We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Brand and Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services.
Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand, and then moved to the UK, where she joined Colt Technology Services. In her thirteen years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology, and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion & diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Branded Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services. Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand and then moved to the UK where she joined Colt technology services. In her 13 years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology. and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process, and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion and diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. Laura, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, very happy to be here.
Laura, one of the things that interested me about your bio was that you brought growth marketing methodology to your team at Colt. Of course, at the Agile Marketing Alliance, we’re about agile marketing. How do you see growth marketing and agile marketing? Are they the same? Are they related? Are they different? How do you think about those two things?
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two and growth marketing as we experience it at Colt really follows a lot of the agile marketing methodology. We’re looking at agile and lean principles, very much an iterative approach and always with that continuous feedback. When we talk about growth marketing, we’re specifically referring to really a partner that we work with, Growth Method. So we’ve been working with them for a couple of years now and we use their experimentation methodology. So we look at having a hypothesis, we do six week experiment cycles, we then fail or pass those and change or scale those experiments. They also provide a platform that they’ve created to help make sure that there’s a repeatable process.
So Laura, you know, one part of hypothesis building and experimentation is being willing to fail. And you wrote an article on LinkedIn called, ÒI Need You to Fail More.Ó Can you explain what you meant by that provocative headline and why you wrote the article?
Yeah, sure. Something that I came up against when implementing growth method at Colt is that fear is really the enemy of innovation. So at the beginning, when I first started looking after digital marketing in particular, we were sort of looking at these six month waterfall type projects. And you’ll know this, that you kind of get to the end of these projects or even to the end of the year, and it’s not always clear if things really worked or even which specific elements of those projects had the most impact. So you’d kind of be getting to the end of the year, you’d be doing it and your reviews and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to say, what worked well, what didn’t work well and what are our learnings. So really, there can also be a focus on delivering stuff in corporates. So often, you look at your list of achievable for the year and it can often be, I did this thing rather than what did we learn from it.
So really, when we brought in this, focus on growth methodology, you really had to, we really had to change how people felt about trying things. And it’s actually quite a cultural shift because if you’re used to this waterfall, if during that waterfall, anything doesn’t work properly, it breaks a project, it delays it. Whereas with growth methodology and that experimentation framework, you’re allowed to fail and actually you learn from failure. And you’ve got to really try to encourage people to fail and fail fast because then they can take that learning, they can go back and they can iterate. on that project. So really, it fundamentally changes your team’s culture, as I mentioned, and it means that people can be a lot more open to kind of giving things a go.
Yeah, I really love what you said. You know, you’re reframing failure as learning. So we’re just learning. And then you hit upon two things that I’m very passionate about. One is this notion that as marketers, we run these A-B split tests. Oftentimes they’re A-B split tests. And then we get the results and we kind of shrug our shoulders and we’re like, eh? Because a lot of times they’re very, very close in nature. And if you don’t structure those experiments in advance and really outline your hypotheses, how do you really know if you’ve succeeded or failed? So I really loved what you were saying about that. And I think the second thing that I heard in your response was this notion of marketers liking to check the box, right? So what I’m hearing you say is by failing more, we not only… are learning about what’s going on rather than just shrugging our shoulders at the end, but we’re focused on the outcomes. And of course, in agile marketing, that’s one of the big shifts that are out there is this shift from output to outcomes. So I appreciate what you had to share, Jim.
I love it as well. And I particularly like Laura, that you talked about the cultural and the mental shift that marketers need to make as they think about this approach of experimentation and learning and being willing to fail and thinking outside the box. Not trying to do simple experiments that don’t change anything, but really trying to do ones that could potentially make a huge difference. And if they work and they might fail, but if they work, they can make a huge difference. So let me ask you another question. In addition to getting your people to be willing to fail more, what are some of the other challenges that you encountered in implementing growth, marketing growth method at Colt?
Yeah, so I would say definitely the first one is sort of getting that buy-in from management and I’m lucky that I have an amazing management team. My manager, Mizu, has been very, you know, supportive of this process, but I do think it does take a little bit of time for people to understand it. So particularly if you’re in front of them and you’re talking about, hey, we had a great result this month, we had 10 failures, it was fantastic, you know, that can take a little bit of getting used to for people.
I think you really have to get that a little bit of education early on about how you’re doing things and why you’re doing them. And I think having that database of information and particularly as I mentioned, we have this experiment methodology and so we have this rich database of learnings that we’ve made and being able to show how, you know, that was a failure, but here’s the learning that we got off it. And then in the future, when we do a related experiment that might be successful, it’s because we made these failures in the past. So there’s definitely a piece of education there and helping people to understand how you do things and why you do things. And then always tracking it back to the data.
And I’ve, as mentioned, been working in marketing for a long time and people, you get accused of being fluffy or there’s all these ideas about playing with colored pencils, et cetera. And I think it’s really important for us to be able to go into meetings and be data-driven and be able to show the results and show the impact. And I would say with what we’ve been doing with growth methodology, really the results speak for themselves. We’ve seen year on year improvements across all our metrics and up to 500% improvement in some of them as well. And I think the other thing too around encountering challenges, I think, is really about influence can be really interesting and… I think other marketers will understand this, that sometimes the things that you think aren’t important, so it might be changing some visuals on your homepage, will somehow get the biggest impact where something that you’ve spent months working really hard on in the background that fundamentally changes how you do experiments or how you do automation gets no buy-in at all.
