Mindy Smith
Global Brand Strategy & Marketing Performance Manager
Jim Williams
Chief Marketing Officer
How do you convince over 30 local markets at one of the largest global energy companies to ditch siloed spreadsheets and custom PowerPoint presentations for marketing planning?
Planning season is intense for Shell. Their Mobility division spends March to October in planning mode with subject matter experts, finance, and operations. Under the hood, there is a powerful marketing planning engine keeping global and local teams aligned. Despite this coordination, Shell Mobility was struggling to keep plans and budgets organized across dozens of disconnected spreadsheets around the world.
Join a conversation with Mindy Smith, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing Performance Manager, as she shares how Shell Mobility overcame the chaos of aligning marketing teams around a unified, aligned, and collaborative planning process.
Key Takeaways:
This session is ideal for marketing leaders, planning managers, and anyone looking to optimize their complex, multi-market planning efforts.
0:07 For those of you who are joining today’s up tempo webinar called Fueling Better Marketing Plans with Shell, welcome.
0:15 Thank you for taking time out of your day.
0:17 And we’re all busy, especially right now, which we’re going to be talking about because it is planning season.
0:25 My name is Jim Williams.
0:26 I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Uptempo.
0:30 For those of you who are unfamiliar with Uptempo, permit me my very short description.
0:36 We are enterprise marketing planning software.
0:40 We provide a platform that allows people to plan better, spend smarter, execute with confidence, and also we provide a lot of best practices around the planning process itself.
0:51 This is particularly timely, of course, because if you’re like well, up tempo and many other businesses, you are entering planning season or if you’re like Shell and you’re one of the largest energy companies in the world, it operates in what, 70 ish countries and 90,000 employees, you are well into your planning process because that’s how it goes at enterprise organization.
1:19 We’re going to hear a lot about that from Mindy Smith, who’s a global brand strategy and marketing performance manager at Shell.
1:27 Before we jump into it and Mindy provides us a quick introduction, I’m going to do the usual housekeeping.
1:34 If you join webinars, I’m sure you’ve heard this before.
1:38 We will be, of course, recording today’s presentation.
1:42 So if you have colleagues, friends, family that want to review this, we will send you the recording and you can share that.
1:48 We encourage you to do that.
1:49 Of course, we will be of course doing Q and AI encourage you to keep track of your questions.
1:58 I think you can enter them in our the Q&A feature here on Zoom or you can just hold them to the end where we will address those as we go.
2:06 So keep those in mind as we go.
2:08 I have been reminded over and over to tell all attendees that we have an exciting giveaway.
2:14 We are giving away the brand new and innovative Airpod 4.
2:20 That’s a special thing to 1 lucky attendee.
2:22 So if you get a call from Up Tempo, make sure you answer it, Pick up the phone because we’re going to be calling a lucky winner.
2:31 Those Airpod fours are pretty cool.
2:33 I was reading about them.
2:34 Awesome noise cancelling technology.
2:36 They even have hearing assist in there.
2:37 So cool stuff.
2:39 I would love to have a set myself.
2:43 Couple other things at the end of this.
2:44 Well, after we do Q&A, we’ll do what we call a backstage pass.
2:49 A lot of times you join these webinars that are sponsored and put on by vendors and you’re kind of left wondering, well, what the what does the vendor do again?
2:57 So what we offer is the Backstage bass if you want to stick it around for 10 minutes.
3:02 After today’s presentation, we’ll actually give you a quick overview of what an enterprise marketing Platinum platform looks like and the benefits of such a platform.
3:11 It’s pretty short, but it’s pretty cool demo and Stephanie will be joining to give that.
3:18 And I think that is everything.
3:20 So let’s just jump right into why are we talking about enterprise marketing planning and the planning process?
3:26 Well, because again, as I said, we’re entering planning season and that is can be a, a frightful period of time for marketers, especially at very large global organizations like Shell.
3:38 Marketers come from a variety of backgrounds like myself.
3:43 I studied super lucrative political science in in university and then kind of found my way and marketing.
3:49 I was never taught how to do planning.
3:51 And usually when you learn about how to do planning, it’s, you’ve got entered, how can you enter the stage of your career where you’re a major budget holder, you’re or you’re running a team or you have some large remit.
4:01 And suddenly it’s like, Oh my gosh, I have to figure out how to plan all this stuff and convince the executive team that I’m going to be as good steward of the marketing budget and hit intended targets and support company strategy.
4:13 And it can be stressful and there’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of eyes on that.
4:17 So we’re going to talk about how to get through that and, and in order to best do that, we’d love to hear from practitioners.
4:24 And Mindy, you’re an excellent example of a practitioner.
4:28 So maybe give a quick introduction and and we’ll roll into this.
4:33 Sure.
4:34 Thank you, Jim.
4:35 Hello everyone.
4:36 My name is Mindy Smith and as Jim already mentioned, I am the global brand strategy and marketing performance Manager for Shell Mobility.
4:45 I have been with Shell for over 20 years in various roles, local global marketing, sales, customer experience, insight.
4:55 Prior to Shell, I had been with a few CPG companies, Kraft Foods and Coca-Cola.
5:02 Currently in my role, I manage a team that manages many different initiatives for the global team and we work very closely with all of the local markets in our direct markets.
5:17 We actually have over 80 markets in shell mobility.
5:22 We are the largest mobility retailer in the world.
5:25 We service around 33 million customers every single day.
5:30 Our marketing planning process, we have a long 1.
5:39 So for us we really kick it off in March of every single year for the following year and then really wrap it up in October.
5:47 But the the critical crunch time is May through first week of October every year.
5:56 And that is really where the peak collaboration between global and local teams happens.
6:03 And that is where insight sessions are held, workshops are held, the key collaboration halls or meetings are held.
6:14 You know, to kind of give you an idea of the scope that we have in shell mobility, we have over 450 up tempo users and every year we have over 1000 unique marketing activities that go into the up tempo tool.
6:32 Yeah.
