If stated correctly, the silos between sales and marketing departments are a long-standing issue throughout every industry.
Do you wish to learn how to bridge the gap between these misalignments? Tune in to Episode 7 of The B2B POD, and indulge in an engaging discussion between our host Radwa Hassan and guest Sunita Hadani, where they elaborate on the challenges and solutions to building a successful connection between an agency and a marketer.
In this Episode,
- We introduce you to our gracious host Radwa Hassan and our guest Sunita Hadani.
- Give you a general overview of the challenges and their solutions to correct the misalignment between agencies and marketers.
- Our guest shares some tips and tricks to get both of them on the same page.
In closing, we'd like to say thank you for tuning in to The B2B POD this week. We hope to see you for Episode 8.
Episode highlights -
[00:10] Radwa introduces the guest and topic for the episode
[00:35] About Sunita
[03:33] Radwa asks Sunita about her experience with establishing an agency
[04:11] Sunita elaborates on how the digital age has affected the relationship
between marketers and agencies
[08:24] Radwa asks Sunita for her perspective on working in an agency
[05:17] Sunita explains the need for agencies to transform themselves
[06:37] Sunita elaborates on multiple challenges and the pressure that
today’s agencies face
[07:05] Radwa explains the crisis of new competitors in the IT industry
[08:46] Sunita explains how the modern agencies function
[09:29] Sunita elaborates on the importance of the agency and
marketing relationship
[10:15] Radwa asks Sunita her views after moving from the
corporate side to the agency side
[13:17] Radwa asks Sunita for her tips for Marketers and Agencies
to build the relationship
[13:38] Sunita gives her tips for Marketers to build a strong relationship
with the Agencies
[15:49] Radwa gives tips on how to successfully run an agency.
[18:23] The End
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Transcript - Marketing Perspectives from the Corporate and Agency world
[00:00] Radwa Hassan: Hello, and welcome to a new episode by The B2B POD. I have the pleasure to host my guest for this episode, Sunita Hadani. She is the managing director of East West Advertising. The title of our episode is Marketing perspectives from the corporate and agency world.
[00:35] Radwa Hassan: Sunita is a contagious, can-do marketer who helps organizations get more out of their marketing dollars. With over 22 years of tech marketing experience covering the diverse MENA region, her core strengths include building a marketing strategy that helps organizations build accountable marketing plans that serve existing markets and help penetrate new markets. She is passionate about changing people’s mindset about the value marketing brings to an organization and demonstrating results. She is also known to be the heartbeat of the teams she works with. Sunita is I think the best guest for such a topic because she has managed to be on the corporate side and in the agency world right now, and Sunita will be able to give us perspective on her 2 experiences from the corporate and the agency. So welcome, Sunita, to our episode, and we are really happy to have you with us today.
[01:38] Sunita Hadani: Thank you, Radwa. I am very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I am really excited to share my views personally because you and I have had such a long history of working together and we've also shared so many experiences. So, it'll be nice to share our views with the audience today.
[01:57] Radwa Hassan: Thank you. You were an excellent partner in crime at some point in time. So our perspective today is the fact that there seems to be a permanent misalignment when it comes to the marketing teams in an organization. The marketing agencies that support these organizations, really the marketers, have always expected high quality deliverables in the shortest time. Of course, being marketers, you always rush through a deadline. Whereas agencies are operating a little bit in isolation because they have a different world and space. They are rushing through deadlines, of course, but maybe they will look at the campaign as a one tactic, one event, one deliverable without knowing the full picture, this of course has changed and that's what we are going to talk about.This misalignment can be improved. Definitely, and there are ways that it has worked for a few. Giving Sunita's unique perspective and experience, having served on the corporate teams of large companies, and today runs a successful agency of her own. She'll be able to give us her point of view on how this has worked or what was her perspective when she was in the marketer seat and now on the agency side. So, I'm going to ask Sunita when you were in the marketer seat, what was your experience with the agencies and the different challenges that you faced? What has changed now?
