Internal Stakeholders

Podcast Summary

Richard Kendrick, Managing Director of Arboreal Marketing, discusses the critical importance of managing internal stakeholders for marketing professionals. He defines internal stakeholders and categorises them into distinct groups, including senior leadership, peer departments like sales, support functions such as IT, and often-overlooked brand-affecting staff. Kendrick emphasises that successful stakeholder engagement was heavily dependent on a company culture that respected marketing's expertise, a tone set by senior leadership. He provides practical strategies for gaining buy-in, such as proactive planning, understanding the objectives of other departments, and building personal relationships. He also addressed the challenges of maintaining these relationships in a remote work environment and concluded that the key to success was for marketers to deeply understand the "why" behind their own projects and the business as a whole.

Key points

• Marketing's role was defined as a "bridge" between the organisation and the external customer, making internal relationships essential.
• Successful cross-functional work was attributed to a company culture, starting from the top, that respected marketing as a technical profession rather than just "posters and crayons."
• Internal stakeholders were categorised into four main types: senior leadership (who set objectives), peers like sales (who have shared goals), support functions like IT (who provide resources), and brand-affecting staff like receptionists (who represent the company).
• To secure resources from support functions with competing priorities, marketers needed to create a "compelling pitch" by understanding those departments' KPIs and demonstrating mutual benefits.
• A common failure in marketing was identified as a lack of proactive planning and involving other departments too late in a project's lifecycle.
• Building personal relationships and maintaining visibility within the organisation were crucial for effective collaboration, a task that has become more challenging with the rise of remote and hybrid work.
• The ultimate takeaway was the need for marketers to constantly ask "why"—why the business exists, why a project is being done, and why their colleagues in other departments are pursuing their own goals.

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. Today we are going to be talking internal stakeholders and I'm delighted to be joined by Richard Kendrick, who is managing director of Arboreal Marketing. Richard, welcome back. You've been on before. We talked about construction industry and we talked about the farming industry, which tells the audience just what a wide background you have. So when we talk internal stakeholders, there will be lots of examples from lots of industries I know. So could we start with what internal stakeholders are?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (00:43):
Well, an internal stakeholder is essentially ... The best way of putting it is 'it's any customer that isn't external'. So marketing is one of those really interesting departments where it touches pretty much every other department in a business and it also talks to customers. So I think one of the classic things we teach in marketing is around 'marketing is a bridge between the organisation and the customer'. And that part, that organisation part, that bridge part is really important for marketing. So you're going to have a number of different types of stakeholders. In this instance, a basic stakeholder definition is anybody who's got a vested interest in what we're doing. So that could be the owner of the business, all the way down to the person on reception who needs to know what promotions we're running in case they take a phone call.

(01:38):
How involved do you have to be with each of those stakeholders depends on the project you're doing, the campaign you're doing, and of course the objectives you're trying to achieve from a marketing point of view.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:46):
I suppose the danger from marketing is that we forget the internal customer, because we tend to be quite focused on the external because that's where the money comes from.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (01:54):
We can do. I think I'd probably say actually it might be the reverse of that. Sometimes we get too focused on the internal customer because they're the ones that are dictating to us or affecting how we complete a project. So I found in my life, there are a couple of different ways that a project will run. You'll either have a really great understanding between the marketing department and other departments. So I've worked in places where cross-functional working is great. Sometimes even at an international level. I worked for a Dutch company and we were able to make sure that all of the different departments, so that could be ... In this instance, we were actually selling physical product. So we had 500,000 different products. It was when I was working in farming. So we had to make sure if we were running a campaign, everything was in the warehouse that had been purchased at the right price.