6:33 So I think I might also mention, you know, in terms of shell mobility, I say that and I assume everybody knows what that is.
6:42 So shell mobility is really the retail part of Shell.
6:45 It is the face of shell to the customers.
6:48 I like to say it is where people go to fuel their cars, charge their EV vehicles, get a car wash, purchase something from our convenience retail shop, whether it’s a beverage, you know, fresh food, something like that.
7:06 For us, we do have a global strategy and what that is one of the key elements of our marketing planning process, right?
7:12 It’s making sure all the markets are focused on the priorities and that everything, every activity, campaign, whatever it is that we spend marketing money on rolls up into our our wider strategy and delivers value.
7:28 I can’t, I can’t even begin to imagine that planning process.
7:33 We’d say 80 different markets, all these different products.
7:37 That’s got to be a challenge and it’s and it’s and it takes a bunch of time.
7:41 You said May through October is your busy season of just getting coordinated.
7:44 There’s a lot of moving parts and I imagine that must come with its share of challenges.
7:49 Can you walk through what some of those challenges look like at a company of your size?
7:55 Now just to clarify, we don’t do our strategic marketing planning process is not for all 80 plus markets.
8:04 We really focus on the 31 direct markets which is still a considerable amount when you think about it.
8:12 But I just wanted to clarify that, you know, our biggest challenge, especially with so many markets and you know, many markets being different, was before we had this process, everyone was using their own method for marketing planning.
8:31 And quite honestly, I think a lot of people were just throwing together an Excel spreadsheet of here’s how I’m going to spend my money, maybe 10 high level lines at the most.
8:41 And that was it.
8:42 There was not a whole lot of detail.
8:44 And the worst part was it didn’t even sync up.
8:47 So that at a global level, there was a view as to, you know, what were there activities lining up to the global strategy, you know, brand managers being able to tell, you know, roll up, for instance, you know, how many markets were going to have a Shelby power campaign next year, for example.
9:07 You cannot just push a button and view that you had to reach out to people in every single market and hope that they responded.
9:16 And then if they did, they’d send you their version of truth.
9:19 And then you would try to take 30 plus different measures of, you know, what their their plans were and try to merge them into one.
9:27 And it was a lot of manual work, not a whole lot of visibility into the details.
9:33 And it created a lot of siloed processes, inconsistent messaging with our campaigns.
9:41 There were data inconsistencies as well.
9:43 I mean, you know, if you’re thinking about it, one of the key elements as marketers that we do is not just execute a good campaign, right?
9:50 We also measure the results.
9:52 We see what worked.
9:53 We see what did not work.
9:55 And if you don’t have the data, you can’t do that and you can’t adjust and learn.
9:59 And, you know, marketing planning more so now than ever before, it’s an agile process.
10:04 It’s not a one and done exercise.
10:07 And so we had to have something that, you know, became, as I like to say, almost like a one stop shop for everyone to do all of this so that we could have good data, a single source of truth and be able to roll things up at a global level.
10:25 All right, I can imagine that is incredibly difficult.
10:29 I mean, everyone using their own process and their own templates and speaking their own language, and then it kind of left up to you to get them all to sync together to see what kind of story that’s telling globally.
10:40 So you’ve done a lot of work, I imagine, to try and sort through this and streamline it.
10:48 Can you share a little bit about the planning planning framework that you’ve been working hard to implement and maybe some of the improvements that that have brought?
10:56 Absolutely.
10:58 You know, I should say many of the process improvements and the strategy started before I came into this role three years ago.
11:09 And it was, you know, so there was a good base there.
11:12 But when I came into this role, the first thing I did was conduct a survey of the global and the local marketing teams, getting their feedback.
11:23 What did they think of the process as it was that, you know, at that time, areas where they felt it could be improved?
11:31 I asked them what their biggest pain points were in the process and that gave me great feedback as to where we were.
11:38 And I think I mentioned earlier, I also had come from a local marketing team as well.
11:43 So I had admittedly some of my own thoughts on how things could have been improved as well.
11:49 And the biggest thing for me was, yes, we need a global process, but we have to give markets more flexibility.
11:59 So I, I, I like to say it’s locally LED, but globally supported.
12:06 And you know, what we’ve built really gives that flexibility to the markets to conduct their, a lot of their market, you know, the marketing planning process in their own time.
12:22 But at the same time, it ensures that they have the support from global, but without being too overbearing or, you know, them feeling like global’s encroaching on their space, if that makes sense.
12:35 And at the same time, it also ensured that local markets, before they even started the process, they were very much aware of what the global priorities are, what creative assets might be available them for them to localize.
12:53 And you know, of course, that that goes back to what I said earlier about driving value.
12:58 Instead of every single market starting from scratch, creating their own assets, creating their own plans, having one central hub for everyone to, you know, see what’s already out there that they might be able to shamelessly steal was a huge improvement, right?
13:15 And again, going back to that, improving the collaboration and making sure things sync up, you know, it was interesting too in that feedback, not surprising.
13:28 I heard from smaller markets that they felt ignored.
13:30 I heard from larger markets, they felt that everyone in global was using the opportunity to fly to their market and crash their planning meetings and get involved and not necessarily provide true value.
13:45 So, you know, it, it was a it was I put, we put a lot of thinking into how do we give enough structure to have that structure and support, but give them that flexibility.
13:58 One of the other things that I discovered was frighteningly enough, sometimes not every market was really using data and insights before they started their plans.
14:10 Going back to, you know, how do you put together plans and know what good looks like if you haven’t even looked back and seen the performance of your past plans?
14:21 So in the structure.
14:23 Yeah, exactly.
14:23 So in the structure we have kind of, I hate to use the word mandatory, but we basically layout for them.
14:30 Hey, you have to integrated insight session and yes, there will be someone from our insights team to help you with that to, to, to provide data and insights.
14:41 And we provided templates for that session as well.
14:44 So that they are even thinking about a SWOT analysis a a pestle.
14:49 What are competitors doing?
