Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 362: Q & A with Louise Clements

Summary

In this episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, host Matt Heinz and Louise Clements talk about servant leadership and purpose driven brands and why it matters more than ever today!

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “How to be a Servant Leader in a Fast-Growing Company“ and my guest is Louise Clements, Global Chief Marketing Officer at WorkJam.

Tune in to Learn About:

• How to engage and motivate teams by instilling a mission that aligns with the company’s goals.
• The importance of leading from the front and the evolving role of marketers in scale-up companies.
• How staying true to your brand’s core values fosters long-term success and employee engagement.

 

Listen BELOW | Watch HERE | Read the transcript below:

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. My name is Matt Heinz. I’m your host. Thank you so much for joining us again. If you’re here joining us live on Thursday morning or afternoon, depending on where you are in the world thank you for making us part of your workday, your work week.

If you’re watching or listening on demand, thank you for downloading, for subscribing each and every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, always available past, present, future at SalesPipelineRadio.com. And every week we try to feature some of the best and brightest minds in B2B sales and marketing today.

Very excited to have the Global Chief Marketing Officer at Work Jam, Louise Clements. Louise, thanks so much for joining us today.

Louise: It’s great to be here. Thanks, Matt.

Matt: One of the things that intrigued me about your background about the work at WorkJam, but also just you in general is these two concepts of mission driven brands and servant leadership.

And so would love to have you talk a little bit about how those have been central themes in your career and how those manifest in the work you’re doing now.

Louise: Yeah, thanks, Matt. So it, it absolutely is what drives me being part of companies that have a mission rather than just a product. And I think that’s an exciting territory for any marketer, first of all, but also in an age of constant change, [it is really, really hard to find Opportunities, I think, for brands to stand out without a mission.

So when I think back and this is a piece of advice I give to my teams now is as a marketer, you need to be a storyteller and you need to drive demand. Over my career, I’ve had lots of opportunities to do that inside really big companies. But I’ve had a lot more fun doing it with scale ups and the scale up world, especially the tech scale up world is one where as marketers, I always like to say we get to lead from the front.

Being mission driven also I think has implications that you’re impacting your stakeholder groups in a totally different way. And you know, at WorkJam, we serve the world’s largest workforce. We have a product that helps them. There’s a societal bias out there against… I don’t think it’s, it’s something that we think about, but the products that we focus on, the people who we think about, especially relative to the future of work are typically people who sit behind desks. But there’s two and a half billion people out there who don’t sit behind a desk and they are the front lines of what keeps the world going.

So as a marketer, to be able to tell those stories makes a really big difference. You know, and then my personal passion around this crazy place that the world is in right now, where we know we need to do better with ESG, with the environment, we haven’t figured out how to get there. And so connecting those two is sort of what I do every day.

It’s an opportunity as a marketer to tell the stories, but not just tell the stories, be part of the solution. And I think that’s critical right now.

Matt: Yeah. I love that. And I think a lot of companies have a stated or a written purpose or mission and many of them also have values, but there’s a difference between having those written and having those activated– having those truly be drivers of daily decisions of triage to be motivators of what you’re doing in the business. What are some of the best practices you’ve learned over the year? And maybe some, an example or two of what you’re implementing and doing at WorkJam to really bring that purpose, bring that mission to life and make it real for employees on day to day basis?

Louise: Yeah, you’re right. There’s a real risk that your mission statement is something that sits on a wall and your values are on your coffee mugs or in the break room or wherever. So look, that doesn’t engage people. It doesn’t create a mission. So, some examples of things that we’re doing, but just generally what I think really works is.

If you’re a sales or marketing leader, you’ve got to have a mission for your own team that they know the why. Like, why does what I do matter? It’s not just about driving revenue or telling a story or getting a campaign out the door. My team actually has its own mission that supports the company mission.

And I talk a lot about leading from the front. I think that really matters right now for marketers because historically, we’ve been considered as the cost center, right?

