The Thought Leader's Voice Podcast

Rachael Kinsella: Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, wherever you are today. Welcome to The Thought Leader’s Voice. I’m Rachael Kinsella, Editor in Chief at iResearch Services and your host today. We are delighted to be joined for today’s episode – a seismic shift to unify B2B Marketing and Sales – by Jenna Pipchuk.

Jenna is Chief Sales Officer and Executive Vice President at SMART Technologies, a provider of hardware and software solutions to educators and business professionals worldwide. Jenna joined SMART in 2007 and has over 20 years of experience in technology. She began her career in Product Management and has helped many successful products to market for SMART. Jenna is known for her transparent leadership, finely honed hiring skills, and for building great teams. For those of you who don’t know, Jenna is Head of Sales, and Jeff Lowe, Head of Marketing, forged a completely different path for SMART during the pandemic. Capitalizing on the shift to digitally dominant B2B buying behavior, the team completely dismantled traditional sales, marketing, success, and service teams, bringing them together and restructuring into what SMART calls ‘The Unified Commercial Engine – challenging the unchallenged’.

Hello and welcome, Jenna. Great to have you here with us today.

Jenna Pipchuk: Thanks so much, Rachael. It’s super exciting to be here today.

Rachael Kinsella: Thank you for joining us. So, we’ll get straight into the questions, if I may. I’m sure our audience is really keen to hear more about the Unified Commercial Engine. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the main driving force was behind the model for you and your team to take this massive step, and what results this restructure has driven for SMART?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah. The Unified Commercial Engine is really dropping the kind of traditional sales and marketing departmental structures, if you will, and looking at the entire customer journey from a new lens and really re-organizing our company around the customer. I know everybody kind of talks about centering around the customer and we said, let’s toss everything aside and figure out what it would be like if we actually built our organization around the customer’s experience and all the touchpoints it has with our organization, and that was one of the main driving forces.

Really what we know is the data is showing that more and more of our buyers prefer to buy digitally. I think it’s something like an astounding amount of over 60% would actually prefer not to interact with the salesperson when making a purchasing decision, even in very complex purchasing decisions, and so we knew that our market was changing and we really had a hard look at ourselves to say, well, how are we going to change to better meet our customer’s needs? And then there was a secondary one, which I don’t think is too important for others, but for us, we were having issues with departmental silos and one thing that we were just not fixing, and so, a secondary or minor point of the driving force was how do we get more connected between our departments? Because we were continually having a culture of siloed departments, which I think many organizations experience.

Rachael Kinsella: Absolutely. Actually, I would argue that that’s an equal challenge to driving your organization around the customer. We hear it time and time again from clients and from their end clients, the difficulties that organizations are having with silos across the company, and particularly between different departments like Sales and Marketing and Customer Success. So that must have been a significant driver, I would have thought.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, it absolutely was; and the results have been phenomenal. So, we are two years in now and we can talk with a lot more confidence about what we have developed here because we have doubled our leads year over year in every category. We have increased our employee engagement to a really good level and we have increased our sales significantly by about 40% in two years. So those three things combined has given us a lot of confidence that says, yeah, this idea of completely dismantling sales and marketing and really unifying your whole commercial process can really be a great driver for any organization.

Rachael Kinsella: Wow, fantastic. So, the proof is in the pudding. You took the leap, and it’s paid off in quite a short space of time across the past two years.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, 100%. And, I think we are interested in how much more we can drive this and how much more we can help buyer groups with digital purchasing.

Rachael Kinsella: Brilliant! Of course, I think we are all quite acutely aware now that the B2B sales and marketing landscape has shifted dramatically with various different factors like the pandemic. But as you say, that drive to digital buyer behavior, the stats that you mentioned are really quite astounding, particularly even in complex purchases. The requirement and the desire to conduct all of that online without any face-to-face or sort of in-person intervention is quite dramatic. Obviously, you’ve identified and tapped into these changing B2B buyer behaviors to meet the customer where they are and where they want to be met.

