Predictive AI will Earn Marketers a Position as Business Leaders at the Top Table, Says Microsoft’s Scott Allen

In today’s business world no company is as nimble as the customer they serve. The online client - b2b or b2c - commands more choice, demands better experience and derives greater autonomy than ever before and companies are largely caught on the back foot. However, being a large incumbent is no excuse for not keeping pace. This is the story of wholesale digital transformation rolled out globally across one of the world’s largest companies in a matter of only a few years as told to London’s top finance marketeers…

Chasing the Client’s Tail

The challenge facing Microsoft’s Global Marketing Development and Strategy team five years ago was stark: digitise or die. If that sounds like nothing more than a worn-out, and unlikely cliché, then the Microsoft story tells us otherwise:

“As marketers we were fine at ‘demand gen’ but what were we doing to really qualify the leads and nurture the funnel and support our sellers in a climate where customer behaviour is changing radically? Not enough – was the truthful answer. We had to be customer-centric and, by modern standards, we were not.”

 Keeping in Lock-step with Leadership

Speaking at the inaugural CIM Financial Services Leaders’ Summit hosted at Bloomberg’s impressively slick London newsroom and offices, Scott Allen, Global Marketing Development and Strategy Director at Microsoft, laid out in no uncertain terms the imperative to bring leadership onboard every step of the way when instigating change in marketing.

At Microsoft, in 2014 and under new management, there was a board-level commitment to a new way of doing business - putting digitisation and L&D front and centre of all that Microsoft does. The team saw an opportunity to link this ethos into Microsoft’s corporate marketing strategy.

Allen was emphatic: “You have got to take leadership with you every step of the way. You’ve got to tap into those strategic mindsets”. Citing research, from MIT Sloan, Allen explained that businesses which succeed at digital transformation are proven to have combined digital capabilities and leadership capabilities which have been effectively brought together.

Under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Microsoft has pivoted from a company whose people ‘know it all’ to one whose people ‘want to learn it all’. The change of attitude is a necessary one and reflects the fundamental shift in business dynamics (underpinned by the evolution of the online economy) where the client knows best and truly calls the shots – requiring the corporation to always be in ‘learning mode’.  And this is a mantra Microsoft were determined to apply directly to marketing and leverage as a means of bringing senior leadership on the journey.

“Waking up every day and relating everything we do in marketing at Microsoft back to the company’s mission statement has made our task really clear” said Allen.  By speaking directly to Nadella’s corporate vision and mission –‘to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more’ – the team were able to couch mammoth and ongoing  marketing change at the heart of their CEO’s primary objectives.

It can be difficult to shift perception away from marketing being a cost-centre which needs to prove every expenditure in immediate return and ‘x number of leads’. And even at Microsoft that process of shifting perceptions was hard won. But ultimately, he said, it’s nothing more than bringing the board into the modern world – ‘taking them out of the 90s’ – and into the now, where our investments are strategic, innovative and at times hefty, but where the rewards over time will be fundamental to the business’ continued growth.

 From CMO to CEO
(…That’s Chief Engagement Officer!)

While willingness to invest may drag, Allen showed how the need for a change in the way marketing is done is absolutely driven by forces from above and outside – that is to say: from the CEO and from the customer.

” 57% of the purchase journey is now completed by B2B buyers before they have direct contact with a supplier – because of online. And 73% of CEOs are concerned that they are not keeping pace with customer needs and expectations…. As a large business we were not alone in having vast amounts of data and no smart way of connecting it”

By building a fully integrated new marketing enterprise, employing AI and Machine Learning to connect and utilise big data, Microsoft’s ambition was to become “Customer-Centric, Personalised, Integrated and Optimised – delivering a compelling customer experience and efficient ROI – At scale.”

To this extent Allen described a shift “from CMO to Chief Engagement Officer”.  However, it was clear that ‘Engagement’ was the crucial term, not purely in relating to clients and customers but fundamentally in the quest to bring leaders and talent on the journey: People, Process and Technology-Tools are what underpin modern marketing, according to Allen. The key, he said, is to coordinate these three crucial elements in order to: “predictively drive revenue by listening and responding to customer demand signals in an ongoing conversation throughout the customer journey.”

During his talk, Allen’s emphasis on people could not have been greater – cultivating a culture and a talent pool which can support, and feel supported by, digital transformation has been a constant focus for Microsoft marketing during the past four years. Engaging the sales teams and learning more about what they do - how, why and with whom - has also been crucial to progress. Marketers at Microsoft have truly been engaging on all fronts.

And the pay-off has been tremendous. Once the AI and Machine Learning was in-place (albeit tweaked and improved on a daily basis), the team were able to oversee nothing short of a marketing revolution and, says Allen, bringing powerful smart data which is predictive to the table is what earns marketing serious strategic kudos at those board level discussions:

“Not only can our predictive pattern matching allow for forecasting, we can tell our colleagues at the top what’s working and what’s not – in terms of product as well as channel. It’s also an opportunity for peer-to-peer collaboration at the top. No matter our vertical we are all on a digital transformation journey, we learn from each other.”

Big Incumbent? No Excuse

Microsoft’s marketing modernisation (digital transformation) journey was one which has taken the entire global company, in the space of only a few years, from sales-driven and siloed to buyer-driven - multi-channel at the front-end and joined-up from the back-end. The journey has been a mammoth one but is truly inspiring in its speed, scale, efficacy and benefit.

It’s tempting to assume that a company as synonymous with technology as Microsoft is, undergoes a subliminal and pain-free overnight morphosis into a cutting-edge digitised enterprise. But the surprising and ultimately heartening part of the story Allen told is the degree to which Microsoft found itself a business like any other when facing the challenge of modernising its marketing.

Moving from a field marketing team in the UK into the global corporate marketing HQ, Allen described  the benefits of having an increasingly well connected field and HQ marketing strategy.:

“Suddenly we could manage a paid media strategy run from HQ without clumsy over-lap, competing with or cannibalising our own channels. Then field-level approaches could be applied intelligently and incrementally over the top. We were now able to be really targeted delivering the right content, in the right place and at the right time and our AI is able to tell us when the customer is ready to buy – lead quality is greatly improved and of course our win rate has gone up.”

He explained how all this intelligence has culminated in one Microsoft Marketing Engagement Index (MEI) - a living, breathing database tracking the nuances (engagement level, activities, key themes, number of engaged individuals, departmental focus) of thousands of managed accounts – a resource which must, surely out-do a sales person’s wildest dreams. “Two years ago, this didn’t exist” said Allen “This is recent, and it’s powerful.”

Financial Services, which have been so particularly rocked by agile, digitally-native new players, are used to citing their incumbent status, sprawling and often aged infrastructure as a major road-block as they strive to compete.

While Allen told intrigued audience members during an intensive Q&A that the job is certainly not done and that the attitude to the technology is “test and learn every day”, Microsoft’s story is one of building from c. ground zero up at almost incomparable scale and at fairly eye-watering pace.  It seemed that Allen had shot at least a couple of carefully targeted arrows through the heart of the myth of ‘incumbent paralysis’.