14:51 What are, you know, external factors that could be, you know, impacting their business next year, for example, whether it’s economic or weather or any kind of thing like that?
15:03 You know, think about that before you really start putting your plans in place.
15:07 And one of the things that we do is we created a marketing planning playbook.
15:14 And this is basically a CHEAT SHEET for all the local teams of every global asset initiative, even pilots that we might be doing for certain markets that we’re seeing success in that they might be able to, you know, do the same thing shamelessly steal, as I like to say.
15:36 And you know, we, we, we made it very user friendly where cuz it’s, it’s quite extensive.
15:42 It’s over 85 pages, but we included hyperlinks.
15:46 It’s organized in a by category so that they know if they’re looking for example, for and I’ll just say Shell V power assets, again, they can click on that link and go to that section and see every single bit of support that the global team and provide them to help them as they put their plans in place and start developing those assets for those plans.
16:09 You know, and we provide that to them way before they even began their marketing planning work at the local level.
16:17 The other thing that was big that I should say is the subject matter experts in a company this large, obviously you have brand managers for our big brands, you have pricing managers, you have global customer experience experts and you know you would assume that everybody might know everybody, but that’s not a case the case, right and you have new people that start people change roles frequently.
16:44 So the other thing we did is we put a structure in place with those subject matter experts where and it’s even organized I should say by geography so that if there’s someone in Thailand, the local Thailand team for example would like to engage and have a subject matter expert for V Power join their marketing planning workshop.
17:08 We make sure that it’s someone from that V Power team that is located in a geography that’s as close as possible to the same time zone as the Thailand time zone.
17:20 And for those on a global team, you understand the importance of that because I am located in the United States and I have been one that has been on 2:00 AM marketing planning calls in the past.
17:33 And you know, we were trying to eliminate that so that people were available and it was at a convenient time for all.
17:40 So we put a lot of thought into making sure there was that connection and awareness of the subject matter experts for the local team and making sure that the global subject matter understood their role as well.
17:54 So it’s, you know, if I look at this slide that you have up that kind of outlines the process and some of the assets.
18:00 So it’s kind of this tug of war interplay between providing structure and assets.
18:06 You know, it’s awesome.
18:07 Like that playbook almost sounds like, oh, it’s a like it’s almost like a menu.
18:10 I can pick this, this, this, this and I customize it.
18:13 So it’s that, but then at the same time encouraging teams to not just pick a bunch of things and do what happened last year, etcetera, to think a little bit more using the market insights and subject matter experts and everything else, right, kind of that, that delicate balance and come up with the right plan.
18:29 Absolutely.
18:30 In fact, the timeline that you’re showing now is very high level.
18:34 We have a more detailed 1 and I decided not to shirt because it would probably make people’s head spins.
18:41 It is that detailed.
18:43 But this gives you a flavor for how we organize things in our marketing planning process.
18:49 It’s great.
18:51 It’s a very detailed and look, a lot of this what I’m seeing is, OK, so you’re an energy company and you have certain markets and certain products, but the structure and the framework you put in place is widely applicable to any very large enterprise organization, right.
19:05 Trying to maintain that delicate balance and inject expertise and subject matter experts and templates and programs and and all of that.
19:13 I think is it’s a it’s pretty profound the changes that you guys have brought in.
19:19 Yeah.
19:19 You know, and one of the things that was important to me too is coming from a local market.
19:25 OK, this is great.
19:26 You put together this structure.
19:27 I’m very aware of the due dates and what I as a local marketer need to do.
19:33 But the other thing is, you know, and we run into this quite often is especially if you have someone new, especially new to the company.
19:40 I mean, shoot, just learning the acronyms takes over a year, right, right.
19:45 You know, we wanted to inspire people to think different also differently also and feel part of a community where they do feel empowered to ask for help and to think about different ideas, right at, you know, in the, in the planning process, no bad and no idea is a bad idea yet, right?
20:04 Let’s let’s think about this and talk through it.
20:06 And so my team also hosts during the May July process.
20:12 We called it external inspirations and best practice calls that also we had guests from outside other companies.
20:20 Outside of Shell, join and talk about things that they did to drive better brand awareness or whatever KPIs or priorities that we had.
20:31 We also would feature in our best practice calls markets that we felt didn’t really fantastic job the year before and in the current year they have the same plan to share how they organize themselves and how they make the process run as free as possible for them.
20:50 And again that is that is other markets presenting to the rest of the markets.
20:54 That is not me telling them what to do.
20:57 That is, you know, so there’s a little bit of credibility there where it’s not just coming from the global team and you know, could potentially be interpreted as, oh, here’s global telling us what to do again.
21:08 So it creates that collaborative marketing community.
21:13 That’s excellent.
21:14 Well, I love the fact you bring in outside books from different businesses this year.
21:17 It’s like you’re putting on a regular planned camp here basically, you know, it’s awesome.
21:24 All right, So really focus on, you know, you templates you provided expertise outside of vice best practices.
21:34 I’d love to talk a little bit about how automation has has featured in this planning process.
21:41 How is it streamline the whole process?
21:44 What efficiencies is it provided to you?
21:45 Can you tell me a little bit about that?
21:48 Oh, that is a big one for me.
21:51 Again, this could sound cumbersome, right?
21:55 If you look at that, that calendar and especially the detailed one that I didn’t want very too detailed almost, you know, for me, automation was key, right?
22:07 We’ve, we’ve got to do things quicker, faster, more agile, more efficient.
22:12 But you know, PowerPoint templates and everything else, that’s still a lot of work.
22:17 And then having to do that every single year and get everybody’s input.
22:21 So you know, one of the things that we worked with your team Jim on was really putting a lot of that automation into the Uptempo tool.
22:32 So we built in alerts for those key dates that you saw on the the slide that you shared earlier in the planning process in Uptempo so that we’re not having to chase all the different people from all the different markets.
22:47 They get that alert automatically from Uptempo.
22:51 That’s a time saver for my team.
22:53 Plus it’s a nice reminder for them.
