This ITAC Marketing and Sales Executive Think Tank was hosted at NCR Canada Ltd. by Luc Villeneuve, President.  

1. Determining the best approaches to cross-border marketing
2. Building communication, cooperation and integration between marketing and sales

What we learned 

• Develop customer success stories from panel of customers
• Run numerical analysis before and after to justify [future] business case
• Put emphasis on discipline to measure metrics; ROI process
• Introduce key message alignments to get to ROI
• Early engagement and early adoption
• Adjust job description and commitment of individuals at corporate level, “How did Canada finish?”
• Feed/due diligence with remote relationships

Challenges in executing “not made in Canada” campaigns

• Adoption is later in Canada; one to two cycles
• Different target market scales pose these challenges:  1) need for constant business case analysis for correct message positioning; 2)  account-by-account nurturing is more costly in Canada; 3) different language/grammar required for executing campaigns
• Different delivery methods, drivers, regulatory and legal environments
• U.S. privacy laws are more lax; U.S. retains data where Canada is prohibited
• Canada accounts for just 10% of revenue, which makes funding a challenge

What is Head Office’s perspective on Canadian and U.S. markets?

• Canada receives blunt end of outlook beginning with account-based perspective
• International head offices in Europe are more sensitive to Canadian marketing, i.e. language and grammar differences
• Canadian perspective is “do things differently”
• Having Head Office and Senior Marketing teams outside of Canada is a challenge; constantly asking “What about Canada?”
• Obtaining data is a challenge; need to engage analysts for the right data to plan accordingly

Where is Head Office coming from? What causes the lack of sensitivity to the Canadian market?

• U.S. Head Offices naturally “forget Canada”
• Early engagement in process and breaking it up geographically is necessary
• Introduce different thinking in U.S. to not be centric, and realize need to localize campaigns
• Comes down to revenue; need to compare ROI for “pick up” of local campaigns
• Make it qualitative versus quantitative; let the numbers tell the story

What are your most effective techniques to influence Canada versus U.S. mentality?

• Achieve early engagement and local market processes
• Build business case/plan to prove results
• Change job description and change mentality; get rid of “them versus us”, “Canada versus U.S.”
• Change the conversation and open lines of communication with Directors
• Build a partnership and avoid combative relationships; early face-to-face interaction makes for a more positive partnership

How would you improve relationships between Sales and Marketing teams, especially remote Marketing Teams?

• Involve sales early in marketing campaign development; sales know customers best
• Sales need to feel some ownership of marketing campaigns
• Give sales a “go to” person to execute ideas; to help formulate plans
• Set up a planning function to better control commitments and competition between teams
• Change planning models to have sales lead a “customer segment model”
• Sales decides the “what”; marketing decides the “how”
• Marketing should figure out how to add value in a sales discussion for a better perspective, instead of involving sales into marketing
• Get marketing to listen in on customer calls

Key points to engage sales; most important points to assist sales with remote marketing:

• Engage early and often
• Get involved in sales meetings; from executive to sales manager levels
• Aim to deliver value to the sales process; continuously asking what sales think
• Avoid the silo mentality – we are on the same team; help one another to deliver profits
• Create panel of customers to develop success stories
• Marketing can help by being sales coach for best outcome

Attendees:

• Ron Mitchell, Fujitsu America
• Todd Greenwood, Lexmark Canada Inc.
• Tara Powadiuk, Microsoft Canada
• Doug Long, Tata Consultancy Services
• Jackie Evans, xwave, a division of Bell Aliant
• Leyland Brown, Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co.
• Deborah Brown, Independent