CFO and CCO unite: Driving growth through collaboration

Jon Busby: Welcome to another episode of Podcast. I'm very pleased to e joined by one of our guests from last year's Masters of B2B. Jeff Lowe from SMART technologies. And this time I'm really excited to be joined by his CFO Roula Nasser. So Roula, it's a pleasure to have you on the tech marketing podcast.

Roula Nasser: Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Jon Busby: Jeff, it's a pleasure to have you back. Yeah, I enjoyed it last year. So yeah we talked a lot about the changes you'd made at SMART with UCE. Obviously this has been a very disruptive year for everyone, not just in the economy, and I'm sure we're going to come onto that in a moment, but also in technology.

What's changed, Jeff, for the UCE over the last year?

Jeff Lowe: I would say that in general nothing has changed, but it's evolving. It's always changing in a small way. The the vision and the concept behind it has not changed. We're very happy with it. It's really working overall. And the concept of not having any silos and having marketing sales and customer adoption and support altogether in pods is something that we still fully believe in.

Now, having said that, we're never done and we're never really satisfied and it's far from perfect. We're always learning. The vision and concept hasn't changed, but we're tuning. One of the things we just recently did was we're always trying to simplify it. I would say simple is hard.

Even though we have this construct and there's no silos, we're a channel organization. And so we get into these discussions on who's the customer. It's a pretty simple question. But is the customer of the channel? Because they're the ones that are actually buying from us. Or is the customer of the, And user who is using the SMART boards and in a lot of ways it's semantics because they both are but there when you have that multi tiered way of going to market, you do have some confusion on who talks to the channel and who talks to the end user.

And do you have I'm the channel rep and I'm the end user rep. And so we've recently simplified around that to say we're all representing SMART technologies and we should be fluid. If we're talking in the morning to one of our channel partners or distribution and going to a big school district in the afternoon.

So that that's not really what marketing sales silos, that's more about going to market in a multi tier channel environment.

Jon Busby: Actually it's a really interesting point because I see. to a lot of channel marketing together. One question that comes up very frequently is where does channel report into?

Like sometimes it reports into sales, sometimes it reports into marketing, sometimes it's its own thing. Whilst of course you've broken down those silos anyway, so if you were to put it in one bucket, like where does it sit as part of the UC model?

Jeff Lowe: In sales, in now we don't say sales anymore, but in the team that helps customers buy is what we call it, but that's where we see a fitting.

But the other thing I'd say on how it's going is we just, a couple of weeks ago, got our company engagement results back. Yep. Which is put out by Mercer Serota. And I think most people are familiar with engagement overall score of how engaged your employee base is. And the UCE overall for the global team ranked at 91.

Which is a best in class, like top 5 percent employers from around the world. So that's, we're very proud of that because it just shows that people are really engaged. They see growth. They're driven. They have a sense of career path. They have a sense of purpose and it's just a real testimony to how the team is feeling about their role.

And I've, of course, if you're going to do great things with customers, it has to start with within having a really great culture. Yeah. And so we're. We're achieving that, which I'm really proud of. It helps to validate the model, really.

Jon Busby: Yes. Which is, yeah, that's a great piece. It's

Jeff Lowe: one of the metrics I always use, because before UCE it was around the high 70s.

And post now we're three years in, but it's a plus 90. So that's one really good metric that I always use. Yes. There's sales metrics you can talk about, but engagement, I think is a really key one.

Jon Busby: Let's bring in Roula. So Roula, you're the CFO of SMART. This is, there's been a lot of excitement about your attendance here.

I think at the ANAs, cause we're all marketeers. We don't tend to. speak the language of of finance too much. You've been alongside Jeff throughout this entire journey. What's your memory of the early days of the UCE?

Roula Nasser: From a people perspective, it was a little bit at the beginning. So it's almost four years now.

It was a little bit chaotic to really define roles and responsibility and assign role clarity. It was a huge change. When you think about it, change was just And then it was around COVID, just, we finished COVID and then we're trying to let people know that you need to interview for that role. This is the role if I recall correctly, and just many roles, different responsibility it created a lot of angst in the organization in terms of, What is that change?

Is that something will last or is that the flavor of the month or the flavor of the year? I think it was the best decision looking back. It's the best decision that we've made. We shook the organization. Yes, there's change management and change is hard. It's not easy and people are used to certain ways and.

At the conference, people having a hard time talking about how sales and marketing should communicate with each other and should learn how to have the same metrics to drive profitability and growth. I look now, we don't have that issue because when learned, have the leads, sales buy will accept the leads and then we'll be able to measure.

The accountability and the performance of that, demand generation all the way to the sales funnel. So to me that's awesome.

Jon Busby: Can you imagine life without this very close alignment? Can you imagine going back to the old way?

Roula Nasser: We'll still be operating in silos and we'll still be frustrated and marketing doing their own thing and sales doing their own thing.