So I think it’s also about understanding how sometimes you have to do some activities because they’re going to have an influence and they’re going to have an impact. and also balancing that with the stuff that is in the background and might not be as impressive, but are actually the ones that are really going to make those changes. So balancing that as well in terms of your influence.
And then the last thing I would say really is about helping sales teams on that digital journey. I do think it’s part of the responsibility of marketing to help sales teams on that journey as well, help them understand the data points and signals and understand how digital or marketing in general can be of benefit to them. And that it’s a, you know, I don’t even say it’s a handshake, it’s an arm around the shoulder. And that’s the relationship that you should have between sales and marketing as well.
You know, that’s really great to hear because so often marketing and sales are at odds, right? You know, the classic is that sales says, those leads you sent me are terrible, and marketing says, well, you didn’t follow up on them, you know, or something like that, right? I mean, there’s the thing. So you’ve been able to create a really good relationship with your sales team and just Tell me a little bit more about that. I really want to hear about that.
Yeah, it’s honestly, it’s incredibly strong, the relationship that we have. And there’s a couple of different elements to it. So one thing that I will say about agile marketing and growth marketing is that collaboration is built into it, right? You need to be engaging with other teams. You need to be getting different opinions and different ways of doing things. So the more people are part of the process, the more buy-in they have to see it succeed. So I think particularly with sales and marketing at Colt is that we bring sales into the process as early on as we can. I also would say that everything that we do has a sales element. So if we’re doing, let’s say campaigns, or if we’re doing events, et cetera, we always have sales packs, we have sales training, we have sales education. But then also, I would say that we got to a point with our marketing experiments that we have a 30% conversion rate on what we hand over. So they trust us, right? They trust us that we’re giving them good stuff. So we’ve built a lot of trust over the years as well.
Yeah, that’s really great to hear. And I really feel like and hope it’s the future of marketing and sales and the finger pointing stops and we become just more responsive to each other.
Yeah, I also particularly as we’ve seen digital marketing change over the years, right, is that it’s no longer linear sale cycle. And they appreciate that and they understand that now. And I think more than ever, they’re seeing the value and watch marketing can bring to the table that you’re not looking. And particularly a company like mine has big deals, right? So you’re looking at a two-year sale cycle sometimes. They want your help. They want you to help nurture. They want you to help engage with those customers. They want to see how they’re tracking. Are they engaging with experiments? Are they engaging with campaigns, et cetera? And all of those data points are super useful to them. And they really help to build up that profile and that customer intimacy as well.
So as you’re experimenting and as you’re building these long-term campaigns and relationships with sales and the customers, how do you avoid getting caught up in just tweaking little things? How do you make sure that you’re achieving your strategic goals?
That’s a great question. And I think it’s an ongoing balancing act, to be completely honest. So at the moment, we kind of split things out. Some things are still project-based. And as mentioned, we try and be more agile with that. And then some things are more experiment-based or lend themselves to experiments more. What we’re also finding is that projects can be a mix, right? So they can have an element of the project that is much more sort of linear, and then they can have elements of the same project that is more, you’re able to create experiments around as well. So a great example is campaigns, where the planning of the campaign might be more linear, but then once you get into the execution, then you can start with the experiments as well. So we’re still understanding which things lend themselves more to experiments and which still need to have kind of project. focus. But I would say, you know, things like Always On, we’ve found is a great way to have an experiment funnel. So creating specific types of activity, as mentioned, like Always On digital marketing activity, we know that that’s going to be really rich for experiments.
Yeah, I really like what you’re saying about the blended approach. And I know that people have combined what they call waterfall with more agile or growth approaches. But it really resonated with me what you said about being able to plan out your campaign, because you do need a plan.
And that’s part of the agile marketing principles. But you also need a plan that bends and changes with your learnings. So it’s a great point.
Laura, you’ve been doing this for some time. What would you say to someone who’s just getting started? How would you help them? What should they do?
Sure, so first of all, I would say as a leader, you have to create an environment where everyone can thrive. So you really need to be getting under the ways of working. So how different team members work, you need to understand what their motivations are, how they calculate that they’re successful, and then really help them on the journey with you. So it’s gonna be different for every person that you work with. You’re gonna have different stakeholders, you’re gonna have different managers. And it’s really trying to get underneath, you know, how they work, how they’re motivated, and aligning it with what you’re doing. And I’ll say, for example, that we, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’ve encountered is that when you get new people joining your team, you kind of have to start from scratch a little bit again.
When we first were doing this, we forgot about that a little bit. And we’d have new people, we’d be like, Come on, right, we’re off, we’re doing growth. get on board and they’d be like a deer in headlights. They’d be really scared because they’re just not used to being comfortable with failure. So I think there’s a really big thing that you have to do about making sure that all the people who are involved in this are on the journey with you. They understand it and they’re comfortable with it. The second thing, as I mentioned before, is be prepared to fail and get comfortable with it. Sit in that failure while I’m at it, really, really get comfortable with it and understand that it’s learning. and understand that it’s something that you need to do to be able to be successful. I would say get stuck in. I think you kind of have to just start the process in a lot of ways.
