Profiles in Persuasion - Shelagh McManus

The world of B2B marketing is constantly evolving, and it takes insights from experienced marketers to stay ahead. With her vast experience, Shelagh McManus offers a treasure trove of advice for today's marketers. Our discussion with her cuts through the complexity of marketing strategies and delivers straightforward and actionable advice. From the importance of customer focus to the integration of sales and marketing, Shelagh's wisdom is distilled into a guide that speaks directly to the challenges and opportunities facing B2B marketers today. Join us as we explore these insights designed to refine your marketing approach and better connect with your business audience.

Guests

Shelagh McManus, Senior Director, Marketing at Brightcove

Welcome to profiles in Persuasion. My guest today is a business leader that has led marketing through many of the largest American blue chip and UK companies through great changes of the 20 tens and 2020s in B2B and B2C marketing. Symantec, HP, Iris, and Sheila has led

change through acquisition, private equity funding, has recruited and developed marketing teams repeatedly. Again and again. She's been called a visionary leader. Her colleagues mentioned her intelligence, commitment, energy. She's a good listener and she's sensitive. Sheila seems to know how

to restructure a team or turn around marketing function, doing the best thing for the company. With her team still singing her praises, Sheila's work is driven by, I would say, drive two types of drive a drive to understand, to understand people. When she's working with data

and in B2B, it's still about understanding people, I think, and then a drive towards business priorities to serve those people. And she's overseen change. And throughout this change, her colleagues have mentioned focus, the ability to strip

away the unnecessary, reduce complexity. One of her colleagues mentioned that the quote was she shielded us, I think, which was about, you know, in great change when there's great change going on in the organization, um, large commercial priorities that are sometimes difficult to achieve

Sheila has been able to protect her team. So, um, starting out in food, I think as a graduate trainee at Safeway's and purchasing to explore that then in in software, of course, both B2C and B2B set up marketing at NC virtual. At the time of great change, Moneo commercialized company, the Iris

the manager at the time said that you treated every pound as if you were your own, which for a private equity company is very, very admirable. Um, of course he recruited and developed teams there. And then the big the big guns, the companies with the really big budgets, the really big teams. Symantec, uh, where you were overseeing, you know

many of the buzzwords of the 2010, 2020 product led growth, um, you know, understanding consumers, um, and introducing new marketing methods and techniques. HPE of course, even bigger budgets, even bigger teams, and then Forcepoint and Brightcove, which is going to be really interesting to explore

Um, you know, the narrative there, the journey between these enormous companies and then these very fast growing private equity backed businesses where we've been able to restructure and oversee global global marketing. Sheila, when we spoke last week, you said you mentioned to me that you thought sometimes we forget our audience

is in B2B. And you mentioned, related to that, the need to kind of re-educate ourselves, ourselves, and given your deep education in B2B that we've just explored, what did you mean by that?

I think as B2B marketers, we are very good at promoting what we do

as in what the company is that you work for, what the products are, what the solution is, and sometimes forget who we're actually trying to present that to and what's motivating them. And it's that classic challenge which we criticize sales for, and we go, all sales just can't sell because they're not listening to the customer and actually saying in the customer's

language. But then as marketers, we too tend to use our own language. We talk about our products. You know, back in back in the old days, um, you know, the worst thing a salesperson could do and the best thing marketing used to give them to do was present the product as a PowerPoint that not listen, not

understand what questions to ask, not really get to the bottom of what is it the customer is trying to achieve. And I think as B2B marketers, we need to have that front and foremost of our minds whenever we're creating something to make sure we're putting things in the right context.

Do you think sales has maybe caught up over the last

five years with things like, uh, you know, the many different movements in sales, consultative selling and challenger sales and kind of evolution through these different techniques. Do you think sales has caught up with the need to listen to the customers and maybe marketing hasn't? B2B marketing hasn't quite kept pace with you think?

I think that certainly

it depends which organization you're in and which sales team you're working with. It's an ongoing thing because obviously you have that constant generational change and therefore as a new generation comes in, they too need to learn. Um, and sometimes people forget that because people talk about sales being a very intuitive thing to do, whereas actually there are techniques and methodologies for a reason. In

marketing. Similarly, I think marketing gained an element of professionalism. Then it sort of lost its way a bit. Then being part of like the C level and having CMO and being on the board, I think we're at an interesting point at the moment where that's almost sort of slipping away again, and you're reading articles

around. I really want to see what's actually around, you know, um, marketing's place on the board and how should marketing act on the board. And it's like, it feels like we're sort of having to fight again to be professional. So maybe we have lost our way a little bit and slip back, and maybe we need to grow up again.

Um, and what would that

what would that be? What would that re-education be in marketing would be?