And we'll be looking at each team. I think we've evolved not just to the UCE, but. We've evolved from a leadership perspective at the use, at the leadership level, which is the leadership T. Jeff could talk about finance. I could talk about marketing. It's a whole evolution of where the market should be going.

It

Jeff Lowe: is such an important thing of, we spend a lot of time talking about this who's a who's on your team? What team are you on? It's a, yeah. What are you talking about? I'm on the, I lead the marketing team. No, stop for a second. As a chief marketing officer, you're on the executive team.

Isn't that your first team? And that, if you think in that concept, then you've got. Executive metrics, which are the metrics for the business. And then you don't have to get into this kind of pettiness of. We need to better understand finance and finance needs to better understand us because you're representing the company.

And if there's budget cuts to be made they're coming from the exec team. They're not coming from finance. And then the same thing goes in the sales marketing and the UCE is, it's just so rewarding for people. Formerly they were on the marketing team or the sales team or the support team. And now they say, Oh, I've got such an amazing team.

In the central commercial pod and they just didn't know the people before and they, people meet each other and they find out they're really SMART and they're really fun to hang out with. They share a common purpose. They never, the personal dynamic is huge. And I was like, Oh, I've got such a great team.

And what they're talking about is their commercial pod. And that's just one of my favorite things about this.

Jon Busby: The, I had a chance to meet Dina yesterday from Xerox and I'm sure I had, yeah, I'm sure you had a both had a chance to meet her as well. And her title of course has moved from CMO.

She still has the CMO responsibilities to now Chief Growth and Disruption Officer. It's a mouthful. But when she was talking through some of her responsibilities, it felt very similar to what you've achieved with the UCE. Absolutely. Do you think this is the final form of, or maybe the next evolution of what the CMO role should be?

So

Jeff Lowe: we're seeing more and more. We ran into a colleague of Roula's yesterday that it was going in a similar trajectory. When I was talking to Dina, um, she had just taken over inside sales and all commercial operations. I believe she didn't have the external sales piece of the puzzle, but almost everything else was identical.

Yeah. It just makes a lot of sense. The problem is what Roula said, the challenge, of course, is change management and people's careers. Cause you, you've got a team and you've got a career path and it's it's very disruptive in terms of you need to be willing to let go of people and titles and blow a lot of things up in the process.

But but. I've never had anybody now in almost four years say this isn't a really good idea from a concept or from a philosophical perspective. That doesn't make sense. Everybody agrees it makes sense. It's just really hard.

Jon Busby: I see. I seem to remember where we talked about it last year. There was some bumpiness initially as Roula, you mentioned there was that initial kind of element where people needed to recalibrate their roles.

But now when you bring people into the organization, I guess it's just must be completely clear. Like this is the role you need to play. This is where you exist in the customer journey. So it's

Jeff Lowe: clear to us. Sometimes it's not clear to them because again, it's atypical. So people will join and they'll come in with a pre established notion of what a, A marketing or a sales role is and our onboarding is we do it a little bit different and so it takes it's not absolutely a slam dunk with our new hires because they too have to adopt to a new model.

Jon Busby: Has there been any, and this is a question to both of you. Are there any residual, an anxieties with the model as it is, as it stands today?

Is anyone, as you bring people in and onboard them, as you mentioned there, Jeff, is there any. Do you notice any bumpiness still, or does it just float?

Roula Nasser: Personally, I haven't seen anything like it continue to evolve and continue to refine the role and the accountability. And I think that's what's helped the whole pod to have a common purpose.

It's no longer you're in marketing, you're in buy, you're like you work together and you achieve the pod financial objective and the contribution margin. So to me, it's if they all have a common purpose and a common goal and everybody knows where they fit. It's like a piece of puzzle. Everybody know how they fit in the puzzle.

So that, that was critical because it's not just you're putting a pod, you're putting a team together, but you also have a common sense of purpose and you know that you're driving the profitability. You have a bigger purpose in terms of growing the business, driving profitability. And to me, that's that's what keeps people very excited to come into work every day and do the things that they do because.

No matter who you talk to whether it's inside sales or channel guy or the pod leader They all have that common language and they all speak the same

Jon Busby: So when you mention everyone getting behind that purpose, is that something you had to define? Or was it part of the organizational structure as you moved through the UC?

Roula Nasser: I think I give the credit to Jeff and his predecessor like In terms of what they did and what they have, it just evolved. It just got better. First, it was the change management, the role, the role definition, role clarity. And people saying, what do you mean, what am I have to, what I have to do now?

Oh, I'm in buy, I'm in adopt it's just you feel like, but it's a whole infinity loop in the journey that people now saying, okay, I get it. And then where's my part? You sold something, but also adoption is important. To, to me it's going through the motion. Anything when you first introduce it, it's fear.

You don't really know what you're getting yourself into. But the team had seen success and I think that's what, drove that engagement, the higher engagement from an employee perspective, as well as, The the commitment, we talk about performance and results. This is like the high performance culture that we have at SMART.

