Driving Growth Through Marketing with James Norwood, isolved

Thanks for joining us today on the Fuel Growth podcast.

What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?

Brand?

Product?

Customers?

Employees?

Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. James Norwood is joining us today. James has more than three decades of experience in enterprise software with a background and product strategy and development, sales and marketing, brand creation and differentiation, all culminating the detailed understanding of driving growth in the software industry. He currently serves on multiple boards and is the Chief Strategy Officer at isolved HCM where he was also previously the Chief Marketing Officer. Welcome to the show, James.

Thanks for having me, Clint. Glad to be here.

James, we're happy to have you with us today.

And thank you, Lizzy.

So James, we are in season two of the Fuel Growth podcast. And in this season, we set out to unpack three different approaches to growth. Product-led growth, marketing-led growth, and sales-led growth. We have you here with us today to really describe your insights to marketing-led growth, which is a topic that, you know, certainly executives with a non-marketing background will want to tune in for.

Before we jump into that topic, though, James, can we get to know you first. Can you give us a brief overview of your career, what has led you to running multiple marketing organizations?

Yeah, sure, like Clint dated me that I was saying I have more than three decades. So it is more than 30 years in enterprise software. But I think one of the things which is kind of nice about that is I've been in Product, I've been in Sales, and I've been in Marketing, I haven't always been a marketing leader. That's kind of my more recent, let's put it the last decade. And that gives you I think, a much more rounded approach to how you think about marketing growth. If you have spent time looking at how product makes a difference and how sales makes a difference. I've been very fortunate in my career, you know, I've been in enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human capital management, marketing automation software, ecommerce software, pretty much the gamut of enterprise software over the years. And yeah, that put me in a hopefully a good position to help companies grow.

So I have to ask which one have you enjoyed the most? Product, marketing, sales, any particular industry?

I thought you were talking about companies but no, same as the companies I've been in, they all have the good and the bad side to them, you know, I would describe myself less as a pure marketer and more as a sort of product marketer, product strategist, that's what I love the most. Pricing, packaging, differentiation. So, whenever I can get my teeth into that area, I'm always happiest.

Well, let's get to know the James Norwood the person behind that corporate persona. So you're an Englishman who lives in the United States, which means you must have opinions on football, right?

It depends which football you're talking about.

Well, there you go. I like all football. What do you think of American Major League Soccer versus the English Football League? Who's your favorite team?

Well, you know, it's my team that I had all my life back home in the United Kingdom is called Brentford. Not many people have heard of them, because they were out of the top flight for over 70 years and only came back last season to the Premier League. So they're a little bit of an unknown.

They need a TV show like Wrexham right or Ted Lasso.

Well, if you want to waste a lot of money buy a soccer team, that's for sure. No one ever makes money doing that, although my club actually has managed to go from the fourth tier of English football up to the Premier League and do it profitably by finding junior players and developing them and then selling them on. So they've actually created a very sustainable model. But to your original question, and you know, if you'll excuse the pun, I don't think MLS is in the same league as English soccer. I'd actually say that the Women's National Soccer League in the US is a more exciting thing for me to watch. It happened to be a client of mine at isolved. They run their human resources and payroll on our software. But they've they've been growing exponentially in terms of interest in women's soccer. And I think they average now around 10,000 Attendance versus just over 20 for MLS and the highest attendance over 30 versus 50. And they've done that from small beginnings with less funding in shorter times. I'm excited that they're getting paid the same amount of the national level. It's about time.

I agree with that. Let's get back to business. As a marketing leader by trade James, you're well versed in how to lead through marketing specific strategies, talked about it already. But before we talk about what those strategies look like to you, could you paint a picture of what marketing-led growth is? You know, this anything-led growth topic is different by every single person that we talk to. So I think having an understanding of where that sits with you and your mindset of what marketing-led growth means to you would be helpful for our listeners.

