Amid the challenges of segmentation and strategies targeting customer loyalty to utilising internal voices to cut down on “finfluencer” costs and mishaps, one pertinent issue hits marketers across all sectors: how to build successful teams by attracting and retaining talent.
From investment banks to insurance brokers, the challenge is the same – and comes into acute focus during the toughest times.
A commercially minded marketer is someone who understands the overarching go-to-market process, says Amie Stankiste, chief marketing officer at LSEG.
“It’s not just about being good at marketing. A commercially minded marketer understands the research, customer insights, what drives data, and what feeds into the products or solutions team.”
Equally as important as the relationship with sales is the partnership with customer success teams, she adds.
“The customer success team gathers a multitude of data points each day, which marketers must leverage and integrate back into campaigns.”
Successful marketing functions play a critical role in bringing together the key stakeholders across a business, says Isha Chander, the former head of EMEA marketing at JP Morgan’s payments division.
“Sales may call on marketing when they need a brochure from time to time, but commercially minded marketers don’t just think about what each team wants – they bring it all together and look at the bigger picture in a holistic way.”
Translation is key
Georgina Peters Venzano, chief marketing officer at Beazley, says a commercially minded marketer must have the ability to translate what they do internally and ensure each team in the business understands the value that marketing is delivering.
Staying away from marketing lingo and adopting professional, jargon-free vocabulary goes a long way in securing buy-in from other departments, according to the Beazley CMO.
“A big part of being commercially minded is thinking about your audience. Although so much of your audience is external, it’s important to get your internal audience to understand the value you create,” she explains.
Outside of the go-to-market process, marketers must understand how to work with new systems and technology to maintain the cost efficiency of their teams.
“If you’re bringing in new marketing technology to your tech stack, you need to be able to work with that technology and understand there will be a temporary depreciation impact on your organisation,” Stankiste adds.
“Marketers can’t just keep bringing in new tech, they need to understand the integration costs and the consequences of that tech on the balance sheet.”
By understanding the impact of marketing on the finance department, chief marketing officers can build their relationships with chief financial offers and introduce the investment case for growth marketing.
Securing a seat
Only 26% of chief marketing officers are regularly involved in board meetings, according to research by Deloitte.
“Having a seat at the table isn’t just for the sake of it,” Chander says.
“It’s about marketing having the authority and responsibility to comment on things that are not marketing related. When marketers are involved in business meetings and asking the right questions to product, sales, and finance teams, that also helps drive credibility and gives marketers more experience to start becoming even more commercially minded,” she adds.
However, there’s little point in pulling up a seat if the table doesn’t understand your message or value.
“A huge part of my learning was realising that marketers come to the table about 10 steps ahead of everybody else,” says Peters Venzano.
Stakeholders that don’t understand marketing often believe customers make decisions with a rational mindset, she says, but marketers understand that purchase decisions are made within an emotional mindset, which is later rationalised.
“As customers, we don’t know why we choose certain brands – it’s an inherent emotional connection we have with them, that is then rationalised through words and experience,” she says.
“If we take little bit of time to take about five steps back and articulate what brands and marketing actually does for a customer, and how that drives preference, connections, targeted sales, and increase in revenue, I think we’ll find we have more of the same language with different stakeholders.”
At London Stock Exchange Group, Stankiste learnt to speak the language of the board by looking at external benchmarks and metrics from competitors.
Working with third-party organisations, Stankiste identified the high-growth competitor companies that C-suite admired and benchmarked LSEG’s marketing spend against theirs.
“We showed our stakeholders the percentage of revenue that competitor companies are investing in marketing on an annual basis,” she says.
“It was really powerful for them to understand what the best of the best are doing. It made them want to raise the bar – who doesn’t have a bit of competition?”
Flipping the budget
By speaking the language of the board and earning buy in from key stakeholders, marketing teams can flip the narrative from “marketing spend” to “business spend.”
“It’s about creating a shared objective in the organisation, so when you’re trying to spend budget, it isn’t marketing spending a lot of money – it’s the business,” Chander says.
Repositioning the narrative forces marketers to consider the checkpoints needed to bring various stakeholders into the decision-making process.
In turn, marketers will become more cognizant of how they spend their budget, she explains.
Navigating budgets – whether for marketing or the wider organisation – is a key skill to learn for commercially minded and strategically driven teams.
Marketing comprised roughly 13.6% of a company’s total budget in 2023, according to Deloitte’s survey of CMOs – that’s a lot of outlay to account for.
Whether your organisation’s marketing spend is benchmarked against competitors or not, marketers shouldn’t blame budget constraints for not executing campaigns effectively, however.
That’s the advice of Peters Venzano who says “a small budget doesn’t mean you can’t be successful.”
“As marketers, you set the parameters for success and educate people about what you can achieve,” she adds.
For Chander, the need to ensure every pound is spent wisely is just as important with a large budget as it is with a tight budget.
Though larger budgets give marketers the tools to pull off creative, global campaigns, they also call for rigorous return on investment analysis.
“With or without budget, there’s always the need to be super creative,” she says.
“Budgets should always be tight, and marketers should always be answerable to how they’re spending it. It’s a marketer’s job to demonstrate the value they can have and ensure that value is not just being spoken about from the marketing team.”
Making room
According to 2023 research by CFA Institute, finance is the most desirable sector to work in among 18–25-year-olds – up from fifth place in 2021.
The finance industry’s rise in the ranks is a stark shift from the peak pandemic years and is indicative of the generation’s desire for stability. In the report, 62% of the respondents cited a “good salary” as the most important criteria when looking for employment.
Yet, in the market, it is common to hear marketing peers talk about the “war on talent” and a need to do more to attract applicants and diversify teams.
Today, more than ever, an authentic employer brand is crucial in attracting candidates from outside the sector, according to Stankiste.
“Candidates are wanting to find companies that they align with on values and principles. They want to believe in what a company is trying to do and get behind the mission before they come into a company.”
In a marcomms environment, attracting new talent to the workplace lies within both external and internal communications – often, your people are your best tools to building a talented team.
“As marketers, it’s about using your channels to tell the stories of your team, your employees, and the wider work of the business,” Stankiste says.
At Beazley, Peters Venzano has utilised the power of storytelling to build out and diversify her marketing team, with 26 new joiners since she started in 2020 [as at March 2024].
“When recruiting new people, the biggest thing we learnt was candidates didn’t know much about insurance,” she explains.
“After building the team, they were blown away by just how exciting insurance is.”
Though insurance and excitement don’t always go hand in hand, candidates begin to understand why the sector is exciting once they gain in-depth knowledge of the business and how it can fundamentally change the world, the Beazley CMO notes.
“That’s where attracting new talent comes back to being commercially minded. As marketers, it’s so important that you really know your business and can articulate the value it brings and how you can shift the needle.”