There's a lot of performance, a lot of activity to deliver the financial results. Yeah. And that's what's underpinning this whole thing.

Jon Busby: That and that brings us nicely onto one of the main reasons you're both here at this conference, which is talking about this research that the ANA has performed that SMART technology has been part of.

And Jeff, this really. When you mentioned this six months ago, this is, I pretty much have had this conversation now with every single guest on the podcast. Like it, it really highlighted how fundamental this problem is. And you described it as if you speak CFOs, they all speak the same language or very similar language.

But if you speak to different CMOs, they'll all be different. So why, firstly, why is marketing always so different from one organization to the next?

Jeff Lowe: There's a few reasons. Marketing has become very specialized, as I would say far too specialized, all these different areas with deep domain expertise.

But fewer and fewer generalists, they're looking at the big business picture. So whether it's content or email marketing or social or ABM, And all these different disciplines and seemingly more and more acronyms but not so much of the broad overview of what are we trying to accomplish with this investment?

How do we view over? Is it an investment? Is it an asset? Going back to the work that, that Jonathan did. So I think that's one main reason. The other reason is, I think, again, if you looked at 10 CMOs or a hundred, I think it's They have very different backgrounds. Think there's a lot of CMOs that come in and don't have a formal marketing training.

They're very successful executives in other aspects of business, and then they're asked to lead marketing. Others come in from a very specific part of marketing, which is again, is unlike finance, right? I don't think there's parts of finance that people come up, maybe there is with things like treasury versus tax and so forth.

With that, there's a bias then for how you're going to lead marketing overall. So with a very strong brand background versus product background, for example, or operational background, so it's just it's complicated. It's very like I say, specialized. And one of my favorite things is, we have GAP generally agreed accounting principles, but what we need GAMP, generally agreed marketing principles, which is why I think the work that Jonathan and his team did is just so fascinating because that's what it's trying to do is bring some GAMP to

Jon Busby: the world.

And to bring us back to the Xerox conversation, we were talking about metrics yesterday that she uses. And there was no mention of clicks, engagement, the leads, SQLs, MQLs, et cetera. It was all EBITDA profit margin. It was all finance. And so I think marketing is heading that way as well.

Roula, from your side, does that variability in CMOs, has that impacted you in the past? And are you starting to see a difference of your standardization now?

Roula Nasser: I think the marketing, too, with Jeff's point has evolved as well from being a journalist, from being the brand, the purpose, the overarching and kind of very specific to product marketing to the evolution of, Click website, like there's definitely a lot of jargon being thrown out there for people just to keep up.

I think what really make a difference between a CMO is how different they are is how well they understand the business. To me, it's, that's the biggest differentiator. Everybody will speak the language of marketing or the finance, but how well do you understand the business and how the business.

makes money and then how can you contribute to that value? That, that, that would probably be the differentiator for any member on the exec team.

Jon Busby: Again, that came out front and centre in quite a few of the conversations this week has been you need to make sure you understand how the business makes money as the CMO.

And I think we quite often sit in a silo in marketing and expect the rest of the business to understand us. The great quote of seek first to understand, then be understood. Comes out here and I think we're being guilty of expecting the rest of the business to shift around us.

Roula Nasser: It has to be mutual.

It just doesn't have to be one way. I think the finance organization needs to also reach out to see what's going on. Not every metric that the UCE track is something that we track on a financial basis because there's very specific metrics from conversion, like different things that they want to watch and keep because it drives the funnel down to the sales.

But there are some two uber metrics that we talk about. And that's what we measure on a regular basis. And just to keep it simple, because the organization, we don't want to bombard the organization with too many metrics and these metrics will have a correlation to financial and growth for the company.

Jon Busby: Can I ask what the two Uber metrics are that, that you were bought on?

Roula Nasser: The SAL and the SOV.

Jon Busby: They're as simple as that. Everyone just, everyone knows exactly what those two mean. We

Roula Nasser: talk about sales accepted lead. Like we could, like the UCE have different metrics which tie back to the sales accepted lead.

The share of voice is where the learn organization and then that's what we drive the market share is one of the pinner, one of the important metric for the organization is we need to grow market share and we need to be relevant in the market space. This is how it ties back to SMART as a whole.

Jeff Lowe: The SOV one, I think, I've talked a little bit about this before is really interesting as a really a measure of brand, but we don't talk about brand, as I say, we don't say the B word it's just so misunderstood not just with finance, just with but when instead of calling a brand, you call it out of market demand generation for the 95% cause we're big followers of the 95, five rule say there's out of market demand gen and there's in market demand gen.

And the way to measure out of market demand gen is with SOV and the way to measure in market demand gen is with SAL. So when you have a conversation with. A CFO or a CEO or a sales executive and say, what percentage do you think we should be spending on demand gen for our customers who are out of market versus in market?

That's very different from saying, do you think we should spend our money on brand or demand gen? Because a hundred percent of people will say demand gen. But when you say what percentage, is it 50, 50, is it 30, 70? Now you're having a real great dialogue and saying, by the way, look at this linear relationship between SOV and SOM, a market share.