Yeah, that's a tough question for me to answer to be honest, because I'm not sure I know what the answer is. But it really depends very much on the company and its go-to-market model in terms of how that works. I think there's a place in all companies for sales-led growth and product-led growth and marketing-led growth and combinations. And in many cases, in the software industry, there's also channel growth as well. But I think marketing, when you look at the marketing side, it's when you actually you created an engine that is providing enough pipeline to feed and grow the organization. And it requires a mindset of thinking about pipeline, thinking about actual opportunities, as opposed to just lead generation. And I find a lot in many companies, it's changing. But in many companies, marketing organizations think in terms of lead generation, which is an irrelevance, in my mind. All that matters is opportunities in the hands of sellers. And until you've provided enough to keep them busy, they're always going to try and supplement through their own efforts or through other aspects. So I don't know if I'm answering the question, I think it's always a combination of all of those things in any organization, certainly what I've been involved in, in technology. But once you get that marketing engine really moving, and it's growing and developing nicely, then the business can start to rely on it a little bit more. And that's great. But it depends on the business and the industry. And I'll give you an example, in isolved's world marketing is very, very important to us. But at the same time, so much of our business comes through circles of influence that salespeople develop over many years within region, create a lot of trust with brokers and local accountants and things like that. And you'll never take that away from our industry, it's always going to be there. And you know, when I arrived I was like, well, marketing needs to pick up and replace some of that for you. And they're like, Well, why, this is the industry. So marketing becomes supplemental to that. That combination is a good thing.

Well, in past experiences, so other companies, how would you see the sales team and marketing teams working together in this world of we'll call it marketing-led growth, which I realize it again, various your answer may be different than someone else. But in today's world, I've seen that there's some tension between sales and marketing teams of who's responsible for what and a number of conversations that are happening on how those two teams can work together? What have you seen work? Well, or what? What would you suggest in a marketing-led company? How would those two teams work together better?

Yeah, look, it's where the rubber meets the road, right, where marketing and sales come together, it can either be a place of extreme tension and toxicity, or it can be a harmonious path to success. So if you want the second, then you need strong leaders in both sales and marketing, that understand each other, and see each other as partners and not as combative "us and them" scenarios. And usually that can be fixed by individuals and individuals approaches marketing. As I said earlier, I don't want to see the marketing department high-fiving in the corridor, when their marketing qualified leads are up because it's meaningless. It only matters when the salespeople have qualified that and turned it into an active opportunity that they're running with. And at the same time, sales shouldn't be just saying, I just need more and more and they talk to you to serve me, they have to take some ownership of their own success, following up quickly, giving plenty of feedback to marketing on what works and what doesn't. And understanding that a lot of what they do is going to help marketing get better, which doesn't always happen. So it's a partnership. And that partnership has to come from the leaders of each department working in lockstep and not having a view of the other as being someone that is there to deliver for them, as opposed to help them.

I like the word that you use that harmonious relationship or partnership between the two.

Tough to achieve, at times, you know, especially when leaders are pointed at different goals, I'd really liked your point there of getting both marketing and sales aligned together around creating qualified pipeline as the measure of success. That definitely resonates with me.

It's absolutely down to the relationship. And I don't mean the relationship between the teams, although that's what you end up getting. It's the relationship of the leaders of those organizations, and push that down to their organizations. If that is harmonious, it's going to be great. If it's combative, it's going to be a fail.

Yeah. Great call out. Thanks.

So let's take this idea of leadership here for a minute James, and maybe expand on it to talk about strategy as well. So I'm going to ask you the question "What should a company's marketing strategy look like?" And I know you're gonna say you just said it a minute ago, it depends on a variety of things, right? And their go-to-market motion probably also depends a lot on the company size. So if you were the CMO of an early stage software company, what would you start looking at to build your initial marketing growth plan? What would be the building blocks that you start with?

Yeah, the smaller you are the more you should be spending on sales and marketing, once you enter sort of your revenue phase, let's say you're a 10 to $15 million company, you should probably be spending around, you know, over 20% of your revenues on marketing, you know, you're in that very early stage, and nobody knows you, you've got to start building a pipe. And so you want to spend a lot of money there, although you're unlikely to have in-house all the skills and the wherewithal to invest in like, you know, SEO, and ABM, and a whole variety of other tactics, even BDRs, potentially, so you can use agencies for that. There are plenty of sophisticated agencies that you can call upon to go do those things for you until you're mature enough of and of a size enough to bring them in-house. So you obviously you need to get your website and your digital strategy up and running. And you need the core competency around that. And then you need, you know, people that roll their sleeves up and are working on on hardcore lead gen, you probably don't need to invest much in brand of that point, something that will come later. I mean, your differentiation is important, but sort of, you know, building the brand comes in time, you know, once you get sort of 50 million to maybe 150 million, you're talking around 11 to 12% of revenue, should we go into marketing, and then it'll drop to around six to seven, once you're in that sort of 200 to 500 million range.