Could you talk us through some of the steps that you’ve taken to arrive at this restructured model, how you’ve facilitated it, and also perhaps the different phases that you went through during that process?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, for sure. So, it’s been a long journey. So about six months before we even implemented the Unified Commercial Engine, we started to look at what we needed to do to restructure. So, what do our customers experience? What is their journey? What are all their touchpoints? And how can we drive a better digital experience and interweave the human touchpoints as well? I don’t want anybody to think that we are all digital because I don’t think all digital works either. Therefore, we went through the customer journeys and that’s really where we started. That is, mapping all of our customer journeys and seeing what they did, and we ended up with a fairly standard infinity loop, you know, the standard customer infinity loop where they are out of market and then they start to identify a problem and then they start to identify solutions and go through a buying process and then a support process and then start the loop all over.

So that is very standard. But once we said, okay, so this is what our customers experience, let’s group it by the different types of things that they experience. So, whether they’re learning about solutions, whether they’re purchasing solutions or whether they’re adopting or being supported by their solution, those are all fairly traditional. So, we mapped those out. But some of the things that were quite unique is we pulled out a lot of centralized things like our operations, our systems, and processes.

Normally you would have a MarTech stack, you have a sales ops stack, and have your financial stack, and what we did is we pulled that whole group and said, well, you support throughout the entire customer journey, so you are going to be a group together that supports the entire infinity loop. We did the same with our content and we did the same with our product and our marketing group because they were at every different stage. So, we combined those groups that had some efficiencies in there and say, you must support the entire journey. What else we did is we matrixed the infinity loop into what for us was geographic regions. In a couple of instances, it’s a segment and that’s actually the secret sauce.

It’s a matrix organization where their every day team is more of the indirect, so the entire customer journey from brand intent all the way through to customer support that is in a geographic or what is we call a Sales Pod or for us it’s ‘The Commercial Engine Pod’ and that’s their everyday team dealing with the entire customer process. Then they are matrixed in through direct reporting lines into like for like. So, all our demand gen people are together, all our inside sales reps are together, that sort of stuff, not knowing that would become our secret sauce. It is the pod itself that your everyday group is the entire customer journey. That’s what really made this thing.

Rachael Kinsella: Wow. That’s a really impressive model and really fascinating way of looking at it, actually, and you could see it makes sense why it would work because you are supporting that customer journey from all sides using all the technologies that are at your disposal, but also those different skillsets and those everyday teams. As you say, that’s their everyday work and area of focus, but it’s actually spanning that whole customer journey. That’s amazing!

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah. It’s the broadening of people’s understandings of our customer that actually made the difference, and yeah, we’ll talk more about it. But it’s become such a key component now of our engagement because people really understand the full journey and their part in it; their purpose is made clear. Their motivation is really there because they understand their impact to the customers much more than they did when they were kind of in their isolated departments.

Rachael Kinsella: How did you go about creating that view of the customer and creating that better understanding of the customer needs? Was it through that mapping process that you mentioned or was it bespoke training around the different areas? How did it work?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, we did what we call the ‘circles and squares exercise’. And so, we built the entire org without putting any thought into the people. We really just focused on what does the customer need at each point? What would that job look like? What were the exact skills needed for that job, and what would they be providing to the customer? So those were our squares. And so, every square, a touchpoint with a customer, and every job required to help a customer was defined with a skill set and what it needed to do.

Then we took all of our people, which was about 260 of them, and we did a similar exercise with our circles, which is Who are these people? What are their skillsets? What is their ability to learn? What is their interest level? And then we started to match circles to square, and so we took anywhere where there was a circle with either the right skill set or a trainable skillset and an interest level into the right square. We did end up at the end with a few circles who are amazing people who just didn’t have the skill set that we were looking for, for the future of our business, and we had a few squares of just skillsets we didn’t have in our current employee base. So, that was a huge restructuring episode, but we still do it to this day on a much smaller one.