(02:44):
We were selling it at the right price or advertising it at the right price. We had to make sure that it was set up on the website in the right way. We had to make sure the account managers were aligned on which campaign we were going to run. And what was really great about that place was that everybody talked to each other regularly. They were all involved in project meetings. Stakeholders had a vested interest. They were actually involved in the project as owners or as members of the project. They weren't just informed as the campaign was about to happen. So in those instances, actually, we become focused on the customer and things run really smoothly and a project gets to the end well. I've also worked on the flip side where you end up in very siloed businesses where marketing and perhaps sales are possibly the closest and they talk the most, but they haven't spoken to logistics and purchasing about what they're about to do, or they haven't talked to IT about whether or not they can actually get that app built and at the door, which they promise now to customers through communication.

(03:41):
So I've worked on both sides of the net and actually when you're in a silo based industry or a silo based organisation, it's very, very easy to get stuck in the weeds and you end up with lots of conversations where you're actually running around trying to stop fires rather than create a great campaign and execute a great campaign. You're basically just chasing your own tail and it becomes inefficient. So very much, it depends on the culture of the business, I think, as to how well that executes.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:14):
Okay. So there's some great bits there. So can we talk about where it works well? Because I suspect, in fact, we'll probably know better where it doesn't work. So where it works well, you said it was to do with the culture. So how does the culture help?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (04:31):
So where I've worked in places with really great cross-functional culture, it tends to come. It tends to start with respect for expertise. So by that, I mean, whoever's at the top of the business understands that they're hiring experts and they let them be experts in what their expertise is in. So if you're a marketer, they understand that being a marketer is a profession. It's something that we train very, really hard and it's something that we learn over time. And more than at any point in marketing's history, it is a very, very technical subject now. It's a technical thing to be in. You need to know about SEO and how code works and you need to understand how PPC is going to be affected by an algorithm. It's not just posters and crayons. And I think that when you work in businesses where that's respected and understood, you end up in a position where actually cross-functionally, everybody respects what marketing does.

(05:34):
And so it becomes an equal player at the table rather than dictated to or knocked about by the departments. So where it works well is usually when people at the top understand what marketing is and how it benefits the business. The flip side of that is when people don't understand that and they see it as just a support function for sales or posters and crayons and advertising and posts and flyers, then you tend to find that everybody in the business, regardless of what department they're in, has an opinion on how you should complete your job and how you should ... And they seem to know how you should complete your job better than anybody else, which is really ... You don't find that in finance. You don't see people going in going, "Hey, the way you CapEx, that last thing wasn't right."That doesn't happen, and yet it seems to happen to marketing.

(06:21):
So I think those are the flip sides. Where you've got someone at the top and where you've got a culture of respect for everybody's expertise, and where that expertise is allowed to shine, you end up with really well-executed projects and great departments, really fun places to work.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:34):
Can we go through some of the different types of internal stakeholders because we've been quite broad brush. So what sort of internal stakeholders do we have? How would you classify them?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (06:44):
So you've got the classic sort of stakeholder licence around who needs to be managed and informed and included and all that kind of stuff. But at a very basic level, you've got the people who own the purse strings and decide on what objectives we need to be going after. So you've got your people at the top, you have those that could be your CEO or your managing director, your finance director, your SLT, basically. Those people at the top who are going to decide on what direction we go in and what really you need to achieve in a marketing department, those are going to be your key stakeholders and making sure you've got a great relationship and there's a two-way conversation there and understanding that they are looking to achieve something with their business and understanding what that is that you can help with that from a marketing point of view.

(07:31):
If you don't know why your business is in business, you can't market it effectively. So you need to build that relationship with those stakeholders to understand why is the business, why is it doing it, what it's doing? A lot of those people will say to make money, but that's a result of what you do. It's not why you do it. So you've got those people at the top. Then you've got your sort of more peer-to-peer stakeholders. Now that could be anyone with a vested interest who is reliant on your support. So let's look at sales as a classic example of that. Your sales stakeholders there, if you don't go out and communicate what you're selling, then they've got a much harder job, a much longer job to try and convert their customer base. So that kind of stakeholder is you're very much on a peer-to-peer level and you are working together to achieve a goal that is set by the SLT.