I think it depends what part of marketing you're in. Obviously, a lot of my background is in technology, and I think what's happened to a lot of tech marketing, um, teams, is that you've become very fractured. So you have people doing very specialized

roles. And that was always something that was more prevalent in larger organizations, whereas now it's prevalent in smaller organizations. Right. So people end up just doing new logo or just doing customer or just doing digital or just doing ABM.

The kind of professionalism of being a marketer is then fractured, and you're maybe experience is a bit

limited. Is that. Yes, exactly.

And then as you get, in inverted commas, promoted through the ranks, then as you move up, you haven't necessarily got that breadth of experience and understanding as to how all those pieces come together. And I think that's where perhaps we've lost our voice at that table, if you like, at that senior table, because perhaps we're not looking at the total

business, and we need to be able to look at the business holistically and then hone in on the areas that we're dealing with and whether that's an area like ABM or digital or whether that's a broader area of the whole of marketing and understanding that whole customer lifecycle, the product life cycle, the business life cycle. I think sometimes we've sort of narrowed our own focus

down to become specialized, which is great. But then it's how do you grow and expand again as you move up through the ranks?

What's an example of something that can get lost and that, you know, maybe we could retain with a different model?

The one for me that stands out the most, I think, is that split between

chasing new logo and looking after customers. And it's always cyclical because it always depends on what the economy is doing. When the economy is tough and it's difficult to chase new business, then everyone goes, oh, we must look after our customers. Um, and then offensive and defensive marketing, almost. And then when the economy is buoyant, everyone's like, oh

yes, let's go and grab a whole pile of new customers. Actually, you know, it's a bit like that quote. And I always get it wrong as to who said it, but, you know, you can manage the short tum, you can manage the long terme, but the skill is managing the two together. And for me that's the same with new logo and customer. You know you've got to manage the two together. You shouldn't ever be literally

pendulum swinging between them. You've got to have that balance between those two things. And therefore, um, with things like digital, you often find that the digital team is either focused on things like the sort of infrastructure of digital. So like looking after the email nurture, looking after the website, looking after

the digital chatbots and things like that, or they're focused on digital advertising to new customers. Well, what happened to how you're digitally communicating with your current customers? That's equally as important. Yeah. So it's making sure that you have got that balance between those two things. I think that's something that we as marketing leaders need to be very

aware of in the organisation.

I think it'd be really interesting when we talk later about individual experiences, uh, to explore the concept of, yeah, the kind of company life cycles, the kind of stages and cycles that businesses go through and being able to keep in mind. Given your experience of a few of these cycles and a few different types

of companies, how to actually implement that long terme thinking, um, in like private equity backed business is very difficult sometimes to have that long tum and be really interesting to kind of to be honest, I think it's equally different in private equity as well as it is in a, um, a public company, because you're so driven to those quarters in the

public company because you've got to present to the city.

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Particularly marketing very much suffers when it's a short tum. Um, um, so we've mentioned a couple of those dangerous buzzwords already, um, product led growth. Another one, um, uh, that we discussed last week was ABM. And

uh, you felt able to question, uh, in a way that I don't think, uh, very many other B2B marketers would have dared, uh, the, the, uh, the sacredness of, of ABM. You mentioned you were, to some extent, uh, skeptical of ABM. What did you mean by that?

I think ABM um, unfortunately, and you're starting to see

a bit of lash back against it, which is good. It's healthy. In my opinion. ABM has become this topic as well. This is what all marketing should be about. And therefore everyone's trying to jump on that bandwagon. And so therefore it's almost become any type of marketing. It's called ABM marketing. What do you do? I do ABM, it's like do you do you really do account

based marketing? And I think it's got very confused as to what that definition is of ABM. You know, in its broadest form, people talk about ABM being targeting customers with messages that are appropriate to them in a focused way. Well, surely that's what we should be doing all the time. That's not

something new. That's not a new thing you should be doing. True, ABM is about properly working with the whole account and focusing in on an account and what works for that account across the organization in the old days that might have included. And it'll be interesting to see if people do ever start doing this again. You know, we

would set up events inside the reception area of a large company so that you could talk to the whole company and you would talk to people as they came through reception, and you would put on games and interactions and things for them. You know, that's part of true, but it's only a small part, but also a part of ABM in its truest form

So that's I mean, that's that's I mean, uh, you need a lot of buying to do that, right, from people to get permission to do that. But I guess if you're champion is saying the better knowledge they have of this vendor, the better they're going to be able to do their jobs. We're paying for this or we're thinking bankruptcy. Um, I guess this is with customers, right? Rather than with prospects

customers and prospects.

