Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Amanda Holmes, EMEA & APAC marketing director on go-to market strategy:

Carlota Pico 0:13
Hi, everyone, I’m Pico from the content mix. And I’m excited to be here today with Amanda Holmes, who is Ma and APAC marketing director at Kodak Alaris and has over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. Welcome, Amanda. And thank you so much for joining us today on the content mix.

Unknown Speaker 0:33
Thank you for having me. Very excited to share some of my stories.

Carlota Pico 0:38
We are to I can’t wait to dive further into your experience. But to get this interview started off, I’d like to learn a little bit about what you’re doing today and how you got to where you are.

Unknown Speaker 0:50
Right? Yes, so yep. So Amanda Holmes, you said sort of 20 years It makes me feel very old, but it is yeah, it’s 20 years plus but it seems like a Just yesterday that I was sitting in Edinburgh, working for an advertising agency, and then I got married, maybe that was good, maybe that was bad, and then moved to England and started really in my tech career. So I started off life in advertising agencies. And but then move to client side always thinking or move back to agency. There’s no way I would stay corporate. I never really did move back to agency. I did dip a little bit and consulted for a few years. And that primarily my experience has been b2b technology IT companies. My marketing schooling was at Intel for eight years. did a lot of as you can imagine, a big company did a lot of different very jobs. And I really say that was my university experience. That’s why I learned all the different techniques and skill sets around marketing and predominantly around stakeholder management. How do you work with them? different stakeholders. So move from from Intel to Polycom. And that’s where I gained my management experience and nearly there, from then on in, I sort of have been managing people trying to work, our sort of go to market strategies, again, primarily working globally with our state us headquarters. So that’s what I’m mainly familiar with. Getting odd sort of strategy and direction from headquarters and then taking that and trying to craft that into something that makes sense and relevant for us in a year. Then I did take Yeah, just three years out to where I thought I quite like to just sort of see what it’s like to be in on my own. So I did consult for a few years and but then fell I was probably more suited, let’s be honest to the corporate world. And because I’ve been in it for so long, and then find myself back in the corporate world. I find myself now managing a team of sort of 12 people Pull up Kodak alaris exciting company. No, we have a heritage. Eastman Kodak from the old day Eastman Kodak. So in the old days, then we formed our own holding company, but privately held, and I’m part of the alaris Division, where we’re focused in on information capture, you know, looking at, you know, how you’re digesting, ingesting your data, and what you know, whether that’s from paper, whether that’s from a JPEG or whatever, whatever that is digitally format, then how does that then look and work into your workflow processes? So we come from a heritage of a, you know, very big company, Eastman Kodak, but we are privately held. So we’re now like a startup. And that’s really quite exciting to you know, we’ve got more agility. And you know, yeah, I’ve got a team that we’re really brought here to sort of yet to understand the strategy that’s coming from worldwide but then really, what is it Go to market strategy. And the refreshing thing with my role is that I work hand in hand with sales. And we create the strategy together, really refreshing, you know, coming from quite big corporate blue chip companies, there was a tendency for sales and marketing to be a bit like that. But we’re here because we are a smaller company, we’re more agile, we work together to figure out how the hell did we go to market how do we take the direction that global has given us and translate that into a go to market strategy. So it’s my role to be understand, translate that into something that we can execute. And then in January, just before COVID hit, I got the sort of an exciting opportunity to take on the Asia part market, and that’s completely new to me. So it’s a, you know, a new culture, a new way of working. So it’s really exciting now to be understanding, you know, what their requirements are, and how I can you know, take my learnings from a mirror and see other things that We can learn together. So that really blew me off today.

Carlota Pico 5:03
Well, congratulations on your new role in the APAC region. And also, because of your vast experience, I am going to focus on two main topics, which will be channel marketing and go to market strategies to do channel marketing. What are the first steps towards developing a channel marketing strategy? Let’s bring it down to the basics.