[03:34] Sunita Hadani: Radwa. Well, a lot has changed now. As you can imagine, the marketplace has changed the landscape of marketing in the middle east, especially has evolved immensely in the last 10 years. When I was leading marketing in the different corporates at the time our marketing was seen as a cost center and the marketing departments had to justify their existence. They always had a type of war relationship between sales and marketing and we had to kind of prove our value on a daily basis, and it was the sales that predominantly owned the customer relationships and drove business. Then suddenly came the internet boom, what we call the digital age, and with that change, our KPIs changed as a traditional marketer was forced to become a modern marketer, providing insights to the business ands today as we all know, the modern customer makes 70% of its purchase decision by researching online before they meet any vendor. So, by the time the sales rep makes their first call or has the first meeting with the customer, the customer already has a very strong impression and opinion about the vendor, and that's where the role of the modern market share comes where we have to ensure that the target market has the right information 24 by seven, and marketing is now seen as an equal contributor to the growth of the business and marketing also has a seat, a firm seat with a C-suite now, and sales rely on marketing to build their customer base. In fact, Gartner recently said that 80% of all B2B buyer and supplier interactions are going to be on digital channels by 2025. So, with that comes the change in the role of the agencies and agencies also have to transform themselves if they want to be in the long term. In the long innings, as they say, agencies also have to shift gears. So today's agencies are not the traditional agencies that I used to deal with. Agencies were only bothered with doing tactical stuff, but today the agencies are made responsible for the buyer's journey for the customer experience, and the vendors ask the agencies to be much more innovative and creative with their approach, such that when they go to market with them or with their brand, the first interaction the buyer has with the vendors' brand, it should be memorable.It should be unique. They should stand out, and anything that goes out from the agency on behalf of the vendor must influence the purchase decision of their buyer. So today's agencies are involved in strategic thinking. The marketers sit down and share their big vision their challenges and everything’s planned with the end goal in mind. What is it that we want to achieve? And each deliverable should be well thought out, such that when it goes out it has that impact and today's marketer holds on to every dollar that they spend and agencies today are also given the pressure to ensure that the marketer gets the right ROI from the investment.
[06:40] Radwa Hassan: Yeah, certainly, the pressure has become even greater because tactics and tools and competitiveness have become more aggressive among the different players in one industry, with new players coming up and rising every day. Like, you wake up one day and then you find a new competitor that was not on the radar before.
[07:05] Radwa Hassan: I see that a lot in the IT industry. So there are new players, new competitors in the different markets. So no one is immune to really strong competition coming on board, not like in the past and the same for the agencies. I honestly see that so many boutique agencies are doing much better than bigger agencies, and that's the challenge. So no one can say that they own the space or they can monopolize a certain industry or the skills and the expertise. Now a marketer can hire, for example, a freelancer. You have platforms like fiverr, for example, where you can just go on and you can find someone to do a job quickly for you. You just have to pay for it, and that's it. You're done. Not like before. If you want to create an HTML, you would have to go to the agency or have someone in house and even the in house skills can be built with the digital and with social you can have that sorted out. So, I think agencies definitely have a challenge and marketers as well, and they need to come together.
[08:24] Radwa Hassan: So, if I ask you now, being on the agency side, you've seen the difference. What has opened your eyes to that difference in perspective from the agency side back when you were a marketer? So it's definitely a shift and an eye-opener.
[08:46] Sunita Hadani: Yes, today's agencies Radwa have to take a lot more onus and it can’t be like the traditional old times where they do small deliverables and they finish their job, as the agencies have to be a lot more involved to be equal partners to the vendors. They also have to understand the vendor’s target marketplace deeply, analyze their customers' buying behavior, the challenges that they face, and then align their services accordingly. As you said, today's marketers have a lot more choice. Today they can go to smaller agencies or freelancers and get their work done faster, but I think on this side of the marketeer although that can happen, if you invest in a relationship, you know you can rely on it in the long term and reap the benefits. The agency and the marketing relationship go a long way, and it is a two way relationship, so it is about investing that time and energy building that relationship, building that trust and eventually you will get a lot out of it in the long term.
[09:42] Radwa Hassan: Sunita that's excellent, like the insights about the challenges on the agency side, and I really like your quote about customer is king, which is something that I know that you live by every day in your day to day practice and with your clients.
[10:15] Radwa Hassan:
So Sunita, now that your point of view has changed after moving from the corporate side to the agency side. How do you see the challenges that marketeers face and really how do you believe that the agencies can bring that comfort to the marketeers with your team, for example, and they come to you and they tell you, "Oh, well, customer is rushing us through a deadline or they want this right now." How do you put yourself in the marketer's seat? And you tell them, well, maybe there is a strong or a difficult stakeholder on their side that they need to make happy or that they need to cater to an urgent demand. So how'd you handle that with your teams, bringing your marketer hat into the picture and giving them that different perspective.
