Building awareness of the customer experience imperative is top of the list for Ansell Asia-Pacific marketing director, Mitchell Mackey.

“We’re making it clear, at all levels, that we today we are all in marketing and that the customer experience is the only differentiator that matters,” he says.

“We are challenging our colleagues to mobilise around a genuine shared vision: ETDW [Easy to do Business With]. This means aligning global revenue performance management, websites with digital marketing, utilising our sales and marketing front-end, quality management, mobile device integration and sales and product training.”

Mackey says his proudest moment in the last 12 months, meanwhile, was securing a global Ansell commitment across key regions of EMEA and the Americas to join the APAC region in embracing marketing automation and starting the journey towards genuinely accountable B2B marketing.

From the CMO50 submission

Innovative marketing

One of the things Mackey has been working hard on is getting the basics right across Ansell’s mission-critical customer experience spectrum.

“We recognise that, along with many other similar traditional enterprises, failing to consistently deliver personalised, efficient and consistent experiences damages loyalty and brand values, undermining the marketing programs we are driving,” he says.

“Marketing, as the unit best placed to influence the customer experience across the spectrum, leads this initiative to identify and remove performance constraints. We are confident that if we lift our ‘basic’ performance, we will generate a competitive advantage which will be difficult for our competitors to emulate, unlike our commoditised products and services.”

Change management is key component in making this happen, and Ansell is working to transition the culture from an inward-out product and service focus to a genuine outward-in customer obsession. A key tool helping this quest is Net Promoter Score methodology, with the addition of a customer effort question, to gauge how primary distributor customers and end-user customers perceive the company, if they’d be prepared to recommend it, and whether they consider Ansell an easy company to do business with.

Empowered business thinking

Having initially embraced marketing automation in 2011, Ansell is now actively working towards account-based marketing (ABM) to amplify B2B lead generation outcomes. ABM as a strategic approach will focus time and resource on targeting key groups of specific accounts, ensuring the brand interacts with different influencers and purchasers within an account in a targeted way. In particular, Mackey says ABM will help with top-of-the-funnel marketing, where the majority of site visitors are anonymous, and he says the team intends to engage customers as soon as they enter the funnel via personalised content.

“The [ABM] functionality can be used to identify visitors from our target accounts while they are still in the TOFU stage, and have not yet transitioned to net new or known names,” Mackey explains. “Using real-time personalisation, we can then direct content to them which features relevant messaging.

“Importantly, ABM is also a tool to improve alignment with our account-centric ANZ sales team which is, of course, intensely focused on harvesting new revenue and retaining existing business from their target accounts.”

Analytics is another part of the mix, as ABM should explain how visitors from target accounts are behaving, what campaigns and program drove interest and website traffic, and what they do when they arrive onsite.

Data- and technology-led approach

Mackey says his team continues to focus on optimising the accuracy of marketing metrics by refining integration of its Sitecore website content management system with Marketo marketing automation and Salesforce.com sales automation platforms. This has led to improved campaign management and better tagging of leads to campaigns, accurate counting of net new leads, known leads, and calculating true campaign costs, such as samples, campaign reports and dashboards.

As a result of functional changes and process improvements, Mackey says the team is getting better at measuring its contribution to the business and is using key KPIs such as marketing-sourced pipeline revenue; marketing-sourced closed-won revenue; marketing-influenced pipeline revenue; marketing-influenced closed-won revenue; and marketing-influenced recurring revenue.

Fostering team capability

Coupled with Ansell’s technology learning investment is a continuous focus on training and professional development. In conjunction with global Ansell counterparts, Mackey is supporting an Ansell Marketing Master Class program to advance competencies and elevate the expertise of its marketing teams. The purpose is to provide a dynamic learning environment which will both expedite the learning process and create a strong and inspiring marketing community.

Ansell Marketing Class is customised training and a platform for continuous learning and sharing best practices. The training modules are based upon existing experience and knowledge and start with basics before branching out to building advanced knowledge.

On top of this, the team is directed to actively engage in professional associations from ADMA and the Australian Marketing Institute, and Mackey says it’s taking advantage of the group’s global scope to rotate team members on an exchange basis into European and North American marketing groups for periods of two to three months.

Another unique dynamic to the business that helps teams not only learn, but find inspiration, is the product range across the group. Mackey says teams are in a good position to observe how the B2B and B2C marketing environments both overlap and diverge. Ansell’s industrial and medical safety businesses play in the B2B space, while the sexual wellness division is B2C.

“The B2B effort is focused on engaging with small segments of professional buyers across long and complex buyer journeys, and we find we must operate across far more channels, buying stages and content types than our B2C colleagues,” he comments.

“Across our functions, tools and channels in the diagram below, the common denominator which flows between them is content; content in the most expansive sense of the word. Yes, it’s about blog posts and emails, but also sales decks and events, help articles and customer case studies.

“In the customer-centric era we are in, there is much greater pressure than ever to produce ever more content in an effort to improve our customer relevancy.”

Creativity

Mackey says he encourages team members to take time out to think in order to help them be creative.

“We have agreed that it is necessary to schedule creative time and make it part of our job roles,” he says. “For this to happen, we have needed to find the necessary space to be creative.”

Encouraging creativity also means being open to failure and developing a tolerance for risk. Mackey notes Seth Godin’s words: “People who produce ideas for a living - entrepreneurs, writers, artists, and I’d include marketers - fail way more often than they succeed. But they succeed more often than those who have no ideas at all.”