Unknown Speaker 5:21
Yeah. For me, it’s always understanding those goals and objectives. And I think you know, as you, you know, want to create an activity or anything, it’s always understanding why. And it always sort of amuses me, you know, might get questions, obviously, not from my team today. And because they’re purely subject matter experts, but you know, it may be that you get a question or you I want to do a trade show, or I want to do this event. And I always say, Well, why, what are we trying to achieve? And it’s like, well, and sometimes you might get responsible, though, because that’s what we’ve always done and it’s like, Okay, what are we trying to achieve? And I think that it’s You know, as as you’re trying to build a strategy and certainly as we, you know, build it with the channel because we are, you know, more or less 100% indirect, we are relying on their understanding and method of feet on the street, on how we can get out to the market because we don’t have a huge sales base. And we don’t have that touch primarily to the end customer. So it’s important for us to really build you know, that strategy with our channel with the right channel. But yeah, you’ve got to start with what are our goals and objectives? What are our routes to market and are we aware, typically a classic tier two model where we go, you know, through distribution, they’re the sort of holding of a warehouse of our products so we don’t stop the box, they will stop the products and then that will then go out to our resellers who then have the top to the end customer. And so that’s typically we do have different there are different products and solutions that we offer. But typically as a tier two model, so it’s important to understand what your go to market is, and then build your goals and objectives around that.

Carlota Pico 7:10
Okay, absolutely. What about like challenges and advantages of channel marketing? Because it does seem kind of complicated, especially in terms of maintaining the same voice or the same brand across different channels.

Unknown Speaker 7:21
Yeah. And I think I mean, the advantages are obviously, as it you know, as I said, because we don’t have a vast sales team, so increases your feet on the street. Those are, you know, that’s one of the main advantages of really making sure you’ve got the right channel so they can be touching the end customer. And I suppose one of the challenges is that you have more feet on the street. And so you have more complexity. And there are different channels that you’re working with. It’s not just one channel, it’s not just see in the web shops or system integrators. There’s a multiple different channels yesterday, then you’ve got the language requirements, etc. Certainly with a mirror and But I think the key advantages is you’re increasing your reach, I tend to the market, and then the challenges is making sure that we can yet get a consistent message of our brands by not being diluted too much. And I suppose that’s one of the major challenges that we face.

Carlota Pico 8:21
Yeah, I know, I definitely want to zoom into that further, because essentially, each channel offers a different audience, different reach and potential obstacles as well. So how do you keep your brand consistent no matter which partner is promoting your services,

Unknown Speaker 8:36
trying to I mean, first and foremost thing is having a very solid strategy, but it’s having a robust partner program, and really making sure that we have clear benefits of why a partner would want to engage with us. And really, what what do partners What does sales care about, they care about their share of wallet, and so on. It’s demonstrating that we have that value, and we, you know, recreate those benefits. And then I mean the other. The other way is making sure that we have strong account management and working, you know, very closely, we can’t do it across all the channels, you know, we have hundreds of channels within our partner program as our partners within our partner program. And but then that’s where you have to tear them and make sure that so for your long tail that you have a very solid distribution strategy. And we’re working the distributors, obviously paying to play in their programs, but working them to help the long tail of the channel. And then as you go up the T rings that we have, you know, dedicated account managers, dedicated marketing managers associated with those partners to build out those, those business plans and joint marketing plans. So it’s just getting those earrings. Correct. But also offering the right benefits to the right sort of partner, which can become quite a challenge to try and please everybody.

Carlota Pico 10:08
Yeah, no, it must also be really difficult to measure the impact that your brand is having across all of your channels without access to the analytics side of those channels as well. So could you talk to me more about that? Like, how do you measure how well you’re performing across your channels? And how do you work with your partners to optimize your campaigns?

