and the next day. Hello guys and welcome to this webinar on how you can solve the issues that relate to global and local collaboration around Omnichannel. Before we get into today's agenda, just a quick introduction of who will be speaking today in the beginning. Yes, my name is Nikolaj and I've been working with different global marketing organizations the past five years, developing concepts and campaigns and trying to really figure out how to work in the most optimal way between global and local collaboration. So I'm super excited to talk about this and share our insights today. Thanks Nikolaj. And my name is Mas and I've been an implement for several years and lately for the last five or six years, specializing in how B2B and life science companies can use digital channels to drive measurable sales pipeline. And in this context, have run into two of the issues we'll talk about today and also we'll share some thoughts on how to address them. So the agenda we'll be looking into today is first off, why so many organizations struggle and then on to solution mode. How do we address these key challenges? And finally, we'll have Mikkel from Demand joining us to tell you about his experiences from a client perspective. We will perhaps have some time for Q&A, but I invite you to also ask questions in the chat and we'll see if we can take them during the webinar. Finally, the slides will be shared afterwards as well as access to a recording. But before we get into the nuances of the agenda, Nikolaj, if you could just share a little bit about how big this issue actually is. Yes, and I think most of you guys listening in today recognize some of these numbers. But CreativeX did a report and a survey among marketing leaders and marketing organizations a few years ago. And they found that almost 90% of globally developed campaign toolkits, so some of the work that people really spend a lot of time on developing so that it makes it easier for local marketing departments, are never really employed and is never really used by the local marketing organization. Then another fact is also that 45% of the core global assets developed go unused. They're simply never used by the local marketing team. And I know that the next number here is a big number, but it's also just an illustration of the waste that a lot of companies experience. So in the average Fortune 500 company experience that 25 million dollars of waste every year in wasted creative resources. And while this number is probably a bit different for your specific organization, it's just an illustration of how ineffective global and local collaboration can really be costly effort. And it's not only a costly effort, it's also mutually frustrating for the global team and the local team, and especially when what you develop globally has to be redone in a local context. And just to put it a bit more on the edge, often campaigns are really big investments, and they are often long to develop and slow to market. And especially when we consider the activation budget available for most B2B companies and medtech and healthcare companies. And especially if we go a bit further down the ladder after having developed the concept and having developed all the assets, going out into the market and experiencing that we have to redo a lot of the work that has previously been done. And when we sum all of that up, we just end up using way too many resources, developing content and developing stories that never really reaches our key target audience. And then when we consider that 75% of you guys and marketing leaders in general say that they are being asked to do more with less, we see that looking into this and succeeding even more with a global and local collaboration is a huge area of potential marketing efficiency and effectiveness in the future. And now I'll give the word to Mass so we can dive into some of the symptoms and root causes and of course also present some of the potential solutions. Thanks, Nikolai. All right, so there's a lot of money on the table here. Let's look into why this is such a big struggle. First off, a classical issue that you may encounter or a symptom that you encounter could be this issue around globally produced assets are not a really good fit with digital channels. So we tend to see large hero assets, long glossy PDFs and high quality expensive videos in one version that are a little bit hard to slice and dice into all the digital formats like email, web, social media, etc. Also, we do see co-creation between global and local, but it can sometimes feel a little bit symbolic. So if you're inviting from a global perspective a handful of local markets into a co-creation process, if these markets are very different, which they culturally tend to be, the local strategic direction could be different or the tone of voice could be different, then when global needs to consolidate the input into a set of content assets that are applicable across, for us, it still feels generic. And this relates a little bit to the third point here, that there's simply not enough volume of content to support the buying journey. Increasingly, we see that what the customers consume is more bite-sized, smaller content assets in many different channels. And this requires a very high bandwidth from global to push out this volume. And the issue then on the surface is that the content doesn't really resonate in local markets. So what they experience in the absence of proper co-creation is that there's a poor cultural fit, the tonality is off, and perhaps the assets are difficult, as we also touched upon in the beginning, and are difficult to apply in digital channels. And part of that can be the experience that the assets aren't used can also come from a slightly irrational place. Because local marketeers included are typically creative people, and they like to have some ownership over the narrative. So if they haven't been involved closely or the outcome of the content development process doesn't cater to their input, they may feel like this is not invented here. And then they start over, and