So now when we say we are going to do a circles and squares, it’s less about putting people into spots and much more about what spots do we need in the future and what skills do we need, and then who do we need to train to have those future skills? And that is a win-win for both the company and the employee, because we really are skilling our people up for the future of Sales and Marketing and we are skilling our company up at the same time, which is a lovely place to be.

Rachael Kinsella: Absolutely. Actually, that brings me really nicely onto one of my next questions, which is how that was scalable and how you can be planning for future growth using that same model, and you’ve answered that question by obviously showing that you’re using the ‘squares and circles approach’. It does sound like, dare I say, it is infinitely scalable across your business.

Jenna Pipchuk: Well, it helps. Yeah, it helps change a mindset too, because I think some people maybe forget when they are doing their planning is there is a traditional mindset that your career development includes more responsibility and then at some point you must manage people to go up the ladder. And what we are really encouraging is saying, hey, sales is changing. It’s just a market that has a tremendous growth with data and with inside sales and where things are going, and we are encouraging them to also look less about this kind of traditional career path and more about what skills do you want in the future? What skills make you more marketable? What skills make you able to do that? And that might have a completely different career path than they might be thinking. And, we think that sets them up better for the future, both at our company or for other companies if that’s where their career path goes. Just because that’s not the only way to get there. That is not what companies need in the future for sales and marketing.

Rachael Kinsella: Absolutely, and it’s about the evolution of the industry, of the role, but also the individual. It is the future proofing aspect of that individual’s development as well as the role itself. So, the two obviously are so closely interconnected to be able to map that out in a different way to the traditional, probably quite defunct now. The traditional career paths you are thinking that you’re only scaling the ladder one way, but actually you’re mapping it to the evolution of the industry and the marketplace and ways of reaching your end consumers, which is an incredibly innovative approach, but its also sensible. It makes sense.

Do you think that because it is taking into consideration the skills and the capabilities of the individual alongside the roles and what’s required from a customer perspective, do you think that has actually helped improve employee satisfaction? What did you find when you were measuring that pre and post restructure?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah. The employee engagement was one of the more pleasant results for us. We had fairly high engagement scores going into this. Pre-COVID and even the first year after COVID, everybody kind of got a lift in engagement scores, and we were in the top 25% of tech companies for our engagement scores by a third-party measurement. After the UCE, we’ve now actually moved into the top 10% of any company in any segment and a lot of that I think has to do because with the broadening knowledge, the understanding of their purpose and actually being able to see the results of their activities to the overall. I think that is one of the highest reasons to get our engagement.

The other thing is the Matrix model that we have requires a lot of collaboration. So, in the beginning, we used to hire for collaborative skills. We have now gotten to a point where the culture itself lends itself to it. So, a good example is in a traditional kind of way if you have a line of the customer journey, you would kind of put in breaks that said, well, this person is responsible for point A to point B, and then there is a handoff, and the next person’s responsible for point B to point C. We took off those hard breaks and we said No, both people are responsible to A and C. We drew a diagonal line and it says the person on the left, they’ll be mostly responsible for point A through C and a little bit halfway point. They are equally responsible and at the other end they are probably less responsible.

Then, for the person who traditionally would be B to C, we said No, you have the whole A to C, you’re just not very responsible for A, you’re about equally responsible when it gets to point B and you’re almost fully responsible at point C. And what that means is, you take a broader look at what has to happen for that customer and you share a little bit of the responsibility. So, there is no kind of hard point handoff that says, ‘I’ve done my job, you go’. There is an equal responsibility and what that means is they have to have a collaborative kind of mindset. They have to be able to work with others to negotiate through how to have the best customer experience through that time frame.

When I talk to my staff about what is the one thing today that you’re finding different because of the UCE? They said, actually, it’s when we bring in new people, we have to spend a little bit more time helping them understand this collaborative nature. We call it ‘Embrace the Grey’ meaning it is not a very clearly defined difference, you have to work together for the betterment of the customer. Therefore, we take a little bit longer onboarding new people to understand the ‘Embrace the Grey’ collaborative mindset. But it’s self-fulfilling and is part of why they’re so engaged, because they feel like they have a purpose, they feel like they are making a difference, and they are collaborating really for the good of the customer.