22:55 That’s just an automatic reminder versus them feeling like someone from Global is chasing them, right?
23:01 Yeah.
23:02 And I mentioned earlier about people using different templates and excels in the beginning.
23:07 Even when we created one template that everyone was supposed to use years ago, guess what?
23:15 A lot of the markets didn’t use it.
23:17 They liked their own template.
23:18 They already had slides created.
23:21 So it was easier for them, which I understand because selfishly, I was one of the ones that kind of used my own slides sometimes for my submissions.
23:29 So by building those templates in up tempo, everybody’s using the same template, right?
23:36 And one of the big pieces that I just absolutely love is once they put their information in the tool that’s in up tempo, they can press 1 button and get a plan on a page just by pressing 1 button.
23:52 And going back to what I said at the beginning of the call where, you know, if my executive team or, you know, brand manager came and said, hey, So what are the, what does it look like, you know, for Shelby power next year?
24:05 What are the markets doing?
24:06 And you know what, what are the details?
24:09 And instead of having to go through all these different power point in Excel templates, I can go into up tempo.
24:16 I can export the data and slice it and dice it any way I want to get those high level summaries of how much they’re planning to spend, what time periods seem to be the biggest ones that they’re, you know, going to launch their campaigns and I can get that data for them very quickly.
24:36 That’s a huge value, right?
24:38 That’s time saving now for other teams, not just mine.
24:42 And then the other thing that my team did as well is in up tempo when we first the first year that we had these templates built into the tool, we did the labor to go ahead and put their previous year’s templates.
24:58 We translated that into the tool and created a copy paste function so that they could take the previous year’s information and templates and copy them into the current years, You know, planning now that’s a little bit dangerous.
25:16 So one of the things we also put is they can’t just copy paste and submit, right?
25:21 So there are some checkpoints where they, you know, they go in, they adjust, they have to confirm that they have made their changes for the current calendar year and then they actually have to click submit to send them.
25:36 So it’s, it’s not like they could just copy and paste and that’s it because we don’t want them doing that again.
25:42 You need to look back, see see how things went, make adjustments and our priorities could also have shifted, right.
25:48 You know, there could be some new priorities for the next year that weren’t incorporated into the prior year’s plans.
25:56 And the feedback that I received from the markets was just tremendous.
26:01 Obviously some growing pains the first year because everybody’s getting used to the new method of doing things inside up tempo.
26:09 But for us, moving forward, they see the value, they see how much time it’s going to save them.
26:17 And it also becomes the marketing record because, you know, as people either leave the company or they move to a different division, new role, a lot of times those external PowerPoints would get lost.
26:29 People couldn’t find them, they weren’t on the SharePoint anymore.
26:33 And so now you have everything in record in up tempo so that the new team that comes in has immediate access.
26:42 Interesting.
26:43 So is that once those templates are in, they sign, sign in, blood, hit the submit, etcetera and going back to adjust those, you talked about how planning is an agile process, etcetera.
26:57 Are they going back regularly or is there scheduled intervals?
27:00 Were they?
27:01 So you know what, I should probably clarify something.
27:04 So I’ve been talking about the strategic marketing template.
27:08 So those are the templates that come out of those workshops and insight sessions and those are high level.
27:14 And if you know on the timeline you showed earlier, that’s what’s due in August.
27:19 Now the phase, the most important phase in my opinion, now where we are now is they have to have their detailed budgets and spends with their specific activities and line items in up tempo by the first week of October.
27:40 And so going to your question, that is where, you know, the rubber hits the road because the high level, yes, it’s, it’s, it’s not specific.
27:50 We’re going to spend X amount on radio and TV at that level.
27:56 It’s just we’re going to have this much for media focusing on radio, TV and out of home, for example.
28:04 And then for, you know, this priority, we’re going to do this now, what they’re doing right now is putting the line by line exactly how much they’re going to spend with the exact dates into up tempo.
28:21 And yes, they do go in and they do update those.
28:23 So you know, going back to automation, my goal three years ago was to make up tempo really the one stop shop because how many of us have five different tools we have to go into for different things, whether it’s budgeting or planning or project management tools, all sorts of things.
28:47 I wish it was just 5, right?
28:48 Like 5.
28:49 I know I was being generous.
28:51 So what we’ve done is we’ve tried to integrate as and put as much of it as we can into up tempo.
28:57 So we really use up tempo for marketing planning, for our actual budget planning.
29:03 We also it’s where we now create our PO requests, it’s where we have our accruals put in and that’s a monthly process.
29:14 So to answer your question about how often do we tell them?
29:17 Now I can recommend all day long that they should go in every single day, every single week.
29:23 But we all know people have their own timelines and their own priorities.
29:27 But with things being built in the way we have it, every marketer, marketer goes in, I guarantee you at least every two weeks they have to, right?
29:37 You have to kind of see where you are with the the spends and the results and you have to be able to adjust for the rest of the year based on those results.
29:49 I’m going to so let’s just throw a curveball question because I’m curious like tell me about the the role of planners versus finance is finance and like how what is finance’s involvement with with the planning tool?
30:05 That’s a great question.
30:07 So, you know, I refer to up Tempo as a one stop shop for the marketing teams in the beginning.
30:16 It was before we did all of these enhancements and automation improvements.
30:21 It really was just a simple budgeting tool and we were still trying to get all the markets to start using this.
30:28 I’m, you know, I’m going back here about five years.
30:33 We do have that now.
30:35 And the other goal I had three years ago was, you know, finance at the time was still really focused on SAP.
30:42 That was their source of truth in terms of, you know, what was actually being spent.
30:48 But we were very collaborative with the finance team to show them, well, wouldn’t it be great instead of you all chasing down every single market to find out what their, you know, latest estimate is every single month, every single quarter, you can, we can give you access to the tool and you can start going in and looking at it yourself.
31:12 How about that?
31:13 And you know what it, you know, presenting it to them in a way that hey, this benefits you because you can go into the tool now instead of having to reach out to 50 plus people.
