Enterprise Times recently sat down with Robert Fleming, the experienced marketing leader who recently joined Infor as its Head of International Marketing. Fleming joined from startup Zivver where he was CMO.
Before Zivver, he was SVP, Global Field, Partner and Customer Marketing at Qlik at the same time as Wolfgang Kobek, whom Enterprise Times interviewed last year. He is responsible for marketing strategy, approaches and activities within Infor outside of the Americas and works closely with Kobek in his role as President EVP and GM International.
Why Infor?
I first asked Fleming why he joined Infor, leaving the startup world and returning to an enterprise. He is no stranger to the sector as he worked at Oracle for several years.
“Obviously, Wolfgang’s one part of it because we used to work closely together at Qlik. We had a good working relationship and did a lot of good work together on marketing/sales alignment. I was very attracted by the product capability of Infor, and particularly the vertical focus on the product side. My experience is different from the other vendors I’ve worked for. Oracle, at that time, had horizontal applications for ERP, supply chain, CRM and so on, which were not industry-versioned. I was very intrigued by that product capability.
“The cloud piece that Infor has and the company’s culture I found very interesting. It’s obviously a big company, it’s very successful, but has a lot of growth within, so that’s very exciting. Then, from a marketing perspective, it was a chance for me to bring my experience and help with the marketing transformation here. “
What attracted you to the culture?
“It’s a really respectful culture. It’s a very collaborative culture. I’m not, at this point, sensing some of the things other companies have. It comes from the top here. Kevin sets the tone. He’s very approachable, very pragmatic, and obviously super smart. It’s a very different culture from Oracle, driven by a very smart guy, Larry, but was highly US-centric and a command and control environment, which had its challenges culturally. It struggled a lot with the acquisitions they made, culturally, to make it work from a human aspect, certainly in my time there as my observation.
“Every company talks about values and culture. But here, I feel it is genuinely held in a high level of importance, about respect, entrepreneurship, and some principles as to how we should conduct ourselves day to day.
“Although this is a big company, it feels very entrepreneurial, and there’s a lot of stuff we’re doing about building for the future. This isn’t resting on our laurels, milking the instal base. There is a lot of hunger around net new logo growth. And we’ve found some really interesting enterprise, new logo customers.”
Infor Marketing
You mentioned transforming marketing at Infor. You’ve been here a few months and have an idea of the data your team has. What did you mean?
“The thing that is very interesting, and great, frankly, is that we have a very focused set of data in terms of the target profiles of the prospects we’re looking to acquire. We have a lot of focused information regarding our segmentation and target prospects. It’s very targeted from an industry perspective. From a marketing perspective, it’s a dream.
“It lends itself well to doing highly targeted marketing. Like where do we think we can add value from an industry perspective? What kind of customers? What kind of use cases? Who are those prospects who we should go out to market to? It is very different from some of the companies I’ve worked for, where it’s more of a spray and pray. Where you’re chasing every industry, every use case, every segment in the stack and the marketing tends to be much more.
Do you use an ABM solution such as Demandbase or 6sense?
“In my marketing experience, I’m a big fan of intent-based technology. I’ve got a lot of experience with 6sense. I brought in 6sense at my previous gig. Here we use Demandbase. Those technologies are super powerful and are part of a modern marketing stack that you should embrace for targeting and help with a more modern scoring of leads. The old-school way of scoring leads is based on points of an individual’s interaction with a company. But overlaying that with account intent is the way to go. We are really enthusiastic about that technology.
“It’s a tool. Like any tool, you can use it well or badly if it’s used properly. If you can use it in an agile way to drive agile campaigns, trigger actions and so on based upon buying intent that you’re seeing out there, then it becomes quite a game changer from old school marketing.”
What’s happening in 2023?
Infor has not held a physical Inforum event since the lockdown began and has no plans to hold one soon. Are events back within the regions?
“I can say that generally, in terms of events, we’re seeing that events are back. As part of our marketing mix, we are sponsoring third-party events. We are running our own physical events as well. It’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of countries and how advanced they are in opening up post-COVID.
“There’s a couple of countries where it’s still stuttering, particularly China, where we’ve had to pivot a lot of times about opening up, closing, postponing events, but for the rest of them, it’s pretty much back.”
What’s the biggest marketing opportunity for Infor?