So that for that framing is why we've landed on those two uber metrics. So we have seven commercial pods in the UCE and when they're doing the reporting, they report on every step in the buyer journey. But the two for. Pre sales for what the artist formally knows marketing are those two metrics?

Jon Busby: The thing, and this is something that's come up a lot and we talk about a lot across marketing is what is the split between brand and demand? We've seen two different models actually here. One being very much that out of market demand gen sits before in market demand gen, which is one very linear way of looking at it.

And the other is that, that brand piece should be a thread that sits through everything. Using your model, is it a linear funnel or is it a thread? It's more a thread. It's more a thread. And how do you balance the budget then between those two?

Jeff Lowe: We have a conversation as a dedicated percentage of in market versus out market.

So that's one thing, but then we all, we always try to infuse the emotion of the brand in everything that we do. Because even in the in market and yes, it's more of a pragmatic conversation on product differentiation and so forth, but still our purpose is a differentiator and our people are a differentiator.

So we always try to mix them in, even though when the budget, if you went and it had to be allocated at one place, it's more in market. We do allocate more to in market demand, Jen, or we're, we're accountable for If not monthly, weekly results to our stakeholders, so that's why. But within then there's always that thread of our brand.

You know what I mean?

Jon Busby: Yeah, and actually you're the A couple of people have referenced your definition of demand and brand a few times, which I think, when's the book coming out on it really, Jed? Because I think it is something, it's a fantastic way of describing an element that's so divisive in marketing and trying to condense it down to something we all understand and then can put budget behind.

Roula, how has that helped in some of the decision making when it comes to deciding how much budget to give? Has that, has using, changing some of this language made it easier or made it a lot more difficult?

Roula Nasser: It didn't make it like easier or difficult. I think where Jeff is, he controlled the whole budget, right?

He controlled the UCE budget. So he has the leeway in terms of, obviously has a channel, the sales. So he has a leeway. Obviously he has a set amount. Of requirement or budget amount that he has for marketing. And he will make the decision. He's a subject matter expert. He'll make the decision where he needs to spend it because he knows the overarching goal of the organization.

I don't think we dictate to you how much you need to spend on in market or out of market. But what I've, what I've been exposed to and I've been, privileged to have access to is that 95. 5, as we're growing into other verticals, into other businesses, where.

My, my first tendency is if I'm asked, do you want to spend in, demand gen? A hundred percent. Let's go to a hundred percent. Like I have no issue. When we were going through growth initiatives to say, yeah, we need a demand gen and in market because that's what we're going to see results.

Remember. We think about immediate results, but the study of the 95. 5 is you need to influence the brand. You need to influence where we're going. So these people, you could pull that pull strategy to bring them into your brand, whether from that vertical. So is that something that again, it's always a blind spot.

Is that something that we should be looking at? So if Jeff comes in and he said, I need this. Then it becomes like a conversation. I get it. Where can we find together the money to fund the brand initiative?

Jeff Lowe: For example, we talk about this on a daily basis and right now we're at a very exciting inflection point at SMART technologies right now.

And we're growing and investing in new products, new verticals new markets. So this is where Jonathan's model comes in really handy and it's not a, what's your one golf club you're going to use. Because it's our strategy for going to market in the Northeast United States is very different from, Hey, we're entering India.

And Latin America, for example, to take two geographies that we're entering into. So what is your golf club or what is your marketing strategy? Approach in different situations is a different club. And then so again, like how much should we be spending on out of market demand gen versus in market?

I think to go into a brand new market and start leading with features and functions and talking about how amazing our SMART boards are, probably not the best approach. So those are going to be more skewed towards who are we, what do we believe in? Yeah. What and trying to find affiliation with people that share the purpose.

That we have that we could have a conversation on how we try to fulfil that purpose by what we actually do and sell and build. Let's

Jon Busby: dive into the research because that Jonathan presented at the ANA conference yesterday. He breaks down businesses into six different types. And then, as you mentioned, you have six different clubs that you can use to get the ball in the hole.

And I love that analogy because The idea is that the CFO, your goal is to get it into the hole in the lowest number of strokes.

Roula Nasser: No, hole in one.

Jon Busby: Yeah, hole in one as you can. Fine. Fine. In one stroke. Fine. If you can do it in one go, then even better. But the, um, from what you've mentioned there, you actually, what we're saying is you need different clubs for different strokes.

Different geos or different products, like it's not just one business is one club.

Jeff Lowe: And I talked to John about Jonathan about this and it makes it a bit more problematic because the, again, simple is the best. So the, I think the goal of the research is to say as a company, here's the approach we're following and you may use all clubs, but the primary club is this.

Okay. And then in the boardroom, people can rally around, Oh, okay, I get it. There's a. There's a, and there's six different ways and our the flavour of our marketing because of our business model is X and it's for us and we're not a very big company, but we are fairly sophisticated and it, like we're in 170 countries and it's very, our approach is very different.