Unknown Speaker 10:29
So I mean, we in Kodak alaris, we actually have a PRM systems, the partner relationship management system, which helps and it feeds into our CRM, and it’s something that we launched last year. So that helps us measure you know, certainly the, you know, the number of partners the utilization, you know, how many deal registrations, so we made it easy to certainly measure the effectiveness of the deal through deal read. We have MDF, you know, utilize it And we can track, you know how much of the MDF they’re using and the ROI of that MDF. Also, we can track if we pass a lead to a partner, then it closes the loop through our CRM. So I think it’s trying to and not every company will have that capability of having such a sophisticated, you know, PRM obviously, that’s sort of the best practice. But it is true, then, you know, if you don’t have that ability or capability, then it’s making sure you are measuring, I think the key points. So if you are, you know, handing off leads to a partner, you know, make sure you have good closing process. If you’re passing a deal to a partner, you know, what is your sort of closed loop process? I think that, you know, we’re lucky enough to have that sort of metrics in place. And also it’s it as I said, it’s about having that joint business plan. I think that’s absolutely critical that you want To stand what your joint goals and objectives are for going to business, and then monitoring that, you know, having, obviously your annual review meeting where you set your plan and then doing your quarterly reviews and checking, balancing that actually you are, you know, on track, and it’s also important that marketing are involved in those discussions. What I always say to sales is that I don’t have a bunch of marketeers or they’re taking orders, you know, those days ago, and I need my marketeers to be strategic and to understand why we want to do things and really to help build what that strategy is. So I think, you know, it stems from having a solid joint plan that you can measure and you agree together, what those measurement points obviously that’s your top tiers. And then as I said, then you’ve got the distribution sort of arm that will help you in a mileage and hopefully make the smaller resellers unit more self sufficient.

Carlota Pico 13:01
Amanda, what you’re saying is actually music to my ears. I’ve always been in business development. So for me tying marketing to sales is just part of who I am. I mean, it’s part of my DNA as a marketing professional, I wouldn’t be able to know what I’m supposed to do in marketing, if I weren’t in so much contact with sales as well, or in my previous roles and talking to sales constantly. I do want to move into our go to market strategy. So let’s start off again with the basics. So what is a DDM strategy? And obviously, by DDM, I mean, a go to market strategy for audience who’s listening in?

Unknown Speaker 13:36
I think it’s about Yes, a go to market. It’s about understanding what your value proposition is. And then how do you take that to market with the resources that you have available? And then it might identify that you have resource gaps as well. But it is really taking your value proposition. And then yeah, how do we now take this to market to become profitable? That to me, is Sort of the basic Wikipedia may certainly say something else, slightly different but it is taking us taking the simplistic view of here’s my value prop. This is how I now need to determine how I get out to market to make money.

Carlota Pico 14:17
That’s a pretty understanding go to market audience. So then my next question would be well, what is every go to market model need to address in terms of a few key questions that marketers should be asking themselves when looking to enter a new market?

Unknown Speaker 14:37
Understanding what our USP is, and you know what, what found you are we bringing to the customers but it’s also you know, it’s obviously spitting it to the customer and do we know what their challenge points are? What what are we trying to solve? And maybe this is a bit one on one marketing, but it is You know, I think certainly, you know, as we looked at in today’s times with COVID, etc, we absolutely need to focus in on those chat with customer challenges, and make sure that we’re relevant to them, not the they’re relevant to us. And I think you know, that, that it’s very simple in my eyes, it’s we’ve got to understand our customer, we’ve got to understand what we’re trying how we can solve their pain points. Mm hmm.

Carlota Pico 15:28
It sounds a lot like starting a startup as well, right? Like identifying the pain points and then providing solutions and then obviously, knowing your value of what value you’re able to provide to the customer. So it’s a little bit down, bring you to a very basic level, it’s, well basic, very complex level, depending on how you’re looking at it. But it’s like building a start up from scratch. So your understanding your audience, your understanding their pain points, you’re providing them with solutions, and then you’re creating your value proposition. Essentially,

Unknown Speaker 15:57
that’s what we need to do. Keep it simple.