Because again, it goes back to that long terme relationship and that long terme strategy piece. You can only afford to do that, obviously, if you've got the big enough revenue. Let's be blunt about it. That's what business is all about, is actually driving that revenue stream. If you've got a big enough revenue stream with that customer, you

know you can't do ABM if your average order value is $10 a pop. Yeah, that's that's not that's a transactional model. That's a inside sales model. That's a more a mass market.

No matter the AI that you have. It's more about absolutely.

It's more about making broader decisions to drive a quantity. Yes, there's a quality within it, but it's

not the pure element of it. Whereas in ABM you're really looking at driving that long. Terme absolutely. Partnership relationship with that customer and really embedding within that. Um, and therefore it doesn't matter whether it's a prospect or a customer, you're still looking for that real integration, that real embedment of

the two businesses together.

Um, what difference has it made going from these very large public companies to more, you know, venture backed, fast growing businesses? What's what's been your experience, um, about the things that have been the same, but what has been different in the challenges

that marketing's faced there?

It's interesting because I sort of almost turned it the other way around because unlike a lot of people, I sort of came up through smaller companies and private equity into the big companies and then back, back down. That sounds dreadful down the other side. Um, but what my expectations were when I joined the big companies was that there'd be all beautifully

orchestrated. They would have the most amazing systems and processes. Everything would be hyper efficient and effective. Um, what I found was that they were much more, forgive me, HP and Symantec, much more scrappy behind the scenes, um, than I actually expected. So actually, a lot of what I'd learned from being in smaller organizations and startups

was very applicable in the larger.

I mean, they are split up into individual units, aren't they? It's not like they are.

Um, but having said that, what very much I learned, particularly from being at HP at the time, HP was an amazing organization in the way it ran, and it was all about you were part of an

engine, and therefore that part of the engine had to work really well. Now the challenge there was then when do you get out of your swim lane? When do you put your head up and look to the broader business to then look to apply it to yourself? And also an element of what I found very interesting. There was managers often didn't manage

their team, they were managing upwards and they were managing, reporting and managing the metrics and not man managing the team as much. Um, which was strange to me because to me as a manager, the whole point of it is that you're man managing your team. So, uh, I think I brought much more humanity into that situation. But

at the same time, then learned much more about that reporting and presentation and how to talk business through the numbers. Um, so that was quite different in a larger organization to really hone in on that talking business through the numbers. And so that's what I then took back out to the smaller companies

is really understanding that business and that data business at a higher level. The whole revenue pipeline retention, EBITDA, which I was obviously very well aware of from private equity, the whole EBITDA side of things. Um, and, and really making sure that I could talk that language and help my

team to understand that language, to make them relevant to the business. So that marketing wasn't just that awful phrase that people use the colouring in team in the corner.

Yeah, I would really like to explore this tension between being the business and the reporting, the numerical, the numbers upwards

and, uh, the needs of individuals within the team. It's obviously, you know, without the team you have nothing, but you don't you can't make decisions in a business or because of individuals needs it. You have to, you know, people have to fit within the needs of the business

to do the right thing for the business. Um, but to be an empathetic leader, of course, you need to be aware of the needs of the team. So how how how has your thinking about balancing this changed over your career?

I think it is that recognition that you are there for the business, and all of us are there for the business

Um, and I think the starkest explanation of that is when a salesperson says, um, well, I'll take all my customers with me. They never should because they should have built the relationship with the customer and the business, and they are just the front engine of it. And that's what you've got to remember as a manager within an organization, is that you

are absolutely representing the business and there to help the business grow and do what's right for the business. But you are working with humans and like even if you are working with machinery, you've got to make sure that that's in its best condition to move forwards. Um, and if you go back to, you know, the old industrialist like William Morris from Morris Cars

you know, he created a health care system now. Yes. Part of that was paternalistic and looking after his workforce. But the reality was it was looking after the workforce. So he got better productivity so that he got better profits so that he got better turn around. And it's the same when you're a manager and it sounds callous, but it doesn't need to

be callous. It can be very authentic because you're listening to the individuals and helping them to grow to the best of their ability. And that may mean grow and grow and move on outside of the business. Um, and so it's understanding what's going to work in the business, what's going to work longer time in the business as well. Um, one of the great things

about HP, which sounds awful, actually, but, uh, when we were doing rounds of redundancies, we were very structured in the way we did it. And one of the things was everybody was ranked and they were ranked by multiple managers on skills that were required today and skills that required tomorrow

And that included soft skills as well as sort of hard skills, if you like. Uh, because it was about making sure that you had the right mix of people to take the business forward as well, not just what was needed today. And sometimes, therefore, people would be made redundant because they weren't the fit for tomorrow's business, whatever tomorrow's business was

Um, and I guess that's a lesson for us all as well, is keep up to date and understanding how business is changing, and learn with that, and make sure that you are continuing your career development, whether that's through training programs or going to conferences or whatever. You know, you've got to move with the times. You can't just sit there and go, well, I've always done it this way, and I'm

always going to do it that way. That way isn't going to be there in ten years time.