31:24 You know, that was a huge win for them.
31:26 So yes, finance is also using the tool.
31:29 I mean, admittedly they still use SAP as well because for them that is ultimately what their system is.
31:36 But this really helps them to understand what the estimates are.
31:41 The big the, you know sometimes you have those big hockey sticks and spending as you know in certain times of the year.
31:48 So they can see that well in advance and use that for their phasing.
31:53 Interesting, Has it have you seen improvements in like forecast accuracy in, in terms of their relationship between what marketers are saying and what finance is expecting is?
32:04 Yes, absolutely.
32:05 We have you know, and it goes back to something I say to the marketers all the time, you know, it’s as good date, you know, data in, data out, it’s as good as what you put in.
32:16 So make sure it’s good and make sure you’re keeping it updated because what you don’t want to happen is you don’t put things in an update.
32:23 And yes, someone, whether it’s finance or someone from global team or the executive executive team goes in and something looks really off, Guess what?
32:34 You’re going to be getting a phone call.
32:35 And I don’t think you necessarily want that phone call from some people.
32:40 Those have never been pleasant calls in my experience.
32:42 Yeah, but it’s a delicate balance, right?
32:44 Because again, you also don’t want to feel.
32:47 You don’t want a local market feeling like Big Brother is watching.
32:50 So again, it’s all about communicating the benefits and the value to them.
32:58 Is that a big part of kind of your role is kind of this almost stakeholder management type of thing, You know, the collaboration and communication because I imagine that you’re a brand manager, you want one thing, you’re finance, you want something, you’re a regional marketer, you want something like that.
33:13 Must be a challenging role for you to balance all of those competing demands.
33:18 Yes, absolutely it is.
33:21 And, you know, there is credibility when I raise my hand and say, I used to be on the local marketing team.
33:30 And you know what, this drove me crazy.
33:32 This is why I changed it.
33:34 And This is why we have the process we have now, because it’s, it’s to help you.
33:38 It’s to empower you.
33:39 Because ultimately the local teams really do have the power.
33:43 They’re the ones that are, you know, driving the campaigns, creating the strategy that works best for their market, but that rolls up to the overall company strategy.
33:53 OK, it’s amazing.
33:55 It’s obviously a quite a transformation that you’ve been driving there at Shell with your colleagues and everything else.
34:02 I’m sure it’s a team effort etcetera, but it’s pretty amazing.
34:05 You just think of the size and scope and complexity of an organization like Shell, you know some of the process that you put in place.
34:13 So I, I’ve just talked all your time with all of my questions and there are other folks that I’m sure want to ask some questions as well.
34:23 So if it’s all right, we’ll go to the Q&A section.
34:26 And remember, like it’s easiest just use the Q&A feature in the Zoom interface to ask any question you might have of Mindy.
34:36 There are a few to kind of get us started.
34:39 We talked about stakeholder management a bit and let me just press on that a little bit more like tell us about like what other techniques do you use to get buy in from various teams around some of these changes to the process.
34:54 You know, you talked about using different templates, the easy copy, but not too much copy etcetera.
34:59 Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
35:03 Yes, you know, I, I started with the survey.
35:08 I mentioned that earlier and that besides giving me great feedback and understanding some of the pain points and the things that weren’t working, the other thing it did was it created leverage for me, right?
35:23 Because then I could use that data, going back to utilizing data, I could use that data with key stakeholders to say, see, we’re making this change because people asked for it.
35:34 This is what the markets have said will help them and, and free up their time and make things more efficient.
35:41 The other thing is, you know, showing that value, literally putting a, a number on it in terms of number of hours saved.
35:51 I think I had, I had done a calculation where with the three-year road map of all the enhancements and automation, it was something, I think it was over 300 hours of saved time between global and local teams.
36:10 By not having all that manual work now and having everything in one place in the tool and having things linked, that’s amazing.
36:20 Care to put a number on that?
36:21 No.
36:23 Well, I did.
36:23 It was over 300.
36:24 And then, yeah, I got hours.
36:26 Yeah.
36:27 So that’s, it’s a lot of things inefficiencies, it’s pretty incredible.
36:31 And also I I missed my queue.
36:32 So just for those of you in the audience that are wondering what is this slide they got put up.
36:37 Obviously I talked about Tempo as a planning platform for enterprise marketing and finance teams.
36:44 We also offer quite a bit of expertise that I mentioned.
36:49 And an example of that is the blueprint for marketing planning.
36:52 I would encourage you, there’s a QR code right on the screen, but if you want to get a blueprint, much like you know what Mindy has done at Shell, she put together a blueprint and resource.
37:03 So we’ve done that more generically for many different types of organizations and different industries.
37:08 I would encourage you to go check out the Blueprint for marketing Planning.
37:11 It’s free, it’s easy to download, you don’t even have to fill out a form.
37:14 I think I might be saying that wrong, but it’s right on our website.
37:18 And as part of that, we’re doing a series of planning workshops over the course of October and into November with a partner in Verda.
37:28 So I’ll be really excited to do that.
37:30 Those are right on the blueprint page.
37:32 You can see what the dates are for that.
37:33 So check that out, download the document, read it, and then join the workshops to hone your skills around plan.
37:41 But let me continue with the Q and AI.
37:44 Actually have some couple of interesting ones here from folks on the line, a great one from Jennifer who asks how would you recommend a business starts this evolution while they’re still in the the Excel files?
38:05 Yes, great question.
38:07 It, it, it, it’s really about change management, I think, right, If I’m understand well, there are two aspects that I see with that question.
38:15 The one is how do you get all the stakeholders aligned?
38:19 That can be the biggest challenge, quite honestly.
38:21 I mean, you can put your templates together and have a great framework and structure, you know, maybe even starting with your blueprint for marketing planning, Jim, but ultimately you’ve, you, it’s only great if people are using it and you’ve really got to get that stakeholder management and & off.
38:40 So, you know, I think making the case for change with the right stakeholders make it meaningful for them again, whether it’s, you know, the hour saved or even driving value.