Unknown Speaker 16:00
Then but a challenge. It’s a noisy market, I think, you know, in any sort of b2b space, or you know, b2c except you know, it’s noisy there are a lot of competitors. Certainly, you know, nowadays everybody’s on LinkedIn, everybody’s on email, everyone’s doing virtual events. And so you’ve got to try to stand out and um, be I think, be persistent and but not obviously annoyingly persistent. And but don’t give up. I think if you feel you have a good idea, you’ve got to try things and try different things and be prepared to fail, fail quick, and move on. But don’t be scared to try things. Just because we’ve never done them before. You know, it was scary times, you know, back in sort of February, March, when you know, all events are being canceled. We’re all having you know, I’ve been talking about we need a balance of virtual versus physical for years and in some of my previous jobs, I’ve been able to do that and queued up a lot. We’re a little bit in a still very physically focused, if you like, and but it’s managed out, it’s enabled us now to look at that balance and understand that actually, we can’t do everything face to face anyway, because we can’t scale our message. So it’s helped us understand that actually, we do need to revise our strategy a bit, and have that balance. Hopefully we can get back to face to face events. In the next few weeks, months would be lovely. And but we need to have that balance of virtual and digital activity as well. We can’t just go back to having all physical face to face events. We have to have that balance because we’ve got to get our reach out into the marketplace and that’s really important that we’re visible at the right time. That’s the magic sauce within marketing. Now, how do we get to the right people? Where do we know that they’re looking? We’ve got it, you know, that’s our role. We’ve got to try and work that one out. And it’s not clear cut. You know, we’re gonna make mistakes.

Unknown Speaker 18:05
But yeah, I always say feel quick. Moodle

Carlota Pico 18:09
reminds me a lot of my days as an entrepreneur where I was just constantly a be testing, figuring out my different personas, pitching different solutions to those personas as well are communicating with them in a different way. So that my message was received in a better way as well. Okay, well speaking, what regional regional nuances challenges or opportunities should marketers keep in mind when addressing the MA MA region? Excuse me both. So there’s a lot of differences. I mean, we’re talking about Asia, Europe, Middle East,

Unknown Speaker 18:46
really seeking

Carlota Pico 18:49
information to just process.

Unknown Speaker 18:52
It’s always like, yeah, so I can take on Asia Park, I know Australia, and that’s sort of about it. And okay, they’ve got a slightly funny Your accent that we have. And that, I mean, I think the what I’ve sort of noticed is it can be the maturity in terms of you know where we are in the market. Certainly I think in most places in a mirror, certainly in our market, we’re probably probably more mature in our digital transformation journey. Obviously there are, there are differences there, but I’m just saying generally, and then if I look at Asia pack, they have more sort of their journeys is beginning but they’re much sort of at the earliest stages. So that makes it really exciting so we can take some of the learnings and see some of the things that are happening within certainly worth Western Europe and then take that and help mold the strategy free Japan. And so I think it is definitely obviously culture as well. You know, is is very different in all the different countries and I think that’s what makes it a working in Europe, certainly asiapac now interesting. and exciting, because we’re all so different. And it would be boring if we were all the same. And but there are similarities. And there are, you know, we have sort of, you know, as consumers ourselves, you know, we, we know more tend to going online and looking at things, you know, in the cloud, where, you know, there are similarities that we can see, again, there are in there in different levels of maturity across all the different countries, but we’re all sort of trending towards sort of that sort of more digital field and looking at things on the internet, etc. So we can take those learnings and build, build that so that I think that’s what I love when I have my staff meetings, you know, I’m spanning from London to Dubai, to new Germany to India to Beijing. And it’s just great to get the sort of different you’re trying to do the different time zones is interesting. And then It’s, you get the difference of opinions and sharing those learnings, sharing the best practice is just so valuable. And just getting those different opinions and going, Oh, I didn’t realize that that happened in Dubai, or that’s what the Germans did. You know, it’s just an understanding why these things are happening. Yeah,

Carlota Pico 21:21
definitely. I’ve worked across the GCC region as well as different Asian countries. And now I’m working in Europe and one of my biggest learning experiences comes from the US side of communication. So whereas Asia websites at tend to be cluttered by European standards, that’s the way that agents like to consume their content and browse their their different websites, whereas in Europe, the simpler the better. That’s basically the messaging when it comes to messaging, especially one really has to keep in mind the UX of the website or the UX of the app or whatever. There is. With their product. Okay, so to wrap this section up a man’s out, what major challenges did you face during your expansion phase? And how did you resolve those problems? And of course, feel free to to zoom into maybe one or two challenges.