Um, tell me about so I mentioned this, this quote earlier from one of your previous colleagues who had said that, uh, she sheltered us was the quote, and I, I think this was at I think this was not at one of the bigger companies. I think it was a sort of mid-sized company. It we don't need to go into the details

but I'd just be interested in, um, you know, that concept, uh, clearly, as we've just discussed, everything we do, uh, should be about, you know, the needs of the business, um, rather than primarily driven on people's needs. Otherwise, we'd be doing something else. Um

but what what does that. What does that mean to, um, protect or look after a team in a period of great change? I assume there was some change or something going on there. Tell me a bit about about your experiences and that sort of.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. So my view is that

and this is something I have had to learn, I have a very open personality and talk to anybody about anything. And that includes in business. And as you go up through the ranks, you realize that actually not everything you know about is relevant or appropriate for people that are working for

you. And it might be the elements of it are, but maybe not the whole story, because maybe they're not in a position to understand how that all impacts or how that works together. And it might just throw them into panic or it might disengage them or whatever. So as a leader of people, you've got to sort of act like a sponge and take all the stuff

that's being pushed down, filter it, and then hand out the right bits at the right time in the right way. And that can be very individual. You know, one person will react to news in a completely different way to somebody else. And again, that's something I've learned over the years, is, you know, just because I think that this comment is perfectly reasonable, someone else might not

they might get completely panicked by it, and it's helping them through that situation. So that's what I think that sort of shielding is, you know, is to make sure that you're protecting your team from the hurt, if you like, and the turmoil, because at the end of the day, any organization, through whatever change it's going through, the

vast majority of the time, I wouldn't say 100% of the time, the vast majority of the time, you're still going to be selling to the same sorts of customers, the same sorts of solutions after the changes. So that's not changing. It's everything else around it that's changing. So you as a marketing team have still got to execute and do

what you are doing, even though there is this mass turmoil around you. So it's sort of sheltering them from that storm around you, but making sure that they're aware that, yeah, the wind is blowing in a different direction and we are going to need to move more up market, down market, whatever it is to actually be part of that. But

fundamentally, the essence of what we're doing isn't changing.

Yeah. And hence your, you know, your, uh, emphasis on understanding the, the customer, the audience is absolutely that relationship between what we can do for the customers. Um, and let's talk about sales. We've talked about sales and relationships with sales. A

little bit already. Um, there are a number of times where, uh, your previous colleagues have mentioned that you had improved the relationship between sales and marketing. Can you give us an anecdote of where that has fallen down in the past, and what things that you have found work that perhaps you didn't

know how to do it, or perhaps you didn't know would work initially that that have actually worked?

Yeah. So I think there's a number of situations where I've walked into an organization, and marketing is seen as a separate thing to sales instead of working together to achieve the same end. And it's come about because

marketing has gone and done what marketing does exceptionally well. But often it's the language that marketing uses with sales, but they don't understand, and sales don't talk the language back to marketing that marketing understands. Um, the inevitable extreme version of that is when a sales person comes to a marketing team

which they often do and says, I need an event. And it's like what the answer should be from marketing is, okay, I'll go and find you a nice event. But what they should be saying is, why? What are you trying to achieve? And really understanding what that sales person? Because at that moment in time, that sales person is your audience

So what's that salesperson trying to achieve? And then say, okay, the best way to achieve that is actually to do this mix of things because we as marketing are the experts in that mix of things. So it's making sure that we're understanding what and why sales are doing something. But then also when we're presenting

the results of marketing, if you like, you know, we do things like say to them, oh yeah, we've created this series of adverts and uh, the click through rate is XYZ and the cost per unit is XYZ and Cfpl's this, that and the other and sales are like, yeah, and

because to sales they're like what does this mean for me. Why what purpose does this driving. Whereas if you can say to them, right, we've we're doing this because we're trying to reach this audience and by reaching this audience, we're opening up that conversation and warming them up so that you can then go and have a conversation with them. And by the way, we've managed to

reach 1000 people in that audience that you wanted to reach. Then sales will go, oh, that's cool, that's great. So it's sort of making sure you're remembering your internal audiences as much as you're remembering your external audiences and then making sure you are accountable. I mean, sales are harshly accountable, you know, let's face it

sales don't hit their number, but they know that their job is under threat. In marketing, it's a lot softer. And marketers, again, will often complain about, you know, well, I don't get the money sales get sales, get all these treats. So okay, you want a quarterly target on your head and you want to be at risk of being fired if you don't hit the right number of leads and mqls

and everything else through the system. You know, it's like, yeah, but I don't have control of it. Neither do they. You know, the customer has their own cycles. They can help orchestrate it and manage it and get better and better at that. They don't have responsibility for it and neither do you in marketing. So it's really making sure that you're working together on these things and you're understanding and

listening and then talking the right language. Back to sales. Um, that's when I find that it works the best.

