21:10):
When you do that and youexecute it well, you get a much richer
conversation and you start toalso reverse engineer some of the
timelines. So in large andcomplicated organizations, typically
product will have theirtimeline and they will say, right,
we've shipped 31 December,we're done. You may not have the
sales team together fortraining and readiness until the
(21:31):
1 April. So you have a deadthree months when you run on that
basis. So actually looking ateverything that's going to be successful
for launch, whether it's thedeveloper conference that you're
going to launch it at, orwhether it's the timing of sales
readiness and salesavailability to your channel, onboarding,
you work from the backend tolaunch point back. That MPI process
(21:52):
creates a structure and aframework that everyone can subscribe
to. And then once you put thatthrough, everybody goes, oh well,
this is a much moreconstructive conversation. This is
much easier, this is much lesspainful. And when you land a product
in market, in my experience,you will typically sell more of it
and you will have happiercustomers. It's never smooth sailing,
right? There's alwaysproblems. But marketing makes a promise.
(22:16):
The sales walks through thedetails of that, the buyer buys and
the product shows up andfulfills that promise. That is quite
rare in a lot of business tobusiness organizations. So putting
that process around it toraise the confidence level is extremely
valuable.
It would also, by the way,solve just about all the whingeing
I hear about siloeddepartments and didn't get consulted
and all that kind of stuff.Because a lot of people talk about
(22:38):
accidental marketers. We callthem untitled marketers, people who
are nothing. They don't havemarketing in the job title, but still
do it. Like who cares? Themost important thing is coalescing
the whole organization, as yousay, to bring a product effectively
to market. And what you'vejust described, I think probably
might be my favorite segmentin a show so far. Hard to deliver,
but wow. The power of beingable to do that, of bringing everybody
(23:00):
onto the same process is, it'snot something that we've heard in
such clarity.
It stops the product team overengineering. So it keeps your cost
base down. It allows thesellers to get immediate traction
with the product, whichimproves their confidence and it
moderates that price and valueconversation. And that's really important
because we talk about pricebeing part of the marketing mix.
(23:24):
And I think the whole industryhad forgotten that until inflation
came roaring back andinflation came roaring back. And
suddenly there was aconversation that says, well, who
does pricing? And the realityis in most organizations, product
sets the cost price by howthey engineer and design the product.
Then finance will set aselling price based on previous models
(23:46):
and some black box, whichquite often is an excel spreadsheet
that's full of flawedassumptions and history. No one really
reviews what's the newcustomer value we're delivering and
what's happening with thecompetitive lens. So those three
lens of price in terms ofcost, value and competitive, the
NPI process gives you abrilliant framework to bring that
(24:07):
to the table and theopportunity to start to play with
some of the variables. So asalesperson whos motivated by an
overall sales number, but acustomer whos put off by an installation
cost, for example, how youstructure that pricing and what you
make payable as a commissionstructure can hugely impact whether
a new product is going to besuccessful. So again, putting it
(24:29):
all in a framework neutral,it's not I built this thing and now
you're telling me you want toprice it differently? It's we built
it together through a process.And as I say that we built it together
through a process, the onlything you have to remember is it's
not designed by committee.Everyone owns their own piece. Otherwise
you do end up with the threehumped camel or whatever the analogy
is for design by committee.
(24:49):
But that's the ideal processand it seldom happens that way. What
are some of the signs or whatare the things to look out for? If
that process is broken and thesilo behavior for example, is still
going.
On, how does that manifestcoming into the business? If you
look@your.net promoter scoresassuming you're in an organization
that's tracking CSAT or netpromoter score, you very quickly
(25:10):
get a feel of is the productand the whole product and the total
experience doing what thecustomer thought they were buying.
A positive net promoter scoresays yep, okay, the salesperson made
a promise or the website madea promise. Depending on which kind
of product you're delivering,customer bought it. They're achieving
their outcome. They don't buyproducts, they buy that outcome that
we always talk about. If youhave a strong NP's but you're losing
(25:33):
to competitors, then okay,let's look at what competitors are
doing and why. And where areyou losing to competitors? Are we
losing to competitors rightupfront at the first pricing conversation
or are we losing to them atthe detailed demo and using that
sort of framework tounderstand where is it dysfunctional
and where are the problemsthat helps set your priorities to
look at it, we've talked aboutno function is unconstrained. I think
(25:55):
part of the opportunity formarketers is to embrace that constraint.
There's never enough money,never enough people, never enough
time in any business, in anyfunction. So looking at that constraint
and saying okay, how do weview that positively as helping us
prioritize what we're going towork on. We're going to be all focused
on how we improve the NP's.Everybody can align around that.
(26:16):
If it means you've got tochange the product or you've got
to change the sales process,or you've got to change the demo,
then people will buy into it.
And marketing's role in manycases, actually the new role under
these circumstances is to bean orchestrator to bring those assets
and the talent and the skilltogether to make those things happen
rather than feeling like theyhave to do it themselves.
(26:38):
Yes, I don't think there is afunction in the world these days
going back to beingconstrained that has all the resources
to do that inside their ownorganization, and nor should they.
If you think about how anorganization is structured today,
if you're a member of areasonable size organization, there's
going to be a strategy team.That strategy team are delivering
the strategy plan. They'reseparate from marketing. They're
(26:58):
looking out at the overallindustry. The dialogue with them
is very much around corecompetence, addressable segments,
and trying to make sure thatwhat their positioning in the business
matches with what the customerand the future prospects are saying.
You've got the productorganization, you've got the finance
organization. So many in theservice industry, the reality of
the product experience isdelivered by a person, that's the
(27:20):
HR team, who are all by theway, incredibly busy and resource
constrained and running aroundtrying to make things happen so the
marketers can't own theentirety of it. But what they can
do is work back from thecustomer to say this is the promise
we're setting. These are thethings that we said we would do in
the market. These are ourguiding Northstar, if you like, as
(27:40):
an organization which isdifferent for every organization,
let's make sure we'redelivering those and let's make sure
we're delivering those in away that's attractive to the buyer,
has a level of differentiationthat might justify the price premium
or price positioning thatwe're looking for in the segment.
Going off on a slight tangenthere. Complicated enough. And then
in November 2022, OpenAIlaunched chat GPT, giving everyone
(28:05):
the ability to generate. Howdo you think realistically that kind
of technology is going to beembraced by marketers? Is this an
efficiency thing or is there acapability angle?