(08:22):
And they'll have their own pressures in terms of targets and everything. And you've got your targets and it's about how you align those things and build a personality relationship there so that you can align your goals, you understand each other, you understand your boundaries and you go and execute well. You've then got your other stakeholders who are more support functions to what's going to be achieved to get to the objectives. So that could be anything where you're going to require their resources to be able to execute a project well. So that could be tech, could be your IT department. They need to know what you're doing, but they've got the ability to throw a spanner in the works, but they haven't necessarily got a vested interest in what you're doing. And what you've got to do there is try and convince them that what you're doing is worth their time because their time is not then balanced on what you're doing.

(09:13):
With sales, it's different because if you both invest time, you both succeed. It's not the same with an IT department or an HR department. They will succeed whether you're there or not. So you have to do more of a convincing job. You need to do more of a sales pitch internally, an education job around why you're more important for those resources than another department, because they're going to be as spread as thin as you are. The thing I've learned working for a lot of businesses is that you never have enough resources. You hope you're going to get enough resources, but it doesn't matter which department you work in, you never have enough resources. So when those are all spread thin and there's too many projects, you have to be the one that comes up with the most, what is it, the most compelling pitch as to why you need those resources.

(10:00):
Then you've got the people who can affect the brand, but actually have no impact over what your project is in any way, shape or form. And that could be people who are answering the phones. It could be people who are designing any sort of clothing or anything Daft like that for the business. Every single one of those ... Let's take a receptionist as an example. That person is answering the phone and answering it in a way, and that's the first contact that customer or prospect might have ever had with your business, which means that's the first impression they get of your brand. And if they don't understand, if they haven't had the training to be able to reflect the brand in the right way, or if you're running a campaign and the first thing they go is, "Oh, well, no one told me. " Immediately, your brand has taken damage, whereas actually it probably would've taken a 10 minute newsletter read or a very quick conversation with them in a small business to tell them what was going on and explain why it's important.

(10:54):
And I think that's probably one of the areas of stakeholder management that's often missed is those people who affect the brand negatively, and yet you forget them because you think they've got absolutely nothing to do with marketing, of course they have.

(11:07):
So I think that covers pretty much anybody you're going to be coming across in a business.

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:12):
Okay. Yes. There's that great line about the person that sweeps the floor is just as important that the people on the door, everybody matters because for as far as the customers are said, they are your company. So let's come back a little bit.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (11:23):
You

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:23):
Talked about making a compelling case to those that don't really have a vested interest, but could still scupper your project. So I'm trying to persuade IT that this great plan that I've got has got to rise up above all the other stuff that IT needs to do. And you're right, it doesn't matter how big your business is, you never have enough resources is one of the things I've learnt over the time of having guests on the podcast. If I'm talking to somebody from some major multinational company where you assume they've got millions, they will still tell you what actually they could have done with a bit more. So how do you make that case? Are there some tricks that you can try that sort of help you persuade people? Do you just have to be nice? Do you have to take them down the pub?

(12:02):
I mean, what do you do?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (12:04):
I think the key starting point is to understand what you're doing thoroughly. So before you've decided to go and talk to anybody else about what you're doing in particular project, you need to make sure that you understand why you're doing that project. Otherwise, if you can't sell it to yourself, how can you sell it to others? So I think one of the big areas I've found with marketing, and I find this from a tutoring point of view and from managing teams, is that sometimes you find that people are doing stuff because they've just been told to do stuff rather than being an intrinsic part of the department and understanding that they've been given that project because there is a fundamental reason it needs to be done for the benefit of the business. And I think the first step is to make sure it doesn't matter what role you're in, whether you're the marketing assistant or the marketing director, you need to understand why you're following that project path and why that thing is important and needs to be executed.

