Insights that Elevate: Neil Anderson on Marketing & Leadership

Chad Coleman
min read
July 28th, 2015

For the first article in this series, I sat down with Neil Anderson, the CMO at Hubble®. Hubble is an integrated suite of performance management apps from insightsoftware.com. It offers reporting, analytics and planning in a single real-time solution that fully understands your ERP.

Neil has had a fascinating and diverse career; it’s one of the reasons he brings such a unique perspective to marketing.

 

I find that a lot of the best marketers didn’t start their careers in marketing. Tell me about your past: how did you end up in marketing?

 

So, I have a degree in classical guitar performance and I spent the first 17 years of my adult life playing concerts around the world, making recordings, and teaching at the New England Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, the Boston Conservatory, and a couple other university level positions. That was kind of the beginning for me. I’ve played all over South America, Europe, and the US. I’ve done my Carnegie Hall debut, as well as my Wigmore debut in London.

The thing about that is, when you are a musician, and if you’re going to be successful, you have to learn marketing, PR, sales, event management (for concerts, master classes) and project management (for recordings). I did that for a long time, and it gave me all the basics that I had to learn to then go into marketing.

Then, I happened into technology just through networking with a musician friend of mine, who had moved into technology. He was doing a startup that did independent testing called The Tolly Group. He and I joined up because he was strong technically, and I had all these other skills, like: marketing, PR advertising, and sales.

Thus, I could run that part of the business while he focused on the technical side. We did that for 10 years, it was a lot of fun. With the marketing side of it, combined with the technical side, we were able to come up with a clever business model and an interesting way to monetize what we were doing.

 

Do you think there is a particular personality trait that marketers must have to be successful?

 

I do think there is a lot of this left brain, right brain balancing stuff.

Most marketing people either are (or they fancy themselves) creative types of some sort, so you do find a lot of artists, musicians, and people who have a stylistic bent. There is so much in the branding, imagery, and all that stuff, if you don’t have a good eye, a good sense of style, and an interesting creative side of your brain, then I think marketing is hard.

However, there is the other side of marketing, which is also creative but it’s figuring out what the market wants and how you can deliver it more creatively than the next guy. Then you segue into the product marketing space as opposed to the marketing strategy side of it.

Obviously the two are joined at the hip, and the more you are able to cross back and forth between those two things, the more successful I think you can be.

 

With the emergence of big data into marketing and advertising, there is a lot of debate in our industry about where the balance between creativity-driven marketing and data-driven marketing lies. Where do you think that balance is now and where is it going in the future?

 

That’s interesting. Certainly the digital and technological side of marketing as it has flourished in the last few years, has changed the game.

However, I think it’s added another element to it, but I don’t think it’s replaced the original elements of marketing. I think it’s brought a whole new set of tools and weapons to the party.

So now, it’s not good enough to just be creative, have a good sense of style, and to just have an intuitive understanding of what the market needs. Considering the whole change in the buyers journey, consumers are now doing their homework, and 60% of the buyer’s journey happens before speaking with a sales person.

So you really have to crack that nut, and the only way to crack it is through understanding the big data and the numbers game - and all that side of the house.

I agree; I also think the level of data we can easily access now has given marketers new leverage. We can go to the CEO now and say, "opinions are great, but here is the data that says X is performing better than Y." We never really had that until recently.

Right, because the data doesn’t lie.

You wonder in the 70’s, 80’s, and the 90’s how the Madison Ave guys were getting people to sign off on multi-million dollar ad contracts based on how many martinis they had at lunch, basically. Or whoever invited them to the nicest golf course, because there was really no data.

Would you mind sharing some of the marketing strategies or initiatives that Hubble is using?

Sure, I’m happy to talk about that! Our marketing revolves around some key areas. Obviously there are a lot of pieces involved: the digital marketing, the messaging and positioning, the product strategy, and sales enablement.

However, the two other big factors for Hubble specifically are the customer ecosystem and the thought leadership elements.

On the customer ecosystem piece, this company has never done enough of what I call customer marketing. The reason I say that is, this company has an amazing asset… we actually have happy customers. I came from the telecom industry, where I spent over 13 years. It’s a consolidated space; you look at the service provider market, Cingular got bought by AT&T, everyone is getting bought by somebody. In that market, everyone is kind of grinding away at the suppliers for the same “product.” It’s just gotten down to very few venders, and everybody does the same thing. So customers have a tendency to go to the suppliers and say: “you’re not giving me enough for what I’m paying.”

However, when I got here, I found that the enterprise software market is just a bigger, richer kind of space. Hubble has a very sweet offering, and we are fortunate because the customers just love it, they just love the solution. That’s a big asset from a marketing perspective, and we are doing more in terms of letting our customers speak on our behalf. Letting them be the army of net promoters that we can leverage.

To do that, it requires some different strategies and programs in terms of what we do electronically, on the web, with webinars, and at conferences. What you do to promote them and let them promote you as a recipe, is extremely interesting to us, and a space that we are focused on. 

"Hubble has an amazing asset: we actually have happy customers."

Neil anderson

The other piece is around thought leadership and industry influence. I believe you really need to have a structured approach. This is something I did a lot in the telecom industry and my startup before then.

How you present yourselves to the market in a value added way, not just in terms of the product that you bring, but the understanding and industry knowledge you bring to your existing customers and your prospects. Because if you are just in front of a prospect saying like “We’ve just got the slickest snake oil you’ve ever seen, we’ve got the most amazing mouse trap, let me show you the the feeds, the speeds, the features, and functions. I’ll even tell you the benefits if I can get that far.” Your marketing efforts are not going to be successful.