That's important. You don't see marketing budgets scaling linearly with the growth of the company, you actually see marketing slowing down as the company revenue grows.

Oh, absolutely. Over a billion dollars, it's usually under 4%. I mean, it's on a scale, you get to throwing more money at digital and more bodies of things isn't going to do it, you reach a point where your brand becomes big enough that it comes into its own right. And you know, you're sponsoring golfers or motor races or whatever it is, or stadiums, and the brand is delivering for you. But you certainly don't have that when you're smaller. But yes, it typically gets that. And I've been in companies that you know, the 10 to 15 million, and it's great to have all that money, but you're starting from a very small position where no one knows you. And then in that sort of rapid growth phase 50 to 150 or 20, yeah, spending around 11 to 12%, down to 7% is quite normal.

Those are good numbers. I think people will come back and want to benchmark against you.

Yeah, I hadn't heard of those numbers before. And it makes sense. You're investing everything up front. And then to your point James, as you're getting larger, you would expect that the brand is well established.

And word of mouth at that stage, too, right?

Yeah. And the same thing happens with headcount and discretion, you know. When you're small, you're going to have a smaller team, and you're going to put more money into actual program spend, campaign spend, and you reach that sort of mid size, it gets closer to 50/50. And as you get bigger, you need fewer people. And sorry, you need more people and a little less spend. So the mix between discretion and headcount changes as well as you go through your growth.

What about challenges as the company is growing? So if we think about the company that surpassed the 50, or $100 million revenue mark, have to imagine that even though the spend of marketing is going to be less that there's still presents new challenges, and new purposes?

Yeah, one of the biggest challenges I've been faced with and I still face with everywhere I go is my I would say it's my secret sauce. But the way I approach every company I come into is I try to get the hardcore lead generation funnel moving. So I focus everything on short to medium term, lead generation. And, you know, I've seen my last two or three companies I've seen in year one 40 to 60% pipeline growth, and then you know, sort of 20 to 40% subsequent years. So, there's a lot of obvious things you can do to build that early pipe. But if you focus solely on that, and this is something that I found out myself through experiences, it will plateau out eventually, because you're doing nothing to invest in longer term brand. And really, or if you just stay focused on that hardcourt lead gen, it's great initially, but it's going to plateau out because there are diminishing returns over time. So you've got to start investing in the brand.

Kind of cultivate that top of the funnel, you can harvest the middle of the funnel all day long, but if you're not filling the top of the funnel, you can't harvest as much to midway through right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, great example in the software industry is like, Oh, let's spend a fortune going to a trade show. You know, you're not gonna bring many leads or opportunities back from that, but you're seen, you're building a brand. And in the early stages, there's a trade off that say we can't afford that I would much rather spend that $30,000 or that $50,000 or whatever it is on going out and buying opportunities from a third party source, but if you don't put that investment in, what happens in year two or year three is you start to plateau and it's very hard then to ramp it up because you haven't made that investment. So you've always got to be ramping up the brand and the longer term top of funnel spend in line with that, and getting that balance right is really important.

And it sounds like just hearing you talk to you that that building a standout brand is something that a marketing department maybe should purposefully assign budget to, if I'm hearing what you're saying, James?

Yeah, building longer term pipe, which is, which comes from brand recognition, and some customer advocacy, customer success, reputation in the market, people knowing who you are, word of mouth, all of that stuff does have to be invested in and propagated and built. You can't focus entirely on just short term pipe generation. Now, there are reasons for doing that, certainly in early days and different market conditions and environments. But yeah, there's absolutely a reason to also look to the future or your pipeline growth will stall.

Yeah, you've made me think of planting a field analogy, right, everybody wants to be harvesting the corn. But if you're not planting the seeds, you won't get to the corn. And if you're not watering the seeds, you won't have the corn. So you kind of have to be continuously investing into that future to fill the top of the funnel with new things to harvest in the future.

I like that.

I'm known for going a little overboard with my analogy.

It was a good one, Clint.

