What makes a successful marketing leader? In this Forbes interview series, Thomas Barta explores together with leading CMOs the secrets of marketing leadership, what works, and what doesn’t. This time, let’s listen to the views of Dan Ramsay, consumer marketing director of telecommunications giant BT.
Thomas Barta: Dan, great to meet you. Here’s a question I’ve been asking your peers: what’s great about being a leader in marketing?
Dan Ramsey: For me it’s being at the heart of the business—at the center of the action. I’ve always wanted to make a massive contribution and be in the engine room of the business. I think marketing is the place where you can drive the business forward and make the biggest difference to the business’s performance. Sometimes that’s great, and sometimes that can be quite chaotic. But it’s very rewarding and gives me a great sense of opportunity for personal growth.
Barta: What’s one of these “massive contributions” you talk about?
Ramsey: Our business is largely a volume driven business. We live or die by the number of subscribers we retain or acquire. My team is responsible for doing both things: acquiring new customers and retaining customers. We have daily conversations about the number of customers joining us or leaving us. I can influence tomorrow’s sales numbers by changing a price or by changing the level of marketing spend. It’s great to work in a business that responds so quickly to your intervention.
Barta: Marketing leadership, as I define it, means serving customers and the company. Have these two objectives come into conflict for you? And what do you do then?
Ramsey: That can happen quite often, particularly in businesses that have set goals that are not well grounded in customer insight. I think you have to create a culture of intolerance of a substandard customer experience. There will always be a million reasons why someone wants to invent a process that isn’t customer friendly but is half the cost or twice as quick.
My job is to create a culture within the business that puts customers first. Customer experience is a very measurable thing. We measure it in lots of different ways at BT, so that people know what process X does to customer satisfaction. As marketers, we have to make customer satisfaction a priority for the business.
Barta: What was your most defining leadership experience?
Ramsey: One in particular sticks out for me. I was once given an enormous business challenge and a very small amount of time to do it. BT had bought sports rights to Premier League football in England. I had to work out how we would sell or market that, which was about a 1 billion investment. I had three days to complete my analysis. It was a very high profile piece of work. Inevitably, you begin to question whether you’re capable of doing something quite so big in a short space of time. After three days I presented to the CEO my recommendation, and it was accepted. I guess what I learned from that was not to underestimate myself. Do what you do best, and have a bit of faith. You’d be amazed at what you can do in a short space of time if you really push yourself.
If I’m facing a challenge today, I find it quite helpful to look forward and say, “Well, in a year’s time, how will I feel about this moment?”
Barta: How do you get things done in your company?
Ramsey: Two things are important: personal connections and trust in people’s abilities. You have to have some level of personal connection with the people that matter and the people that make that change happen for you. I don’t mean necessarily an intimate day-to-day relationship—you can’t have that with the number of people you might need to influence. I’ve got 170 people in my team, and I don’t deal with them all day to day. But I can still reach out to them frequently. It might be just a “how’s your day going?” in the lift, or it might be a polite “hello” on the way into work. And some of it happens in a bit more of a formal sense.
I think the other thing you have to do is create a culture whereby you set very clear outcomes and then trust people to go and deliver them—and give them the space to do it. People have to be really clear right from the start about the goal and that you are going to hold them to account for it. You have to be able to say “I asked you three weeks ago if we could do this. That time is up. How are you getting on?”
Barta: That’s fascinating. How are you practically balancing that team coaching and performance management?
Marketing leadership expert and keynote speaker Thomas Barta is a former McKinsey partner and the author of the new leadership book The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (with Patrick Barwise).
Full interview can also be read here