So I think we're just at thebeginning of figuring it out. I do
think it's interesting. I'vebeen in a number of different forums
(28:25):
and conversations. I thinksome of the use cases around customer
service and replacement ofagents and the ability of technology,
people are looking that as avalue add. So yes, you can increase
the customer serviceexperience at a lower cost and a
lower experience. So peoplehave kind of jumped on that quite
quickly. The ability to docall summarization and data management,
(28:48):
the ability to build into aproduct, the agent to agent interaction,
I think is, is superinteresting in terms of what thats
going to do to the productdevelopment cycle. And were only
just beginning to see thatbecause it takes so long to embed
that into a product strategy.But interestingly, for marketing,
so often the conversation isyoure going to value ad, youll value
(29:09):
ad, youll value add. Yeah,content. You guys can just do it
more cheaply now becauselanguage is easy. I think its a real
challenge for marketingleaders to sit in the room and say,
actually there is value to behad here. But I think if you find
yourself pegged in that itsgoing to be efficient and you can
shut down your content teamand chat GPT will just generate everything.
(29:31):
Youre in a pretty toughconversation right off the bat because
youre clearly not seen as astrategic value driver for the business.
And if youre seen as astrategic value driver for the business,
then you should be in therehaving the conversation that says,
hey, this is how my team isexperimenting with this tool. These
are the directions werethinking they can take us. And actually
working around using AI toaccelerate your market insights,
(29:53):
your market research. I mean,these things are trained on the entirety
of the web as it stands on anycutoff date. That means you've got
all different customerprofiles and customer prototypes
in there. So you can go have aconversation, set up a customer profile,
talk to that customer, seewhether it gives you any insights.
I'm still somewhat skepticalbecause I think it is. That's the
(30:14):
lowest common denominator.It's going to gather together all
of the common data and justgive you a more accessible way of
getting to it. So I think ithas value, but insight, judgment,
the human capabilities thatmake us the advisors and orchestrators
to our business. I don't thinkit's going to change that quickly.
It is a new and interestingthought partner to the CEO and CFO,
(30:37):
and you do find they getinteresting questions about why don't
our products show up in aperplexity search or a chat GPT.
So perplexity algorithms arefront of mind for me at the moment.
I haven't cracked that oneeither, but it was interesting. So
I think one of the challengesI think we're going to have is that
vendors are now starting topush the marketing is content argument
to try and sell theirproducts. I saw today a series of
(30:59):
Microsoft Copilot, I guessthey're promoted linkedins, I don't
know, but it's all aboutaccelerating content development
in organizations, and there'sa very well known organization talking
about how is revolutionizedtheir content creation. So I've downloaded
some of their ebooks and someof their white papers, and it's very
clearly generated, it's veryclearly generated by chat GPT, which
(31:23):
of course is copilot. I thinkwe're not there yet. I'm much more
excited, as you said, thatonce you understand the totality
of the information thatthey've got, the scope of it, and
if you have a basicunderstanding of how embedding works
in those models, so how itsees relationships between things,
then you can start asking itsome really interesting questions.
(31:44):
And that's sort of the lowestcommon denominator, or maybe mean
reversion, whatever. You'regoing to get a bland answer because
it's got all the crap people'sopinions as well as all the good
people's opinions. But with abit of judgment skill and I think
careful prompting. I thinkthere's really good intellect, intellectual
work that can be acceleratedby using it. Sort of more strategic
stuff.
Yeah, I think it's beingcurious, right, and asking smart
(32:08):
questions and not beingintimidated. I mean, it's slotting
in some space for curiosityand experimentation with artificial
intelligence. In your normalday job, when you're busy, it's not
easy. The team I've workedwith for the last few years, we did
limited exploration because wefelt that things were moving so quickly.
We would be better placed toactually understand the use cases
(32:29):
and think about thefundamentals rather than try to add
on another layer oftechnology. When you talk about the
vendors, you're uncovering awhole other issue that marketing
is going through recently. Andwhy is marketing siloed and constrained,
and why does it struggle? It'sbecause the marketing department
is an absolute sucker forwhat's going on. In the tech industry.
(32:50):
And marketers have to realizewe're not our own customers. We're
a very unique breed. We'recurious, we like to learn. We will
jump on the next bandwagon.And the vendors actually have a massive
influence in what's going onin the landscape. You look at any
conference, trade show event,it is always now funded by the technology
vendors. And I spent threeyears working for an ad tech technology
(33:11):
vendor, pulling some of thosestrings myself in terms of driving
demand. If marketers only lookat that which they're being fed by
those organizations and don'tget out and take a more holistic
view of what's happening andlook at the broader use cases, they
will repeat some of the samemistakes in the past. And the places
they're going for informationare sponsored by those vendors, they're
shaped by those vendors. Thetraining, the certificates we ask
(33:33):
our people to have aresupplied by those. It's a big problem
for the industry that I thinkAI will just, just amplify because
people are going to get oneview of what it can do for them.
It almost feels like heresy ifyou go to challenge any of that orthodoxy.
So actually, I was having aconversation this morning with Gerry
from labs in our organization,and he said, this is going to be
(33:57):
a really weird question, buthow useful do you think CRM actually
is? It's like, oh my God,that's definitely heresy. But if
you start thinking about.We've all been trained to think about
our customers in terms of anumber or a table or something that
feels very artificial, but ifwe don't do that, it feels like we're
being told we're doing itwrong. And somehow everything that
(34:21):
we know or that we do comeswithin the framework of the technology
that we have to use to executeit. That's a very strange place to
be. So for me, AI removes someof those barriers. Now, it's not
going to replace CRM with AI.The tools are built in. But in terms
of looking for understanding,actually being able to interpret
datasets and get assistancefrom a good model is invaluable.
(34:46):
Yeah, we've all been throughthat. Marketing department needs
a data scientist, or theorganization needs a data scientist.
And I do think there's a realvalue in the fact that the accessibility
of these tools mean you canask a straightforward, common question,
and as you can begin to learn,that maybe actually you don't need
to understand the dataanalytical tools because these things
will get replaced by AI toolsor the interface will be different.
(35:08):
But I do think that thequestion is the important thing,
how you approach the question,where you focus your effort. Everybody
has limited time and resourcesand actually just understanding that
it's going to be all about thecustomer in your segment. Does the
customer see a value for AI?How are they going to think about
it? There's so much AI noisegetting added on to products, but
(35:32):
it does create an opportunityto streamline and provide efficiency,
but with all kinds of weirddependencies. So you're building
on top of someone else's largelanguage model. And if marketers
learned one thing in the lastdecade, it's the danger of building
on rented land. So, yeah, howquickly do you want to go? Where
do you want to put yourenergies? It's still early days,
as I said, as we adapt to it.
(35:52):
So coming back to the theme ofthe show, which is marketing is everyone's
business, not just themarketing departments. We've looked
at sort of behaviors andstructures and culture a little bit,
and now we've looked attechnology for our listeners who
are thinking still ofmarketing as a department, because
(36:13):
that's the framework theyhave. What advice could you give
them to try and think outsideof that box? I mean, we know that
many marketing departments areactually promotional departments
or communication departments.How do they take a step back and
become useful in the way thatwe've been talking about today?
