Uniting sales and marketing remains a challenge for many organisations. But it’s a challenge worth tackling as it can make a big difference to client and prospect engagement as well as your bottom line. We talked to Antonia Wade, Chief Marketing Officer at Capita, about how the company’s teams came closer together at a time when everyone was further apart. 

Tell us about your role at Capita 

Capita has a real sense of purpose, which is founded on driving better outcomes for all stakeholders. When I joined, I wanted to make sure we made a brand promise to our employees not just our clients. But that can be difficult with such a large organisation - we have more than 60,000 people supporting hundreds of clients across the private and public sectors. 

Our services are also incredibly broad - from helping energy suppliers to deliver electricity to 35 million homes every day to ensuring food is safe to eat in 127 countries and handling £1 billion in housing benefit payments. This diversity poses a real challenge when it comes to marketing as buying behaviours, sales cycles, and client journeys vary considerably.  I love being able to use the entire marketing ecosystem to drive value for Capita colleagues and clients as well as society as a whole. 

How have you brought Capita’s sales and marketing teams closer together? 

For me, one of the best ways to bridge the gap between sales and marketing is to take on the same risk. As a marketing leader, you need to set a revenue target – just like sales people do. And that’s what I’ve done at Capita - I’ve got skin in the game and it’s led to greater collaboration. 

Sales and marketing have joint ownership of the buyer journey and by working together we can drive stronger results together. And we can see that in action with Salesforce. We now have a clear line of sight between marketing and sales , which means we can evaluate how different activities have directly or indirectly influenced a deal. 

For example, with Pardot, we can track the performance of every piece of content, which is incredibly powerful. The more data you can capture around your marketing initiatives, the more relevant they become. This ability to optimise our marketing to this degree is what I get most excited about - it helps us develop richer content and use our resources more efficiently and intelligently.

How can marketing become more predictive and proactive?

I’m a firm believer that marketing should take on responsibility for finding new leads; I want the team to originate new markets and prospects for sales. To do this, we need to understand which organisations are best suited to different Capita solutions and services. 

With Salesforce, we can tap into existing client insights to build prospect profiles - and then target and nurture them with relevant content. We take cues from a prospect’s digital engagement to flex the type of information they receive. We can also capture feedback from the sales team on the quality and conversion of leads, so we can change course as needed. 

I love that we can now answer more of those elusive ‘why’ and ‘what if’ questions. It’s helped to inspire a real sense of curiosity and made our marketing more data-driven and ROI-focused. 

How has the way you approach marketing changed as a result of the COVID-19 crisis?

Lockdown measures meant that our sales teams were unable to attend the normal face-to-face pitches and meetings. As a result, there has been greater demand for more marketing content to use in sales outreach. For this to be effective, it’s vital that we know what our clients and prospects are interested in. 

With Pardot, we can see how people consume our content. And there have been a few surprises - topics that we thought were done and dusted were actually still gaining traction. It also helped us rapidly scale up our output - within a month, the team deployed more than 130,000 pieces of communication through email and social channels and organised 16 webinars.

What other changes have you made as a result of the pandemic? 

A lot of our teams were not set up to work remotely, so it was a massive challenge for the business. Within three weeks, we made this possible for 20,000 people.

When you are working from home on a permanent basis, you can start to feel disenfranchised because you are not connecting with your colleagues so closely. Helping people to understand the impact of their work can really build morale and confidence. With Pardot, we can show our team the results they have achieved with marketing content and the overall impact they have had in driving Capita’s growth during this period. 

There’s been a number of other company-wide initiatives to help improve staff morale and wellbeing, such as online quizzes and drinks. We are also launching a ‘virtual village’, where people can go to discuss everything from books and movies, to latest marketing trends and challenges. It’s important to act with kindness and empathy towards colleagues and clients during difficult times. 

What role will social media play in your marketing strategy? 

Social media gives us real-time information about what topics are trending and how you can add value to client conversations; it’s a really cost-effective way to amplify your message. It has also been interesting to see how much more traction we have with clients now we have all our sales and executive teams promoting our points of view.

We want to have a bigger share of voice ownership on key topics that demonstrate the extent of Capita’s expertise. But social outreach should not be one-way: it’s also a great way to capture client feedback and drive improvement. We plan to use Social Studio to help us boost engagement and better understand brand sentiment. 

What are your tips for driving successful change? 

You’ve got to win hearts and minds. As part of our client-first approach to marketing, we moved from more than 30 CRM platforms to just one, so it wasn’t just a system change but a culture change. Ensuring everyone understands the importance of good data is essential especially when you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of records. 

We have a lot of great leaders who acted as ambassadors for the new one CRM platform as well as a number of super users in different divisions. People learn and adapt in different ways, so we created playbooks and videos and organised mystery challenges to add a bit of fun to employee engagement. 

Like with everything, the more information you have, the better decisions you can make. I am really enjoying the transparency we now have over what works from a channel and content perspective – and what really drives client value. 

Capita delivers better outcomes for its client and stakeholders with Salesforce

By uniting its marketing and sales teams, Capita can build stronger prospect and client relationships. Find out how its one CRM initiative has also helped to boost agility and drive better stakeholder outcomes in this full customer success story.