38:52 I think I used the example earlier of, you know, when you have many different markets, if they’re starting from scratch and creating their own creative and their own campaigns without any support, there is a lot of efficiency and scale with global companies such as ours, right?
39:11 So if we have global assets that they can just quickly localize for very low cost, that’s a huge value driver there.
39:18 And then when you have an executive team that is wanting to know, you know, exactly how much money globally we are spending on a specific campaign or a specific brand or whatever that KPI might be for your business, having that information at the touch of a button in one place is, is huge.
39:40 So, you know, aligning with the stakeholders, making sure that of expectations as well, right?
39:47 You know, marketing planning, it’s not going to cure every issue that marketing might have in global and local dynamics, but you know what it does increase that visibility in that collaboration.
39:58 You know, the other thing that I did was I.
40:03 You know, you have, you’ll always have the naysayers and then you’ll always have your supporters.
40:07 Make sure you have your supporters who are also advocating for the change that you want to make, especially if you know they’re in the same market or on the same team as the naysayers, right?
40:20 So then they, they’re hearing it from someone beside yourself, They’re hearing it from someone that they work with on a daily basis.
40:27 And the other thing I would say is communicate frequently and, and, and, and communicate in a way you probably picked up on the fact that I said things a certain way about we don’t want this to come be.
40:41 We didn’t want the local markets to feel that global was shoving this down on it, right?
40:45 So, so everything was a team effort.
40:48 And you know, we are here to support, you know, you know, let us know what help you need from us without saying you, you know, you must do this.
40:58 We try not to do that.
40:59 It’s a little bit of it’s more carrot than stick, as I sometimes say, right, right, because force meets force in, in those types of situations, right?
41:08 Absolutely.
41:09 2X.
41:10 Can I double click on some of your comments there around this question Jennifer asked.
41:14 So you know, a lot of times motivation, you know, you said get stakeholder alignment, stakeholder back.
41:19 And a lot of times that motivation comes from like pain, frankly.
41:23 How do you how do you convince, say executives that they’re looking for visibility, but how do you convince them that the lack of visibility has a business impact, a measurable business impact?
41:36 You know, you talk about 300 hours, but sometimes executives are like hours and those aren’t my hours, you know, like what, what techniques do you use to kind of build that business?
41:45 Yeah, Well, so I’ll, I’ll follow up with the example I just, I just mentioned, you know, talking about because in my instance, I I think I mentioned earlier we were using up tempo just for really budgeting in the beginning.
42:01 But because of that, I could go in and I could see just how much every market was spending on what we call non working activities, right.
42:14 So I’ll give you an example of that, an agency fee and shockingly there were some markets that were spending over 40% of their total annual marketing budget on what we call consider non working activities.
42:35 You want to get the biggest bang for your buck, right?
42:38 You’d rather spend more money on the actual media buy or the, you know, sponsorship activation, whatever it might be, because that’s ultimately what goes what the customers see and that’s what drives drives business growth.
42:53 You don’t want to spend it behind the scenes just, you know, paying agencies.
42:57 So for me that was a big piece of that too is again, and I mentioned earlier, also aligning with the overall company strategy.
43:07 A lot of times, especially in a large company, you get down to a local level and again, everything’s a balance, local and global.
43:17 But at the same time, nobody should be doing anything that does not roll up to our overall strategy and our KPIs, right?
43:26 You have some unique local needs and they could have their own unique KPIs, but ultimately everything should match what our overall global strategy and objectives are.
43:41 So you really have to drive that home and and use the data you have.
43:46 That’s what we did.
43:48 That’s great.
43:49 And then you started to talk about this, but maybe you can expand on it because we have another question from Kristen in the audience that talks about whether the adoption of a tempo and the frameworks and templates and best practices.
44:04 Do you think that has improved alignment between global strategy and local?
44:08 And how do you, how do you measure that improvement?
44:12 You know, like how do you know, which is difficult, right, because you don’t have local control, but at at the same time local activities that are supporting the overall global strategy.
44:21 How do you, how do you kind of keep your finger on the pulse there?
44:25 Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question.
44:28 So we we had the template.
44:33 So we created the framework and had the templates in a PowerPoint form before we ever integrated them into up tempo.
44:44 I think I mentioned earlier, the first year we did that though, we saw that half the markets didn’t even use the template that we told them they really needed to use.
44:52 They still use their own.
44:56 But yeah, but for us, you know, having that integration, yes, it again, the purpose of the templates is not to pound our fist necessarily and say this is what you need to do, blah, blah, blah.
45:17 They’re they’re, they’re detailed enough.
45:20 It starts the thinking right?
45:22 And it, it, it, the templates line up with our priority.
45:26 So going back to that global and local so, but you know, it asks them for each of the key priorities.
45:35 What are your plans in these areas?
45:37 Now, we’re not asking them to necessarily in those high level templates, you know, put every little detail that goes in later, but during those those workshops and that peak planning time and insights time from May to August, especially it just even looking at the templates forces them to start thinking about that right.
45:58 And going back to the important role of a subject matter expert, which is usually a global brand manager or a customer experience manager or operations, whatever that might be.
46:11 It’s a two way St.
46:13 So we put the framework in place.
46:15 We connected people so that they knew, you know, everyone was aware who were the SMEs for each market and the market knew who their SMEs were.
46:23 Now we said to the local markets, you know, we’re not going to insist that every SME get involved in your workshops and in your plans, but you should align with what they have or what they’re working on that you can use.
46:43 And in some of those best practice sharing calls that I mentioned earlier, a lot of times we would use that opportunity for the local team to talk about how they had collaborated with, for example, the global Shelby Power brand manager and oh, guess what?
46:59 They were able to help us with creative that they funded that we just had to localize and you could almost see some of the marketeers on the call from local markets go, oh, I wonder if they could do that for us.
47:15 You know, that would be really helpful.
47:17 That would so it you know, it’s that kind of of of interaction.