The first one is to berigorous about your own discipline
(36:36):
and professionalism and whatyou deliver. And that means actually
doing things like zero basedbudgeting. So you are creating the
space in your own budget to domore. And this more for less is a
bit of an insidious ifmarketers just accept that more for
more is good, but you have tobe able to go to the table and have
that conversation. You needsome evidence for doing that. Again,
(36:59):
one of the things I like aboutworking through organizations that
are going through change istypically youre coming in after a
period of a plateau or aninefficiency. So there are ability
to self finance new things,but only if youre rigorous about
that zero based budget modeland actually orient yourself on the
value to the customer. Soactually finding a metric that you
(37:20):
can be accountable for, thatthe business cares about, thats going
to drive your conversations,because that metric then drives your
credibility. So in theorganization I was with most recently
for the last seven or eightyears, went in and realized that
actually marketing was busydoing stuff, but it wasnt really
connected to the sales outcomefor the business. So we sat down
(37:40):
and looked at the performanceof the business and said, at our
best we drive 30% of the salesnumber. At our worst we drive 5%
of the sales number. So thenew benchmark is 30% of the sales
number. How are we going toorientate ourselves around that as
a marketing function and whatare we going to do to drive that
out of. So then yourcommunications activity starts to
become crystal clear in termsof what good looks like does it drive
(38:02):
leads into a process thatconvert well that deliver at the
value that the sales team islooking for to grow the business.
And as you do that you startto find different conversations coming
because youre no longertalking about share of impressions
or media coverage or the eventthat you were at. You end up having
conversations about how is thebusiness performing, what's happening
(38:24):
with the why is the marketdynamic the way that it is. And then
if you've got your beautifulconstraint lenses on as you're thinking
about the business you canstart to see where the business has
an inefficiency. So youtouched earlier on CRM. If the sales
organization isn't trackingand reporting their deals well within
the CRM, you're going tostruggle to establish the impact
(38:45):
of marketing. Before you eventhink about attribution, its partnering
with the sales organization.Say actually lets just understand
whats driving growth together.How do we improve the overall and
so common dashboards, commonmetrics, shared dataset, thats a
multi year piece of work in alarge complex organization. But that
journey builds credibility.That when you get to the data point
(39:05):
and you start looking at itand going actually the problem is
we dont have product and salesjoined up so now we should start
thinking about a new productintroduction process. Or actually
the problem is that we areexcluded at the first RFP because
our book price is too high. Oractually we're seeing that we're
missing because we're slow onour speed to demo, then you're into
(39:27):
a conversation that says wellhow do we solve for that? You've
got the insight as themarketer, you've got the capability
and that's how you build thebusiness case for expanding the responsibilities
of marketing and more formore. And you're having a conversation
with the business. That said,we can help you solve this problem.
Yes im going to need to hire apricing specialist, but look at the
upside of what we did in thelast year around performing and simplifying
(39:49):
our book price. We have soldmore of this product at a better
margin. Would you like more ofthat? And it very quickly becomes
well yes actually that seemsto make an awful lot of sense so
you can start in quite atightly siloed function. But if you
establish a reputation forexcellence, if you establish an ability
to drive the number for thebusiness, you begin to enter into
the conversation that says,well, whats the next thing to do
(40:10):
to drive the number for thebusiness? And actually if thats price
or its product or itsdistribution, youre in the room having
the conversation saying, well,maybe if product took more to sales
and we could create amechanism for that that would help
accelerate our process. Andthen someone eventually always says,
is anybody going to put uptheir hand to run this? And then
you just got to make sure itsmarketing puts its hand up quicker
(40:31):
than say, the product team puttheir hand up or the sales team put
their hand up. Does that makesense? So you kind of build your
ability to drive theorganization forward.
Well, there you have it. Muchindeed to Graham Wiley. And thank
you for taking the time towatch or listen to this episode.
Now, if you want to talk to meabout its content, you can find me
on LinkedIn and there's a linkto my profile which you'll find on
(40:52):
the show notes at unicorny Dotco dot UK dot. Now, if you liked
the content and want more,then please give us a thumbs up by
subscribing. And if you'refeeling really kind, I'd love you
to write us a review. That isall we have time for today. Thank
you again and we will see younext week.
How many times in your lifehas the brand promise that a marketing
function made beendisappointed by the client service
experience or the productreality? First, advice for a marketer
is never waste a crisis,right? If you've got a disruption
happening in your market,those are all opportunities to start
approaching the stakeholders.
(00:28):
Today we are exploring a topicthat may just change the way you
think about how marketing getsdone. Now, we've mentioned it before
at a very conceptual level onthis show, but we've never really
got into the weeds and todaywe're going to do just that. And
here's the what if marketing abusiness wasn't just the responsibility
of the marketing department?What if it was something that everybody
(00:49):
in your organization should beinvolved in? Now, in most companies,
there seems to be anassumption that only the marketing
department does marketing.After all, it's seen as a separate
function responsible forthings like promotions campaigns
while generally getting theword out. But as we keep banging
on about on this, the unicornymarketing show, there is more to
promotional marketing thanadvertising. And there's more to
(01:13):
marketing than promotion.Marketing is actually the whole process
of taking a business, aproduct or a service to market. Now,
my guest today is GrahamWiley. He's an extraordinarily seasoned
marketing executive and allround business strategist and guru.
And he believes that themindset that marketing belongs in
the marketing departmentdepartment is outdated and is joining
(01:34):
us today to challenge that. Hebelieves marketing is so important
it can't just be left tomarketers. It has to involve everybody.
As he says, marketing abusiness is everybody's business.
So whether you're an MD, aCEO, a CFO, head of operations or
in internal audit, thisepisode is for you. Today we are
(01:54):
going to explore how marketingcan and should be a driving force
across your wholeorganization. Let's get straight
to the studio and meet Graham Wiley.
Pleasure to be here. Lookingforward to the conversation. I've
listened to a number of theprevious podcasts. You've got a good
cross section of guests and abreadth of opinion.
I hope so. Well, when we'regoing to add to that today, why don't
we start? By the words ofCinder Black, maybe you could tell
(02:16):
us who you are and whereyou're from.
So I'm Graham Wiley and Irather like the way April Dunford
talks about positioning. So Iwas thinking about this this morning
and I thought the world'sforemost authority on marketing and
organizations going throughchange. So three decades in b, two
b, marketing for organizationsthat are an inflection point. So
whether that's a growth,growth or a turnaround, whether it's
(02:37):
VCP or corporateorganizations, cross section of industries,
cross section of marketers. Sorather been there, done that, got.
The t shirt, just theinteresting bits. Then when it gets
like normal, I.
Have a low boredom threshold.
I don't really do normal forunicorns. You may not know, but before
every interview that you hearon the podcast, we have a pre meet.
(02:57):
On this occasion, what Inormally do is I ask our guest to
identify one topic they reallywant to talk about. And while we
were talking to Graham on thatcall, he said something really profound,
which is that marketing's tooimportant to be left solely to marketers.
