Tell us about yourself. 

I’m Chris Wade. I run Gamma’s product strategy, commercial and marketing teams. 

As part of the leadership team, I have three or four core responsibilities: one is making sure we’ve got the right products in our portfolio, another is making sure we’ve got the right commercial structures to put them out into the market and the third is describing them and telling the stories around them to activate them through the sales team.

So it’s an end-to-end flow - taking things out of our technology delivery group and making sure they’re put effectively into the hands of the sales teams, working with who we need to work with along the way.

How do you see your role as a marketer in driving broader industry or sector change within your space? 

Everybody in marketing is in the business of changing people’s minds - that’s pretty much the job. B2B marketing is slightly different because you’re typically trying to explain to someone they need to buy a thing they’d prefer not to spend money on, because they’re business owners and they like not to spend money on things. What you’re trying to do is demonstrate the value and why their business will be better, more efficient or more effective with what you’ve got.

Everybody in marketing is in the business of changing people’s minds - that’s pretty much the job

In our space, we’re talking now over a video conferencing system that probably 15 years ago didn’t exist, certainly not in the way we use it ubiquitously now.

People have understood that this technology can help them - it helps them take on remote workers, conduct more business because they can speak to people in different places, manage multiple offices more effectively and cut down things like travel costs.

In the communications sector, what we’re trying to do is help people make their communications infrastructure more modern, more future-proof, more resilient, more secure, more scalable and more flexible.

In B2B marketing you’re typically either introducing a service someone hasn’t used before or replacing a service they’ve had from someone else. In both cases it’s difficult to make people act rather than stay stable. Inertia is always the biggest challenge you have to overcome.

So B2B marketing is about getting to the point where you’re in all the places you need to be, talking to the people you want to talk to. And critically, creating something that is distinctive, different, memorable and valuable.

What's the most provocative idea or strategy you've implemented in your b2b marketing, and what was the response? 

The biggest decision we made was related to brand. If you did a survey of the websites of Gamma and all its competitors in the European market - the visual identities, imagery and messaging - you would see a sea of people smiling back at you with a headset on. The only thing that really varied was the people in the picture and the colour of the background. We did quite a significant piece of work to say we need to consolidate the profile of Gamma as a brand and create something distinctive and different.

We spoke to an agency who presented three ideas, as agencies always do. The last one was based around the value of relationships - Gamma has a purpose and mission to be well connected to the communities we’re part of. The agency asked what might represent trust, reliability, security and warmth, and if you ask a dog owner where they get those feelings from, they get it from their dog. So the agency pitched the idea of a six-foot-tall purple dog. I remember sitting in the room with the team thinking we couldn’t really do anything with this unless I went and spoke to the CEO straight away and got him on side. So I walked out of the meeting and called him.

We talked him through the concept, the PR story behind it and how it would come to life visually, and he bought into it. That purple dog now appears everywhere in the organisation. We use it to engage employees, partners and customers, and it helped us move away from looking like every other telecom company. It’s distinctive, and it’s something that people remember.

Can you share an example of how you've used storytelling to shift perceptions in your industry? 

The dog is one example, although that’s more of a metaphor than a traditional story.

Another example comes from the kinds of organisations we support. We provide telephony services to things like critical care hospitals and roadside recovery businesses. If you think about that scenario - someone breaking down on a cold November night on a country lane - you want that phone call to go through first time every time. It needs to be stable and reliable and have all the information at the hands of the agent as quickly and easily as possible so they can get help to you.

When you frame it that way, it’s not just someone on a headset answering a phone. You’re removing the worry and stress from a situation where someone really needs help.

We also did something quite interesting around the UK’s PSTN switch-off - the move away from the old copper-based telephony infrastructure. Most people didn’t know it was happening. So instead of explaining it technically, we partnered with Aardman Studios and created an animation using their character Morph.

The story showed two businesses - one embracing the change and one ignoring it - and what the consequences were. It was a more engaging way to explain a technical industry change.

In your view, what do you think is the biggest change needed in b2b marketing right now? 

You can’t have an interview about B2B marketing without talking about AI. The interesting thing is that no one really knows whether it works, whether it’s good or bad, or what difference it really makes.

It definitely helps with making things happen faster inside businesses and agencies. Whether they happen better at the same time is probably still open for debate and depends on the skill of the person using it. B2B marketing still has the same problem it’s always had in many cases - getting the businesses you’re trying to market to realise the value you deliver. I think there’s a tendency for AI to move things towards generic outputs, and I think what has to happen is you maintain that connection between customer insight, genuine value delivered and marking out a territory where you are different.

The best B2B marketing understands the pain points of the businesses it’s trying to serve. It articulates really clearly why you’re different or better, and it has a perspective on the problem that will serve that customer today, tomorrow and into the future.

In many ways it’s about doing the basics brilliantly. Even in a world where AI is helping people do things faster, there are still pieces of insight and connection that need to remain at the core of what B2B marketing does.

Even in a world where AI is helping people do things faster, there are still pieces of insight and connection that need to remain at the core of what B2B marketing does.

How do you encourage your team or organisation to think boldly and embrace change in their marketing approaches? 

I think there are several bits to that. It’s a perennial battle for most marketing teams to make sure you’re putting marketing at the right table and in front of the right audience - demonstrating the connection between everything the business is trying to achieve and what marketing can do to support and accelerate that.

When it comes to encouraging the team, that’s slightly different. For me it’s challenging them to ask whether they’ve walked a mile in the shoes of the people they’re trying to speak to. Do they understand their problems? But equally, do they understand the context of everything the business is trying to achieve?

That’s quite hard because you’re asking people to embrace two very different mindsets. The reason I do it is because if you’re going to get something inspirational or genuinely different, it usually comes from combining quite widely spaced ideas and concepts. So you’re always challenging people to think bigger - not just about a launch or an event, but about what happens around it.

Don’t think about that launch or event in isolation - think about everything else happening in that channel at the same time. You’re trying to bring that together into a coherent view so that everything that happens can support and reinforce everything else you’re trying to do. A lot of it comes down to trust. The purple dog only came out because the person who suggested it was someone you trust implicitly because you know they’re good at what they do. That trust carries through the team and into the wider business - people trust you to do the right thing.

So it’s about taking the time to establish those relationships and doing the basics well. You can’t have a wacky creative idea that’s disconnected from what the business is trying to achieve. You can’t be unsympathetic to the context of the business, and you can’t put something out into the market that’s totally at odds with the trends that are happening. Most companies don’t have the scale or power to break the rules entirely - so it’s about building layers of activity that reinforce each other.

What do you think in one word makes b2b marketing changemaking? 

Impact.

Everything you do in B2B marketing is typically trying to help a business better. And if you think about the people that work in those businesses, they’re often there because they’re passionate about them - in many cases it’s their business. And anything you can do to help drive that and support that I think is having a positive impact on many different levels.

What is your one piece of advice to future change makers on how to be more effective in B2B marketing? 

This is going to sound really stupid coming from a marketer, but communicate. How do you take people along with you? How do you get buy-in and followership for the ideas you’re trying to generate? How do you make sure the organisation you’re part of understands that you’re not doing marketing for marketing’s sake?

You’re not there to drive financing metrics. You’re there to make a difference. If you can’t get that confidence, you won’t be able to make change.

Changemakers spotlight innovative B2B marketing leaders who are driving industry transformation, where we explore bold strategies, disruptive ideas and the power of marketing. Meet more Changemakers here.