“Our biggest opportunity is to reach more people to tell them the great stuff we’re doing and share our value prop and customer stories. We have this genuinely engineered, from the ground up, industry-specific product capability. We are doing that, but our biggest opportunity is to do more of that. That’s why I said earlier; we’re looking to be heavily targeted with those stories.”
What’s your biggest challenge for 2023?
“The biggest challenge is prioritisation. I don’t think it’s a unique challenge for here, to be quite honest. I had the same challenges in my roles elsewhere. You’ve got to prioritise where to focus on having the biggest impact. Not just from a geographical point of view but in terms of marketing effort. From a marketing perspective, we’re trying to lay out some clear priorities for next year that we’re going to be really focused on and go much deeper in. One of which is, as I mentioned, the really targeted marketing approach. The other is building more awareness of who Infor is and what we stand for from a brand awareness perspective. “
Marketing Insights
How do you balance inbound and outbound marketing in your digital marketing approach?
“I feel very strongly it’s a blend. Part of the job for myself and my peers is getting the mix and blending right between inbound and outbound, digital and non-digital. We want to ensure that we have solid inbound and are almost organically attracting interest. That people are going to our website, asking for a contact or online chat. Then we’re running targeted outbound plays and campaigns. Where we’re going out to tell the Infor story, often by industry or persona, toproactively reach out through digital and non-digital means.
“I don’t think there’s any real secret sauce to balancing it. I’d say the danger is not to get too singularly focused on one channel. It’s very often the case that if you’re going to get a lead, or certainly an opportunity, it’s usually that the buyer has had multiple interactions with you. They could have been to the website and read an article. They could have responded to a digital ad.
“Alternatively, they could have been to one of our events or webinars. It tends to be a mixture of things. We’ve done work to look at a buyer’s journey over a period of time before they came to a deal and what interactions did they have with us. It tends to be multiple touchpoints. Make sure it is a balanced mix because, especially with enterprise software, this is not like someone buying a consumer commodity at a very low price. There tend to be multiple interactions before they make a buying decision.”
How do you see the role of the CMO has changed?
“If I think back to how things were and how things are now, the CMO needs to be very close, in my view, to the business. I’m not so sure that that was always the case in the past. Marketing was in its corner, and sales was in its corner. In my experience, the key to being successful is that marketing-sales alignment. Being close to the business and understanding the context of what you’re marketing sounds obvious, but my experience is that it has not always been the case that people, especially those deeper down the organisation, understand that. Having a seat at the table with the business, and business strategy is super important.
“Then the other piece is around some of the digital tools. There’s been a lot of change. If you look at things over the last few years, some of the technology we have talked about, account-based technology, looking at the role of digital and the different digital techniques that can be used, optimising those, and making sure that being on top of that optimization, is really key.”
What is your view on the balance between the art and science of marketing?
“There is a little spiel that I have with teams that I lead. I mean, I strongly believe it is those two pieces knitted together. It’s like a Star Trek analogy. Spock is nothing without Kirk’s intuition. Kirk is nothing without Spock’s data-driven approach. I really think that’s true with marketing.
“You can have incredibly innovative, creative, artful marketing campaigns. But if you’re not data-driven, and you’re not scientific about how those should be optimised, then they may come to nothing. Similarly, you can spend a lot of time looking at optimization and the science of the funnel but have dull marketing campaigns with no artistic innovation around them, which won’t perform as well. I do think it’s a balancing act.
“Obviously, I spent a lot of time at Qlik, where it’s all about data. I love data. I tend to think being data-driven is super important, and getting deep into understanding funnel optimization. But I do think it is a hybrid role. Obviously, in the marketing world, not everybody is a hybrid individual. In terms of putting together a Marketing organisation, the team, you want to make sure you’ve got that blend, because I think marketing is an art and a science together.
The book question
What’s the latest book you read? And what was your takeout for business?
“I’m not sure there is a takeout for business. I read Tony Visconti’s autobiography. (Amazon Aus, UK, US). I’m a big music fan. He is a music producer. He produced many of the David Bowie albums and all sorts of people. He’s very analytical. We were talking about art and science, which is interesting when you think about it because he’s a creative type.
“What I took from that was his focus and clarity of where he’s trying to get to in his career and being resolutely not afraid to turn things down. He turned down a lot of potential big projects because they weren’t the right projects for him. He wanted to stick with the things he thought he could excel in. I mentioned prioritisation earlier on. I think that’s key. You see that with many of the memoirs I’ve read with people who’ve got a real focus on what they want to do and how they want to get to it. It comes down to prioritisation.”
