What Virginia Sharma teaches about B2B marketing

Staying in marketing and doing marketing well versus trying to actually be a little bit of everybody else. So 17 years in marketing with IBM and then since 2016 you have a sales role for LinkedIn marketing solutions, right? Just tell us about this experience, the shift from marketing to sales, how hard is it? Yeah. So in fairness I had a soft landing. After about 15 years at IBM I spent two years doing marketing at LinkedIn.

So it was a soft landing. But I remember I was very clear when I first came in whether I would have the opportunity to run or do a revenue role at LinkedIn. And I think one of the pieces of advice I have for a lot of marketers looking to move into a revenue role which is important for your career if you decide to go into general management is have the conversation up front as to even if you have to do the marketing role for a period of time is there a career path into business.

Right. And it's also sort of, you know, there's also a connected question. What is the role of the marketer? How is it evolving? Is the marketer role really going to sort of evolve into a chief business officer or a growth officer or an operations sort of role? How do you see this conversation sort of changing in your experience in your career? Are these questions, are these real questions for the marketing community?

I mean, these are very real questions. There are a lot of mentoring sessions I have with marketers as they think about their next plays. And many of them, you know, are in the quandary. They've been largely doing marketing roles focused on 1P promotions. Right. And sort of product has gone to product. Pricing has gone to finance or gone to operations or sales. And then distribution has gone to, you know, sales or now with digital, the chief digital officer. Right, right.

So if you're kind of left with, you know, owning the brand, a lot of people see this as a bad thing. But, you know, if marketers are good at managing the brand, let's manage the brand well. And I think that there's something to be said about staying in marketing and doing marketing well versus trying to actually be a little bit of everybody else. So a little bit of a contrarian view than what a lot of people are saying.

You know, a bit of the evolving role of the marketer, the question comes from the aspect that marketing traditionally has been seen as a space where you spend, you build on the brands. But, you know, there's not a lot of feedback in terms of how is it? The ROI question, right? The ROI question. And today, especially for digital companies, ROI is a supreme question. You can track everything from the starting to the end point. And that's where marketers are suddenly finding themselves a little more uncomfortable at the spot.

But some are evolving really fast. Is that a good thing for the community? Sure. I mean, look, measurement is very important. You can't manage a business you can't measure. However, the issue is, you know, for a long period of time, people were having a debate about should we measure and what should we measure? Right. I think that's the wrong question. I think the question is when should we measure? You can't really measure the effectiveness of something until you see it pan out.

And so what happens is that if you measure, for example, the effectiveness of your brand campaigns in months, you're not taking into account that brand really helps you drive salience with audiences that may not be ready to buy until next year. And so one of the things that really needs to happen is, yes, we should measure ROI. Yes, we should have a discussion about ROI from marketing efforts. But maybe we shouldn't be measuring so quickly and so frequently.

One of the biggest challenges that many brands say that they face with content is how do you measure it? Is there a sort of a standardized system that is accepted across that sort of measures the efficacy of how a content does and how you connect it back to ROI at the end of the day? What are your thoughts on this aspect? Yeah, I mean, engagement is definitely the correct metric for measuring the efficacy of content, not views, not volume, not reach. Right. We have very interesting analysis we do around topic ownership.

And basically, it's a grid that basically shows, you know, how well is your content performing in terms of the number of people that have seen it? And then on the vertical is maybe, you know, what is your engagement rate? And what we see is if you throw enough money behind your piece of content, you can actually get a lot of people to see it. But we call them noisemakers because just because you throw a lot of people, it doesn't mean the content is a lot of quality. So tell us about life as a B2B marketer.

What is the opportunity in this space and where are we today? How is the space evolving? Yeah. I mean, one example is my career journey, you know, as a B2B marketer. I think your day-to-day connection is with the sales team. And you spend a lot of time with your sales team and understanding both their interactions with customers, but also their challenges in reaching their customers. And I think if you think about your role as a lot of people say your role in marketing is to be the voice of the customer.

And in B2B, that's not really true because you are not interacting with customers day in, day out. Your sales teams are. It's to really make sure that you're well aligned with sales to create a favorable selling environment. Are there any specific examples of great B2B marketing that you'd like to sort of recount? Yeah. I mean, I think there are so many.

I think obviously the company I work for for most of my career, IBM, does a brilliant job in making the market and building categories before capturing it, does a great job of integrating online and offline. So I think IBM is one. But I also think there's like brands like NEC, which is a Japanese company. You know, there's preconceived notions about what Japanese companies are in terms of quality, et cetera. But you don't really think of them as global companies.

So NEC is a great example and they're very active on our platform and do a great job of leveraging the platform. I really like the way E&Y uses brand, Ernst & Young. If you ever see the black and yellow, there's a brand consistency of everything that comes out of E&Y that even if you didn't have their logo, you'd know it's them. It's E&Y, yeah. And the last one, I think, in India, I really admire the kind of work that Emphasis and HCL do. Thank you.