(12:59):
And if it's not important and it doesn't seem to have any impact on the business, then why are you doing it? So that's the first bit to answer yourself. Once you are fully clear of what your objective is, it makes it so much easier to then go and find out what everyone else's objective is from your campaign. So you have to sit down and work out what is it that everybody's going to get out of me completing this and doing it really well and then being part of that project. So if it's a typical sales promotion, let's say, we're going to be launching a new product, putting it in the market. Well, sales benefit because that'll increase the amount of revenue we're coming in. From a personal point of view, that sales team will maybe be on commission. So there's an opportunity for them to earn more money personally and then for the business they get to hit their targets, get a pat on the back and they'll probably have some sort of bonus at the end of the year.

(13:52):
It's funny how marketing don't often get personal bonuses. They tend to get company bonuses, but understanding how a salesperson's bonus works is quite an important thing for a marketeer because it does help with the sales pitch at that campaign. If you can show how personally they benefit, then great, well done.

(14:13):
And the sales guys tend to get it and understand it more than anybody else. If you're pitching to one of those support functions like, "HR, I need this resource to come in to help me with this project or IT. I need this time to build an app or get something extra on the website." That comes down to what I would say is the risk versus reward of that project for that person. So you're going to ask them to step away from a different project and you've got to make sure that you can sell to them and say, "Actually, this is going to be much better." So knowing what their person, their department KPIs are is really important, and this comes back to that cross-functional. If you're a cross-functional business, generally all the heads sit together and have those meetings where they all understand what the overall corporate objective is, but what everyone else's individual objectives is or department objectives are underneath that.

(15:07):
And you can then, once you understand that, you can then say, "Well, actually if I do this, then you benefit as well." Or, "If you need this, then I can help with that. " And it becomes a bit of a quid pro quo. So it's always about negotiation. It's always about compromise because you'll never get exactly what you wanted right at the beginning, so you have to know where your line is to be able to get that project done and walk away from that deal feeling comfortable rather than walking away thinking, "Oh, well, I can't do it now." There's always that compromise between two departments and then also knowing how does the other person benefit and how can I sell that I'm going to benefit them from doing that action. So it doesn't come through taking them to the pub. Generally, it comes from actually just sitting in a room or sitting on a Teams meeting and getting to know them and having that personal conversation where you're like, "Well, this is what I'm trying to do.

(15:59):
What are you trying to do? How do we meet in the middle?"

Kiran Kapur, Host (16:01):
Okay. So there is quite a structure to that, isn't there? Because it's understanding the corporate objectives and therefore you said, why are you in business? So it's understanding that, and then it's understanding where the business is trying to go in the short term, and therefore how everybody contributes to that. Is that fair?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (16:22):
Yes, I think so. And I think in some organisations it comes easier because of the nature of the structure of the business. So people are more open to talk to each other, maybe they're all based in the same office, maybe it's all in one country, maybe it's a small business, so it makes it easier, but it's still very possible when you're in, for instance, when I was in farming, we were in 28 countries, we were all introducing a new CRM system. It was very important that we all got on the same page with it in multiple different languages, and yet because of the structure of the business and the way that it was ingrained that these project teams were cross-functional and someone from every department was involved in the conversation right from the very beginning, it meant that those things ran much, much smoother. I think a key thing that marketing often does is it will run off and go and do a thing and it'll forget to involve people right at the beginning.

(17:15):
And so they'll go, "Hey, we've got this thing launching next week. Can we have X, Y, Z?" And that is probably one of our fatal flaws because actually what you're then doing is adding extra workloads to a department rather than benefiting them. And I think one of the things that we could improve a lot more is being planned far enough ahead that we can go to them at the beginning of the year and say, "This quarter, we are going to do X, Y, Z. Can you help us with it? " Or, "For next year, for Q1, this is what we're going to land. From Q2, this is what we're going to land," et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's one of our things that we need to be reactive as a department, but we're not proactive enough often.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:57):
And ironically, that comes from being more planning. Go. So I think sometimes one thing's being proactive is being sort of very agile and moving around, but actually you do need a certain element of planning so everybody else knows what's coming.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (18:11):
Yes, particularly with the largest projects. If you plan to launch an app and you're going to do it in Q3 of next year, ideally you need to make sure that the business knows about that right now. At the very latest, you need to build it into your budget. You need to build it into your communications planning, into your media planning. You need to make sure that things like with any big business, if you're introducing a new app, that means you're bringing on probably a third party provider who's going to build it for you, in which case they've now got to get through all the security checks from the IT department. They've got to be onboarded by the suppliers and purchasing teams, and that could take a long time. A business I worked for recently, it could takes anything from six to eight weeks to get a supplier onboarded.