We've we've talked a couple of times about this combination of business, uh, business success and driving, business success and empathy, justice and, and and, um, I guess understanding

of people's, you know, understanding of what's, what's fair, what do people have control over? What do they need, do you think this have you been aware of this concept as a driving principle in your life?

Yeah, definitely. Um, for me, fairness and justice is deep, deep rooted in my

background and probably in my genetics, to be honest. Um, inevitably, from my name, the color of my hair, most people were gathered, obviously the Scottish or Irish, and it's the mix of the two more Irish and Scottish, um, and therefore my family have always been about helping the greater good and doing

things for the greater good. Uh, my parents are very much, uh, in that mode as well. And although my father started out in the in mining, he ended up teaching. My mum was a teacher. My uncles and aunts are all teachers. I've got grandparents that are teachers. So it's always been about that education and helping others and helping others for that

better good. And so for me, even in business, and it's it's an interesting one that I've wrestled with personally from a sort of moralistic standpoint, almost is at the end of the day, business is about business, and a therefore business is about making a profit and you can't get away

from that. Now, do I believe in materialistic profit driving things? No. I'm much softer and believe in equality and goodness for all. Um, and so there is that slight tension for myself within a business that yes, I'm there for the business. And at the end of the day, the business is about driving money and profit, and therefore people

do get made redundant. There are restructures to me recently, you know, because that's right for the business. Um, but it might not be right for me personally. And it there is that sort of tension and fight within there, but absolutely very deep rooted that nine times out of ten you can balance those two things. And that

the one thing as a manager, I always try and be is fair and equal across the team.

Well, how how does that impact the decisions you make?

Probably things. I think about them a lot more than a lot of other people. Um, because I'm trying to make sure that it is appropriate and appropriate to where people

are trying to get to. So one of the things I always try and make sure I keep in touch with, and it's not just when you take on a team, it's as you manage a team through as well is what are people's motives and drivers, and that changes throughout their life. It's changed for me throughout my life. You know, again, an obvious one as a female is when people have children, you

know, yes, they still want to work and they absolutely want to do a brilliant job in work, but now they've got this other competing priority that they want to do the best for their children and be there for their children. And so it's making sure that you're helping them balance that and equally achieve, you know, filling all your buckets to the right level and not just

sinking yourself into one level, um, and trying to manage that through. And that can become very personal. I have been known to give, uh, my team personal objectives, like they must take a two week holiday within the next three months. Yeah. And literally measured them on that, um, uh, which is an interesting one. But yeah, those things are

important to people.

Well, tell me about so we're talking about, um, uh, motherhood. Tell me about your own mother. When we, when we were speaking, it seems that, you know, these concepts of partnership and alliances, which we've been talking about quite a lot today, alliances between sales and marketing

to do the best thing for the, you know, the collective, you know, working with teams, constituents of those teams to do the right thing for the, you know, the group, the collective. Um, I think that that concept of partnership and alliances seemed crucial to her as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So my parents weren't your

archetypal mum and dad, you know, bearing in mind I was born in the late 60s. So therefore, you know, that goes out to work. Mum stays at home. Um, from the outside, they look like dad was a strong one and mum was the more mild one doing all the domestic duties. Actually, that wasn't the reality at all

They worked together very much as a team. Both of them worked. Um, in fact, my mum went back to full time employment when I was only two and a half, so I managed to get an extra two and a half years at school. Lucky me. Uh, which I really didn't want by the time I was 16, but never mind. And my mum always had this philosophy as well, that being living things should always

have pairs, so that they have a friend and a someone that they can sort of be close to that's close to them in age as well. Um, and therefore there's me and my older brother and then they, my parents had a gap and then, um, they started to have more children. They actually adopted two children. They adopted them together so that they were a pair together

because there was quite a large age difference between us. And then as we all grew up, then me and my older brother often looked after my younger brother and sister. You know, it was very much that everybody shared together. Um, my parents both did Open University as well when we were younger, and so me and my older brother would look after the

younger two because my mum and dad would be having their panic because their assignment was due in that weekend, or they were working late and therefore hadn't got up for breakfast. And in the morning when we had breakfast, my dad would get up first. He always took breakfast with my mum in bed, which was a very sweet thing. Oh, wow. Um, right throughout their marriage, which was 55 years long. So they did that for

many, many years. Um, and as children, we were trained that we would come downstairs, help ourselves to breakfast, and you washed up your own stuff and you put it on the side before you then went back upstairs. You know, it was sort of like a almost an Army style thing, but not without a the, um, aggression within it. It was just that's what made

everything work smoothly together. So that whole everything partnering relationships process system for a reason, then that's been embedded in me right from the very start. Um, so yeah, very much so. And my mum now has a incredible partnership because she's actually now

blind. And so she has a guide dog. Right. Um, and my mum has never had dogs in her life before. And so when she got her first guide dog for her, that was a different relationship and partnership that she had to learn and then learn how to bring that back into the family, because obviously that was another element and another twist. Um, within our family

So yeah, it's she's definitely an interesting character.