47:22 I don’t know if that completely answered the question or not was no, I think I think very much so.
47:27 I think that speaks right to the idea of alignment, especially with all the resources.
47:31 You know, it’s kind of like a early warning indicator.
47:33 You put all these resources out to help drive that alignment and no one’s taking advantage of them.
47:37 It’s like what’s going on there?
47:39 Well, and quite honestly, we did have that the first year that I, I, I put that together, I do the survey every year, by the way, right.
47:47 That’s a continuous learn and improve.
47:50 And the first year I did that with the SMEs.
47:52 I did get feedback from SMEs that they said they weren’t clear on what they were supposed to do.
47:59 And oh, we weren’t sure if we were just supposed to reach out to every single market or if they were supposed to come to us.
48:04 We weren’t, we weren’t sure.
48:05 And then we heard from markets.
48:07 Well, we never heard from our subject matter expert like no, we didn’t.
48:12 We didn’t Even so even though we had provided the materials and even though we had communicated it, you know how it is some right, you know, some people still miss the message.
48:20 So for us that gave us an opportunity to be very clear.
48:24 And what we did the next year was I organized a call specifically for the subject matter experts and I walked them through this is, you know, these are the roles and responsibilities.
48:37 No, we do not expect you to fly over or dial in for every single market’s calls.
48:43 In fact, we’ve tried to break it up by geography so that it’s not consuming all of your time.
48:48 We realize everybody has a day job as well.
48:51 So you’re really just there to support.
48:53 Now, if there is a key market that for you is part of your brand strategy, KPI pilot, whatever you’re doing well, then obviously you should probably reach out to that team and make sure that you all are aligned so that you know what you’re working on for their market.
49:14 You know you’re, you’re everyone’s aware and working together.
49:18 On the same token, we had calls with the local markets.
49:23 I had one kick off call that I do every March where that is where we make sure that the local markets are aware of.
49:32 Here’s the timing, here’s the process, here are the SMEs.
49:35 Again, here are the roles and responsibilities.
49:37 So don’t just sit back and expect people from the global team to just pound knock on your door.
49:46 We have told them because you have told us that you felt overwhelmed by all the global in the past.
49:51 So we’ve told them to, you know, let you invite them in and use them as needed.
49:58 So being very clear on if you need help, ask for it, right?
50:03 Very good, very good.
50:06 I know it’s going to stress Stephanie out because trying to ask her to give a demo in 10 minutes is challenging enough, but there’s such, there’s another good question just has to be answered.
50:14 But so I just, I’m going to go with one more.
50:16 There’s a question here from Valentina around the process, this process and how it relates to aligning partners, agencies and distributors.
50:26 If you work with them, like what is the role there?
50:28 How do you get them involved in this process?
50:31 And how does up tempo support that, if at all?
50:35 Yes, that is a very good question.
50:39 Gosh, I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer because that really varies by market.
50:44 But one thing I will say is the markets that in my opinion have done the best job of this are the ones that bring some of those key people in sooner rather than later.
51:02 Now ultimately we do recommend in the beginning that you, you know, you start kind of thinking about your strategy, you’re doing your look backs and part of that look back might I say is including with your agencies and suppliers, right?
51:18 They should be helping you with this, whether it’s your media agency of, you know, what worked well last year, what gave you the the highest number of impressions, what was the biggest cost, you know, that sort of thing.
51:31 And I apologize, I think my camera just stopped working.
51:35 I’m trying to get it going, but I’ll keep talking.
51:39 And at the same time, you know, bringing them in at the right moment.
51:47 So what most of our markets do is during that key period, May through August, it’s really their team and their stakeholders, whether it’s operations, finance, customer experience, team, whatever.
52:02 And then when they get into the really detailed level plans that they’re going to put into up tempo, those activity by activity, line by line, that’s really where they have the agency engagements and all the other engagements before they finalize and put those numbers into the up tempo tool.
52:25 OK.
52:25 All right.
52:27 Got it.
52:27 So it’s still, it’s still the shell marketers that are using the tool to put plans and agencies never submit into that, but they will take input from the agencies in order to make those plans, correct, Correct.
52:40 OK, it’s good.
52:41 It’s really insightful and I’m glad that we take the time to answer that question because the agencies are a big part of this process.
52:48 But with that, you mean it’s been a fantastic conversation.
52:53 And I’m going to turn it over to what we call the backstage pass, which is always entertaining because Stephanie is so good at this.
53:00 Stephanie, maybe give us a quick walk through of what an enterprise marketing planning platform does what it looks like.
53:09 Happy to.
53:09 So let’s talk up tempo.
53:12 And I assume that everyone can see my screen, so I’m going to get going here.
53:17 Now up tempo planning is simple.
53:20 It is a one stop shop for planning and budgeting.
53:23 Where we’re going to start with is that planning environment here in what we call activity plans, which is a calendar view of our go to market plans.
53:31 So we think about building out those plans.
53:33 They can be built in a format that aligns with how each unique organization thinks about planning.
53:39 As I expand out one of my examples here, we’re just going to go on down here and build this out.
53:46 It’s a hierarchy, so plans are built in a nested format.
53:50 It’s flexible to accommodate the different needs for marketing.
53:53 Now, as marketers are building out their plans, they can create different initiatives, different campaigns and programs, down to the individual tactics and the activations underneath.
54:05 And that’s where they’re collecting relevant data.
54:07 If I open up an example, they’re collecting the relevant data that was once captured in disconnected tools like PowerPoint and Excel.
54:17 Now, what marketing can do here is they could narrow their focus.
54:20 They can go down to the individual days of the week in their plans.
54:25 They can also zoom out for a full view of their year.
54:29 And so as marketers are getting ready for next year’s planning, their prior year plans can be easily brought forward, copied and brought forward for editing.
54:39 Now let’s talk about some plan data in here because that’s all going to be relevant.
54:44 Those plans to collect data such as you know we’re capturing our segmentation, our targeting data.
54:52 What they can also do is tell us how marketing’s activities are consuming the budget.