(18:56):
Well, if you do that now, you're halfway through Q1 next year, in which case you've now lost time before the contract's even been signed, let alone the app's been built. So I think with certain things like that, it's an awareness, an overall awareness of how the company operates so that you can make sure that you're talking in the same way to each member of the departments rather than just making an assumption that everything's just going to work at a click of our fingers and then going and trying to get it done.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:25):
You've worked with me then.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (19:26):
It's a very interesting-

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:30):
I can hear people, including me thinking, but I'm in marketing, I've got to be agile, I've got to react to things, I've got to be ... Something happens and you want to react. How do you fit that in? Because it's a question we get frequently when we're talking about planning. People will say, "But I can't plan because things change." So when I'm dealing with internal stakeholders and I'm trying to plan and I'm trying to be agile and reactive, how do I fit all that in?

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (19:55):
So when you say I need to be agile and reactive, usually that's because there's going to be a number of different reasons. The first is, do I need to be reactive because the external landscape has changed? And there's not a lot you can do about that. You have to plan for what you think the situation is going to be in the future. So you put your plan together and you make sure you evaluate and review it regularly so you can change the plan. A plan is not a concrete thing. It should be a fluid and living document. So you put the plan together and you involve everybody at the beginning and yeah, something is going to change over the next 12 months. I mean, look at the last 12 months, nothing stayed the same for several weeks and you adapt to it and you react, but everyone is in the same boat.

(20:37):
So if you know that something's going to change and you've got a plan in place and you know who's going to be involved in that particular project as part of that plan, everybody's already informed and is expecting you to come to them rather than it all be a surprise and a flap for everybody. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is you have to make time to plan because it's the most important thing. If you haven't got a plan, you haven't got objective set. If you haven't got objective set, then you're just doing stuff again. And we're back to being a posters and crayons department, which we're not. Then I think the other thing is that the things that will change, if it's an external thing, you can't help that. If it's an internal thing, if you're already making a plan and you've built those relationships internally, then that change should be telegraphed to you from quite a way off.

(21:23):
So it means that you're not suddenly flapping at the last minute. I'm not going to say that's never going to be the case, but you shouldn't the majority of the time be flapping about something that you know is coming down the pipeline and you can therefore plan for the change. I think where the balance is creating a plan that is easily communicated and means something to the business versus planning for planning's sake and having a thousand gun charts that people take too long to read, are too complicated, don't get you anywhere. And I've been involved in both, I have to say, where a very quick source tack plan knocked together and shared with people as a living document is one thing. Having five different gang charts across the same, just within one half of the marketing team isn't going to get you anywhere. It gets you tired and knocked and suddenly you see leads drop off.

(22:16):
So I think it's about knowing the right formula, it's about being involved as well within the business. I think a lot of younger maybe, or I wouldn't say maybe less experienced marketing people, people who are entering marketing for the first time might not necessarily have the right communication skills to just go and wander in and start building those relationships to the right people, the right stakeholders. But often it's a case of, as long as people are aware of who you are and what you do, life becomes a lot easier. So within any business, if I start working on a project with a company, the first thing I want to do is introduce myself to everybody, find out something that makes them tick, find common grounds for interest, make sure I'm having a chat with them beyond, "Oh, I've got this project." Even if it's a teams meeting, first five, 10 minutes of the teams meeting, ask them about their weekend, what happened, what sort of football team they're into, all that kind of nonsense.

