
Welcome to Episode 26 of The B2B Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Voices in Business.
Today’s show covers the topic of risk-taking in marketing. Trevor Salomon, Senior Marketing Director at Symantec responsible for strategic and tactical marketing to enterprises across the company’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, talks to Greg Grimer of Voices in Business about when to take risks and when not to, discussing topics such as measurement, ROI and selling risk-taking internally, also providing some examples of successful and unsuccessful risk taking.
Trevor has a strong commercial background with over 20 years experience in senior marketing management roles in a variety of software and consultancy companies, including CMG, Coopers & Lybrand, SAP UK, J.D. Edwards and Adobe.
Show notes for this episode:
00:15 – Introduction
00:58 – Start of interview
02:02 – Why don’t marketers take more risks?
03:31 – Measuring the effectiveness of marketing activities
05:00 – The importance of business planning
06:42 – An example: corporate blogging
08:29 – “Baby steps” and “risklets”
11:00 – Dangers of focusing too much on measurement
13:16 – The safety zone of trade shows
14:43 – The “soft R” option of an ROI
15:36 – What exactly IS a “Sales Lead”?
18:10 – Examples of successful & unsuccessful risk-taking
22:45 – How to sell risk-taking internally
24:00 – Involving the Finance team
27:48 – Advice for marketers new into the job
29:16 – The 90-day approach
31:46 – Aligning Sales and Marketing
34:53 – Direct communication between Marketing and customers
38:56 – Value statements
39:56 – End of interview and wrap-up
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