A former professional kick-boxer, Toby Lee currently competes in triathlons. That training and competition gets his customer-segmentation mind-set into fighting shape and provides the kick Lee needs as CMO of Thomson Reuters’ $1.2 billion Tax & Accounting business. He stays fleet-footed to juggle his many responsibilities, which include global marketing strategy, branding, creative services, demand generation, public relations, customer excellence, and online marketing. After stints with Dell, Hitachi, Trend Micro, and Toshiba, Lee is developing a more agile approach to marketing at Thomson Reuters through a blend of data analytics, persona detective work, tight collaboration with sales colleagues, and a heavy emphasis on content marketing and impactful performance measures.
What’s your marketing passion?
It comes down to building brands that customers love. Obviously, there’s a whole lot required to do that. Building a business is great and getting revenue is great, but building sustainable customer relationships is even better. You build those relationships through brand affinity. We approach everything we do as a marketing function and as a company through the lens of customer relationships, as opposed to looking only at tactical business transactions. Our ultimate quest is to build a brand that customers love. Great marketing operates with that objective in mind.
Was there a moment when the important role that customer relationships play in driving brand affinity struck you?
I remember it vividly. It was June 1999 in my first job with Toshiba. I had graduated from business school and I was working as a product marketing manager for the company’s line of PC servers. I was leading a meeting where we were trying to upsell SMEs—50-seat companies, basically—and my presentation rattled off all the great ways we can help build bigger businesses because our new products had more speed, more processing power, greater scalability, etc.
How did that go over?
The reaction was horrible because I didn’t understand who I was talking to. These guys didn’t want to grow their business, and they certainly didn’t want the next big upgrade. Instead, they wanted to understand the basic functionality that helped them do their current job better. That disconnect was evident in survey feedback, which translated to, “That was a crappy presentation.” The experience was painful, but it made a huge impact. It showed me that if you don’t truly understand who you’re talking to and what their pain points are you’re missing quite a bit.
How do you translate this passion into practice at Thomson Reuters?
Our goal is to become an agile marketing organization. We’ve been focused on understanding data, segmentation, and the interest, behaviors, and dynamics for different segments of prospects and customers at a fairly specific level. This work has allowed us to start building a content strategy that can move with our prospects and customers as they progress through their purchasing journeys.
How does agile marketing actually work?
We’ve built up a pretty good data layer that allows us to blend sales and marketing data so we can look at the entire sales funnel. We look to see where we’re failing in the sales process; is it in the research phase or the appointment phase? Is it in the trial phase? By looking at this data we start to see where leads are getting stuck. And then, through the partnership we’ve developed with sales, we can have a conversation together about where leads are getting stuck at a particular point and why that’s occurring.
Give me an example of this in practice.
We recently realized that we hadn’t delivered a strong enough value proposition in the research phase for why tax technology is better than Excel spreadsheets. We married that realization with our persona research, which shows what [prospective customers] care about during the research phase. We compared those needs to our existing marketing content and said, “We skipped something; we’ve been assuming that they have a desire for tax technology.” So, we adjusted our content strategy by developing a white paper ad blitz campaign that addresses all the ways that tax technology trumps spreadsheets. One month into that campaign we saw a 15% increase in leads moving forward from the research phase. The objective is to manage the customer experience and the feedback loop quickly and accurately so we can continually adjust the content we’re putting out to the market so that it resonates.
How about one more example of agile marketing?
My team of roughly 100 people is made up of two groups. We call one “business unit, or BU, marketing”—classic field marketing people—and the other “essential marketing,” which enables and supports the BU teams with functions like brands, tradeshows, PR, online marketing, lead generation, customer experience, and marcomm. We said to the BU teams, “Save 15% of your budget every quarter for ‘I don’t know what’ kind of stuff.” We look at the business results on a weekly and a monthly basis. If we see that sales are falling short in month two or three of the quarter, we want the BU teams to use that money to quickly execute something with some proven success. That doesn’t mean it will automatically convert to revenue immediately, but it does help us say, for example, “If you do X, you should be able to close on this group we’ve prioritized in the queue of hot prospects.” We’ve also stopped doing lengthier campaigns—those longer than six months—because that inhibits agility and, often, the budget.
Your approach also has a major data component. Tell me about your function’s data philosophy.
Data’s one thing, but context around data is another thing completely. And when you marry data and context, you come up with an understanding that says, “My marketing strategy needs to be modified to really move them to the right.” For a long time most marketing functions have embraced a kind of spray-and-pray approach. Marketing throws it out there, hopes something sticks, and then waits until the end of the quarter to measure results. We can’t do that anymore because the dialogue between the brand and prospects, or customers, needs to be faster and needs to change more frequently.
How do you flesh out the context surrounding the data?
One way is to avoid cosmetic metrics. Awareness is a great example of a fuzzy measure. It’s fairly common to measure awareness by counting the number of articles a company or product appears in. But we want a deeper understanding, so we measure impact based on three components. One is the message. In each business, we’ve developed a messaging platform. So, does the article provide consistent coverage of one of those messages? We score that evaluation on a scale of zero to 30. The second component is prominence. If an article mentions several organizations, how highly does Thomson Reuters rank against the competition? Do we have the headline? Do we have positive sentiment? And we score that on a scale of zero to 30. The third one is relevance. So, if The Wall Street Journal picks up our story or message, we score that—again from zero to 30—higher than if, say, The Dallas Morning News reports on us. We’ve created a blended score that we track. Our thinking is that this isn’t just about leads or articles; it’s really about the engagement and impact our efforts generate.
Data sounds like a crucial enabler of agile marketing.
Yes, but it is only one enabler. I think that tools, technology, and data are about 10% of the equation. The other 90% consists of the smart people you hire to analyze, derive insights, make decisions, and take actions. The extreme emphasis on data in marketing right now is awesome, but you’re not going to create differentiated messaging that emotionally connects with the customer unless you really understand your customer. Data can help get you there, but if it’s the only compass for your marketing strategy, you’re missing the soul—the two-way communications and dialogue you want to have with the market.
Thomson Reuters developed a cross-functional customer experience management (CEM) capability to deepen customer engagement. A central component of this capability is the following multi-step process, which, Lee asserts, is bolstered by leadership commitment:
• Survey customers: Thomson Reuters surveys known customers (the survey is not anonymous) for quantitative and qualitative feedback.
• Case management: Any survey topic that receives a score of six or lower triggers a case through the company’s CRM system, which routes the issue to a CEM director within 24 hours. The director shares the issue with a customer experience manager who then has 48 hours to contact the customer to learn more about the issue.
• Key-driver analysis: All survey data (structured and unstructured) and follow-up insights are rolled up and subjected to an intensive analysis across key drivers (typically, touchpoints like billing, training, products).
• Recommendations: Cross-functional CEM teams within business units and another CEM team in the marketing function work together to generate recommendations based on the analysis.
• Action plan: Finally, the teams produce an action plan to correct the issue.
