Xerox’s Valerie Thomassin: Conduent Will Be A New Business, Not A Copy

The business services and document technology giant will separate into two companies in January 2017. The senior vice-president corporate marketing and communications for Europe talks about marketing challenges.

On January 1, 2017, Xerox, the business services and document technology giant, will separate into two 500 Fortune-scale companies. The document outsourcing and print business will continue with the Xerox name, while the business-process outsourcing company will be known as Conduent.

One of the people working on the marketing implications of this move is Valerie Thomassin, the company’s senior vice-president corporate marketing and communications for Europe. A 27-year Xerox veteran, Thomassin also created and now leads Global Marketing Shared Services, including the Demand Centre and Sales Enablement team. She spoke to CMO.com recently, and began by explaining her role in more detail.

Thomassin: Firstly, I’m in charge of all the usual corporate marketing assets and communication channels for Europe: the brand, PR, social, the web, etc. Second, I’m leading globally the Demand Centre, which is really the outbound capability we created a couple of years ago. Third, I head Global Sales Enablement, which is pretty rare to have under marketing but a very critical area for us at Xerox where sales is much embedded in our culture.

CMO.com: What kind of marketing challenges will separating the business create?

Thomassin: We have to establish two brands. People know the Xerox brand, but it’s about positioning the NEW Xerox, as a lot of things have happened over the last years. Building on our approach, our market connection, our people, and our innovation and technology, we are making the statement that Xerox reinvents the way the world creates, communicates, and works—printing, of course, but also connecting analogue and digital, personalising, and automating. There’s a lot to do to make this come across.

On the Conduent side, it is simpler, nobody knows this company (not yet!)—that’s a dream for a CMO, having to build everything! Watch this space as we are now in the process of defining the brand positioning and new communication platform.

The second challenge is to put the marketing engine back in place both sides to generate revenue and help tackle the sales productivity challenge. As with any other B2B company out there, we are very much involved in sales productivity and ensuring that marketing is playing a key role to drive them.

That means doing three things: firstly, generating new sales-ready leads for the new businesses as well as cross-selling on the existing client base. Second is helping to secure revenue from our client base. Then third is helping our reps at both companies—our direct sales force as well as our channel partners—to close business.

CMO.com: Do the two divisions currently have their own marketing functions, or is there a centralised marketing function as well?

Thomassin: Today we have one headquarters, one CMO, and we have business units in both divisions. The headquarters I belong to is handling classic corporate marketing activities on behalf of everybody, but also acting as a shared service, which is my team.

In the future, we will have two of everything—CMOs, two headquarters, and two Demand Centres. All the relationships between the business units and regions within the two companies are to be formed.

CMO.com: Are you taking this opportunity to rethink the way you organise marketing within the two companies?

Thomassin: The principles will remain the same, but we’ll take this opportunity to rethink the structure, typically creating a big digital team with social, content, the web, and the Demand Centre sitting together. We’re also making sure that brand and advertising are under the same roof.

These are organisational decisions in support of our transformation journey, embracing the modern practice of marketing and the desire to create alignment and leverage the skill sets to a maximum. The next step is to define the role of headquarters versus field marketing (the operations) in the regions a bit better. Who is responsible and accountable for what? What do we centralise? Who owns the budget, what is the level of autonomy given to a region to ensure customer centricity? Where should the content be created? We’re redefining this at the moment.

CMO.com: Obviously, you can’t say yet what you’re going to do, but how are you thinking about those relationships?

Thomassin: We’re thinking about standardisation. Even if we have been successful in creating and modernising the function, and also influencing the sales leaders and field marketers over the years, we still have a lot of silos, a diversity of opinions, random technology choices, variety of messaging, and not enough thinking done holistically. It doesn’t mean that we have to centralise everything, but we have to standardise, define success, and, obviously, put the bar at the highest level possible, and then organise the activities and the skills set against these. We need to continue to push for integrated marketing plans at all levels. As an example, events—that are loved by the sales leaders—are great, but they are only one tactic among many, and coherent plans from the brand narrative up to sales enablement including inbound and outbound must be established. These should be agreed together with sales, in a balanced way, with measurable targets to support business objectives of a given region or business unit.

The Demand Centre is a good illustration of this. We built a factory. We made sure that the flows coming in and out are following a very strict process, campaign targets are clear, the data base is managed, measurement is in place, and everybody knows their roles and responsibilities. It’s standardisation and a level of centralisation to gain scale and to ensure it’s done professionally, so then the business units/regions can focus on creating content in line with their value proposition and targeting their respective personae we help them to identify.

CMO.com: How far do you think Xerox is in terms of moving from thinking of digital as a channel to existing in a digital world?