Marketing has a budget. Marketing costs X. I try to use words like investment and talk a lot with the team, encourage them. I think this is a big part of what matters in a scale up too..

You’re trying to do wacky, crazy things and grow exponentially, probably with not enough people, which is in my view, part of the fun. As a, as a marketing leader, if you are telling your team and empowering them, okay, we’re going to go out, we’re going to lead from the front.

That means that what you do every day., You might be running social media, for example. Stretch yourself because that’s a huge thing that you’re doing, representing the company.

You are leading from the front. You’re helping to build that brand. And to me, Matt, when I think back about my career, when I started, that’s not a role that marketing or sales ever had. We followed, we didn’t lead. So I think that matters now more than ever.

Matt: I completely agree. We’re talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Louise Clement. She’s the Global Chief Marketing Officer for WorkJam and we’ve been talking a little bit about what it means to be mission driven. Not just on paper, but in reality and from the front, as you mentioned earlier. And I think when you do that, well, you not only empower and motivate employees, but if you do that well, that transcends to your customers and even your prospects and industry that see what you are doing and how you’re doing it differently.

Can you talk about that opportunity and how companies can bring what sometimes feels like just an internal mantra and really make that more of an external mission driven opportunity as well?

Louise: Yeah, that’s really, a topic near and dear to my heart, Matt. I think the best example was one that I had the pleasure of living last year with my team and everybody at WorkJam, where we took our mission and we said, we think what we do makes a difference in people’s lives.

We serve vulnerable people who are usually hourly paid. If they can pick up another shift, maybe they can make their rent. If they can swap a shift with somebody, if they can get a better training, they can earn more. And so what we did was we aspirationally went out there and said, we’re going to try to get on Times 100 Most Valuable Companies of the Year list.

Now we’re this little tiny company based in Montreal and we made it to the list so we’re right up there with Kim Kardashian and lots of other people who we’re talking huge brands, but I think for me, what was more meaningful and connects back to your question about the mission is you can be a scale up and what you do can make a difference to people.

It’s not about your size, but if you’re living your mission and you are telling that story and bringing that product out to the market, then you’ve got an opportunity to engage your team and a step beyond where you think you belong. So we’re super proud of that. It was like such a great moment. So proud of the whole team.

Matt: I love that story. And thank you for sharing that. you know, My parents, had the same job for 35 years and it was a job, right? It was a job that just sort of enabled other things they wanted in their life. And that was fantastic. And I benefited from that.

I think increasingly, I find that younger generations really want work with meaning. They need to make money. They want to pay their bills. They want to enable things for their life and family. But the work they do and the impact that has on the world around them, that becomes a motivator, not only to do the work well now, but to stick with and be loyal to companies that truly commit to that.

I’m Gen X, my generation certainly does not stay at the same job 35 years as often as we used to. But I think you still have an opportunity to say like, hey, listen, this is a company you can lean in on. It’s going to give you personal opportunity, but also continue to have a real impact on the workplace.

That’s a pretty big differentiator from an employment and a hiring and a retention standpoint, no matter what you’re selling, the people are going to be the foundation of that.

Louise: Yeah. hundred percent, Matt. I also think that trickles down to something you said before, which is the connection to your customer experience.

People buy from companies who make a difference. And so for everybody who’s listening, if you are thinking that not having an ESG strategy suddenly doesn’t matter, rethink this. Buy from brands who do good things and increasingly it’s driving your bottom line. I also think you said something really powerful about loyalty.

Now people may not stay with your company. Everybody jumps around and that that’s. That can be a great thing. I think, especially for marketers, it’s how we can build, but I would say that there is an opportunity to really develop your team. So like enable them as a leader, give them time to learn. And what will happen is they’re going to give good back to you, even if they leave.

They’re going to send good back. You end up with better staff. You end up with people who are more engaged a hundred percent, because you get back 10 times more than you give. Certainly in my experience.