Rachael Kinsella: That’s fantastic, and you can see how that would improve engagement. But as you say, working in traditional silos, you are kind of beavering away very busy doing your thing or what you deem to be your thing; it doesn’t foster collaboration. It doesn’t foster that transparency and the communication that is for the good of the customer, and you don’t see that bigger picture, as you say.

You don’t see your direct contribution to the commercial success, to winning the customer, to keeping them engaged, to making their life better. So, by opening it up, it automatically encourages collaboration. I like the way you say, it’s kind of woven it into the fabric of the organization rather than having to hire for those specific collaborative mindsets and skills. It’s actually part of the job and it becomes that natural flow in terms of the workload to not get a sort of off-the-cliff hand-off point. You’re actually working together throughout different stages, but you still have ownership and purpose because you know which bits are your key focus.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, and everybody gets to share in the win now, right? I think before that you would have done your job to the best of your ability, but whether it succeeded or failed, you didn’t feel like you owned that outcome. It was just like I did my bit and I handed my baton and you know, too bad that the other person running fell down. Bad for them. Now you see the whole race, and so, you see you get to our Demand Gen people or even some of our Brand Intent people now get to feel the success of the win when we have either made the sale or helped a customer with a problem and support. You know, they get to see the longer picture and so then they get to feel more of those wins that we collaboratively get together.

Rachael Kinsella: Brilliant! That’s excellent. It’s a really, really good model to understand and to learn from across different types of sectors and different types of organizations as well, I think. Do you think that kind of approach works across all sectors and all-business types, or do you think it lends itself more naturally to some rather than others?

Jenna Pipchuk: No, I think it does lend to all types. I think how you create the pods would be different. So, if you were maybe in a more complex multi-million-dollar deal with specific named accounts, maybe you would make pods based on the type of account versus either a geographic pod or a market segment. I think the key is to understand all the touchpoints in your customer journey and they also have to have some kind of things in common.

You know, for us it is a lot more geography. It’s like we have all of our Southeast United States group work together, but that is because then they have the same set of customers, they have the same channel that is serving them. So, they have a lot in common. In other instances, we might tick a segment like maybe a small-medium business and we might give it a larger geography because there are enough similarities there. And so, I think it can apply everywhere, but how you build your pod is unique. Also, remember that each of the pieces of the pod, whether it’s your Brand Intent person or your Demand Gen person, your Inside Sales Reps or your Account Rep or your Field Sales Rep, you can add any number that makes sense for that pod. So, all of our pods do not have the exact same people, but what all of our pods have is they at least have all the components required.

Rachael Kinsella: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I think it’s tailoring it to your fit and tailoring it to your end audience as well. So again, it’s being geared up around the customer, but whether that is by geography or segment or sector or whatever the case may be, it’s making sure that it’s reflective of your journey.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, if your journeys were very different, then I don’t think you could have that in the same pod because, you know, different journeys require different touchpoints with different reasoning, and so you’d have different successes.

Rachael Kinsella: Great. Thank you. You also created (not as if you didn’t have enough to do with everything that you’re doing with the restructure!) but you also created the three centers of excellence. So, one focused around Data and Analytics, one for Customer Insights and Positioning, and one for Creative and Digital Experience. So how did they work alongside the pods and the other areas of facilitating the UCE? And can you tell us a little bit more about how each has helped the organization overall?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, I would love to. And just for the purposes of everyone not thinking that everything was just hunky-dory, two of these are going really well. One of them we are still quite working on. So, I’ll start with the two that have been quite successful and then I’ll share with you some of our challenges in the third one because I think it will be helpful to others.

Rachael Kinsella: Great. Thank you.