And that made me step back alittle bit. But actually it's kind
of in thinking with some ofthe themes we've been developing
(03:18):
on this podcast. But I don'tthink I've heard anyone express it
like so clearly. Maybe youcould explain what you mean by it
and why you think that thatconcept is important for any organization
looking to transform.
There's a lot of discussion,always has been, within marketing,
about its place inside theorganization. And it seems to lurch
from crisis to crisis. Shouldbe living in a golden age of marketing
(03:41):
when you think about howchallenging the market environment
is, how empowered the buyersare, but there still seems to be
a sense that marketing is anidea, is challenged and in some areas
failing. And looking at that,I think actually marketing is probably
the most successful idea ofthe 20th century. How you think about
the structure of a marketorientation, approaching the market
and driving more than thetransactional sales engagement. But
(04:05):
it's the marketing departmentwhen it's confined to a department
that seems to be strugglingfor its definition and its scope.
I simply think that the ideaof marketing has been so successful
that it has outgrown thelimitations of a silo. And so the
marketing leadership rolebegins to evolve from the doing of
marketing in a dedicated siloto the orchestration of a whole company
(04:27):
effort to deliver that promisethat marketing makes to the end consumer
or to the end user in abusiness to business context.
I get the concept because Ithink what I've seen is that so often
now in organizations, theyseem to think the battle for marketing
is territorial rather thanideological. And so you get marketers
who are trying to hold ontomore and more of the function and
(04:49):
being less successful at doingit. Which then is why I think there
are organizations who wouldtell you that particularly in business
to business, marketing is incrisis. Marketing is just fine. I
love the way you phrase thatthe most successful idea of the 20th
century.
I've seen all the differentmodels and conversations, so you
can think about it and you dothe academic study, and we were talking
(05:10):
earlier about studying thetheory of marketing. There's a point.
Either the academics have itwrong around the application of marketing,
or the marketers are doing itwrong, or the business simply isn't
understanding. And you canbreak down the challenge of marketing
under those three kind ofumbrellas and look at it in granular
detail. And what you find isthat actually marketing isn't the
(05:31):
same in any two organizations.There's different functions doing
different things, but it setsout the same objective. I know you've
spent time thinking about whatis marketing and episode when you
were talking about thedefinition of marketing. Well, if
you bring that into acorporate or business to business
environment, it needs to betailored for what that business is
trying to achieve and theresources and institutions it has.
But in theory, marketing ownseverything. But in practice, in so
(05:55):
many different organizations,it doesn't own product, it doesn't
have a say on pricing, it'sbeing directed by others on how it
does communication. It'sdifferent in every organization,
which of course means everyorganization can change and tailor
and evolve the way theyapproach marketing. Typically that
happens at a point ofinflection when they're going through
a change.
Do you think the fact it isdifferent is a problem though?
(06:17):
No, I think it's what makes itstrong. I think if you take the principle
of building around thecustomer and targeting the customer
and providing a level of valueto that customer, that should be
a whole company effort. Howmany times in your life has the brand
promise that a marketingfunction made been disappointed by
(06:37):
the client service experienceor the product reality? And if marketing
doesn't have an input orreview across that, or isn't shaping
how the whole organizationthinks about it, you end up with
almost a schizophrenicorganization where it thinks it's
one thing, but it's promisingsomething else to the market.
That's really common as well,I think. Interesting, I'm working
up a new episode. It'll be amonologue, I think again about something
(06:59):
that's totally overlooked,certainly in software companies,
which is that the relationshipbetween customer and supplier is
captured in a contract andmarketing never gets to think about
the terms of those contractsand say you've got a lot of SaaS
companies now who are trappingpeople in contracts with auto renew
dates. And if ever there was apromise to the customer that gets
(07:21):
broken, it's broken in thatdocument. And again, I'm not saying
marketing should be writingthose documents. If culture is what
you do and your brand promisesis how you interact and behave with
your customers, it seems to methat it comes to documenting those
relationships. Maybe moreeffort needs to be given to it.
I would caution against such abroad, sweeping statement that marketing
(07:42):
never gets to look at thecustomer contract because there are
organizations where themarketing team is involved in that
conversation. There are partsof the organization where you rethink
a product proposition andyou're changing a product proposition.
You have to think about thewhole product solution and some of
that is how you're going tocontract. Are you going to drive
market share and growth bymaking it easier to do business with
(08:02):
you than somebody else? So wetend to default to. It's not common.
I'll agree it's not common formarketing to be in there, but there
are great marketers working onthe detail of public sector contract
and tendering processes andI've worked with some of them and
they do great work in thatspecific process.
Well I'm very pleased to becorrected on that one, but I am going
to call out some bad companieswhen that episode comes. I've briefed
(08:25):
the lawyers to stand by. So ifmarketing is too important to be
left solely to marketers in anorganization, who else is doing the
marketing and how do wecategorize them or how do you try
and embrace them?
So if you, as you didrecently, take a step back and think
what do we mean by marketing?And I think the CIM's earlier definition
was profitably meeting theneeds of a customer. So the whole
(08:46):
organization is involved inprofitably meeting the needs of a
customer. From my perspective,actually understanding who's owning
and delivering those touchpoints and what's their guiding principle,
you know, is the operationbeing driven to reduce cost and eliminate
customer touch points whilstthe salespeople are being driven
to deliver a white gloveexperience and it's finding those
disconnects and looking forthat continuity through the buying
(09:10):
journey that allows you toactually work out. Is this consistent?
In which case, terrific.Everybody's working in separate functions,
but they're orchestrated anddelivering the same promise. Or are
there inconsistencies? And arethose inconsistencies impacting the
business adversely? So I sayI've got a track record coming into
companies when they're goingthrough change. Typically that's
looking at theinconsistencies. It's we've got a
(09:32):
pipeline problem or a salesclose problem actually. Maybe youve
got the right quality of dealsin, but the salesperson isnt executing
effectively, or youve got aproduct market fit problem, or you
think youre selling x andactually the audience is trying to
buy y. So that framework ofauditing the existing business and
then saying, okay, where areactually the real challenges? Where
(09:53):
are the things were going toprioritize to make a change that
allows you to pick where theinconsistencies are and then focus
on those, and then go to thepeople who are currently delivering
and working on those tounderstand first why there are inconsistencies,
and then secondly, whethersomething they're doing needs to
change or if they've got itright all along, because they're
maybe closest to the customerand it's what's going on upstream
(10:15):
that needs to change in orderto create that consistent value.
Raoul so either way, the pointof change or that moment of inflection
implies there's going to besome conflict because someone's going
to have to change what they'redoing. And people do get, they like
to get territorial about that.How does an organization, or how
does a marketing organizationget buy in from EO and fo ideological
(10:36):
with the EO and assetallocation with the fO to make the
kind of transformation you'retalking about?