Matt: I completely agree. And for those that may be saying like, listen, [00:11:00] we’re like 11 minutes in on something Sales Pipeline Radio talking about brand and mission and purpose. You just mentioned the key reason why I think it’s relevant to this audience, right? I mean, we don’t always buy from the best. Sometimes we buy from people we enjoy or people that we feel aligned with. And if they happen to provide a great solution, that’s almost a law.

So if you are trying to create market differentiation, There’s a lot of ways to do that. There’s a lot of expensive time consuming ways to do that. But if you can align with the mission and purpose and the values of your customer, it may mean that some prospects are repelled by you, but others are attracted in a way that becomes a lifetime relationship.

You know, we internally think about that a lot in terms of our stated purpose as a business is to positively impact careers and lives by enabling work that matters. Like marketing is not even in that title. Sales marketing isn’t in that, but by following that mission, we can support clients. We can support our employees. We can support the communities in need around us. And by saying that this is something we are truly day to day committed to, not only is it the right thing to do in the world, but I think you find people in companies that say, we believe that too. And so we want to partner with companies in a variety of capacities that share those common values relative to what the world needs.

Louise: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think also as we are a global economy, going back to your comment around sales, the sales pipeline, the procurement requirements for your customers, they’re going to look at all of these attributes that you bring to the table. And so it matters more and more and, tying this back to the whole scale up conversation, driving growth for scale ups, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a team that leverages that mission and that product differentiation, because you’re probably asking your team to wear five hats. Right?

Matt: Yeah.

Louise: Very few scale ups have somebody in a job just doing one thing. We certainly don’t, but it’s what makes it really fun. Going back to the product differentiation and worrying about the growth and the bottom line. If you’ve got a brand that’s out there doing something, you’re going to get picked up. Your voice will be heard a lot more than a company that’s just doing following the playbook

Matt: And I think your prospects can hear that. I think they can hear it in the voice of your sales team. I think they can see it in your marketing, they can see it in your brand. I think there’s a difference in how people manifest and communicate a company’s message when they are behind it, when they believe it is doing good, when they believe that the purpose and the mission and the values are not just on the wall, but in daily decision making and triage and what’s going to happen.

Why do companies not do that? Cause I think to you and I it kind of seems like a no brainer, but I think sometimes the short term pressure points people in a different direction. What are some of the ways companies can mitigate that short term pressure based thinking to stay consistent with a mission driven direction?

Louise: I think it starts with what’s your brand truth. Hearkening back to my agency days, if you understand your brand truth, it solves your differentiation problem.

It allows you to really also be focused on the short term without letting go of what that brand truth is. So you can pivot because the market is forever changing, especially for those of us in the B2B sales and marketing world.

We’re talking about a lot of complexity, changing complexity, et cetera. But if you stick to your brand truth, in my experience, it allows you to make those pivots in the short term without losing sight of who you are and also without confusing your own employees.

Because if you’re shifting gears every five minutes, your people are confused, your story gets confused, your product gets confused.

Matt: Well, and we need leaders like yourself that will stand up for that, right? On sunny days where it’s clear sailing, it’s really easy to follow that purpose and values, but you know, life, business is not always clear sailing.

Louise: No.

Matt: And we have to have the courage and the fortitude and the consistency to continue to make those decisions the right way for that brand truth and for the needs of the business and your customers and your overall direction as an organization.

Louise: A hundred percent.

Matt: Love it. Well, we are out of time for today. Louise, thank you so much for doing this. If people wanna learn more about the mission driven work that you’re doing and that WorkJam’s doing, where, where can they go?

Louise: Yeah. Come to our website, workjam.com and reach out to me on LinkedIn, as with all your guests, one of the things we appreciate about you, Matt, is that you bring us together and make us think. So love to stay part of that conversation with the rest of your community.

Matt: Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you everyone for joining us today, live and on demand. We’ll see you next week for another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com

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