Home » Seismic’s New Head Of Marketing APAC Is On A Mission For Sales And Marketing Alignment

22 November, 2021

Seismic’s New Head Of Marketing APAC Is On A Mission For Sales And Marketing Alignment

Seismic’s new head of marketing APAC, Simon Hickox (featured image), wants to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

Hickox joins Seismic from Telstra, where he was the marketing director, and he previously worked at UBS.

With a wealth of experience behind him, Hickox realises the tension that can exist between sales and marketing teams and wants to solve it.

“Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, many of these companies find the marketing and sales units are generally at each other’s throats when the pressure is on,” Hickox said.

According to Hickox, there are four main things marketers need to learn to enable a tight and productive alignment between sales and marketing.

Make your salespeople ‘smarter’ – keeping them up to date on the marketing team, and/or procuring data and insight on customers and markets.
Own overlapping goals and metrics to get skin in the game. Not enough marketers can effectively hand over the baton to sales.
When it comes to content, quality must trump quantity – Forrester notes only 35% of content created by B2B organisations is actively used – that’s 65% of effort wasted. That makes it critical to ‘craft the message’ alongside sales, rather than discovering that strategies and assets are ineffective when they get to market.
Marketers should sit in the shoes of the seller to understand the pressures of having a dollar target.

On the last point, Hickox expands: “If you sit with sales you actually learn through osmosis all the time. So you, you can learn on the game, you can hear through what’s going on.”

Some of Hickox’s other concerns going forward include keeping things simple, particularly as marketers are renowned for over-engineering.

He also emphasised the importance of continuous development in people’s digital skills.

Hickox says this is critical as the next wave of B2B technology comes to local markets.

Going forward Hickox said: “Come next year all businesses are going to be starting on the same foot and it’s going to be really interesting because we’re all rebuilding and everyone’s going after it.

“I think marketers are at the front end of making sure that they drive the growth and you want to make sure they do that, hand in hand with the sellers.”

Hickox started the position with Seismic earlier month and will be based in Sydney while working with brand marketing and demand generation teams within Seismic globally.

Advertise with us

Please login with linkedin to comment

Seismic Simon Hickox