As mentioned, we work with The Growth Method. It’s a company and they have a tool and that’s really, really helped because it’s provided that structure for us. And I guess that would be another, something I would tell people would be to get some expert advice. So, you know. This is a great podcast. You’re gonna get learnings, get out there, get as much information as you can as well to kind of look at different ways of doing things. But also, and this is kind of an interesting one for an agile approach is that you need to be disciplined. You need to stick with it. You kind of can’t just do it for a year and say, well, I gave it a go, I’m not seeing what I wanted to. You kind of have to stick with it for multiple years and really get it working and get it functioning well.
Yeah, I mean, Laura, I’m a gardener. And as much as I would love to have tomatoes in January, it takes some time for those tomatoes to grow and to mature. So you do have to nurture things and water things to reap the rewards.
So you shared a lot of lessons there. You get disciplined with the approach, and make sure you remember to onboard people. If you were to do this again, what are some of the things that you do differently, maybe in a different company, or if you were to do it again with a different team?
I’m not sure that I would do things considerably different. I do think, and this is part of that growth or agile way of thinking, is everything’s a learning, right? So if I was going to do it again, I would be learning in a different way. So I think everything that we did that maybe didn’t work as well from the get-go was a learning and helped us iterate and improve. Some things I think around our metrics, our early metrics, we looked at things like form fills and things like web visits and things like that. Now I would look at those as not being as effective metrics. I think kind of getting understanding about what metrics are good ones is something to do early on. I think I probably would do that slightly differently. But other than that, I do truly believe that it’s all been a positive learning experience.
That’s great, Laura. One of your passions, it seems, from what I’ve read about you, is women in technology. Okay. And in marketing in general, in both the US and the UK, women make up about 60% of marketers. But when you look at CMOs, the ratio is almost exactly the opposite. Only about 40% of CMOs are women. What kinds of things do we need to be doing? to encourage more women in marketing leadership positions.
Yeah, sure. Women’s progression is such an important topic. I mean, we know that companies with female CEOs are more profitable and perform better. But unfortunately, as you mentioned, there is that broken rung issue that the women aren’t going into leadership positions. Even looking at women entering the workforce, looking at something like digital marketing is only about a third woman, only about 26% of those in the tech workforce are women. And, you know, looking at recent studies, it’s not super positive. A recent PWC study showed that only 3% of women say Korean technology is their first choice. And half of young women who go into tech leave their positions by age 35.
So there are things that, I mean, there are things that we can do, right? So one is around mentoring and sponsorship. So particularly for younger women, having those, giving those opportunities that they can get into mentoring and sponsorship. Sponsorship in particular, if you find women who are incredibly successful, they’ll often tell you that they had a sponsor along the way. So if you are a young woman wanting to succeed, or if you’re a woman as well, who’s wanting to pull up younger woman, is helping them to find some of those mentoring and sponsorship opportunities. That’s super important. Allyship is obviously hugely important. It’s of everyone’s benefit when women succeed.
As mentioned, it’s positive for the companies and it’s positive for diversity. It’s just generally a good thing to be happening. So allyship’s super important. Role modeling. One of the reasons I agreed to do this podcast was that I think it’s really important for young women to see women who are successful in technology and in technology or STEM roles. And we kind of think it’s maybe part and parcel when we’re doing it. But I do talk to young women and they actually don’t really see it. And there’s a saying, you can’t be what you can’t see. So it’s really important for women to kind of stand up, be heard, make sure that they’re speaking out and joining podcasts and being able to tell their story as well. And then finally, I think really around policies and best practice, there is… policies about women’s life stages, things like menopause or fertility, looking at companies’ policies. So if you’re in a company, have you got fair and transparent policies that help women at every life stage? What are those development opportunities that they have? There’s a whole bunch of things that people can be doing to look out for other women.
Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. I really appreciate and feel a lot of what you said. And the thing that strikes me is it’s not a one-dimensional issue,
We’ve got to do all of these things. Being a role model, we’ve got to help mentor and support people. We’ve got to support people through life stages. And especially that last one, I was thinking to myself, well, if the roles were reversed and we had a long legacy of women you know, leading companies and men were in the position. I wonder if the companies would have just automatically have had childcare and other things in place.
We’ve really appreciated your sharing your story today. And it’s been a pleasure to meet you and chat with you. So I know one of the questions we get is people are like, I, I loved what Laura had to say. I want to talk to her, I want to connect with her. For those who want to reach out to you, how can they do that?
Sure, LinkedIn, obviously the easiest one to do. So just look up Laura Perrott, double R, double T, and I should be the first person that pops up.
Great, thanks so much for being here with us today and sharing your stories with us.
It was great to be here, thank you so much.
Well, thanks for listening to our show today. Check out the show notes for this episode at AgileMarketingBlog.com or at the Agile Marketing Alliance.