that can be both on the content development side with creative agencies locally and also local media agencies to push it out. And this creates some of the redundancies that Nikolai touched upon just before. All of this can result in this blame game where global and local are pointing fingers at each other and debating who is at fault. And this is obviously counterproductive. Let's look a little bit closer into what causes it. But first, I'd like to invite you to respond to a little poll where we want to ask you which of these are that you encounter. And the QR code in the bottom, you can scan with your phone. And perhaps I can get Jonas' help to just put the number in the chat. So as I move on to the next slide, I'd like you to respond to the Menti. But you can go to menti.com and enter this eight-digit code, and it would be interesting to hear which of these symptoms you experience in your respective companies. Good. Let's move on, Jonas, and I'll allow people to respond while I present. I see the responses are coming in now. So I want to take it from a perspective of the sales funnel that you see on the top here to explain a little bit about how global and local have different objectives and different tasks. And this creates some of the friction. So sales funnel on top, and on the left side, you have the drivers of the messaging. And if we start with global, then global marketing typically is tasked with more conceptual and positioning-driven messaging, perhaps going into the solution and the pains and gains. Whereas local marketing is more towards the lower parts of the funnel, looking at themes like value-proof and product and features, and is slightly more tactical. Now, since global and local are charged to do different things, this, of course, results in some friction. Another angle on this is, what are the incentives? How are we measured? And global is often measuring recall. So are people remembering the messages we put out there, which is quite different from local looking for engagement. Also, global could be measuring or looking for brand perception, and local more looking for leads. And finally, driving brand preference versus an outcome that is more closer to the top line, so actual sales. So that's a little bit on the incentives. Now, the last part of the exploration of what's causing the issues is around the capabilities and resources that I just want to dive into a bit. Now, global marketing owns typically the creative development budget, perhaps with the exceptions where local goes completely rogue and starts over with content development. But the idea in most multinational companies is that global owns the entire or at least the majority of the content development budget. But local marketing owns media and activation budget, or the majority of that, if you look at it as a global company. And this creates this content channel misfit that we also touched upon before. Furthermore, global attracts a lot of strategic competencies, people that are looking with a longer horizon, maybe three years down the road, what should the position of the brand be long term. And local attracts mostly operational competencies because they're also with the objective, as we discussed before, to actually activate the assets coming from global. And this creates this brief and catch challenge where there's a bit of desynchronization between the two units. Furthermore, there's this campaign and burst mindset we often encounter in global, where, for example, on a few product launches every year, a lot of the energy is poured into making these big bang burst campaigns with a handful of assets that are with a very strong narrative, but not designed for more than perhaps a month or two of exposure. As opposed to local, as opposed to local, that are typically more looking at always on exposure. They have a portfolio of accounts that they want, where they want the brand to stay top of mind at all times. Then there's this proximity to decision makers, and it can create some political friction that you have for global stakeholders that are very close to, let's say, the CMO, for example, and other key decision makers in HQ that control the overall direction. But locally, they are far from those decision makers, but they're closer to the GM. So what might, if there is a conflict about, let's say, vetoing a particular set of content assets where the narrative is off relative to the local culture, it's a little bit easier for the local marketing director to just go to the GM that they're close to and say, I think we should start over with the local agency, and this is often sanctioned or accepted by the local GM. And it's hard to control in many multinational companies where there's a large degree of autonomy. The local market have their own P&L. So that's also why it's a little bit hard to control from a global perspective. Finally, there's the type of capabilities or competencies that you have. We often see global organizations that have access to specialists and quite sophisticated agencies and local that are dependent on in-house capabilities. And the result is sometimes that the global may produce assets and activation guidance that is overly sophisticated, sophisticated considering the bandwidth of what can be activated with a handful of resources. And perhaps it's a little bit harder for local markets to attract very competent talent specialized in digital, as an example. And I see in the chat that there are just the classical question around receiving the PowerPoint slides and the answer is yes, you will get the slides afterwards. We've been a lot in the issue department. Now I want to move into a solution mode. I want to discuss how we can address these challenges and some of the solutions we've encountered and built with our clients in B2B and life science over the past years. And I want to split this up into some of the more short-term initiatives, things that you can do without making fundamental structural changes and more long-term structural changes that you can make. If we start with the short-term, we encourage you