Unknown Speaker 22:16
Okay, I mean, it’s and certainly if you’re meeting sort of the expansion phase in terms of what moving from an a role, you know, role from a mere to asiapac or wasn’t quite sure the context of that, but I, I think it’s always stress trying to get your, because you’re now have a number of new stakeholders that you have to engage with. Right? Yeah, as I said, sort of before, right back in and my background. For me, Intel, it was all about, you know, understanding who your stakeholders are really engaging with them and getting them aligned and bought in. So that’s, so I’ve got that skill set, but it’s also a challenge when you’re building those new relationships because you know, Relationships then say within the Emir of stakeholders now have to build a whole new level of relationships and networking in Asia pack. And they don’t know me, you know, I’m someone sitting in London, and you know, I don’t know asiapac now for bands, I don’t, I’ve never worked in that market before. And obviously, I’m not going to be able to come over and see you for several months. And it’s always nice to sort of see people face to face to start with to build that relationship. So we’re having to do things virtually, and we’re having to understand try to understand their culture, their challenges, their pain points. So I think that, you know, it’s just a way of working but it certainly that’s the challenge that I’m in now, grasping and embracing, to really understand how that culture works and how I can support them and prove I can add value.

Carlota Pico 23:56
I think it’s really important how you zoomed into the relationships that you’re creating. Across the APAC region as well, because throughout the podcast, I’m normally focused on the end user and the end client. But very, we don’t often look into the relationships that need to be built in order to launch new products across different regions, relationships with distributed distributors, excuse me, suppliers, providers, etc. And that’s going to be part of your success story as well, the strength of those relationships that you’re building, and that requires knowing or understanding their culture as well because whereas in Europe, we might be very straightforward, especially in Western Europe, we might be very straightforward with each other and communicate on a in Spanish we would say to the two, which means you two you two, there aren’t very many, or in French, that tois there are very many obstacles when it comes to communication because we’re very straightforward, very direct. We’re very honest, honest. My experience working with Asian countries is that often times Communication isn’t as fluent. And people may not be as direct in their messages. And therefore relationships sometimes can be kind of left in the air where you don’t really know how to interpret the message because they’re trying to think without actually saying it. And that can be an obstacle, of course, and requires just knowing the culture and just figuring out how to work around that. Okay, moving into our last set of questions, Amanda, this will be a rapid fire set of questions, which is basically your recommendation to our audience. You provided great tips and insights already, so I cannot wait to hear about your I can’t wait to hear about your source of inspiration. Amanda. So who do you admire an influencer? A professional role model?

Unknown Speaker 25:49
Yeah, no, I was thinking about this. And it’s actually I’m somebody, I have a number of different people and actually I have sort of old you know, managers that certainly have inspired me. Some of them have been good, some of them been bad, but you know, even that sort of the bad ones have helped inspire me to move me forward. And that I you know, I think at the moment actually my inspiration and maybe this is a bit boring but I am a great believer or you know, looking and trying to understand new things, the best information so I do a LinkedIn to the fan. I try and understand you’re certainly in our virtual world today in sort of social media and I, I try and you know, approach and work in different sort of network groups. So I’m in a sort of a b2b marketing group at the moment, the contact next contact mixes as a new group, which is great so and also there’s another it’s called What’s it called? And there’s a hot topics private groups, were bringing sort of b2b Marketing Leaders in across Europe together. And I find those are the my most sort of valuable sources because it It puts you, you understand that you’re not alone. In some of your challenges and pain points, and you have sort of like minded people, and it just gives you that confidence that actually, you know, be confident in yourself. And, you know, normally if you think something and you’ve got to then go with that, because it’s generally right. So I think you know, I’m at the moment I’m certainly getting inspiration from meeting all these different people within the sub network groups are trying to do them sort of once a month, you can’t do them all the time. And that, you know, being associated with some of these sort of networking and relationship groups just helps to certainly from a career perspective and from our understanding, not just my industry, but marketing overall, and helps sort of validate and then meet my brain trigger go Oh, they’ve mentioned Tick Tock Should I go now and adventure Tick Tock or something as an avenue for us moving forward. So there’s tips and tricks that I get from that may be a bit boring But that’s certainly where I get my inspiration from today.