Just given the examples that I just showed is it's not the same model. So I got to use, I got to use this club over here, but I'm going to use a nine iron here, but I'm going to use my. My three would in this market. And so that complicates things then at the executive level for folks who are really trying to simplify because it just leads to the question which is it?

Can't you simplify and just use the same club, which is the premise of having a model where you can align on one thing.

Jon Busby: I'm going to, you said you, you'll play. You're quite sophisticated. I think you're doing yourself a disjustice there, by the way. But the, what I've seen of SMART, I know this is probably a little bit of a tangent, but you guys are pushing the boundaries of everything that I've seen in marketing.

Yeah. What. And I know we're going off on a huge tangent here, but obviously Peter just launched his AI startup Evidenza today. I didn't, I don't know if you had a chance to see some of the session, but what he's doing is going to be pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve in, in B2B.

But I've seen examples from your team where you're applying. AI levels that are way ahead of any other B2B company. So I think you're doing yourself a disjustice by just saying you're sophisticated. Like you are, you're like, you're NASA in space compared to some B2B companies out there.

Jeff Lowe: Yeah I’m so excited about what we're doing with AI. The leadership from Sarah Richards, who leads our marketing team globally we're doing some great things. Cause we've changed some of our deliverables based on what I've seen from Sarah.

Like we've looked at how we're delivering things as an agency and saying this is going to change how like I must have presented what she showed us to the our leadership team to say this is where the market is going. And no other company has Gone that far yet. No one else is thinking. Okay.

Should we be deploying these kind of tools out? I think we might see that in the next six months, but you guys were there early I really think it's important to tell the story because it's been so impactful for a team because you talk about how CMO CFO alignment we will What about the CEO?

Jeff Lowe: The legal is what about the executive team alignment? What one of the, and I told this story yesterday, but one of the most impactful things we did is we're work, working with a consultancy. And they challenged us in a really good way to say what's the role of the executive team?

How do you define success? That's, more than your business results, what do you do? And, the exercise he works with a lot of big brands around the world and is you have to write a manifesto. And and so I call it the Jerry Maguire paper because he showed us some examples and it's like a 20 page Word document and it's, who is this company?

Why would anybody care? What's the vision? What's the mission? Where's it going to be in five years? What's it like to be a member of this company? Something that the whole executive team can stand behind because the notion is when you co create something and you really work hard at it, then you own it.

Yeah. And then you can go lead around it. And it's a really fascinating concept. So we did it. But we didn't write the Jerry Maguire paper though. We ended up with a diagram, one page diagram. And but it took us several weeks, if not months, because that's, that's, it's everything, right?

Like who is SMART technology? So we called it SMART is, and it ended up being four concentric circles. And when all those circles are firing on all cylinders, what you get in the middle of that Venn diagram. It's something called pride. So we zeroed in on our role as executives is to instill pride in 565 people around the world that we're doing something amazing and we're making a good dollar as we go.

And so guess what one of the four circles was coming back to what you said earlier purpose. So purpose and promise is so we don't say brand, but that's cornerstone, of course, to brand. And then there's there's three other areas. One was more human resource related, which has our visions and values framework, which we take incredibly seriously.

One is we're really leaning into the concept of high performance which is a whole other tan that we can go on. And then the other is what's our North star in terms of our our roadmap for what I was talking about earlier, products, markets, where's the company going? What are we investing in?

So those are the four things. So what, anyways, what that ends up, how that manifests itself is we do training sessions for our team all over the world. We do cohorts of around 30 employees. We do them in Dubai, we do them in Germany, we do them in Calgary, and we just take turns as an executive team, we're interchangeable.

So what you have then is you'd have Roula, for example, going and doing a training session on Purpose and Promise, which is our brand. And just as well as Nicholas, our CEO, or Matt, who's our head of legal and leads our IS team. It's the same thing for going to the customer visits, by the way. So we have a big customer opportunity and a visit with this CEO of this distributor or an end user.

I can't make it rule is going to go. And I think that's very different, but it's because we did the work on aligning of what is our role and what is the company we're trying to lead? I

Jon Busby: think, purpose for me, it always comes back to if you look at any great company Xerox is a great example, they've existed for over 120 years.

They've had that core purpose at their core for all of that history. I think, essentially what you're creating there, Jeff is the legacy that, that will then, hopefully continue on past all of our tenures. And when SMART technologies is making holograms that go into classrooms instead of whiteboards that's, that purpose is hopefully still going to be part of it.

Jeff Lowe: No, for sure. And it also, it's the purpose is this diagram I'm talking about is the one that goes around the other three. Because for example, when we envision our product roadmap or where we're going to invest, what's the filter for that? The filter is our purpose. So how are we paying off and our promise?

So how is that paying off? I guess our purpose of inspiring greatness and learners and our promise of making connections that matter through technology to with human beings, that's our purpose and our promise. So where we're going to invest has to pay off against that, which is an amazing thing to have that.