to set up a governance model and it could look like this, where you have in the middle a campaign project group, let's say focused on a particular launch or a particular segment or product group or however your existing campaign structure typically is. And then in the bottom here, you will have global brand directions coming, for example, owned by the CMO coming in. And from the top, you have a series of local markets where the GM will be the owner of what is the strategic focus in the market. So if you collaborate with a handful of key markets, typically the largest ones or the most important ones, then you'll have the input you need. And this group gets together to design the content for a given campaign, let's say a brand or a product launch. Now, the typical norm is that you do one set of content assets that are supposed to be generically applicable. Obviously, if you have 20 local markets, it's going to consume too much bandwidth to do 20 variations. But perhaps you can do a handful of variations, for example, by region or other bigger groups. So that's the idea. The second part here of another potential short-term initiative that you could do is to think about the formats that you need and the go-to-market strategy in the local market early in the process. And it's always this chicken or the egg. What comes first? Is it the global direction or global strategy that is cascaded down? And where does channel strategy and local market strategy come into play? But for example, local markets and channels like digital can submit the requirements for formats and channels relatively early so that when global starts developing content, they already have an idea. What is it? What types of assets are you looking for? And this, the variations could be based on, if you have multiple variations of each segment, if it's more bite-sized and you have, let's say, 10 different landing pages, 20 different emails, they don't all have to be in one generic sequence. There can be variations based on segment or persona. It can also be based on, is it a more rational or emotional appeal? Or it could be based on different pains, etc. So the idea with this is that it really enables that you can do A-B testing and it also enables that the markets can more quickly adopt the content and activate it without too much time consuming in-depth localization. A couple of more short-term initiatives, customer insights. So we often see a lot of global marketing content assets that have very limited influence from local insights. And sometimes there are patterns that go across many countries and it is possible to absorb them and allow them to an extent drive the content development. And this is an example of how you might prioritize different ways to collect customer insights based on how complicated, time consuming or what investment it takes on the x -axis and the richness of the insights on the y-axis. So we also recommend that you really leverage insights. And we've seen examples of this with, for example, social listening where it's been possible to really automate this and still make it really data driven at a relatively low cost. The fourth one here probably could spark a bit of debate, but that is, it is a possibility. Not saying that it's the right for everyone, the right solution for everyone, but it could be a solution to implement stricter rules from global in terms of how media spend is allocated. And in force more hardcore that the global content assets have to be reused in a certain fashion. Now, this will be a little bit conflicting with a classical multinational setup where local markets have high degrees of autonomy. But we see some degree of centralization happening across the board. So this might be where things are going. But this really depends on what would work in the company. Moving on a little bit to the more longer term solutions that will require some more structural changes. More in depth centralization, as I just touched upon, would go beyond just saying you have to use certain assets, but you would actually move the responsibilities for a lot of the marketing initiatives from local to global. And that also means that the media budget or the activation budget would move from local to global. And I'll share the slides after, as mentioned, so you'll have a chance to read the nuances of this. But that's the overall idea. The potential risk is that localization suffers from a local perspective. It can feel more generic. But as a little teaser, we have seen examples of global campaigns or globally activated campaigns in local markets where very limited localization has been done. And still metrics like cost per lead and click through rates are still higher than previous campaigns where it was fully localized, which can be attributed in some cases to global centers of excellence, being able to attract more talent and simply have more specialists that maybe it's not as localized or a perfect cultural fit. But at least it is designed according to best practice within digital marketing. Finally, there's the hybrid, you could say, with regional activation. So, it's a little similar to what you saw before, but instead of saying all of this is anchored in global, if you have a large enough organization and perhaps already a regional setup, this could, a lot of the content development could be distributed to regional centers of excellence. That's what we have on the solution front in terms of short and long term. To finish off the how to address the challenges part of it, we just want to go through a few of the tools that you can use to succeed that perhaps can bring you some inspiration. First off, perhaps obvious, a business case is always a good idea if you want to make changes. And it is actually possible to estimate how much waste is there in the global content development process. How much content is developed, as Nikolai touched upon before, that's never used for anything. And how much redevelopment, so to speak, is conducted in local markets. And in addition to the reduction of waste, there's also the potential upside of