Our approach is to go to our customers and impress upon them how much we understand what their problem actually is, and then help understand that there is a different way of thinking about their problem. If they are bold enough and brave enough to take a moment to consider a different approach, we can grow their business. We sell to a lot of financial people, CFO’s, comptrollers, analysts, and we sell to IT people. They are two different constituencies within an organization. However, both of them are constantly fighting fires, they are constantly behind the eight ball. The finance people are working tremendous hours because the CEO is dependent on them for the budget; he's placing heavy demands on them because he or she has to go to the market and talk about the results for the quarter. Sadly, the systems and processes the financials folks use tend to be antiquated, status quo, they’ve been using them for a hundred years. It’s the corporate financials, and nobody likes to change anything, but there is a better way.

With Hubble, we can get them out of the office at 5 o’clock, which makes their life better. But, more importantly we can help them see the whole business more clearly. Both the historical part of the business so that they can understand it, and what is going on right now in real time so that they can manage and make decisions decisions on realtime analytics. Then we give them a window into the future, the predictive part of the business. We do this through an integrated suite of tools and applications, so that they can become strategic to the business, instead of tactical.

Instead of them going to their boss and saying “Hey boss I’ve built this great report and it’s going to tell you what your gross margin was last month.” Our tools empower them to be truly part of the growth of the business.

B2C marketing gets a lot of attention, but I think B2B marketing has really matured in the last ten years or so. Would you agree with that?

Yes, I would definitely agree with that. I think that the whole buyer's journey thing that we spoke about earlier is largely responsible for that, and the digital marketing industry that has flourished around that is thanks to the internet and Google. In the past, if you were a business the way you got your information was from a sales guy. The sales guy showed up and he explained to you how the world worked, and you either bought into it, or you didn’t. Relationship selling was extremely important.

But Google has become the way everyone figures out stuff now, and if your not there, your not in the game. So now when the sales guys walks through the door, the customer already knows what he wants, how he wants it, and how much he wants to pay for it. “So what are you going to do for me Mr. Sales guy?” I believe that sales people need to add value now, they need to say something to the customer that the customer didn’t know before.

Your colleagues have complimented your style of leadership—what is your general philosophy on leadership?

I don’t know that I have general philosophy. I have some principles or best practices I try to live by, that have done well for me.

Part of it goes back to the music days. When I was teaching at the university level, I had a lot of really talented people come along that entrusted their educational journey to me.  What I found worked best for me was not the traditional maestro student relationship, the “No, that's horrible, do it like this, imitate me and you’ll be good.” That’s kind of the old European picture that you have of the maestro sitting in the chair criticizing and belittling the student.

I found what worked better for me was to think of how I could get them to be better than me. In other words, figuring out what was keeping them from playing at my level, or better than my level.

It’s the same for me in leadership. How do I remove obstacles, so that the people who work for me can be really successful and leverage their talent. Their unique set of skills and interests to the benefit of the company. If you can get the people a clear vision of the goals, give them the resources and tools they need, and sort of get out of their way, it’s amazing what people can do.

"Nothing builds teams like solving hard problems together."

neil anderson

Another principle, which will probably sound cliche, is teamwork. You can’t get peak business performance out of people operating in vacuums. You’ve got to knock down whatever the barriers there are that keep people from working as a team. For me, that’s always about getting people together, in a room, face to face. Video conferencing is awesome, WebEx is great, but I’m a super big fan of the theory that nothing replaces face to face.

Nothing builds teams like solving hard problems together. Whenever everyone gets invested in the problem, invested in the answer, and participates in what they can individually bring to that answer, then you start getting everybody rowing in the same direction, and you can kind of step away a little bit. That way, people can just run a lot faster and achieve a lot more.

So for me, it’s kind of about empowerment, investment and enablement, those words, all those kind of “ment” words, haha! Then, also, recognition for the accomplishment when it happens. Understanding how people like to receive recognition; everyone is unique. Some people like to be recognized with money, some with a glass trophy on their desk, some at an all-hands meeting, and some people would just like to get an email from their boss saying “great job.”

So you have to tailor your approach to the person, and it will work. 

If you could go back in time, what piece of leadership advice that you know now would you give to yourself when you had your first leadership role?

I guess it would be “Don’t try to be somebody else.” When I was coming up through the music ranks, I had a lot of masterful musicians that I revered: how good they were and how well they played. I found myself sometimes, you know, I’d go to a master class and watch them in action, and I’d find the next week I would imitate that style. After a while I realized that it wasn’t working for me. I had to find my own voice, my own style, and once I figured that out, it accelerated my success. 

Neil Anderson on leadership: “Don’t try to be somebody else.”

Then the other thing is just around communication. I had the pleasure of working with a great leader while at Spirent Communications, Barry Phelps. I learned a lot from him. He was a real coach; that was his style of leadership. Sometimes I would go into his office and I’d say “Hey, you know, I need your help with this. So and so is doing this or that, and I just can’t seem to solve this problem.” Barry would always say to me “What did this guy say to you when you told him about this problem?”

People love to come to their boss and tell him or her the problem they have with somebody else. The implication being, “Hey boss can’t you go fix this for me?” He would just ask me that simple question “What did this guy say to you when you told him about this problem?” What he did was empower me to solve problems myself through communication.

What is your favorite book on business, marketing, or leadership?

There are so many great ones; it’s difficult to pick one. Some of the classics like Good to Great by Jim Collins come to mind. I like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Right now I’m working my way through The Speed of Trust by Stephen R. Covey.

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