The B2B marketing leader tells Tim Healey why inflated claims can be tempting in technical categories, how showing your workings builds trust and why customer relationships last longer when integrity comes before easy numbers.
Tell us about your journey into marketing at Saft?
Straight out of school, I was working in a hotel as a porter carrying things along corridors for conferences and other events and trying to try to see if I could get good tips whilst I worked on a bar. At the age of 18, I was physically burnt out, so I applied for a job just as an office boy.
I joined a battery company called Sanyo Energies as a sales administrator when I was 18. This job led me to another job in the battery industry where I worked my way through the ranks at a distributor called AllBatteries. After some relocations and working in various roles, the opportunity came up to work at Saft – a huge French battery company headquartered at Paris, France, and I have been here for the last 16 years.
What’s the offer at Saft?
Saft is a high-end battery company. When I was a distributor, it was apparent there’s lots of different brands of batteries out there, but Saft was always quite an aspirational company to join, being over 100 years old and evolving from providing Ni-Cd batteries for train luggage trollies to now powering applications like military and commercial aircraft, off-grid, and IoT applications.
Saft is also a western high-end battery manufacturer, which is something of a unique proposition, given the many competitive alternatives that are out there in the world, especially in China.
What’s coming up for Saft in the next 12 months?
Batteries are an electrochemistry, so the more we do our R&D into certain areas, the more we can evolve and improve the energy density of batteries.
Energy density is always the holy grail. The higher the energy density, the more power you have, the longer things can run for, and so on. We’re always innovating and working towards that. All major battery companies are working towards breaking through with solid state battery development (where liquid electrolytes are replaced with a solid mass), which again increases further safety and energy density.
In addition to that, we continue to work on how batteries become part of wider and bigger systems as we work in areas such as energy storage and infrastructure and connected devices.
For the Connected Smart Energy Division of Saft where I serve as the marketing director, we are focusing more on content and thought leadership, and less on traditional lead generation such as trade shows. We have launched a roadshow series of ‘Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Days’ which we have found to be very successful in connecting developers with our battery experts. We are looking to host the next edition in Asia, where we expect lots of growth in the IoT sector.
You spent much of your career in sales before you ran marketing. What did you understand about marketing once you owned it that you couldn’t see from the sales side?
When I moved into the marketing side, I realized how many people in marketing actually are salespeople with a resolute determination to see products sell. In my role now, I have several people that I work with who are product managers and market managers, but they think like salespeople. They want to see wins.
When I was the sales guy, I kind of had this misguided opinion that only sales guys wanted the win. When I moved into marketing, I realized that they want the win too.
What does that ask of marketing that consumer brands never have to think about?
I think consumer brands have got the strength of the brand itself. Whereas in technical marketing you have to do a lot more work to show the features and benefits of your product without necessarily relying on the fact that your brand is so well known to begin with.
At Saft, we are selling a technical product, so our marketing is focused on what customers can attain, for example broad temperature ranges for outdoor use in hot/cold environments, long autonomy for 10-year operating life and so on. In order to do that we need to ensure we have good existing customer relationships where we can demonstrate our work within our content marketing.
What advice might you have marketing in this area? If everyone’s talking about their innovation or everyone’s saying they’re best in class, how do you distinguish?
I would admit it’s actually very hard to distinguish, all you can really do is make sure you focus on the features and benefits that are actually beneficial to the end customers themselves. We can all talk about the high capacity of Saft battery, or we can talk about the ability for it to work in an outdoor environment, or in an extreme temperature range, for example. You have to know your market to know how your features and benefits are relevant to the end customer.
We do our marketing based on industry trends and based on the end customers – as opposed to making something we think everybody will like, and convincing people to buy that. We have learnt that the latter doesn’t work. Our focus is very much based on what the market needs and then trying to be just one step ahead of that.
In previous roles, you ran manufacturing, logistics, and purchasing, as well as marketing. What did owning it all teach you about where marketing fits into the mix?
Early on in my career, I was responsible for everything except sales. You really realize when you have the all-encompassing role that marketing is something of an overlooked entity. You need sales. You need your purchasing to be right. You need your operations to be efficient – and some would argue that you don’t need marketing. And then you realize how much you need marketing after you’ve abandoned it.
I think it highlights that marketing is something of a marginalized and overlooked function but you only realize the importance and value of it when you decide to scale it down, try to do less, or try to do it in a cheap and cheerful way. So, I really learned through that job that marketing is very much overlooked and yet is an essential component.
You’ve moved from selling batteries to leading a connected smart energy division, how does marketing a system differ from marketing a product?