I'll take the win. Different tack here for a second. Let's shift gears, if you don't mind. Let's get into the nitty-gritty of how you actually execute on that pipeline creation and website building, and all those other mechanics around inbound marketing, and pipeline creation and even other aspects around it. So what are your favorite tools for collecting customer and market data so that you can build what I would always argue is the foundation of a successful marketing strategy, which is a data-driven marketing strategy. What tools do you use? How do you like to approach the actual mechanics of of doing those things you talked about?

Yeah, everyone talks about data-driven. And I agree with what you said. But I do believe that marketing is as much an art as it is a science, right? It used to be all about the art. And now it's very much a science as well. And I think we need to remember that it's the combination of the two things that makes a successful business these days. There's some incredibly talented technical folks in the marketing world these days that know a lot more than me. And you know, there's a lot of left brain and right brain people and but I think you have to bring that together, you know, but I'm gonna answer your question a little bit differently. I could go on all day about revenue intelligence tools, like one that a lot of people like these days with Clari, or I could go on about sales intelligence tools and sequences like outreach. But you know, for me, the most important tool for marketing is the sales force automation system. And, you know, I'm not talking marketing automation now, I'm talking sales force automation, that part of the CRM system cannot be understated how important it is to have an accurate and complete CRM system from a sales perspective. Opportunity Management that's rigorous. Win-loss data that's complete, industry data that helps you understand your ICP and company size data, having that all accurate, and it really annoys me when salespeople's hygiene is not where it needs to be. Because for a marketing team to be successful, they need 100% accurate sales force automation system. We run our business on analyzing the pipeline, forecasting what sales are likely to be based on historical sales activity. I spend my entire life analyzing CRM in a way that you would expect a sales leader to do. And I'm a marketing leader, I spend my time doing that. And I build my marketing budgets and my plans around what's going on in there. So, if it's not complete, and accurate, not to date, I'm making bad assumptions on my budgeting and my planning. And that's disastrous. So, my favorite tool is sales force automation used properly.

What gets interesting, though, because if you're a leader in the marketing space, you go back to the comment that you made earlier James, around having that harmonious partnership with the sales leader. As a marketing leader, you can make assumptions that the sales leader is doing all of the right things to trickle down the hygiene practices that you would want in a CRM. I think everyone would agree that that's important, especially for marketing, as you're calling out. What it is, though, you're relying on a sales org to play out this practice, manage them effectively and follow through. Do you in marketing play a part in monitoring that, making sure the data is accurate or is it purely relying on this sales team? And let's hope it's accurate, because it's not there's going to be an impact?

So the answer is yes. And yes, I'm, as is the marketing team, absolutely reliant on what's in there and yes, we take some ownership of making sure it's up to date. I have regular calls with the sales team and the sales management to explain. If we don't have accurate data, again, we may have our budget cut, if we can't show that we're getting a return from a spend in a certain area, because the attribution is wrong, because sales didn't do their part of it, right, you have to explain to them, what this means is us understanding win-loss more accurately, because you took the time to do it properly, not just select the bullet's name in the list, because you didn't care. I mean, all these things have a bearing on investment decisions and stuff. So, it comes back to that relationship, as you say, I work very closely with the sales leaders to help them understand what we're looking at, and how that plays back into our investments and what we're doing to support that team. And that helps them put the right amount of pressure and onus on their teams to understand the partnership and what it's there for. And it keeps marketing focused on the end result, which is actual sales, and not necessarily, you know, lead generation. So again, it's a big part of that.

Yeah, interesting insights in there. As you break down the walls between sales and marketing, and you get sales and marketing aligned, I've actually found just as you said, in the marketing team, they're so keenly interested in what the sales team is doing, and getting insights from that and get really plugged into the sales force automation tool. And I've also conversely, seen sales leaders get really excited to see what marketing is doing. And looking inside the marketing tools that they're using. You know, for instance, at our company, we use Triblio and Lead Forensics to unpack what people are doing on the website. And I would say our sales leaders are probably more frequent users of Triblio and Lead Forensics than our marketing team is so there's always an aspect of wanting to be able to look over the wall and frankly, get rid of the wall and say, Hey, what do you guys doing over there? And maybe those insights can help me do my job better?