Jenna Pipchuk: So, our Customers Insights and Positioning; this was really great because, you know, we all have listening posts from many places. And I think many companies might be like ours, with different segments of your company here, different listening points, different inputs about the customer, but they don’t always share that with people outside. And so, what we have with creating this kind of group outside is they took all the listening points together and we call them a ‘project heartbeat’, which means they have to take all of the input. They have to summarize into what’s important to the company, maybe what’s the biggest problems that we are going to tackle, and then they have to share that out throughout the whole company. So, there’s this lovely kind of cycle going through the company that this group is fully responsible for, which is What are we hearing? What is changing in the market? What are our customers saying? How does that apply to our business? And then here’s the three kind of messages that we are pumping out across the journey with all the right deviations based on market and segments and all of that stuff.

But just having one group solely responsible for customer insight and sharing that insight is always the thing that I think organizations have the most trouble doing, so that everybody has more information about the customer as they go through their day and make decisions. The second one was really more about the Creative. And so, this is just, you know, video and branding and images and even taking our technical writing team and putting them with our website writers. You know, it’s a different type of writing. It’s a different type of personality. Did we get efficiencies from that? And we did. We did because at the end of the day, having the entire creative group together just created more synergy.

So it might be, of course, your technical writer is not the same as your website page writer or your marketing writer, but having them in the same group, they understand what each other is writing. And so, there’s much more consistency in how we talk in our voice and how we talk to our customers, which is a super important, again because remember, we are centered around having a single customer journey and what does our company represent to them, and so having more consistency in our creative elements just helps kind of fine-tune that from a customer perspective.

And then the third one is the one that I would say that we are still working on, and that’s our Data and Analytics. It is taking all of our MarTech stack, all of our Sales Op stack, all of our financial and customer support information and putting that all together into a data and analytics team. And I will say that our processes changed faster than our systems could keep up with it., and current marketing and sales applications aren’t made for as much coordination as we have. So, it’s taking us much longer to get our systems enabled to our new processes than maybe we thought at the beginning. Also, it’s forcing, which is in a good way, really coordinated data sets. It is taking a lot more time than we probably planned for, and so, I would say on our data side, we are not exactly where we want to be. We have come a long way from where we were, but we are still not quite at the full UCE experience from a Data and Application standpoint.

Rachael Kinsella: I can imagine that’s a mammoth task ahead, and it’s, you know, bringing data from all different areas of the business through all the different Tech stacks that you have. And it’s one of the number one challenges for any organization currently that, you know, the technology and the combination of the technology and how that’s embedded throughout the organization is not necessarily keeping up with how fast the processes need to be or how quickly customer demand and behavior is changing, and so being able to map it all out, it changes as soon as you already have. So, it’s very much a fast-moving and evolving process, and I can imagine something like that, given your level of connection and collaboration would be a far greater task than you would find in many organizations. So, it sounds like you’re well on your way with that. But I think with everything else that you’ve got set up, that will definitely sort of come in time, and the fact that all the other different elements are so coordinated and collaborative must give you a very firm foundation to be able to move towards that.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, I think, yeah. Look, it’s causing the right conversations, even if we don’t have the right solutions just yet. It’s like getting our HubSpot Application, which is a marketing application to work really really well with our Salesforce data, to work really well with our customer success. That’s a different application called ‘Gain Site’. And I think all organizations have the same problem of how do you share data between all of the systems? But also getting the applications to work in coordination is, is our next-level challenge. So, I’ll just put that one out there. If you’re looking to do this over, plan for more budget and data analytics because it’ll become the glue that makes it all work long term.

Rachael Kinsella: Yeah, absolutely. Well part of that future-proofing and the future thinking as well will come in time. But you have to allow the budgets and the resources for it because it can quite quickly take over. Some of the conversations we have had on previous podcast episodes have been around that, you know, those specific challenges. So, you know something that’s shared across the board, but I can imagine that would be quite the task for you and your team. So, looking forward to hearing more about how that develops and grows over the coming years.