I'll speak from oneperspective, which is I've tended
to work with organizationsthat are going through change. The
reason I do that is it givesme the opportunity to affect that
change. There are a great manyvery smart marketers in large and
small organizations thatalready have a fixed mindset that
they're never going to affectthat change, because marketing isn't
(10:58):
going to drive that change. Ifthe company's making its number,
if it's investing in line withits priorities, it's not looking
to unsettle the business. Soyou're looking for those points where
the business is beingunsettled externally and then finding
out how you lean into those.So first, advice for a marketer is
never waste a crisis. Ifyou've got a disruption happening
in your market, a competitorentry, a change in the regulatory
(11:21):
landscape, a change in acompetitor's offering, those are
all opportunities to startapproaching the stakeholders and
then actually understandingthat those stakeholders have typically
a very limited view of themarketing function and what it has
done historically. So I saidearlier that the cause for that marketing
is being challenged is eitherthe academics have it wrong, the
(11:42):
marketers are doing it badly,or the C suite doesn't understand
what it needs. All models arewrong, but some are more useful than
others. Yes, there aremarketers who are doing it wrong,
but there's marketers that'sdoing it brilliantly. Yes, marketing
tends to be quite inwardlooking and chewing over itself on
the different priorities. Butthe biggest obstacle you've got right
off the bat is that the Csuite doesn't necessarily understand
(12:03):
that marketing can be part ofthe solution. And the CEO, Ben Horowitz,
and the hard thing about hardthings has this lovely idea about
being a wartime CEO or apeacetime CEO. That's the first job
for the marketer. Understandwhat CEO you've got and what priorities
and challenges they're facing.And then Rory Sutherland did a lovely
piece recently about CFOmindset and stability and predictability
(12:26):
above everything else. So ifyoure going to a wartime CEO who
has a CFO whos based onpredictability and stability, and
you have an inflection pointin your market now youre in an interesting
conversation, right. And thatopens all kinds of doors to doing
things differently. But if youhave a steady state, peacetime CEO,
Peacetime CFO, a highfunctioning organization thats delivering
(12:47):
its numbers, the organizationwont naturally be looking for change.
So its going to be a longerterm process for a marketer to orchestrate
more broadly across the business.
I would also argue if allthose things are going well, it doesn't
need change.
Yeah, you're probably tweakingaround the edges, although it's interesting,
even some of the bestexamples, and you look at the world
(13:08):
of BTC and the FE awards, theyalways start with, everything was
going great until, andeverything had been going great,
whether it's a soap powder orwhether it's a chocolate bar. It
had owned its category untiltypically takes an organization quite
a long time to catch on thatthings are not going well. A marketer
should be at the forefront ofthat. They will be hearing it from
(13:28):
sales. They will be seeing itin the market data. They will be
hearing it from thecompetition in the market. And they
should be bringing thatcustomer perspective into the organization
to say, I know the lastquarter was fabulous. I'm looking
four, five, six quarters out,and I think we have some things that
we can do better.
That's always, my caveat,actually, is that things can be going
very well, therefore thebusiness could be doing it well.
(13:49):
But is it sustainable? And weknow that plateau inevitably leads
to decline. If you're notgrowing, you are going to decline.
There is going to be thatmoment where things go wrong.
And that problem with thelevel of C suite understanding and
marketing being the mostsuccessful idea of the 20th century
people believe it's a reallyweird situation. They believe that
marketing can do anything,that I can come to you in the final
(14:12):
quarter when the numbers arelow with money I found down the back
of the sofa and say, can youfix this situation for sales two
months later at the beginningof the fiscal year? There's no money
available because it's notvisible or tangible results that
we delivered. So if thatplateau is left and if you wait for
the inflection point, themarketing organization is going to
(14:33):
be under pressure to do justthe short term quick fix. The time
to have those toughconversations, the time to think
about broadening the influenceof the marketing organization, is
when you can see the changecoming down the pipe, but it hasn't
yet hit the business in ameaningful way. And that's the nuance
of then engaging with theexecutive senior leadership team
to say, okay, this is what'sgoing to happen. This is the way
(14:56):
the market's developing. Do weall agree that you have a conversation
about the market and thatdrives towards outcomes? If you walk
in there and go, hey, wemarketing function have done research
and we see this, everybodywill be like, it's not there in our
data. We don't see it becausethe business is performing well.
And you've mentioned italready, though the time from action
to reaction can be enormouslylong when you're trying to affect
(15:16):
change. So short term resultspossibly can be tinkered with normally
at the expense of the futurebecause you're probably dragging
demand forwards. But if youactually want to instrumenthouse
a proper change, it takes along time to turn things around.
Yes, in a lot of organizationsthat change often gets hooked on
a product cycle. So you are inthe conversation where you're saying,
(15:39):
hey, okay, so there's newmarket players or there's a different
buyer need, and the defaultresponse is, well, we'll fix that
in the next release. We'llhave that feature or we'll have that
functionality. And that'swhere having marketing in the room
as the product conversationstarts to develop, which I know we've
talked about in the pre call,that becomes incredibly important
(15:59):
because so much energy and somuch of the cadence of an organization
gets tied up in the producttimetable and the product launch
process, that if you're notbringing that market change into
the room with the product team612, 18 months ahead of when it's
going to happen, then you'restuck again, further out of sync
with the market.
So when we were talking aboutproduct, you mentioned stage gates
(16:21):
in product development.Explain this to me a little bit help
me understand how marketingcan influence those.