Carlota Pico 28:03
Yeah, tick tock is a whole different conversation. Tick Tock and how entertaining it is, but that I don’t necessarily know how to implement it when it comes to b2b social media strategy.

Unknown Speaker 28:15
I haven’t quite worked that out yet. I don’t think our audience are quite there yet, but I quite, I’m a bit of a stalker on tik tok, and certainly my children, my children are all over it so

Carlota Pico 28:25
well, it’s definitely fun. Okay, what about a group a book or publication that you’d like to recommend?

Unknown Speaker 28:31
Yeah, so actually, there was a book, I mean, the group sort of certainly I would say, you know, try and get yourself associated with sort of a, you know, an association. And like, you know, b2b money depending where you are in the world. But you know, in the UK, we have b2b marketing, there’s hot topics, contact mates, there’s other, there’s other groups out there, try and get yourself associated where you can network with peers and have those like minded conversations. From a book perspective, actually, again, this may be a bit boring, but we, in my last company, we redesigned our cultural beliefs. And we sort of built in sort of methodologies from it was actually from a sort of this, this book, and but all around accountability and it’s actually one of the books I read cheat sheet because most of them me disagree or whatever, but it was, so it was all around accountability and really, you know, it does, you know, really help you fix your mindset that you are accountable for what you’re in charge of, and stops that if you know pointing the finger and oh, yeah, but I couldn’t get to it because or, you know, trying to hide behind email and try to get rid of you. Certainly. I think a lot of companies you have such a bullying culture, and it’s trying to get rid of that and taking that accountability for yourself. And building that culture. So certainly that was a book that I really recommend, but also one that I’m about to read, which we spoke about at the beginning, but it’s marketing, but it’s all about that alignment with sales and marketing and how we should now have this blended approach. And is it you know, is it sales? Is it marketing or actually is it marketing? And should we be combining the senior some organizations where they combine the roles together? And that you know, that have the separate you know, sales and marketing. So, that’s an interesting sort of methodology philosophy moving forward.

Carlota Pico 30:41
Definitely. Amanda, would you mind reading the title and the author, for our audience, those of those people that aren’t watching us on our youtube

Unknown Speaker 30:51
so let’s fix it to getting accountability right and inspire Roger corners and Tom Smith is all around the world. They’d sort of the best sellers of the old principle. It’s very much a corporate sort of business to business book for sure. But I think it helps set you know what you’re, you know how, how to work your cultural beliefs within your company. And yeah, as I said, Hold that accountability to yourself, you know, we’re all holding that then we should have a healthier culture.

Carlota Pico 31:24
Definitely. Okay. Today’s last question will be your favorite app at the moment and why and it might be Tick Tock I mean, tick, tick tock.

Unknown Speaker 31:37
Tick tock, a few because I stalk Tick Tock but then another really boring but it’s got to be Amazon at the moment because what would I do without Amazon? I mean, and and actually my scenes breeze so in the UK, we have a our UK supermarket so seems a breeze because I’ve got to do my clicking collect. It’s my that’s probably my most used app.

Carlota Pico 32:01
Time’s right Koby times call for quick measures. And Toby does. So yeah. All about Amazon lately as well. Okay, Amanda, those were great insights. Thank you so much for joining us on the content mix. It was awesome to meet you and really great to learn about your experience. No, thank you very much for having me as your husband, ours, and to everyone listening in today, thank you so much for joining us on the content mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out the content mags. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every week. So keep on tuning in. Thanks again. Have a fabulous day and see you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai