Podcast Summary

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director of Cambridge Consultants, joins the Cambridge Marketing podcast. In this episode, he focused on the complexities and strategies involved in marketing high-risk, deep-tech innovation. Leyland discussed how Cambridge Consultants, a "deep tech powerhouse" for its parent company Capgemini, sells intangible professional services. He explained that their main competitor was often client inertia, driven by the perceived risk and significant expenditure of innovation projects. The key to overcoming this was highlighting the greater risk of being left behind by the rapid pace of technology. Leyland detailed their marketing approach, which included using niche events, developing extensive thought leadership to prove expertise, and adapting to the emerging challenge of AI-driven search engines that are changing how clients find information. The conversation concluded with his personal career reflections and the unique appeal of working in a complex but interesting environment.

Key Points

  • Marketing innovation was described as complex but also inherently interesting due to the appeal of "the new, the surprise of the new, the shininess of the new, the power of the new."
  • The primary challenge in selling innovation was not direct competitors, but rather overcoming the client's own inertia and reluctance to take on high-risk, high-expenditure projects.
  • The most significant question on a potential client's mind was whether the proposed innovation was even possible and if the potential value would justify the cost.
  • A powerful motivator for clients to overcome inertia was the understanding among C-level executives that in the current technological landscape, standing still meant falling behind.
  • Cambridge Consultants' marketing strategy involved a dedicated focus on specific vertical markets (like healthcare, telecoms, and consumer) and utilising niche trade events to connect with key decision-makers.
  • A deliberate and core part of their strategy was producing thought leadership content to demonstrate their world-leading expertise and build trust with potential clients.
  • Richard Leyland identified the rise of AI and LLMs as a significant challenge to their existing thought leadership model, as clients may get answers from AI directly in their browser without visiting the company's website.
  • He predicted that despite current flaws like "hallucinations" and a generic feel, AI-generated copy would become the predominant way marketing content is created, forcing the industry to adapt.

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:00):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the world of innovation and particularly are looking at consultancy and innovation. And my guest is Richard Leyland from Cambridge Consultants.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (00:11):
The biggest thought that is in the minds of the clients we're trying to sell to is, "Is this thing even possible within normal realms of development and is the value going to be worth the fairly significant expenditure?"

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:26):
Richard, welcome. I loved your description of being 'a marketer right down to the bone', so we will be getting that one in. But obviously, you, I mean Cambridge Consultants, one knows very well. I love the fact they're described as the 'deep tech powerhouse.' But I think for my listeners, what they're going to be intrigued by is how you sell innovation because that's really hard to do. And also, you're selling something sort of quite intangible.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (00:50):
Yeah

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:50):
So, that's what I wanted to explore, if that's okay.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (00:52):
Sure, sure. So you're right, it is a fairly hard thing. And we're a complex business in professional services, and professional services is a fairly hard thing to market. We bring together a whole load of technologies, technological expertise, and we put that all together for clients. And all of those things that I just said sort of add layers of complexity into marketing for Cambridge Consultants. But actually, I see that as a good thing. That's why I'm here doing it. And indeed, I left Cambridge Consultants a few years ago and returned. So I have a real sort of strong sense of wanting to be back doing this. And I actually really enjoy that complexity, and it being very different to being a company that sells a widget and you're trying to market said widget. It's more complex, more difficult, but in being so, it's more fun. And then marketing innovation, I mean, I would slightly take the other perspective, which is that innovation is inherently interesting.

(01:51):
The new, the surprise of the new, the shininess of the new, the power of the new, I think tends to lend itself to the best stories. I might just be describing myself here, but it's the stories I'm most interested in. And so I hope others are too. So I see that as a really good thing. And then finally, yeah, we describe ourselves as the deep tech powerhouse of Capgemini, who are our parent company. And deep tech is a complex notion. And I think we're still on the way to properly communicating what it is and why it's powerful in our hands. So I don't think we've fully nailed that yet, but I think it's a really critical mindset and set of technological capabilities for most of the big challenges that the world faces now. And really, what it's about is going back to first principles of science, technology, engineering, to see can we create entirely new solutions to the problems of the world?

(02:56):
And when you frame it like that, I mean, that's really a powerful thing and an interesting thing. And it feels like for me as a marketer, that's just an incredible ball to be playing the game with. Does that make sense?

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:08):
It does indeed. So can we go back a stage and just talk about what Cambridge Consultants does? And then I really want to sort of explore that one a bit further. Okay. So you're the deep tech powerhouse of Capgemini. So what does that mean? Because Cambridge Consultants have been around for a very long time.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (03:25):
Sure. So I'll give you the sort of flat description of what we do and then the slightly more dynamically interesting one. So the flat description of what we do is that we are a fee-for-service in the main product development business. So companies come to us in order to accelerate their development of a thing or to bring in capabilities they don't have to develop a thing, and that's the sort of meat and drink of our work. So that's the sort of flat description of what we do. In sort of slightly more evocative language, I mean, we are, and I think always have been for 50 odd years, a collection of scientists, engineers, technologists that are very rare to exist under one roof and is even rarer to just put that in the hands of clients that want us to do something incredible for them.

(04:20):
So that's the work that we do. And yes, you're right, we're part of Capgemini, which is an enormous French-owned, mainly sort of engineering professional services partner. So it's a fairly neat fit, I think, with our parent.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:35):
You're selling innovation, which, as you say, is very, very, very exciting, but also very scary for some people and very, very risky for your client companies. So presumably one of the big things you're selling is trust.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (04:50):
Yeah. So it's certainly true to say that the stakes tend to be unusually high in the type of projects we take on for our clients. As such, sometimes we're competing against inertia, don't do it, don't take the risk, and that's a big dynamic. So any company is in a kind of competitive situation when trying to win work, and of course, we have competitors that we compete with, but we find that more often than not, that's the competitor. It's, this is so risky. We're maybe not even going to do it. And I apologise, I forgot the second half of your question. 

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:25):
It's all right. Is trust the key thing, therefore that you have to sell on, but it sounds like it might be more than that if one of the things you've got to do is overcome inertia.


Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (05:34):
I mean, trust is certainly a factor in how we market the business and how our salespeople go out and speak to clients. I don't know that it's any more or any greater a factor than any other company that provides a professional service to a set of clients. You're right, it's a thing that we do focus on. And of course, as a marketer, the way you communicate trust is demonstrating your technical bonafides, having case studies of the type of work that you've done before and so on. So it is a factor, but I don't think it's the biggest single factor in how we market the business.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:13):
So what would you say was the bigger factor?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (06:17):
I think the biggest factor or the biggest thought that is in the minds of the clients we're trying to sell to is, "Is this thing even possible within normal realms of development, and is the value going to be worth the fairly significant expenditure?" If you're a medical device company and there is some new device that you think will really unlock something powerful commercially, well, that's a really complex decision to take. And so I would say navigating around all of those complexities around high risk, high risk and potentially high reward and getting very comfortable that it is worth the really significant investment of time and money and so on to leap right in and develop something new with both feet.

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:08):
So you've talked about inertia, and I can see that. I mean, for anybody in business, it's always easy not to do something. That's always the easiest default option. So are you sometimes having to help your potential clients to find ways to sell the idea internally to their company, for example?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (07:26):
I think occasionally we do end up doing that, the sort of internal sell and certainly entering into a development project with us is a complex many dimension thing. And we'll have a whole pool of people that we communicate with at the client, and there'll be those sorts of dynamics where we're building trust and helping them internally sell it. So all that is there, but actually the drive to overcome inertia and to say, "We must act, we must do something, we must avoid falling behind, or we must make a big significant step to get ahead of our competitors," all those things.

(08:02):
One of the really big things that's in our favour there is that most C-level folks right across the various industries that we're active in have this sense that the kind of rapid march of science and technology is such that inertia means falling behind. And that's a very broad statement, but it applies across most industries that we're active in that emergent tech, emergent science is in the hands of those that are bold and brave and that if you as the person leading the company, do nothing, then that means falling behind in a really big way. So that's a very broad statement, but I think it applies right across most of the industries we're in, if not all of them, and outside of Cambridge Consultants as well.

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:48):
You've mentioned that Cambridge Consultants works a number of industries. Can you just give me a quick overview of the type of industries that you work with?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (08:55):
Sure. So I mean, we work across a very broad range of industries, but there are certainly some where we're particularly strong, and those would be telecommunications, healthcare, consumer, industrial energy, and a handful more. But we sell across a very broad range of industries, but those are where we focus our energies.

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:15):
And from a marketing perspective, I mean, you are the marketing director of Cambridge Consultants. You've just given me a huge range of sectors that you work in. How, as a marketing department, how do you as a marketing director, keep across that number of industries and sectors and keep a coherent message because presumably what you're selling to one type of sector may be slightly different to another.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (09:37):
Therein lies the complexity in the role and why it's not always easy. I mean, I wouldn't want to declare victory in that. I wouldn't want to say that the way we handle that has been completely nailed and we've got it fully settled. I mean, we allocate marketers within our marketing function to what in our language are business units, but are essentially vertical markets. So there are marketers in the team I lead who are there trying to understand the particular dynamics of that industry or that market and to bring that back to the central marketing function and work out how we need to adapt a kind of central corporate marketing effort to the needs of any given sector that we're in. So we have people that we charge with that complex role. And when we're developing what you might call our brand story or our brand marketing efforts, they're done with a view to how to best serve the core markets that we're in.

(10:38):
But it's difficult, and it's complex. And I think it's a constant battle to try and get better at that without thinking you've ever nailed it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:47):
So just so that the listeners, can you give us an example of the sort of things that are involved?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (10:53):
If you think about our events programme, like any professional services company, we have an events group within our marketing team, and we go up and we do a whole bunch of events every year. And in the main, the events that we do are relatively niche, very specific to a particular market that we're active in, in our language, a business unit. And so the majority of our events are like that. They are trade events. The nichier we can get, the better in general in our event programme, because that's where we'll meet the real decision makers in any given sector. But if you're not careful, you never really tell your brand story at events because you'll just go and tell the story in these quite niche events. And so we, in recent times, have been working really hard to try and answer, well, what is an event that we would like to attend that allows us to tell the full brand story that we have and expect that will reach ears and eyes right across a bunch of sectors that we're active in.

(11:58):
So I'm just describing the dynamic here. Again, I really want to stress that. I don't think we're perfection in any way yet, but that's the dynamic we're working with.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:08):
Okay. I was intrigued on the LinkedIn and your website. You have a lot of opinion pieces and opinion formers writing expert pieces. Is that a deliberate choice and part of your strategy?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (12:22):
Yes, that's very, very deliberate. So maybe this gets back to the trust point that you were making earlier. A client has to trust that we really do have the expertise in the markets that we're active in, in the technologies that we harness for clients, and it has to be absolutely world-leading in order that a company will outsource that effectively to us. And well, how do you ensure that you prove that you really do have such expertise? Well, then you expose bits of it in our thinking, in thought leadership, in written materials and so on. So that's very, very deliberate. I think that method of proving expertise is evolving really, really quickly and we'll have to evolve with it really, really quickly with the emergence of LLMs and a different way of people answering complex tech-led questions, not Googling stuff and finding, "Oh, here's some people that have expertise on machine learning in, I don't know, medical devices or something like that.

(13:28):
It used to be that you could pose that question in a search engine, and we would quite like to have optimised well enough that the searcher comes to our website. Well, now they're going to get the answer to their question in an AI-generated response in the browser and they very likely, I think they call it a zero click, don't they? They very likely won't come to our website if that's the way they had their question answered. And so we have to change with that very, very quickly, I think, such that we're influencing those LLM-driven responses in a way that's clear. So yeah, that model that we're describing of having a lot of thought leadership on our website is being challenged.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:09):
Yes. I think that's something that we're nearly all grappling with at the moment is the rise of the AI search. Apart from us, it's happened so quickly. So we were all still sort of learning what that meant at the point that we've suddenly got to do it. So yes, I think you're describing something that we're all really grappling with at the moment, but it's interesting you feel it's having an impact on what you do.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (14:30):
Well, I actually think the impact at today is relatively small. I apologise. I can't cite exactly where I read this, but I remember reading some research that suggested it's something like 10% of the type of searches that we would compete for are now being responded to in the browser with an LLM response. So that number is not high yet, but we've got to see the direction of travel that the number will increase until I think that will be the dominant form of question and response.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:02):
I think undoubtedly because one starts off going, "I'm not going to use that. I'm going to do a traditional Google search." And then very quickly, you find actually it's much quicker if I let the AI do it. So yes, I agree with you. And I think generally we can see a direction of travel going. So what else can you see that's coming in and changing? I mean, the chamber consultants is doing this deep tech leg, you're doing a huge amount of work and thought leadership in this area. What can you see that's coming in that's going to make changes?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (15:31):
I think it's not very clear to us yet. One of the things that I have tasked the team that I lead with doing is for every individual to be developing their own theory of the case for how AI will offer new possibilities, and also challenge the work that they do because I, as the person leading the function, don't feel I fully get it across the various different domains of marketing. I'm paying attention. I've got the odd theory, but I think I want every individual in my team to really be thinking about that. I think there's an area where people's experience of AI has been disappointing so far, but I'm confident it's going to get really good. And so we have to accept that, which is just copywriting. An awful lot of what a marketing team does is writing words for things like thought leadership material, reports, white papers and the like.

(16:25):
And at the moment, that still does tend towards becoming slop sometimes, and it certainly needs a lot of work, and it will hallucinate. It'll say things that just aren't true. So not that notwithstanding, I think it will fix all of those problems and become the predominant way of creating content. I think it'll still need human eyeballs on it, but the kind of generic feel that you get from that copy and the mistakes and the fact you can sniff it out as AI, I think that'll all go away, and that will be how most marketing copy is created, I think.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:06):
I find that an absolutely terrifying concept, but I do agree. But at the moment, I mean, yes, you can tell when it's used as an educator, that terrifies me, of course.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (17:15):
Yeah. I don't much love that idea either, but this is, I'm going to say something even more depressing now, which is that if that's the way the industry goes and that's how all of your peers and competitors are going, you don't have much option but to do the same, otherwise you're commanding the tide not to rise. So yeah, but I don't love the idea.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:38):
No, we will see. I mean, we could come back in six months or two years time and go, "Actually, we all explored doing this with AI, and we've all realised that it didn't work." At this stage, we don't know. So on a sort of day-to-day basis, what does a marketing director at a deep tech powerhouse do?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (18:00):
Good question. I'm very busy, so I'm clearly doing some things. What is it that I do? So our marketing team is, I think, sort of 18, 20 people strong around roughly that. And a fair amount of my time is on the people management within that, finding out how people are doing, what they're up to, shaping their future work, all that kind of stuff. That's probably, I don't know, about a third of the work I do. And I spent a few years working here of 2016 to 2020, mainly leaving the communications function, and I returned to lead the marketing function in August last year. So I'm only less than six months in. As such, I'm still developing an evolution of the marketing strategy as a whole, working out what is the most sensible evolution of the strategy, how we can actually improve bang for buck, really get value from our marketing expenditure.

(18:59):
I still haven't really finished that, and finishing it includes the full hearts and minds job around the business, supporting an evolved direction. So that is quite a bit of my work at the moment. It won't always be, but it certainly is right now as a newbie, winning support, credibility for an evolved direction.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:20):
And my last question, but it's something I ask nearly all my guests, is, if somebody's listening is going, "That sounds like an amazing job." And I imagine quite a few people are. How did you get to where you were? You've already indicated that you left and came back, but where did your career start? Did you know you were going to be a marketing director? Is that what you wanted to do?

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (19:44):
I didn't know until a couple of years into my career. So I graduated in psychology, decided very quickly I didn't really want to pursue that. I wasn't too interested in it. I got a job at an IT company in sales because I just needed any old job that was local to the student flat I was renting in London. And from there, it was a really good company size. It was a company I joined. It was about 150 people or something like that. And at that size, you get to see the whole living, breathing entity. You get to see the accounts team and the marketing team, the sales team and so on. And I realised, looking at a company where I could see all of it, that marketing was the most interesting part of it as far as I was concerned. And so I managed to get a sort of sideways move into a very junior marketing role.

(20:32):
And then I've been, that was 26 years ago, 26 years ago. And apart from a sojourn into being an entrepreneur, where my wife and I founded a business that we later sold, I've been a marketer ever since. And really, the only decision-making that applies all the way through that period is that I always felt that marketing was more interesting than the other bits of the commercial world. And I just pay attention to marketing. I'm just interested in it and always have. So it's always felt like that was the right domain for me to work in. And the reason that I'm here at CC and the role that I'm in is having worked across a whole wide variety of companies, including two of the big four in recent years, big four professional services companies, I realised that this is a company with the best stories. This is a company where they have the sort of people that I like and get on really well with.

(21:31):
And this is a company where all of the complexity challenges of how to market it, I find more interesting than I do stressful. It took a while, but I've found a role that is a really good fit for my sort of personality and interests.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:45):
I love that description of finding something that's more interesting than stressful because I mean, any senior job has its stressful moments, any job has its stressful moments, but that's so important that the interest outweighs the stress so that you still want to go and do the job, however stressful it is.

Richard Leyland, Marketing Director at Cambridge Consultants (22:01):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm still new enough that the stress levels are well under control. Who knows how that'll look in a year from now. But yeah, I definitely have always understood that this is a company and companies like us where working out how to effectively market is a really tough job, but one that I sort of am fully engaged in and quite enjoy.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:25):
Richard Leyland, marketing director of Cambridge Consultants. Thank you so much for your time. That was really, really enjoyable and very insightful. Thank you. Pleasure.