improving conversion rates, etc. by centralizing more and also perhaps saving resources. We recommend running pilots. So if you have an idea around a different model that might work, experiment with it. That's one of the sources of the data point that globally activated campaigns, in some cases, perform better. So before changing your entire structure, we recommend that you test it out on a handful of markets and customer segments. And let the data speak for itself instead of a long debate on what theoretically works. And finally, on change management. All of this, in particular, the more structural changes will require a lot of change management. It's not just sending out an email with a new governance model or introducing a new IT system. So keep that in mind. Now, we have a question in the chat and I will just read it aloud here and then I'll give some perspectives on it. Could the issue be that both local and global teams are rushing into tactics without spending enough time on the strategy and diagnostics? And thank you, Helen, for that question. Certainly, that's also what we touched upon a little bit with the insights part and also the part about how thinking local market strategy into it or go to market strategy into the picture early would help. But this is also even what position are we trying to take? Which direction is the brand really going instead of we see a lot of engineering heavy B2B companies also in med tech and pharma? That are so obsessed with the product features that campaign by campaign is actually not particularly strategic but goes straight into tactics. So that is a good point. I agree with that. Now, before we invite Mikkel onto the stage in a little bit, I have a little teaser for you. I'll give you another poll here in Menti that you can enter anonymously and this is a little bit of a raffle. You can win four hours of free consulting and I invite you to go to the Menti code here. And if I can ask you, Jonas, to just put it in the chat again so you have the Menti code if I flip the slides. A few examples of what you might do with some free consulting could be to explore the root causes. If you're facing some of these issues, we can help you analyze that and figure it out and then you can solve it on your own or with our help. It could also go into solution mode. How do we increase adoption of global content? How do we reduce waste? Or from a local perspective, how do we develop content that really resonates from a local market perspective without breaking the bank with content development? And here we also have some interesting experiences on how to leverage AI in practice, not just on paper that you could perhaps be inspired from. If you're interested in this opportunity, then go in and just say yes in the Menti poll and then we'll draw a few lucky winners. Now, Mikkel, if you would join me up here and perhaps I will sit here and then Mikkel, if you. Welcome, Mikkel. Thank you, Mads. I'll let you introduce yourself and then I have a few questions for you about how things work in demand. Yes. Well, my name is Mikkel Andersen. I head up the digital marketing part of the wholesale division in DMAT. So, very B2B, very life science and very familiar with some of the challenges we saw today. Cool. Perhaps to set the stage, Mikkel, if you could, before we dive into the issues you have experienced and the solutions you've encountered, then if you could tell us a little bit about how you work with Omni-Channel or digital marketing in demand. Yes. So, we come from a reality where we have product launches. So, our main communication is a biannual product launch and, you know, as digital marketing, we, of course, we are deeply involved in that process. Next to that, you could say we have local or tactical activations often driven out of the markets themselves. And what we experience is that something else is needed other than just the product focus or just the local activation focus. And what is that third thing? Well, the third thing is something that really connects global and local and sales and marketing. Something that actually puts a true purpose to the content and something that can resonate in the bottom line and can be sort of a translated reality from global to local. All right. Interesting. Now, if you think about that as a frame of reference, those three dynamics and perhaps in particular the product launches and this last model with lead generation or demand generation where you are more always on. Because the local tactical activation, I guess, is more specifically locally driven. But the other two that require some collaboration between global and local. How have you experienced a gap there? Well, you mentioned many of them. Obviously, when we when we do product launches, they are by nature product focused. So they're they're focused on the let's say the last part of the need identification you have in a in a in a in a buyer journey. So that's very focused on what is what new features, what new benefits does the product bring right now. That's also reflected in the content. So it tends to be, as you said, short lived. It has a few months before the next cycle kicks in and we're ready to talk about the next thing. So that has some inherent difficulties in in in actually getting value out of your content. So what we sort of looked at is how do you actually make that relevant in the market? Not the not the product itself, but how do you cater to the rest, let's say of the journey where there's not an identified need where there's no you're not looking for solution, but rather you're realizing a problem. And that whole part of the content journey, I think, is where we try to build what we call the demand gen track. So an always present and and very collaborative format that that is set up between global and local. And in working with with local on that, can you give some examples of of issues you encountered working together? Yeah, I think you mentioned you highlighted that there is, of course, local and global marketeers with each their own role that the deep specialist typically out of global and the let's say the the local marketeers with a more tactical view. I think we all want to put our footprint on whatever comes out. So often there's a lot of back and forth. I think we've had examples with let's say for relatively simple content package have 200 iterations with a market. So obviously that that's a that's an issue if you want to to to have some sort of of scalability, some sort of of footprint that you can you can act on quickly. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, that's I would say working with multiple different companies, mastering this balance of what is localization at one extreme. It is one to one translation at the other extreme. It is throwing out what you get and starting over. And how do you strike that balance in between where you take the narrative, you embrace the ideas and then you make adjustments for local tonality, etc. in an efficient manner? Yeah, good question. I think so. I have full respect for the fact that markets are closer to the customers and they have a knowledge of culture, language and a tone of voice. But I think that what we experience is that if you are a bit more normative from a global point of view, it doesn't really make much of a difference in terms of the data that comes out of it. So highly localized content does not necessarily produce better results than more let's say less adapted content. So that's at least a key learning for us. But also to it does not mean not to that you don't involve markets, but that you have a process for involving and you involved early on and you involve both sales and marketing. In my world content needs to have a purpose, it needs to support a commercial objective and it needs to, of course, support your journeys. And that requires that you have at least a basic understanding as a global team on what is actually the market, what are they chasing, what are their commercial wins and how do you connect your production of content to that. Makes sense. And then of course the complexity of having 20 local markets that have differing objectives, but often I think we've both found working together also that there are some commonalities across like it may seem on the from one perspective that they're super heterogeneous, but when you dive into it, let's say a lot of the customer pains, you know, 60, 70% of them are actually the same. Maybe they're articulated slightly differently. Maybe at least half of the markets are specifically chasing A and B accounts, the large ones. So how do we cater to that segment? So I guess it's also the balancing act of finding the commonalities and then making something meaningful for that. Yeah. And I think if you address this early on, typically head on workshops, including global and local, including sales and marketing, you have a fairly good understanding of what those commercial or other pains that your content should address, but they are. We call it a pain library. At some point, you'll be able to see that there are commonalities in the pains across markets. Yeah. So you build a library that is adapted and that has involved local colleagues, but at some time becomes something you can more or less pull off the shelf. Yeah. In addition to product launches. Cool. Which is a nice segue into the going in a little bit into solution mode and what you have experienced worked. Just before that, I just want to encourage the listeners here that you're also welcome to ask questions for Miguel. I'll ask Nikolai and Jonas to write them on cards and pass them to me. So if you're curious about what is going on at demand and what Miguel has learned, please feel free to ask questions in the chat. Bringing us, as I mentioned, we sort of creeped into solution space here, but what are some of the key takeaways if you were to give some of our listeners some advice on what works? I think one thing I keep coming back to is sort of the full fun responsibility for the for the content. So many of us in the B2B space are used to, you know, producing and handing over. I know this problem has been addressed for 20 years, but I still experience it. So we have to have teams that are able to actually go from inception to bottom line to where the lead takes us. And that full funnel understanding really brings, I think, the teams together and brings more of a purpose to the content. Yeah, makes sense. And so one is a little bit like we have this split into, say, some short term hacks you can do. It could also be more structurally. And now a pretty long question, so bear with me. But if you were to describe and not constrained by how demand operates today or organizational constraints, how does the ideal operating model look like for global and local to really be efficient in a multinational B2B or life science company? So an elements of an operating model could include things like how are we organized, what are the roles and responsibilities, the processes, the systems, etc. So what does the ideal operating model look like? What are some of the components? That's a big question. I know. I know. So just elements of it perhaps. Yeah. Well, I think first of all, as I said before, especially in the global teams, I think you need to have sort of the full set of capabilities. So you need to be able to take content content from inception all the way through ideation, production, activation, automation, and finally build on your your Martech stack and working with sales at the other end. So that full set of competences need to be available and to be close to each other. And then I think the inclusion side between global and local, I keep coming back to that. But if you have sort of an 80-20 perspective on it, that in some cases it's 80% out of global and you take input from markets. In other cases, when it's more tactical or more locally driven, you flip that and you become the react part to the local 80%. Then I also think that specialists belong, deep specialists belong in the global teams. I think locally you need to have strong T-shaped digital profiles. But for all the reasons you mentioned, it can be