Monique Elliott of ABB joins us to discuss the hurdles of transforming marketing departments within industrial B2B organizations.
Danny:
All right so let's go ahead and jump into today's episode. Monique, thank you so much for joining us here. For those who don't know who you are, could you please introduce yourself to the IndustrialSage audience?

Monique:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. My name is Monique Elliott and I am the Global Head of Customer Experience for ABB's electrification products business.

Danny:
Excellent, so tell me a little bit about what's a day in your shoes like? What do you actually do?

Monique:
I will tell you a day in my shoes these days is very different than it was say a couple years ago. So I am in the midst of helping the organization really transform and revamp the marketing function. So, a year ago my role would have been the Global Head of Marketing, or the Chief Marketing Officer, and today we're really transforming and evolving that function into customer experience. So I spend a lot of my time educating and trying to understand the different parts of marketing that the company's doing today, and how we can make that more contemporary for a very industrial market.

Danny:
That's great. So I love, and like with every guest that we have and we have a kind of off-camera banter and whatnot, but one thing that kind of just came, I'm going to ask you a question off-script.

Monique:
Yeah.

Danny:
So to speak. There's nothing off-script here but, I'm fascinated by the customer experience function and the fact that you said that maybe a year ago it was Chief Marketing Officer. Tell me why your organization has decided that hey we need to be focusing on this a little bit more.

Monique:
So I think it's really twofold. First of all, not having a strong focus on the customer, I think was doing the function a bit of a disservice, and so language matters, and in this case marketing in very traditional industries or very industrial industries tends to mean something that was a little bit more old-school around the development of brochures, and maybe we made marketing collateral or we went to trade shows, so constantly or consistently calling what this function wants to be marketing I think was doing it a bit of a disservice. So the first reason for changing it was if you change the language then you can start to change the way people think about it. The second reason was the insourcing of talent, and so marketing in education and in a lot of the universities was starting to change, the curriculum was changing, and so that's also a way to in-source new talent is to start talking about the function a little bit differently.

Danny:
Absolutely. Now that totally makes a lot of sense. We've undoubtedly seen a dramatic change, not just in industrial markets but just across the board relative to technology and marketing. What would you say just in terms of the need for that change now, just as it relates to just that whole cultural change that we're seeing?

Monique:
Yeah, well I think a couple things are happening. There's a generational shift that's beginning to happen in a lot of the more industrial markets, like the one that I'm in, the electrification products business, and so as you start to see buyers' behaviors change, there needs to be an evolution of the function as well, and that's what we're starting to see. Now granted, I would say that this industry is maybe 15 to 20 years behind where our friends in the retail space is, so when I talk to my friends in retail, they're like yeah,