(23:12):
And then working onto what the project is, because it's amazing how that pays itself off in the future. When you're actually sitting down and naturally it feels like you're two people working together as part of the same team rather than, "I need to explain who I am every single time." And a lot of execs struggle with this, I think. Execs struggle with visibility. The directors, the head ofs, maybe the senior managers, it's very easy for them to go and do it. It's an experience thing and it's also a job seniority thing, but I think when it's execs and assistants, they find it hard when they're running it being part of a project to just go and meet stakeholders and just go and talk to them and get to know them and be visible. And I think that visibility is really important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (23:55):
I think sometimes it's also remembering that in the same way you are asking other people questions about the weekend or the football or whatever it was, they will normally want to know something about you. So maybe you've got something that you like to tell people that you do. So if you start every meeting with, just got a new puppy or whatever it is, you're giving people that chance to know that you are not just this strange person that's sitting on a project team.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (24:24):
I think that is one of the things that's become harder for execs as well over the last three years maybe, because post lockdown, hybrid working and remote working, which actually I'm very much in favour of overall, one of the big negatives is that that stakeholder management becomes a bit more distant, a bit harder, because you're not just going to ring someone on Teams for a chat, but when you're in the office, you might end up bumping into someone and be having that chat anyway, and that becomes a much easier thing. So that connection's much easier in person, but as a remote thing, it becomes harder. One of the things that HR departments are looking into is how does the metaverse support that? So having virtual forums, having breakout areas online where you can go in with an avatar and have a chat with someone who's already in there.

(25:15):
For remote teams, it's a company called Disguise in London that has been very much heavily looking into this. They've got a place in South Korea and they've got a place in Los Angeles and they've got London. So how do they get those teams to blend and become one team? It's quite a hard thing to do. So having the metaverse support that has been something that a number of the larger businesses have been looking into. I think Dunelma is another one that's properly invested in the metaverse as a way to get together remotely and talk about stuff and become one team. And I think it's definitely something that's become much more of a challenge since lockdown.

Kiran Kapur, Host (25:52):
It's interesting, isn't it? Because on the one hand, you're talking about structure and getting your plans in place and everything else. But what you sort of started with and what we're finishing up with is actually people, it's people to people always. And it's having those relations and those connections and feeling like you're all going in the same direction is actually what makes the difference.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (26:11):
Yeah, which is why I said it starts at the top. If you've got a CEO or an MD who is really good at bringing teams together and disparate departments together and finding a commonality between them that common goals drive towards, then actually it cascades down the whole business. But similarly within marketing, we cannot as a department because of the profession we're in, we can't just sit there and be silos because then that means that the people who actually lose out in the end of the customers, because we end up executing poor campaigns, the business doesn't meet its objectives. The customers get poor service or don't know about products that would have suited them or services. So actually customers lose out and internally our internal customers lose out. So marketing really can't ... It will fail if it becomes a silo. I think I started with the bridge between the organisation and the customer, didn't

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:10):
I? And I think you're right. We are the bridge often between the organisation and the customer. And you also started by saying that we're one of the departments or one of the few departments that has connections with all other departments and the customer. And that's quite a major thing. Richard, that was a really, really helpful description of internal marketing and managing internal stakeholders. Would there be any sort of things that you would want people to take away that sort of said, "Well, if I want to do something about internal stakeholders, what should I be doing?"

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (27:41):
I would be asking questions about why I'm completing the projects I'm doing and understanding the business inside out. So know your objectives, know why you're doing that stuff and why the business is in business, and then know why your colleagues in other departments, your peers, know why they're doing their things. So find out why. That's the most important thing. Not just, "I'm doing stuff. Why are you doing that stuff?"

Kiran Kapur, Host (28:06):
Brilliant advice. Richard Kendrick, MD of our Boreal Marketing. Thank you so much for your time.

Richard Kendrick, Arboreal Marketing (28:12):
Thank you.

Announcer (28:13):
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