Yeah, absolutely. So that's the science part of it. A lot of the tools that have been developed these days support sales and marketing, and it is sales and marketing. It's together! And so yes, they do. I mean, historically, sales always wanted to know what marketing was doing. And they had their ideas and stuff in a way that you know almost I didn't trust them and they thought they were better at a discipline that they weren't trained in. Whereas marketing spends very little time trying to tell sales how to go run a sales process, right, they trust them to know what they're doing. But this is more about the two teams coming together to ensure that the data that both organizations' input and use is complete and accurate so that they can service and support each other more effectively.

Well, I'd like to move to something that is one of my favorite topics or "Lessons learned", James. So for anyone to have spanned leadership roles across many verticals, as you have, I'm sure you've seen your fair share of things that didn't go as planned. And were thinking maybe you would not want to see others stumble across. And so you'd be maybe open to laying out for us a couple, maybe two to three lessons that you've learned, maybe not necessarily as you were leading a marketing function, but cross any vertical.

No, I think it's fair that I talk about what I got wrong and and what I learned from that, you know, they're real stories and, and they've made me stronger. One of the things is about brand and a naming which is very important. I was in a company where we had brand recognition and equity in a company name. And we changed it to a name a new name that was an invented name, that no one knew it took five years for the company to rebuild its brand equity, five years. It was a mistake. And you know, oftentimes when companies acquire or merge with other companies, they think this is a good time to, you know, so no one's a winner or a loser to come up with a new name or to get rid of a name that's dated or something like that. But if you've got brand equity in it, it's something you need to think twice about and not play with, you know. Unless the company you're acquiring has a brand that is stronger than yours, and you want to go to that. And I've seen that, but even that probably comes with a year of turmoil. So what we learned is you never mess with names without thinking through all the consequences, whether it's product names...

What about logos, how do you feel about changing logos?

I don't think logos matter too much. And you know, your customers, even if you change your product names, they'll always refer to it as the product that it was called when they bought it. So they don't really care about that. And that doesn't matter too much. But your ability to stay relevant and keep creating demand can be massively affected if you're to change your company name. So that was the biggest mistake I once made. And I won't go through that again. Another one for you is when you do go through acquisitions, when you do acquire companies is never to just assume that people in the company you've aquired and the roles and the titles they have are the same as they are in your company. And this is a mistake I made once and I've lost some people, some very good people because of it. But in the company I was in, people under a certain title where I won't say they weren't important, but they certainly weren't strategic or anything. And when we acquired this other company, I just assumed that the people with the same title had the same role. But they had completely different roles, very strategic roles. And rather than getting to understand that, I just made some assumptions. And that was bad. So always, you know, in M&A is to look at people and individuals and learn what they do and what they're responsible for not never just take their titles. As a guideline, based on what you've learned to this point might seem obvious.

It's not obvious at all. I think it's an excellent tip for anyone that's exploring that. Because if you're going to be acquiring a business, it would be helpful to know you got this person in this seat with this title, what are their actual responsibilities? And what's their level of skills? I don't know that that's a realistic ask of businesses that you're acquiring, but I feel like it would be in the process.

Different companies use the same title to mean very different things. So it's something worth thinking about. The third thing we've already talked about it is making sure you're you're investing in longer term brand, as well as that short term pipeline generation. As I said, I made that mistake in the past. And then it's very hard to catch up once your pipe plateaus. You suddenly build brand. That's the issue, once that short term pipe plateaus, because everything you're doing just throwing more money at adspend is not going to change that you've got out of it everything you can. You can't then suddenly ramp up the brand machine because brand development takes time. So that's something you've got to be very careful to. Great point!

Excellent lesson. Thank you for being so humble enough to share your experience and your mistakes. We all make them. It's how we grow.

Well, I gotta say, James, thank you so much for joining us today. Really great learning more from you on the marketing front. Before we end this episode, can you tell our listeners, where can they find you and learn more about you?

While they can find me isolve. I'm not on much social media anymore. Just LinkedIn, really, which is where most of business goes on so they can find me on LinkedIn. And yeah, I've tried to be as engaged there as possible because it's where a lot of our customers and prospective customers spend their time.

I think we hear that answer from every one of our guests. So outstanding, LinkedIn is the place to go. Well, James, again, thank you so much. We appreciate your insights. Your appreciate your time. Appreciate you. Thank you very much for joining us here on the Fuel Growth podcast.