Again, sitting across a numberof different industries, I've worked
with hardware businesses thatby default have to be really thoughtful
about what they're going todevelop, how their features are going
to build. So they've got areally tight philosophy about product
management and that productmanager's job is to build the product
and get it on the shelf to acertain set of specifications. Then
(16:44):
product marketing comes in andthey're going to take it off the
shelf and push that hardwareproduct out through a variety of
different channels, generatedemand for it and see it into the
market. In the world ofsoftware and services, everything's
much more malleable. And sowhat you can find happening is that
the conversations betweenproduct and the existing customer
base index towards certainfeature functionality. The sellers
(17:07):
are being tasked to talk to afuture customer base. The sellers
will also filter what they'rehearing based on their own experience
and they will prioritizefeatures that probably were discussed
in the last conversation withtheir biggest potential deal. That
deal probably is going toclose in the next quarter to two
quarters. The productlifecycle is possibly six months
(17:27):
to a year ahead. So there'sall kinds of disconnects and challenges
in the way that operates andproduct. People are in product by
and large because they loveproduct. They get excited about building
feature functionality. They goto great lengths to do user testing
and user work, but they'retalking to people who are using the
(17:48):
product today or the potentialfuture users. They're not talking
to the next segment that'sgoing to be the growth driver of
the business. So there is adisconnect between product, between
sales and the market. And whenthat goes wrong, you have product
building what it wants tobuild, sales, selling what it wants
to sell, and a very poorcustomer experience when they get
the product and it doesntquite deliver, even if its down to
the contract terms andconditions not being quite what the
(18:10):
buyer had expected. So puttingmarketing into that process and bringing
the customer, the futurecustomer, the future segment, the
future growth driver into thatconversation you start to drive a
much richer dialogue. But itneeds a framework because otherwise
products are going to go, no,no, no, we're under a mandate, we
got to go build this thing. Soan NPI or new product introduction
framework is a stage gatedprocess. So what that means is you
(18:34):
have to pass through cohesivestage gates before you can advance
with the work. So stage gateone typically comes in an early conversation
with product that says, can wedo this? We think we see an opportunity
in a particular geography orin a particular segment, can we be
the people who build theproduct that solves that problem
for that client? And that'stypically when you get the nice strategy
(18:56):
deck that says, hey, this is abillion dollar market. If we take
1% of this, we've paid for theR and D, by the way, we can do it
all in incredibly quick time,etcetera. You normally get to that,
can we do that? And thenthere's a second question in that
stage gate, which is should wedo that? Does that align to our core
competencies, mission andvalue as an organization? Do we have
the right skills? We can buildit, but do we have the right commercial
(19:19):
go to market? So that kind ofcan we, should we, is those first
stage gates. And that's not amarketing driven stage gate. This
is about an orchestration ofthe organizations where I've seen
it work most successfully.Product is presenting the initiative
with a product marketer who'sthinking about the whole product
solution. And the decisionmaking panel is general management,
(19:42):
operations, sales and theleadership of the business. And you
really need, depending on thesize of the business unit or the
size of the company that's apresident or chief executive buy
in that says, okay, yes, canwe, should we, right, go away past
that stage gate, come backwhen you figured out how we do it,
so that next stage you get thefirst stage gate, which is can we,
should we? Then you can go offand you can talk to all sorts of
(20:05):
customers, all sorts ofprospects. How do we take this thing
to market? How do we build it?How are we going to price it? Who's
going to be the distributionchannel? What are the opportunities?
How does it compete with thecompetition? And then you come to
another stage gate, which iswe figured out we can, we figured
out we should, we figured outhow does it stand up to the stress
test? Do we actuallyunderstand that we built the whole
product, that it deliversbuyer value at a competitive price,
(20:28):
which drives profitability forthe organization? And if you can
get through that, then you gothrough to right now we're into the
stage gate to launch. So howlong to orchestrate every department?
How long for legal to sign offthe trademarks in multiple countries?
How long for legal to put theterms and conditions in the contract
together? How long formarketing to pick the launch window?
(20:48):
How long for product marketingto train the sellers and ensure that
we're ready with enablement.That whole go to market so that you
land in market on the day thatyou go and there is a stage gate
decision for go. There is a gono go that says Yup, products ready,
we built to our mvp or ourthreshold. Sales is ready and trained
marketing is ready to launch.Then everything goes to market together.
(21:10):
When you do that and youexecute it well, you get a much richer
conversation and you start toalso reverse engineer some of the
timelines. So in large andcomplicated organizations, typically
product will have theirtimeline and they will say, right,
we've shipped 31 December,we're done. You may not have the
sales team together fortraining and readiness until the
(21:31):
1 April. So you have a deadthree months when you run on that
basis. So actually looking ateverything that's going to be successful
for launch, whether it's thedeveloper conference that you're
going to launch it at, orwhether it's the timing of sales
readiness and salesavailability to your channel, onboarding,
you work from the backend tolaunch point back. That MPI process
(21:52):
creates a structure and aframework that everyone can subscribe
to. And then once you put thatthrough, everybody goes, oh well,
this is a much moreconstructive conversation. This is
much easier, this is much lesspainful. And when you land a product
in market, in my experience,you will typically sell more of it
and you will have happiercustomers. It's never smooth sailing,
right? There's alwaysproblems. But marketing makes a promise.
(22:16):
The sales walks through thedetails of that, the buyer buys and
the product shows up andfulfills that promise. That is quite
rare in a lot of business tobusiness organizations. So putting
that process around it toraise the confidence level is extremely
valuable.
It would also, by the way,solve just about all the whingeing
I hear about siloeddepartments and didn't get consulted
and all that kind of stuff.Because a lot of people talk about
(22:38):
accidental marketers. We callthem untitled marketers, people who
are nothing. They don't havemarketing in the job title, but still
do it. Like who cares? Themost important thing is coalescing
the whole organization, as yousay, to bring a product effectively
to market. And what you'vejust described, I think probably
might be my favorite segmentin a show so far. Hard to deliver,
but wow. The power of beingable to do that, of bringing everybody
(23:00):
onto the same process is, it'snot something that we've heard in
such clarity.
It stops the product team overengineering. So it keeps your cost
base down. It allows thesellers to get immediate traction
with the product, whichimproves their confidence and it
moderates that price and valueconversation. And that's really important
because we talk about pricebeing part of the marketing mix.
(23:24):
And I think the whole industryhad forgotten that until inflation
came roaring back andinflation came roaring back. And
suddenly there was aconversation that says, well, who
does pricing? And the realityis in most organizations, product
sets the cost price by howthey engineer and design the product.
Then finance will set aselling price based on previous models
(23:46):
and some black box, whichquite often is an excel spreadsheet
that's full of flawedassumptions and history. No one really
reviews what's the newcustomer value we're delivering and
what's happening with thecompetitive lens. So those three
lens of price in terms ofcost, value and competitive, the
NPI process gives you abrilliant framework to bring that
(24:07):
to the table and theopportunity to start to play with
some of the variables. So asalesperson whos motivated by an
overall sales number, but acustomer whos put off by an installation
cost, for example, how youstructure that pricing and what you
make payable as a commissionstructure can hugely impact whether
a new product is going to besuccessful. So again, putting it
(24:29):
all in a framework neutral,it's not I built this thing and now
you're telling me you want toprice it differently? It's we built
it together through a process.And as I say that we built it together
through a process, the onlything you have to remember is it's
not designed by committee.Everyone owns their own piece. Otherwise
you do end up with the threehumped camel or whatever the analogy
is for design by committee.
(24:49):
But that's the ideal processand it seldom happens that way. What
are some of the signs or whatare the things to look out for? If
that process is broken and thesilo behavior for example, is still
going.
On, how does that manifestcoming into the business? If you
look@your.net promoter scoresassuming you're in an organization
that's tracking CSAT or netpromoter score, you very quickly
(25:10):
get a feel of is the productand the whole product and the total
experience doing what thecustomer thought they were buying.
A positive net promoter scoresays yep, okay, the salesperson made
a promise or the website madea promise. Depending on which kind
of product you're delivering,customer bought it. They're achieving
their outcome. They don't buyproducts, they buy that outcome that
we always talk about. If youhave a strong NP's but you're losing
(25:33):
to competitors, then okay,let's look at what competitors are
doing and why. And where areyou losing to competitors? Are we
losing to competitors rightupfront at the first pricing conversation
or are we losing to them atthe detailed demo and using that
sort of framework tounderstand where is it dysfunctional
and where are the problemsthat helps set your priorities to
look at it, we've talked aboutno function is unconstrained. I think
(25:55):
part of the opportunity formarketers is to embrace that constraint.