And how has that background affected you, do you think the how has that changed the way you think about life? I mean, you have actually quite a lot of siblings now. Um, you know, you're clearly, um, perhaps particularly close to

all of them as a, as a child, when your parents were doing the degrees and things. How has that experience shaped you?

Very much the whole diversity, inclusivity and equality piece. Um, so, uh, my younger siblings are what they, uh, excuse me if it isn't politically

correct these days are mixed race. That and therefore we were a mixed family. Um, and therefore that was just all part of how you dealt with life. And then obviously with my mum going blind, that's a disability. So that came into it as well. So for me that's always just been I've never really understood

why people don't automatically treat people equally and inclusively. I was also brought up in a very Christian household. My father was a devout Catholic, my mother a devout Church of England. So not the same. Slightly different sides of the same coin. Um, and therefore that whole principle of um, helping others, treating others for

giving others, uh, learning from that and learning from your mistakes was very much part of how I was brought up. So that's very much how I try to manage my team as well. You know, people will make mistakes. That's that's normal. And it's giving people a safe space to make

those mistakes in and then helping them to learn from that and not make them again. So, you know, and and that growth and that development, you know, you learn much more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. The success is just a success, a mistake. You can take something away and learn from it. Mhm.

And what was your what

was your dad's role do you think in this how how did they uh how did they get together. What was their, what was your kind of, your dad's uh role in, in, in that family and uh, your dad was a very strong character, um, and very methodical and mathematical and logical and scientific and data

He was, um, electronics and mathematics, um, whereas my mum is much more theatre music. Although dad was very much into music, both of them were very much into jazz. That was one of the things that, you know, they shared in common, but they were both very individual within their partnership and gave each other that space within their partnership. Um, so

dad was very mechanical as well. Um, hence me being able to weld cars and fix cars when I was 14. Um, so yeah, so he was very much the sort of strong figure, but he was also much more sporty and outgoing, not sporty. In team sports. It was individual sports

Um, that's something else that's definitely rubbed off on me. My parents weren't really competitive. They were all about doing the best because you can do your best. Yeah. Not to compete with somebody else. Um, and that's one of the things I have struggled with throughout my life is I don't compete, I can't compete, and if someone else wants

something more than I do, then I'll help them do that. Yeah, rather than walk over them to get there. Uh, which sometimes can be potentially my degradation at the time. Um, which is an interesting one, I think.

I think we have an event coming up about, uh, how to do how to do self-promotion, because I think sometimes marketers

uh, like, you have that, have that dilemma sometimes. Um, okay. So, um, let's see, let's ask about how you got into marketing. What was what was the trigger? So obviously you started out at Safeway graduate scheme. Um, yeah. So what was the trigger to kind of get you interested in marketing?

So going back before the Safeway graduate scheme

um, as part of my businesses where I was very lucky and I don't think there were any courses that are like this anymore. I think what was called the Thin sandwich course. So each year you did seven months in industry and five months in college until the last year when you did eight months in college and we had to complete 22 months in industry to be granted our degree. So you had to have a sponsoring company

Um, and I was actually in a chemical engineering company. Right. Uh, so again, a very different environment to be in from where I ended up.

And so this is this is the data and the science side of you.

Absolutely. That's that's the data science, engineering, the maths, the logic that side of it. The reason I ended up doing business studies was that I actually decided I was going to go into

human resources, the people side, the people side within that logical business piece of it all. Um, when I graduated, couldn't get a job in HR because at the time you didn't really have HR graduates. It was something. It was something that a lot of people went into with that failed somewhere else in business. And that was the reality at the time. There weren't many professional

HR people. It's interesting. We changed completely obviously since then, um, and hence ending up in Safeway because it was retail and working with people, you know, your main resource is people. So that's how I ended up at Safeway. Um, I then ended up in, uh, sales and marketing for, uh, FMcG companies

um, through aerosols, then into food. Yep. Uh, then moved over to the Netherlands in sales, um, and ended up in recruitment first and then into a telemarketing telesales in tech. And that's where my technology piece all started. I ended up back in the UK, um, and was doing a business development management role and realized while