Solidarity across the leadership team to, to adhere to that.

Jon Busby: It makes me think, you talked about it being a 20 page document and getting it down to one, there's a great, I think it's a Mark Twain quote, but it, I may be misquoting him here. I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.

Like it takes time to get to that one page. I, one question I've got for you as the CFO, like investing that amount of leadership time, which is an ex, ex very expensive activity to be writing something that feels probably. I'm going to say like fluffy and undefined was there ever an argument that we, you needed to do this?

Was there ever a point where you looked at it and said, is this going to generate the value it needs? Or was, how did you, how did everyone get aligned that this purpose was required?

Roula Nasser: I think part of it is we were so focused on companies going through some financial difficulties, with the acquisitions.

And so we were really focused on short term profitability and we were what's going on this month, what's going on this quarter that we didn't really see the force from the trees. And finally, when we were able to turn the corner and then we were profitable three years in a row and we're that inflection point that we need to change and then provide a view of.

What do we stand for? We're not just chasing, short term results. We're here for the company to good to last for many years. We've been in business for 30 years. We had some financial trouble. We've overcome these troubles and we had the best year ever this year. And what do we need to do to continue and empower the team?

Because, our greatest asset is the team. And it's that sense of purpose is like, how do we instill pride because we were like a little bit taken by yeah, we did this is what's happening. We're always looking at that, negative aspect of what we could have done better.

And the consultant came in and he said, you should be very proud of what you've done. You should be looking at beyond in terms of how you want to empower, how we want to instill that sense of pride in the organization. And I think it was a no brainer to go in there and yeah, you know what, we've been like, with COVID and everything else, it was really hard.

It was like three years and then change in the UCE, the change in the management there's a lot of things that happened. But we have, we have one and we have made some huge improvement and it's just a time to step back and say, okay, now we need to start looking at our North star, but our North star and profitability.

And then where we want to go five, seven years from now is really not going to pay dividend until we invest in our purpose. And that purpose is not just a company purpose. It's a purpose in each individual. And how does it tie back to the individual, to the company purpose? And that's super powerful.

Jon Busby: It's, you hit the nail on the head, I think, there, for me, which is, we're so focused, especially in this economic climate, of looking at short term results, and to know that you took the time to step back, to build what I'm gonna call the legacy, to say what does this mean? Have you seen it have an impact on the autonomy that teams can take the decisions they're making because they now have that North Star that they, they

Roula Nasser: It's still evolving.

I'm not saying we have a, it's like the UC, we haven't perfected it yet. We started about a year ago. It still has to be distilled. We spend a lot of time going through the onboarding, the training sessions across the globe to let people know what we stand for. And that drove the engagement that drove the commitment of the of of our employees, which is great.

And now, how do we keep reinforcing it? The challenge is how to keep reinforcing it and disseminate that information all the way to the individual levels.

Jon Busby: I'm going to say, we're going through a very similar journey, like I think every business is. One challenge that I think any business going through that kind of change in definition is going to be, they feel like it has to be perfect, but you mentioned it's still evolving.

When did you know you had something that you could share? Is there any practical advice you could have given when you were like, this is ready?

Roula Nasser: We perfected it as we like we started it, we had a pilot and then we knew that, and it was everybody's input, whether it's from, Jeff, or Matt, or Nicholas, myself.

We've okay, so how do we distill this? How we explain it to people so they walk away with something concrete. And then we did that, the why, the what, and the how, because I had to tell, remember WWH, that's all what you need to remember about what SMART is. And if you remember these three three letters, then you remember why is our brand purpose and promise.

You remember the what is our North Star, and our results, and where we're going. And the how is the values and behaviors, as well as the high performance culture. So try to keep it simple. First, and then really dig deeper in terms of what each circle or each element. And then when all these four concentric circles come together, that's a sense of pride.

And that's what you tell our people. So just to keep it simple, so anybody could speak that language. Versus, oh, Nicholas presented differently, Matt presented differently, it's the same common language and we do it in our own style. I do it in my finance view, you do it from your marketing view and everybody have, share a story.

How do they relate to that? And I think it's just, it's evolving. It's probably, we'll continue to to work on it.

Jeff Lowe: We've done 23 education sessions around the world on this diagram with every single employee down the company and the purpose of those, that two day session is to say, so This is SMART.

But what about you? Like how do you see yourself in this diagram, in this company? How does your personal purpose reinforce, reflect on the corporate purpose? Same thing for the vision, the values which aspect of the North Star are you involved in driving? How are you what's your high performance plan?

So that's all it is, and we like the small cohorts cause you can really get into the details. And so that's, it's a major investment we've made. That's I think really highly rated by our team to get everybody aligned on, on where we're going as a company. And we don't say, Hey, everybody needs to understand the brand.

Or come on, this new HR policy is really important, but in effect, there's that sprinkled in there. But it's how it's framed is this is the company that we're all in and we're doing something really special here and everybody's a part of it and people can really see that.