[11:16] Sunita Hadani: Great question and I really want the world to hear me today for this, because as a marketer I know the pressures. I've been there on the other side. I know what we live by every day. I know you need to think ahead for your business. You need to be, in fact, two quarters ahead. You need to build that pipeline to ensure sales arrive in that quarter. They're ready to get going and today's marketplace, especially with the demand. It's very demanding. It's very instant and everything needs to be done yesterday, especially in our marketplace it's a very fast paced environment and this is where I, as a marketer slash While I, as a agency owner, have the vision, sometimes to fulfill that vision, you need to have the right engine, the right team, and I really would love for the marketers to hear sometimes the challenges that agencies face, which is if we could have a long term planning or at least some sort of timelines to be able to turn around those deliverables would be ideal, which we don't have. Everything was whenever you speak the customers, when was it needed? It's needed yesterday, but two days ago and sometimes the agent agencies have been magicians for their customers. Yeah to be able to turn it around and I see that our customers rely on us to do a good job to shine in their jobs and this is where me as an agency owner I'll have to sit down with my team every day to help them prioritize, structure make sure that sometimes they don't put themselves maybe in the marketer’s shoe of the pressures and deadlines that you have and then we have to sometimes burn the midnight oil, but at the end, it's all worth it when the marketer comes up it's the appreciation that we get from their customers, that that goes a long way as it becomes a very motivating factor to be able to perform the next time or the next day.
[13:07] Radwa Hassan: One hundred percent I fully agree with you and I really like your approach, and I know that you do it in reality so you walk the walk and talk the talk. So if I ask you now what would be your tips that you want to give first to the marketeers in order to work out this relationship? really nicely and effectively and secondly to the agencies and what you would give them as a tip to work out the relationship.
[13:38] Sunita Hadani: So to marketers, really, for me they must understand that it's a two way relationship take the time to invest in the relationship, build the trust. The agency can be a true partner. The agency can be a true team member. It can be an extended team and they will give you rewards.
[13:59] Sunita Hadani: Once the marketers know that they are being valued then they will do everything to go beyond to ensure that the work is done in the most fantastic quality way and for that to happen the marketers must have clear and consistent communication of their expectations of their goals and provide feedback. It shouldn't be you invest enough time in coming with your deadlines, but once it's served, then there is no feedback mechanism of what worked, what didn't work, what should have gone better. Come back, give the feedback invest in the relationship, build the trust and really all of that will go a long way. It's like any other relationship when you put the energy it will come back and then in terms of agencies Radwa, I like your point of view a lot where you said sometimes agencies get complacent. So, to the agencies, if they want to survive in the long term my big advice would be, don't take your customers for granted.
[14:59] Sunita Hadani: Provide your unique value proposition. What is it that they will get more from you than they would from another agency? What is your unique factor? It could be just honesty, it could be putting in the passion, the hard work and do all of that because as you said the marketplace has become much bigger now and marketers don't have to rely on their existing agencies as they have so many different ways to get their work out. So to ensure that you keep growing that business definitely do not take the customers for granted put in the extra hard work, go the extra mile it'll reap rewards.
[15:39] Radwa Hassan: I certainly agree with that Sunita and it is again a two way my word to the agencies would be that customers need to work on the relationship, but in most situations they have the upper hand because they can get competitors and they're not going to be the ones compromising a lot. That's why agencies also need to put the effort in a relationship which I know a lot of agencies try to do that, but really now it's not about just nurturing the relation and bonding, but more of showing the value up and how you can make the marketers you work with shine. Look better and succeed and create that win win experience for their clients for their internal stakeholders. So that it's a 360 degree relationship. It's not a relationship with one person in an organization and even in one of the episodes, we were talking about how the agencies can create that connection internally in an organization with a different stakeholders so it's a 360 and it has to work out on a multifaceted relationship, I would say. So I thank you so much Sunita for coming to the show and for that great and engaging episode really happy to have you with us and I hope our listeners really take notes and benefit from this episode and thank you so much for listening.
[17:27] Sunita Hadani: Thank you, Radwa. Thank you for having me and I hope we talk again. Very interesting. Thank you for having me on the show.
[17:34] Radwa Hassan: And for our listeners from corporate or from the agency side, please share your views, share your experiences. We'd be really happy to take them in and also share them maybe later with the listeners in a different episode. So thank you very much.
[17:51] Sunita Hadani: Thank you. Bye-bye bye.
[18:24] The End