I think, I mean you’ve given us a great overview and there’s an awful lot to learn from all that you’ve shared with us, and thank you for being so candid and transparent with sharing your story. I think there’s a lot that different teams and different company types can learn from your story and the path that you’ve taken. I think there is so much to be excited about with having such strong levels of customer and employee engagement during a pandemic, during times of so much uncertainty, whether that’s geopolitical or financial or across different markets. So, it’s as we were saying earlier, it was a real kind of leap of faith in difficult times. But actually, it’s a way of managing those in a more cohesive way, which I think is something that we can all learn a lot from.

Where do you see this going over the next few years in terms of the continually evolving B2B buyer behavior and ways of working? Are there particular steps that you’re taking now over and above what we have been discussing in terms of Tech and Data and Analytics and Insights for you to ensure that the model continues to be robust as possible for future-proofing and making sure that it’s fit for purpose for the next stage of growth – and also for any other potential changes or restructuring that you may need to do as time goes on?

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, I mean for sure B2B is changing, B2C has it right over COVID, they’ve understood the consumer wanted digital and they’ve got it. B2B has a lot more complexity. One because you are not dealing with an individual consumer, you are dealing with a buying group, so how do we get better digitally to help support buying groups? You know when people are looking for your product and on your website, how are you helping them share information with their stakeholders, I think is a key part of that. The other thing with B2B is how we are integrating channel and other partners into our buying experience digitally. Do we have great handoffs between the digital sites to help them go from maybe investigative about a product on our site, into hey I want to purchase a price quote on their site. So, how are we helping them? Those handoffs across companies, it’s really important. And then, some of the data that comes in through these complex buys.

You know traditional sales, you would bring them information, while digitally we don’t have to do that, they can go and find out all their information now. So, what do the buyers needing from you? Well, they need assurance, they need to know whether they are making the right decisions, is there any information that they have missed? And then they need to know like how are they going to get approvals through their buying group, and so, having the right level of assurance in the digital mode and whoever can crack the right level of assurance with buying group, with different partners – that’s B2B digitally and until that exists, we still have a lot of ways to go.

Rachael Kinsella: Yeah. So, its that collaboration with partners and handholding for the customer, for the buyers. So just that we have the re-assurance that the product is what they are looking for. Have they got their testimonials, and those kinds of reviews. I suppose like-minded buyer information at their disposal.

Jenna Pipchuk: Yeah, its all about the information because we redid our website so that we had better information about who’s there and what they are looking for so that we can customize to the customer as much as we could. We redid our partner portal, again to get the plumbing rights so that we can get better handoffs. And so, as we get better on our digital sites with our digital information, we are also looking for how do we share that in the B2B environment because at the end of the day its not just our customer, it’s a mutual customer with our partner, and so how do we extend the things that we are learning and the things that we doing that’s in privacy compliance that you know that holds the customer to the right level, yet includes everybody involved in the buying journey.

Rachael Kinsella: Of course. Something we have not even touched on, though, is that you’ve got regulatory parameters that you have to exist within as well, and you know going above and beyond compliance. So that’s another layer of complexity to add-in.

Jenna Pipchuk: Well, if it was easy, everyone would do it right? (laughs)

Rachael Kinsella: Well, this has been really fantastic. Thank you so much, Jenna. I really enjoyed speaking with you and it’s a fascinating and very exciting story. I know you are talking about it all over the globe at the moment and sharing your experiences. You know, we are really keen to continue to watch and hear from you as you are learning along the way, and I hope we can collaborate on some more content and some more discussions around the future of B2B and what that will look like in the next few years and then longer-term.

Jenna Pipchuk: Thank you so much, I appreciate the time that you are spending with us and you know, we are feeling quite good about it. Let’s hope that these kinds of results continue and we are happy to share both those learnings and successes and you know, maybe whatever blips in the road that we come across. So, thank you for your time, Rachael.

Rachael Kinsella: Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. Speak again soon.