I was doing that and working with marketing agencies, and it was in a small organization, so I was able to properly work with the directors who were the owner directors of the business as well, to really understand the business that I realized that there was a lot of things I was trying to achieve as a sales person, that actually I could get much more help

by working with marketing and the marketing agencies. Um, and obviously through my reputation, obviously filtered through and leached out because I then got headhunted. Right. It took three months for the headhunter to persuade me to go for an interview for this director of marketing role, and the

reason it took him three months was I kept saying, I'm not a marketeer. That's that's not what I do. I'm sales, I'm business. Um, and then he said to me, but what do you think marketing is? I said, well, at the time in technology, um, marketing was very much about being in Europe, about being a project

manager for stuff that was produced in America and project coordinating out. And for me, that was part of what I could do. But there was nothing interesting in there, nothing I could get my teeth into, nothing exciting in that. Um, and he said, but what do you want to do in five years time? I said, well, I want to be part of a business success. I want to be

part of the strategy, understanding what's making it work, what isn't working, putting that right. And he said, well, why do you not think that's marketing? And I thought back to my business studies degree days and thought, yeah, fair point. Why isn't that marketing? Um, and that's how I ended up going for the job role in marketing.

And did you see yourself in in leadership? Well, clearly

you did. What about B2B? Did you see yourself in B2B?

Yes. So that was in B2B as well. Um, so I sort of moved from the FMcG side, Stirling into business, um, and then moved into the tech side selling into business. So yeah, very much on that B2B side of things at that point. And for a few years

after what my ideal role was, and I guess this sort of circles back to our conversation at the beginning about, you know, marketing and having that place on the board was to be a sales and marketing director. Yeah, that that was sort of my ideal ultimate, because then you're owning the strategy and the marketing of it and what's working and owning the delivery of it. And

I've always said, and sales leaders will kill me for this, but the sales is part of marketing. You know, everybody does marketing and actually sales follows what marketing does. So actually sales is part of marketing. So for me it wasn't a sales and marketing director. It was a marketing and sales director. It's just retargeting. Really. Yeah, absolutely. Human retargeting taking it through, nurturing it

Human nurturing. Uh, so yeah, the poor sales. Um, so yes. So that's how I ended up in marketing and in leadership and yeah, so always I'd always set myself a goal. And I think that's something that's an interesting one. I've read this article around some research that had been done on Harvard

students and which Harvard students had been successful, and it was those that had always set themselves goals. And so I'd set myself a very broad goal, um, obviously giving myself good scope to hit it. But I would be a proper board director. So not just director of a proper British board or director

By the time I was 35, um, and I managed to achieve that, I became a managing director by the time I was 35. The bit that I forgot, though, and something I would say to people when they're setting these goals is, that's great, but what do you do once you've achieved that goal, then where do you go? And I literally went into almost like a mini midlife crisis

at the age of 35 because I was like, okay, I'm now a managing director now, what do I do from here? So yes, leadership. Yes, B2B um, although I love the buzz of B2C, B2C is so much more fast moving. And again, that's something I'd say to B2B marketeers is look at what B2C is doing. Whatever B2C

is doing today is what you need to be doing in B2B tomorrow. You know, it really is so closely linked. You know, you think about things like the Tesco's loyalty card when that came out, oh gosh, wasn't that a new thing? And gathering people's data and being able to target them individually. And guess what we're now trying to do as B2B marketers and the whole

idea of ABM is understanding your audience with data, being able to target them more specifically with specific adverts. That whole personalization journey that was happening in consumer 20 years ago. Yeah. And and that's where look at what consumers doing catch up with it because that's going to give you the edge in B2B.

Tell me about tell me

about the people that you first managed those those people that were in marketing, in your first marketing management role, what do you think they what do you think they lacked or needed in terms of skills or management or support back then? And does does that change with the people that you manage today

that you managing tomorrow? What do you think those B2B marketers need in terms of support or skills that that they don't have? And how has that changed?

That's a really interesting question actually. Um, I think looking back then, so we're talking 99,

2000 when I sort of started managing proper marketing teams as opposed to pseudo marketing teams and marketing agency. Um, I don't think it has changed that much because it was all about we sort of touched on it already around. The people were very focused on the bit of marketing they did. So whether that was I'm an events

person, I'm a user group person as it was in those days, or I, I'm a report writer, you know, and it's making sure that you understand the audience that you're trying to do that to. So to give you an example, the first person I was managing who was doing events, um, amazing events,

all in five star hotels with great ab, um, fantastic giveaways, you name it. Apart from the audience we were actually trying to attract were software engineers, not even their managers. It was software engineers. Yeah. And a lot of the software engineers

coming into those five star hotels found it really difficult. It wasn't their natural environment. They'd had to put on a suit that they wouldn't normally put on. They felt very out of water, you know, fish out of water, feeling to them were very overcome and overwhelmed by this whole environment. And again, it was back to that, you know, mantra

understand your audience and what works for your audience, and then being adaptable enough to change and change the format that you're doing to suit whatever the audience is that you're going to at the time. Yes, as a marketeer, going to a five star hotel for a couple of nights with all this AV flash, flash, bang bang. Fantastic. Don't I look good and don't I look

bad? But it's not actually achieving what you're trying to achieve. And I think fundamentally that's the same today.