Jon Busby: It's an incredibly inspiring story, I think, and from my perspective as well, if you look at any high performing organization, like I'm going to use Salesforce as an example you've, they have pretty much touched every other tech company at some point, everyone's used Salesforce. But if you look at their internal processes, they've done the same thing.

They've got V2 mums, as they call them, which is their visions. Visions, values metrics, I'm trying to remember what the other, what the O and M's mean, but essentially you've built your own SMART version that everyone can get behind. Did you find people are now creating their own personal objectives against those concentric circles?

It and they're using the same language, has it gone as far as going, talking about brand again? Has it gone as far as permeate, going outside the organization? Has it gone as far as make its way into channel partners or, Oh,

Jeff Lowe: absolutely.

Jon Busby: And have you, what impact have you seen as you've started talking about this externally?

Jeff Lowe: The more that we build these kind of internal artifacts, they start as internal, but I always, I find myself now using them with customers. Cause it, again, it shows the human side it shows what we care about. It shows what things like values and behaviors, like this is where we're coming from as people.

And it it's I think it's really welcomed by customers and it's different and different is really important in business. And it's before we started this meeting, I just want to let you know like where I'm coming from and what I believe in. And these are the values and behaviors I'm going to be trying to exhibit during this meeting because we have a framework at SMART that we really believe in.

And it's Oh, that's. That's fascinating. And then they'll be picking things off the chart as well as saying, Hey, I would like to now demonstrate what, this other value or part of your purpose. And this is what I think the connections are that matter the most to me. And it's been really positive.

So time and again, I'm bringing it up with our channel customers and with our end users as well.

Jon Busby: I wasn't expecting the conversation to go in this direction, but this is incredible. It's incredible. I like what we all often talk. Come bring us back to metrics for a second. Now we've talked about share a voice and SQLs and these very big metrics that go on wonderful slides to the exec team.

What's really powerful at the moment are some of those human stories. Yeah, do you, do each of you have a memory of, we've talked a lot about purpose here where. Someone's come to you with just a compelling story that's stood out. Something I'll give you an example with AI, like it's very difficult for us to measure the impact it's having on productivity, but when you have one person come to you and say, I've just saved like four days of time and it's completely changed how I can prioritize it, it brings.

It shows you're moving in the right direction. So what's your memory of that one moment that stood out for you?

Jeff Lowe: One of the most profound ones from last year was, um, from a ministry in Spain Castillo La Mancha near Madrid. And we were at a, we were at a big technology show in Barcelona.

That ministry said, oh, SMART isn't SMART is near me. I'm going to come and I need a meeting. So this is very rare, right? When you have a very senior level member of the ministry come to see you. So he came and sat down with me and some other members of our team and said, you're doing a fantastic job with with the schools in our region.

In fact, we're in about 5, 000 schools with our SMART hardware and software deployed. He said you're a fantastic partner. This is great. Here's the thing though what about our seniors? Because he's the Minister of Objective Education, but of wealth, social welfare.

So he has the entire gamut from students all the way through to seniors. And so we said what about your seniors? And he said I think what you do in terms of, again, going back to our purpose and our promise, connecting people together making environments more collaborative, getting people engaged is really the business we're in.

And I think you could really help with our seniors. We, so let, we should do a pilot. So here's our customer trying to convince us that we should do a pilot in 200 senior homes in Spain. So of course we did. And then there was a major press conference to announce this. And the press conference was presided by the president of the region.

So there I am with the president of the region announcing. Our intent to digitize senior care in a region of Spain. And

Jon Busby: this wasn't a product you had before this was the customer came and said

Jeff Lowe: it was re imagining and redeploying our product in a different scenario for senior citizens. And so then the minister stood up and I was listening in on a headset because everything was in Spanish and it was all translated.

Then I was speaking as well. And people were listening to me and getting translated. But I was listening to his speech and he said, we were partnering with SMART technologies because this is not just a technology company. This is not just about, uh, SMART boards and interactive technology.

We're partnering because this is a company with soul. And I was just like did I could just get translated correct? And that's the highest compliment I've ever heard in my

Jon Busby: life. Let's forget about the fact that they came to you and are basically telling you your product roadmap, which is incredible on its own.

But to come there and say, this is a company that. That's, now that led to a

Jeff Lowe: global pilot now we expanded into senior care in Australia and of course the United States. And we've got papers on the efficacy of our using interactive technology in that particular area. Industry vertical.

So all that's great from a business perspective, but it's just the comment of he, and the other word he said was spirit. This is a company with spirit. This is a company with soul and that, that is who SMART is. So that's, just an amazing moment.

Roula Nasser: We don't have, we don't have to say it. Our customers, our, I think, we we operate in a very commoditized market, right?

Like any B2B and our differentiator is the promise that we make to our people. We're a connection company. We talk about, yes, technology company, we're a product, we have product, but most importantly, we're a connection company. And what we do is we show our team at a town hall. What story or what connection we've made and this is what the customer or the school telling us how our technology have improved their life.