Thomassin: We have made a lot of progress. The first thing was making sure that the key blocks in the digital marketing world were there. The second was making sure that when there was already an existing capability, we made it the best. We are also testing a lot—it’s embedded in my team culture, we have a budget aside for that—and if a project fails, we stop—hopefully quickly—learn and move on. Then we started to connect the dots because, in a digital world, you need to be integrated, and you can be, this is good news. The web is the centrepiece of this strategy. Now when we do something, we know why we are doing it and which plan it fits into. Our budget is now predominantly spent on digital.

We still have a lot to do, but my vision is to continue this integration and to move much more in the context of what we have been calling “revenue marketing.” We are aiming at a stage where we are seen almost as another business capability that is contributing to the revenue of the company in a very specific and measurable way.

CMO.com: Could you explain in more detail what you mean by revenue marketing?

Thomassin: I mean being around the table with the sales leaders and being capable of stating that, thanks to marketing, they are (and will be) generating $X million of pipeline that will, in turn, translate into signings; being able to measure the impact of our marketing activities within that integrated plan I just mentioned, and translate that into revenue. That’s the goal. Some of it is easier than others. We can absolutely measure outbound. We can start to measure inbound much more precisely, and then, after that, it’s a question of attribution of the lead—what is the influence of all these different activities on revenue creation? PR? Advertising? Etc. Then doing that on a repeatable basis to the point where we can predict the contribution. You put one dollar in, you can expect X dollars on the other end.

CMO.com: How do you think about personalisation?

Thomassin: We have to do personalisation for two reasons: relevance, and also because of the customer experience that we are after.

The relevance issue is clear. Clients are bombarded by many different things. If we want to make a difference, we have to be absolutely personalised in terms of communication to generate the right level of engagement.

We need to do it because we need to be much more precise at the personal level and customise the content to that person and—on top of that—to what that person does, and how they interact with what we are sending, or with the experience that she or he is getting on the web. Nurturing this contact smartly.

I’m also a strong believer that B2B is on the verge of moving to B2C principles. Customer experience is central; research firm Forrester called it “the age of the customer,” because you and I, as well as the clients, are consumers. Our level of expectations is skyrocketing. The experience with a B2B company is starting to be similar to a B2C one. Acknowledging this and starting to drive strategies in support of this will strengthen the company competitive edge. I am sure.

CMO.com: The other interesting thing is how relationships change within the organisation as it becomes more customer-centric. As the company starts to realise that every customer touch point is a brand-building moment, the CMO has to have oversight or some understanding of what’s going on in every bit of business that touches the customer.

Thomassin: Totally, and it is endless because every touch point of any function of the company becomes an experience. Four years ago I had business units targeting the same clients with different messages. Imagine the brand experience! We solved that. That was the first big step, the second is the customer-facing material and experience through our channel partners and our sales reps.

I started to be very involved in sales enablement, to the point that sales enablement moved in with us. The digital journey of a client doesn’t stop with marketing. It continues when we hand over to the reps. We must look at what’s going on here, as our reps and our channel partners reps are more challenged than they were in the past. Indeed, the client is much more empowered than they were. The reps are under pressure, and we need to help them to take back control of the selling cycle, telling them what the client or the prospect did digitally before they were able to engage and give them the tools to drive the conversation against their own agenda helping the client to solve his or her pain point.

That’s the first big reason. The second is that when the reps are engaged, we need to ensure that what’s happening is also in line with the brand and the positioning of the company. This is very important, so we are looking at the customer-facing documents, we are ensuring that the reps have the right tools in their hands connected to the value proposition and we all speak the same language, consistently.

Same for social selling, where we started a very exciting global programme last year. Same for the briefing centres, for the showrooms, for the inbound calls in the countries, and any natural touch points of that nature. Then we’ll have to go after the other functions. The bill, for example. When we bill our clients, what does it look like? This is the next step.

CMO.com: Does the approach that you’re describing require more people? Or is it working with different types of technologies?

Thomassin: Actually, we are working with fewer people, but with different skill sets. Centralisation, which we discussed earlier on, also helped us to optimise resources—less headcount with very well-defined role and more programme spend. Indeed, we invested in technology, starting with marketing automation, of course, for the Demand Centre, but also brought in software to help us producing dashboards with our ROI metrics and technologies to make our people more effective. New type of people, too, with skill sets unexpected before in a marketing team such as data management or analytics. We have fewer creative designers and more engineers in-house now. A revolution.

CMO.com: What happens to you after the two companies separate?

Thomassin: Who knows (laughing)? At the moment I am helping with the design for both companies, mapping our people, closing the gaps, making sure the skill sets are in the right place, and working on the processes. No time to be bored, and marketing is about constantly adapting to the needs, right?! I tell you it has never been a better time to be in marketing!