Whatever the kind of buzzwords are, whatever exactly the AI or whatever the kind of techniques are changing, it's the, you know, making sure you're understanding why you're doing it.

Because that's the other thing. As marketers, we all love a shiny new thing, and we'll all

run in that new direction. But really understanding for your business and what you're trying to achieve in your business, is it the right thing to be doing, and if so, how are you applying it? How are you going to measure that it's successful? How do you know whether you should continue to invest in it, or invest more in it, or invest less in it and change it

Um, AI is a really interesting one because of course that works from so many different angles. You know, can all of us benefit from AI in how we manage, for want of a better description, the more mundane things of the jobs that we do? Yes, absolutely. But don't forget to insert a human in there. Yeah. Um, and funnily enough, when

I was managing director, it was for an organisation that, uh, had a business process system. And the whole point of the business process system is actually for financial services, with the 1% stakeholder fee for pensions was that you needed a system that, to keep at that 1% level, could be managed automatically

It was all automated. It was all process automation right the way through, but it had to have the relevant alarms in it that any point in that process, you could get a human involved to change that wherever they needed to. I think that's what we've got to remember as we go down that AI for processing route, that you've still got to have

that human intervention to check that it is all on the right track.

There have been a huge number of marketing automation fails, and I'm sure there will be a huge number of AI. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But we're just coming to the end now. But what are what have been the hard changes for you? We've talked about a number of different transitions throughout your your

career and and some of them, in retrospect, have seemed natural. But what have been the what have been the hard the hard transitions?

I think the hardest for me, um, because I didn't have my own children, I had stepchildren was when my, um, now late husband

unfortunately. But he had a very serious motorbike accident, and I had always been somebody that had worked whatever hours I wanted to work and to be honest, was probably bordering on that workaholic type side of things. I wouldn't work at weekends I was quite strict about. I would work very long hours in the week, but my weekends

my weekends, and when I switched off, I switched off. And that's still I still very much do that. But the challenge I'd always had was finishing at a specific time. And when my husband was in hospital. And this is where I liken it to when people have their children, you know, your children have to be collected at a certain time. Yeah. You know, the

childminders, the nursery, the school, they don't have flexi hours. You know, you they can't just stay there for another hour or so while you finish off that bit of work or do this. And when I was going to see my husband in hospital, I, um, with a group with my manager obviously changed my workout. So I was working from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon and then leaving

bang on three to get to the hospital. Yeah, and that was a huge change for me and really made me have to consider. I always thought I was quite good at prioritizing and time management and all those things, but boy, when you've got something like that, you become exceptionally good at that.

And it's one of the things I'd say for people that are looking after children, men or women that have that have to do that choice and keep those hard lines, that actually that's a huge strength because you are being much more focused and prioritizing your work because you have to be. Yeah. And so you do. And I think that was probably the

the hardest, biggest change for me.

And looking back over that career, are there things that you think now that you wish you'd done differently?

I think there's always things you wish you'd done differently. But having said that, I do live with no regrets

because I think you can only do your best at the time. And yes, looking back with hindsight, you go, oh, I should have done that better. I should have done this better. But at the time you did what you thought was right. And that's the other thing I would say to anybody out there is stick to your own moral compass as well. If it doesn't feel right to you in your gut, try and work out why

Maybe get mentoring and coaching assistants to work that through. But actually, so long as you do the best you can at the time and are true to your morals and your morals are pretty reasonable, um, then you shouldn't have any regrets. And yes, there were times when my management style

was rough. And there's one particular part of my career when I was managing a team, um, actually when I was a general manager, and I was awful to them. And I absolutely really regret that. And it was through my own frustration. I took that out on them as being quite harsh, and I, I must

said the team, I must have seemed almost schizophrenic, because I'd sort of be really nice to encourage them and goal driven. And let's do this and let's have all this fun. And then when things weren't working, I'd be this manic monster on them. So yes, that I, I, in inverted commas, regret. I feel very, very sad. And I'd love to apologise to that team for

putting them through that because. But that was part of my learning as a manager. Um, and when I stepped away from that boy, did I change because I realized that's what I've done and I've burnt myself out in that process as well. But I was up and down so much within that as well.

Um, so yeah, Sheila, thank you for sharing your profile in persuasion.

Thank you very much for having me.