There's never enough money,never enough people, never enough
time in any business, in anyfunction. So looking at that constraint
and saying okay, how do weview that positively as helping us
prioritize what we're going towork on. We're going to be all focused
on how we improve the NP's.Everybody can align around that.
(26:16):
If it means you've got tochange the product or you've got
to change the sales process,or you've got to change the demo,
then people will buy into it.
And marketing's role in manycases, actually the new role under
these circumstances is to bean orchestrator to bring those assets
and the talent and the skilltogether to make those things happen
rather than feeling like theyhave to do it themselves.
(26:38):
Yes, I don't think there is afunction in the world these days
going back to beingconstrained that has all the resources
to do that inside their ownorganization, and nor should they.
If you think about how anorganization is structured today,
if you're a member of areasonable size organization, there's
going to be a strategy team.That strategy team are delivering
the strategy plan. They'reseparate from marketing. They're
(26:58):
looking out at the overallindustry. The dialogue with them
is very much around corecompetence, addressable segments,
and trying to make sure thatwhat their positioning in the business
matches with what the customerand the future prospects are saying.
You've got the productorganization, you've got the finance
organization. So many in theservice industry, the reality of
the product experience isdelivered by a person, that's the
(27:20):
HR team, who are all by theway, incredibly busy and resource
constrained and running aroundtrying to make things happen so the
marketers can't own theentirety of it. But what they can
do is work back from thecustomer to say this is the promise
we're setting. These are thethings that we said we would do in
the market. These are ourguiding Northstar, if you like, as
(27:40):
an organization which isdifferent for every organization,
let's make sure we'redelivering those and let's make sure
we're delivering those in away that's attractive to the buyer,
has a level of differentiationthat might justify the price premium
or price positioning thatwe're looking for in the segment.
Going off on a slight tangenthere. Complicated enough. And then
in November 2022, OpenAIlaunched chat GPT, giving everyone
(28:05):
the ability to generate. Howdo you think realistically that kind
of technology is going to beembraced by marketers? Is this an
efficiency thing or is there acapability angle?
So I think we're just at thebeginning of figuring it out. I do
think it's interesting. I'vebeen in a number of different forums
(28:25):
and conversations. I thinksome of the use cases around customer
service and replacement ofagents and the ability of technology,
people are looking that as avalue add. So yes, you can increase
the customer serviceexperience at a lower cost and a
lower experience. So peoplehave kind of jumped on that quite
quickly. The ability to docall summarization and data management,
(28:48):
the ability to build into aproduct, the agent to agent interaction,
I think is, is superinteresting in terms of what thats
going to do to the productdevelopment cycle. And were only
just beginning to see thatbecause it takes so long to embed
that into a product strategy.But interestingly, for marketing,
so often the conversation isyoure going to value ad, youll value
(29:09):
ad, youll value add. Yeah,content. You guys can just do it
more cheaply now becauselanguage is easy. I think its a real
challenge for marketingleaders to sit in the room and say,
actually there is value to behad here. But I think if you find
yourself pegged in that itsgoing to be efficient and you can
shut down your content teamand chat GPT will just generate everything.
(29:31):
Youre in a pretty toughconversation right off the bat because
youre clearly not seen as astrategic value driver for the business.
And if youre seen as astrategic value driver for the business,
then you should be in therehaving the conversation that says,
hey, this is how my team isexperimenting with this tool. These
are the directions werethinking they can take us. And actually
working around using AI toaccelerate your market insights,
(29:53):
your market research. I mean,these things are trained on the entirety
of the web as it stands on anycutoff date. That means you've got
all different customerprofiles and customer prototypes
in there. So you can go have aconversation, set up a customer profile,
talk to that customer, seewhether it gives you any insights.
I'm still somewhat skepticalbecause I think it is. That's the
(30:14):
lowest common denominator.It's going to gather together all
of the common data and justgive you a more accessible way of
getting to it. So I think ithas value, but insight, judgment,
the human capabilities thatmake us the advisors and orchestrators
to our business. I don't thinkit's going to change that quickly.
It is a new and interestingthought partner to the CEO and CFO,
(30:37):
and you do find they getinteresting questions about why don't
our products show up in aperplexity search or a chat GPT.
So perplexity algorithms arefront of mind for me at the moment.
I haven't cracked that oneeither, but it was interesting. So
I think one of the challengesI think we're going to have is that
vendors are now starting topush the marketing is content argument
to try and sell theirproducts. I saw today a series of
(30:59):
Microsoft Copilot, I guessthey're promoted linkedins, I don't
know, but it's all aboutaccelerating content development
in organizations, and there'sa very well known organization talking
about how is revolutionizedtheir content creation. So I've downloaded
some of their ebooks and someof their white papers, and it's very
clearly generated, it's veryclearly generated by chat GPT, which
(31:23):
of course is copilot. I thinkwe're not there yet. I'm much more
excited, as you said, thatonce you understand the totality
of the information thatthey've got, the scope of it, and
if you have a basicunderstanding of how embedding works
in those models, so how itsees relationships between things,
then you can start asking itsome really interesting questions.
(31:44):
And that's sort of the lowestcommon denominator, or maybe mean
reversion, whatever. You'regoing to get a bland answer because
it's got all the crap people'sopinions as well as all the good
people's opinions. But with abit of judgment skill and I think
careful prompting. I thinkthere's really good intellect, intellectual
work that can be acceleratedby using it. Sort of more strategic
stuff.
Yeah, I think it's beingcurious, right, and asking smart
(32:08):
questions and not beingintimidated. I mean, it's slotting
in some space for curiosityand experimentation with artificial
intelligence. In your normalday job, when you're busy, it's not
easy. The team I've workedwith for the last few years, we did
limited exploration because wefelt that things were moving so quickly.
We would be better placed toactually understand the use cases
(32:29):
and think about thefundamentals rather than try to add
on another layer oftechnology. When you talk about the
vendors, you're uncovering awhole other issue that marketing
is going through recently. Andwhy is marketing siloed and constrained,
and why does it struggle? It'sbecause the marketing department
is an absolute sucker forwhat's going on. In the tech industry.
(32:50):
And marketers have to realizewe're not our own customers. We're
a very unique breed. We'recurious, we like to learn. We will
jump on the next bandwagon.And the vendors actually have a massive
influence in what's going onin the landscape. You look at any
conference, trade show event,it is always now funded by the technology
vendors. And I spent threeyears working for an ad tech technology
(33:11):
vendor, pulling some of thosestrings myself in terms of driving
demand. If marketers only lookat that which they're being fed by
those organizations and don'tget out and take a more holistic
view of what's happening andlook at the broader use cases, they
will repeat some of the samemistakes in the past. And the places
they're going for informationare sponsored by those vendors, they're
shaped by those vendors. Thetraining, the certificates we ask
(33:33):
our people to have aresupplied by those. It's a big problem
for the industry that I thinkAI will just, just amplify because
people are going to get oneview of what it can do for them.