When you talk about saving four days, whether it's that autistic child or that child in the back that cannot really participate and our technology enable them to be. Be the best he can be and then participate. That's amazing. Like when you can't really put a price tag on this.

And that's a purpose that we stand for as a company. And that's what make us better than any other company that served in the technology, in a technology space. Because we have that sense of purpose, when people try to make a decision and then go back to your EdTech assessment tool, the brain and the the heart the head and the heart, a lot of, you're doing with a technology consultant, with the IT director, they're looking for specs, they're looking for dollars, they're looking to maximize the usage in the classroom, the teacher looking for how can I engage my students?

The principal, everybody, every stakeholder has different needs. But with our EdTech, a tech assessment tool, which you're going to take it to the next level in July, it's all about making sure that we provide our customers with a solution that stand above and beyond. What the highly commoditized market is doing.

And that's what we stand for.

Jon Busby: It's, that is an incredible story. One follow up and I'm no, I'm, we're going to run out of time to some of this, but like in such a dis I had a chance to go into a school recently. I do a lot of work around business. And this was a, essentially a group of 11 year olds.

And we were teaching them how to start a business. They had to essentially create a budget. They had to create a pitch deck. And then essentially close that business all inside one day. Like it was like a very compressed or we call like a young enterprise young enterprise program.

And this was a group of 11 year olds. They all had laptops. They all had Chromebooks in this case. No SMART no SMART whiteboards, unfortunately in this room, just due to the setup, but the. One thing that blew me away is they were just all using AI, like half the teams. And these are kids that are 11, 12 years old.

They created Shopify websites. By the end of the day, they had products, they had logos. I'm looking at my team going, that's going to take them two weeks to deploy something. These kids did it in a day. Like how, if you were to try and summarize SMARTs approach to how rapidly this market is moving.

Like, how do you mold your soul or your spirit in with some of that technology disruption? What's the approach?

Jeff Lowe: We're doing a lot with AI. You mentioned the great work we're doing in marketing. We do have a, we do have an AI committee. The the mantra for our AI committee at SMART is responsible AI.

And we are, so that's more of a use it internally first. We have to be incredibly careful with our approach to AI. Obviously we deal a lot with children. And so the data and privacy aspects of that are mission critical. So we're very, we're, while we're doing some really bold things, we're also very cautious when it comes to AI.

But one thing that we're just announcing is in our our lesson software. So this isn't in the board itself, but in the, in our Lumio software, which gives people a very interactive experience on their personal devices in an inner or outside of a classroom. So it's all around, it's all around time savings again for the teacher.

And so imagine a teacher's being able to say Okay, I'm teaching about the solar system.

The core curriculum of what our standards are that we need to teach in the past, she would have had to do all those on her own. So okay. So that's done. And then what our software done is it puts students into groups and it makes things engaging by automatically gamifying that and so different teams playing against each other and having different, things like monsters hatching out of eggs when they get a question.

Or the. Race cars going around the track. And so all this, all of a sudden now with AI it can do that for you as well. So now it's okay, randomize it, put the students into groups make it a sorting game or a matching game. It was always our value proposition to make life easier for the teacher by having this interactivity that could just take a few keystrokes to enter in the question set and then go and press go.

But now we've condensed. We used to say you can create a really engaging experience for your students in under five minutes. Now it's like in under one minute, but with due to AI. So that's an example of how we're leveraging that within our software.

Jon Busby: It's I, it's, it's, it could be a time discussion.

I think we could talk about that for the next hour and I'm conscious we need to wrap up here. So I'm going to ask one final question to both of you. We've explored purpose today. We've explored metrics, how, we've talked about some of the research that's been performed here at the ANA's around the different types of business, the different golf clubs you could use, if you were to summarize all of this down into one piece of advice, you could give a future CMO in five words or less.

And Jeff, we did this last year. So I'm intrigued to see how your answer is going to change. What would that advice be? And I'll go to Jeff, I'll go to you first.

Jeff Lowe: Take the ing out of marketing. That's my new one I'm going with for this year. And you know what I mean by that is you take the ING out of marketing and what do you have?

Market. Think about markets, not marketing and it automatically raises the game to what is our approach as a company to this market, whether it's a, whether it's a vertical, whether it's a geography it's just a kind of a silly way of saying, have a business mindset. And you can rule it.

Roula Nasser: I'm just going to reiterate what I said yesterday and to echo on Jonathan's study really driving accountability, making sure, and that's what really worked for us on the UCE is common accountability.

and the discipline in terms of sticking to what you said you're going to do and then what are you doing differently to ensure that you're still accountable for your for your goals. And to me, that's an understanding the business. It's the three critical elements, uh, departing comments for any, anyone who's listening to the show, but, and thank you for having us.

Jon Busby: No. Thank you for joining me on the tech marketing podcast Roula Jeff. It's been a pleasure and I hope to see you again next year.