54:58 So during planning what marketing can do is they can indicate what they anticipate the cost will be.
55:05 What’s also powerful, and this speaks on the theme of automation, think integrations with a connection to the back office system, let’s say.
55:15 I want to see more details around this line item for collateral.
55:18 Let’s take a look.
55:21 From here, the marketers can see the details of the costs be taken to another workspace, which is what we call an investment plan.
55:28 Separate from those activity plans.
55:30 This is where marketers can manage the plans at a level where they want to track the costs.
55:36 So this is where they can do things like let’s say, get detailed information about those invoices or those POS as they flow in.
55:47 This is also where marketing can initiate the PO process, truly making it a one stop shop, enabling always on reconciliation.
55:56 Now, any data that’s captured in an investment plan, any data that’s captured within our activity plans, there are a number of things that we can do with that one.
56:09 Let’s actually bring an example to life.
56:12 We’ve aggregated all this data.
56:13 We need to be able to export it in a format that’s consumable to broader audiences based on the plan structure.
56:22 This is another example.
56:24 We have the ability to export what is in up tempo into a custom PowerPoint deck.
56:30 So let’s go ahead and do that real quick now.
56:33 What I hear have here is a strategic plan example similar to what Mindy has been talking about, but this can be set up for any planning scenario.
56:42 Think all of the plan attributes, all of the data that marketing has been inputting, Everything can be done in your branding, your format, and it’s all automated with a very simple click of a button.
56:57 So kind of really quick on that theme of automation out of the plan.
57:02 We can orchestrate any data to downstream systems, not here to death by PowerPoint you, but just to flash this up here as an example, we can send data from up tempo to any of these systems.
57:15 We can make sure that we have information coming back about what’s happening in other places.
57:19 Think like bringing back invoice data, bringing back campaign canvas and response data from ACRM or a marketing automation platform.
57:26 Think like your sales forces, your Eliquis, your marketos.
57:30 Let’s get out of that.
57:34 So let’s talk about that example there with an integration to Salesforce.
57:39 Let me go back to my event shared example.
57:43 Marketing can compare their anticipated revenue against the actual performance.
57:52 So what marketing can do is they can predict the revenue that they expect to realize as a result of their efforts.
57:58 Now this is all powered by a revenue model that sits on the back end.
58:02 It’s configured uniquely for each business so that marketing can compare to those actual results using this data to make informed decisions like where should they ship their investments.
58:15 So let’s give bring that example to life real quick.
58:17 And I know we’re coming up on the end, but we’re almost there.
58:21 So let’s talk about that example.
58:22 Remember all of those attributes that we’re collecting?
58:26 Let’s go back here.
58:27 All of these attributes here, those attributes are powerful in that they enable us to pivot our plans by any of these dimensions.
58:36 So let’s say marketing wants to understand how their tactics are performing by target persona.
58:43 Let’s see tactics.
58:49 See all of our, let’s actually just see all of our tactics and let’s group them by target persona.
59:01 So our plans are still there.
59:02 We simply cut out a lot of the noise and let’s shift that from a calendar view into a very simple grid view.
59:08 So my filtering has persisted, it’s got my grouping.
59:12 And now what I can do as a marketer is see what have I got by my cost?
59:17 What about my plan ROI?
59:20 What about my actual revenue and then be able to stack rank that.
59:24 So then they can make those informed decisions where maybe where should we defund certain tactics?
59:29 Where should we provide that newly available funding?
59:34 And lastly, because Tempo is that connective glue between your systems, we can aggregate and visualize the data, pull up an example here in meaningful dashboards and reports.
59:50 These dashboards and reports can be built for different audiences.
59:53 Think reports for our investments, reports geared towards the finance lead, reports focused on ROI, maybe ACMO specific dashboard and all of the reports, all that segmentation is brought into the reports being able to see by the different dimensions that matter to your organization.
1:00:12 And so with that.
1:00:13 I know we’re at time, I’d love to show, I’m happy to meet with anyone one-on-one to give you a more detailed view of up tempo, but I also want to be mindful of our calendars and thank and thank you for your time.
1:00:25 Jim, back over to you.
1:00:27 Thank you, Stephanie.
1:00:28 I was the one who was not mindful of time.
1:00:30 So I appreciate you giving a 9 minute quick overview of an enterprise marketing platform, no simple task, great overview of what a planning system of record looks like.
1:00:42 All right, so we create all these plans, they’re in PowerPoint and spreadsheets.
1:00:45 If you got it into a system where you can have that ongoing visibility across the whole organization and then visibility into not just activities by timeline, but really interesting as you were talking about, Mindy, if you want to see what the plan is by certain brands, by products, by regions, by personas, you can get that view and always answer the questions.
1:01:05 Always seems as a new question coming out of left field.
1:01:07 If someone wants a view of the plan specific to some attribute that’s enabled in the up tempo platform.
1:01:14 So with that, I know it’s one O 2.
1:01:15 Many of you have stayed on for the for the whole webinar 2 minutes over.
1:01:19 Really, really appreciate it.
1:01:21 I’d like to make a special thank you, of course, to Mindy.
1:01:24 Thank you for taking time out of your extremely busy time frame right now.
1:01:29 You talked about I he’s like, oh, right through October is our busiest time and it is September 25th.
1:01:35 So thank you.
1:01:36 Thank you.
1:01:36 This was incredibly informative.
1:01:38 We really appreciate it.
1:01:40 Thank you, Jim.
1:01:41 Yeah, no, it’s exciting.
1:01:42 And watching all the in the demo is like, oh, I do that, I do that.
1:01:46 It’s great.
1:01:48 Thank you.
1:01:49 We appreciate it.
1:01:50 Again, I encourage you to download the blueprint, sign up for the workshop series, and if you get a call from Up Tempo, pick it up.
1:01:57 You might just get a new set of Airpods 4.
1:02:02 Thank you everyone.
1:02:02 Have a great afternoon.
1:02:06 Thank you.
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