It almost feels like heresy ifyou go to challenge any of that orthodoxy.
So actually, I was having aconversation this morning with Gerry
from labs in our organization,and he said, this is going to be
(33:57):
a really weird question, buthow useful do you think CRM actually
is? It's like, oh my God,that's definitely heresy. But if
you start thinking about.We've all been trained to think about
our customers in terms of anumber or a table or something that
feels very artificial, but ifwe don't do that, it feels like we're
being told we're doing itwrong. And somehow everything that
(34:21):
we know or that we do comeswithin the framework of the technology
that we have to use to executeit. That's a very strange place to
be. So for me, AI removes someof those barriers. Now, it's not
going to replace CRM with AI.The tools are built in. But in terms
of looking for understanding,actually being able to interpret
datasets and get assistancefrom a good model is invaluable.
(34:46):
Yeah, we've all been throughthat. Marketing department needs
a data scientist, or theorganization needs a data scientist.
And I do think there's a realvalue in the fact that the accessibility
of these tools mean you canask a straightforward, common question,
and as you can begin to learn,that maybe actually you don't need
to understand the dataanalytical tools because these things
will get replaced by AI toolsor the interface will be different.
(35:08):
But I do think that thequestion is the important thing,
how you approach the question,where you focus your effort. Everybody
has limited time and resourcesand actually just understanding that
it's going to be all about thecustomer in your segment. Does the
customer see a value for AI?How are they going to think about
it? There's so much AI noisegetting added on to products, but
(35:32):
it does create an opportunityto streamline and provide efficiency,
but with all kinds of weirddependencies. So you're building
on top of someone else's largelanguage model. And if marketers
learned one thing in the lastdecade, it's the danger of building
on rented land. So, yeah, howquickly do you want to go? Where
do you want to put yourenergies? It's still early days,
as I said, as we adapt to it.
(35:52):
So coming back to the theme ofthe show, which is marketing is everyone's
business, not just themarketing departments. We've looked
at sort of behaviors andstructures and culture a little bit,
and now we've looked attechnology for our listeners who
are thinking still ofmarketing as a department, because
(36:13):
that's the framework theyhave. What advice could you give
them to try and think outsideof that box? I mean, we know that
many marketing departments areactually promotional departments
or communication departments.How do they take a step back and
become useful in the way thatwe've been talking about today?
The first one is to berigorous about your own discipline
(36:36):
and professionalism and whatyou deliver. And that means actually
doing things like zero basedbudgeting. So you are creating the
space in your own budget to domore. And this more for less is a
bit of an insidious ifmarketers just accept that more for
more is good, but you have tobe able to go to the table and have
that conversation. You needsome evidence for doing that. Again,
(36:59):
one of the things I like aboutworking through organizations that
are going through change istypically youre coming in after a
period of a plateau or aninefficiency. So there are ability
to self finance new things,but only if youre rigorous about
that zero based budget modeland actually orient yourself on the
value to the customer. Soactually finding a metric that you
(37:20):
can be accountable for, thatthe business cares about, thats going
to drive your conversations,because that metric then drives your
credibility. So in theorganization I was with most recently
for the last seven or eightyears, went in and realized that
actually marketing was busydoing stuff, but it wasnt really
connected to the sales outcomefor the business. So we sat down
(37:40):
and looked at the performanceof the business and said, at our
best we drive 30% of the salesnumber. At our worst we drive 5%
of the sales number. So thenew benchmark is 30% of the sales
number. How are we going toorientate ourselves around that as
a marketing function and whatare we going to do to drive that
out of. So then yourcommunications activity starts to
become crystal clear in termsof what good looks like does it drive
(38:02):
leads into a process thatconvert well that deliver at the
value that the sales team islooking for to grow the business.
And as you do that you startto find different conversations coming
because youre no longertalking about share of impressions
or media coverage or the eventthat you were at. You end up having
conversations about how is thebusiness performing, what's happening
(38:24):
with the why is the marketdynamic the way that it is. And then
if you've got your beautifulconstraint lenses on as you're thinking
about the business you canstart to see where the business has
an inefficiency. So youtouched earlier on CRM. If the sales
organization isn't trackingand reporting their deals well within
the CRM, you're going tostruggle to establish the impact
(38:45):
of marketing. Before you eventhink about attribution, its partnering
with the sales organization.Say actually lets just understand
whats driving growth together.How do we improve the overall and
so common dashboards, commonmetrics, shared dataset, thats a
multi year piece of work in alarge complex organization. But that
journey builds credibility.That when you get to the data point
(39:05):
and you start looking at itand going actually the problem is
we dont have product and salesjoined up so now we should start
thinking about a new productintroduction process. Or actually
the problem is that we areexcluded at the first RFP because
our book price is too high. Oractually we're seeing that we're
missing because we're slow onour speed to demo, then you're into
(39:27):
a conversation that says wellhow do we solve for that? You've
got the insight as themarketer, you've got the capability
and that's how you build thebusiness case for expanding the responsibilities
of marketing and more formore. And you're having a conversation
with the business. That said,we can help you solve this problem.
Yes im going to need to hire apricing specialist, but look at the
upside of what we did in thelast year around performing and simplifying
(39:49):
our book price. We have soldmore of this product at a better
margin. Would you like more ofthat? And it very quickly becomes
well yes actually that seemsto make an awful lot of sense so
you can start in quite atightly siloed function. But if you
establish a reputation forexcellence, if you establish an ability
to drive the number for thebusiness, you begin to enter into
the conversation that says,well, whats the next thing to do
(40:10):
to drive the number for thebusiness? And actually if thats price
or its product or itsdistribution, youre in the room having
the conversation saying, well,maybe if product took more to sales
and we could create amechanism for that that would help
accelerate our process. Andthen someone eventually always says,
is anybody going to put uptheir hand to run this? And then
you just got to make sure itsmarketing puts its hand up quicker
(40:31):
than say, the product team puttheir hand up or the sales team put
their hand up. Does that makesense? So you kind of build your
ability to drive theorganization forward.
Well, there you have it. Muchindeed to Graham Wiley. And thank
you for taking the time towatch or listen to this episode.
Now, if you want to talk to meabout its content, you can find me
on LinkedIn and there's a linkto my profile which you'll find on
(40:52):
the show notes at unicorny Dotco dot UK dot. Now, if you liked
the content and want more,then please give us a thumbs up by
subscribing. And if you'refeeling really kind, I'd love you
to write us a review. That isall we have time for today. Thank
you again and we will see younext week.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!