difficult to retain deep specialized talent in markets. And then I think crucially, you need to be able to connect across the chasm of sales and marketing. So locally, you need to be able to have buy-in from sales, from sales management to the content that you're actually producing so that it becomes relevant in the local setup. Yeah, I completely agree with that, which actually reminds me that when we created this webinar, we wrote in the invite that we would touch upon the friction between sales and marketing as well. But as we developed the program, it turned out that it was a little difficult to cover both of those aspects in detail. So we do have perspectives that go further into the sales and marketing gap. But it's also a little bit hard to distinguish because global is more marketing-led and local is more sales-led. So it's a little bit two sides of the same coin to an extent. Now, a few questions from the chat. We have Eric asking if you could elaborate more on what you said that localized marketing material does not necessarily yield better results. That seems kind of counterintuitive. I have a comment on that as well. But perhaps you start, Mikkel. Well, I think what I said was that we see that this extensive long journey of back and forth in reviews, in translations, in localization, in sort of getting those tweaks in place, those can be reduced. It doesn't mean that we should not work together or we should not take local considerations into perspective. But the very long process that we often experience, we don't see that one yields better results than the other. Yeah. So in particular, I guess if you take the costs into perspective that it adds to have that many iterations, the overall return on investment might be worse actually. And Eric, just to add to that, we've seen examples of A-B testing between campaigns that have been developed by Global and on the same theme, where Local took the Global material, threw it out and started over. And one of the things that caused higher click-through rates and lower cost per leads from the global variant of the campaign that was also activated in the same local market was that the journey design was more sophisticated. The channel mix, the setup of the targeting, etc. So the sacrifice of, let's say, cultural adaption was justified by higher quality in the execution. And this was because it was activated straight out of global. So some sacrifices, but overall better performance. So this is one data point. Yeah. And then you take the collaboration early on so that markets not only are included, but also feel included. And that perspective is built in before you start the journey. So you're completely aligned on what the journey towards the content objective is. Yeah. All right. We have time for one more question. Jessica asks, what is the biggest struggle or challenge that you have found between the integration between local and global collaboration and how did you manage it? Well, I'm not sure I can answer how I managed it, but I'm at least in the middle of it and have been for some time. So the biggest struggle or challenge I find is that we need to have something that is not just product driven. So we need to have something that sort of comes between products. So we call it always present, but something that's relevant across the board, even if we don't have something to talk about. So that is in most with most people I've talked about this. It's fairly new to have that institutionalized, to have it work, to have it scaled over time. So getting markets on board to the fact that there is not a blue ocean, but there is an opportunity out there. If you're really focused with your people, with your collaboration and with your marketing technology that can actually drive substantial business locally, if that makes sense. So the challenge here is to make sure that we see the potential together and that we can implement that locally. As you say, it's often a very sales driven reality chasing the next quarter or the next figures. So being able to put something in play that yields results over time and that takes a new kind of collaboration. That's what we're working on. And we do it through pilots. We do it through building the cases market by market and then sharing the results with other markets. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds. That makes a lot of sense. And also sounds like an approach we've worked with a number of different clients on. I think the sales focus from local, what global can take away from that is that it'll enable a whole other dialogue also in global. If global marketing is able to demonstrate the contribution to sales pipeline, perhaps not with perfect attribution or two lines under the result, but at least with some degree of certainty that goes beyond, let's say, clicks and impressions and the assumption that share of voice drives marketing. The assumption that share of voice drives market share, but something that has a little more hardcore evidence of sales pipeline contribution. And that's a good point. And that's what I meant before by also making sure that you have full-fonding responsibility. Yeah. So in your, just as a simple example, if you, if what you're trying to achieve is not reflected in your CRM or your marketing cloud, then sales and marketing will move away from each other. Yeah. And you will find it difficult to prove that case, to prove that attribution. Yeah. So your lead qualification process, for example, needs to be reflected in the marketing technology, but also in your processes. Mm. Completely agree. Now, guys, I think we're out of time. Lone, you have a question. I'll, Meghla and I will get back to you on email on that. Please keep the questions coming. You also feel free to, to reach out to us if you have any questions. We'll email out the slide deck and the recording from today so you can access it. And then I think all that is left to say is, Meghla, thank you for stopping by. Thank you for having me. And all of you guys, thank you for your attention and see you in the next webinar. Thank you.