I’m still involved in both sides of that. There are four divisions of Saft, and I’m the marketing director of a division called connected smart energy (CSE). Connected Smart Energy is essentially things that are connected, whether it’s a railway sensor, a desk occupancy sensor, a water meter, or – believe it or not – even a cow.
Most products are things that you could hold in your hand and that have a Saft battery inside that’s going to last for 5,10, 15, or 20 years. These days, more and more often, I am marketing the systems, the applications and the tools of Saft so that prospects then go on to buy a battery.
A good example is cow tags. We supply many millions of batteries per year for cow ear tags, meaning that cows in the dairy and meat industry can be located, and monitored for ill health and quick treatment, thanks to the sensors inside the tag. Meaning that if a cow is unwell, it can be found and treated as quickly as possible.
We really see the need for customers to not just buy batteries but use associated tools to help them select products correctly. We created a new role recently called Business Applications Manager where we have a brilliant person called Isabelle, who manages those things for us, so we’re marketing our capabilities, actually more than we’re marketing the product.
Is there an AI x human sweet spot?
Absolutely, the sweet spot exists where the critical thinking remains human and that AI is a support function. If you start to try to use AI to do your thinking for you, you’ll lose any level of creativity you have, because we’ll all just become robotic in our thinking, whereas if we try to go against AI and do it all ourselves, we’re missing out on a great tool.
So, absolutely, there’s a sweet spot. The sweet spot exists around human critical thinking still being the nucleus of whatever you’re doing.
How important is creative risk taking when you’re doing your marketing at Saft?
I think if you aren’t taking some form of a risk, then you are either being lazy or not showing any innovation whatsoever. It’s important to take risks, and it’s also important to accept that you’re going to fail at certain things, and that you will learn from those experiences. Those failures will inform your next attempt and help you to improve.
I’m sure the chefs that made the best recipes we’ve ever eaten had 25 variants before we got to try it, and we have to accept that experimentation and error are a par for the course.
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery you’ve made that you found surprising?
I think our biggest surprise in recent years is the continued decreasing of product lifecycle. In the past, we were supplying batteries that had to perform for 20 years in customer devices. We see now products having a life of around six years on average, which can be surprising given the worldwide push for sustainability that we see.
On the other hand, in our domestic lives we have the same experience with such products as washing machines and tablets, so it is a similarity to that. Of course we have adapted our products for the “shorter life, harder life” trend.
Could you share with us a challenge you’re facing right now, and what might your advice for other marketers facing that challenge be?
I think the biggest challenge I’m facing right now within marketing is marketing a product and a range of products based on their features and benefits and their capabilities to customers, but I’m doing that in a very sincere and honest way in the face of competition who don’t necessarily like to do it that way. Our competitors want to give customers numbers that you want to see and data that you want to read. At Saft, there’s a lot of integrity, but then when our integrity shows a lesser performance rather than a bit of fabricated information, that makes it very hard to go up against competitors.
We believe that we have to stick to our principles. We have to show our data and show our workings. Then, working very closely with customers, we make sure that we’re actually more of a partner rather than a data giver. I think that’s where we can then hold up our end of the deal with customers. And that’s why a lot of the customers we have will stay for the entire life cycle of a product because we’re working with a lot of integrity from day one.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps to make a great team?
I strongly believe in the concept that just because you’re the best manager won’t necessarily make you the best leader, and vice versa. I really believe that a very good balance of leadership and strength of management is the way forward, but I also believe that with everybody that I work with and for, and who works for me, you get so much further with a little bit of empowerment and trust.
Spirit will get you so much further than by mandate and prescription. If you let people have a little freedom to do a great job, and you encourage that, you will get so much more than if you just mandate that you do a bit, that somebody does a, b, and c.
I also believe in something of a buddy system. I think we can get lost in our thoughts and opinions. Personally, I have a person who is my confidant who I trust without exception, and she will tell me if I am right, wrong, too far this or that in my thinking. Even if I am annoyed by the feedback, I often remark that she is the only person I listen to! So I do believe it is important to have somebody like that in your corner. We can’t just talk to the mirror. We are always right when we talk to that guy in the reflection!
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
How do you make sure you do a great job without taking it home too much?
Imagine you’re watching the movie version of your life. What do you think you’d be shouting at the screen and saying, ‘No, you got that wrong.’
I think we all have these terms of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. If I look back on my career, I’ve done okay, because I’ve worked hard, and I believe in doing good work for the people that pay me, and yet I’ve always been a little handicapped by self doubt and that imposter syndrome, I wish I could just go back to watch that movie and say: “hey, you don’t need to do that, you’ll be fine.”
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is?
Marketing must value your customers as much as it values your sales.
This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While – an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas worth making are ones that earn it. You might die tomorrow. Make today worth your while. https://wyw.agency/
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