Tell us about yourself.

I'm Sylvana Chang, Director of Global Integrated Marketing at SAP Concur, focused on global campaigns. My role involves developing end-to-end global campaigns, from messaging and content creation to supporting our field marketing on campaign activation. Basically, we work behind the scenes to prepare everything our global and field marketers need for driving brand awareness, thought leadership, and demand generation.

Looking forward to 2025, our team is focusing on finding more efficient ways to develop campaigns and content. We're exploring different initiatives and approaches, developing insights, refining our messaging and leveraging technology to create content. We’re always trying to determine the most effective ways to deliver the right content across different channels.

‍
How do you see your role as a B2B marketer in driving broader sector or industry change?

I'm personally committed to continuous improvement, whether through small adjustments or major innovations. I believe if you don't move forward, you fall back. In my role, I lead strategy planning while maintaining hands-on execution, which gives me firsthand insight into our team's challenges and opportunities.

While changing the broader industry might be too ambitious, I focus on creating a culture of improvement within our team and organisation. I help foster an environment where we're always trying to do something better year over year. This philosophy has been central to my entire career - I'm always looking for small improvements in everything I do. It gives me a sense of security and confidence in tackling whatever comes next.

What's the most provocative idea or strategy you've implemented in your B2B marketing and what was the response and the outcome?

The most recent one has been quite a big shift in trying to streamline our global campaign planning and development process. At SAP Concur, we used to have (and still do have) enterprise and SMB as two different business segments. But because these segments had different go-to-market approaches, operations became quite siloed, with different business units handling things separately. I think two years ago we started exploring the idea, but the actual consolidation happened last year, trying to bring together all the planning and development across enterprise and SMB.

Working in a global organisation, I think everyone would agree that all markets and business units think they're special and unique and they all want to do things differently. But what I did was spend quite a lot of time digging into the data and insights from our reporting. We have loads of technology collecting data everywhere. When we really looked at the reporting, when we analysed our audience behaviour like how they consume content and how they engage with CTAs, there actually wasn't that much difference.

This really gave us an opportunity to rethink our strategy, our resources and our bandwidth - where should we focus? So last year we made this change to combine enterprise and SMB planning. We tried to push for more segment-neutral content and execution. That doesn't mean we totally ignore segment needs - we still do that - but it's about changing priorities and focus areas. I'll be honest, at the beginning there were some doubts about this change because the organisation had been operating that way for so many years.

But a year later, we're seeing loads of compliments and positive feedback on our strategy. When I looked at the reporting just before this call, our Q4 contribution - our global campaign contribution to the overall marketing organisation - actually reached its highest point. We broke our own record with this consolidated strategy. It's also given us the ability to reallocate our bandwidth and resources to do more creative work, like our CFO insights and travel manager insights. We definitely see this movement helping us drive change for the organisation, and we're the ones leading it. Hopefully this can influence other teams to rethink processes they've been doing for a long time, see where they might need to adjust to do more creative work on certain projects.

Having a clear strategy and communication was extremely important. I remember my first call facing this, it was with a new stakeholder on the SMB side. I was actually quite nervous because I didn't know what to expect. I tried to think through all the possible negative responses, but I really appreciated when one leader asked me to create a slide about what we would stop doing, what we would continue doing, and what new things we would add based on this strategy.

We had some ideas in mind, but that request forced me to think it through properly and put those ideas into words. It helped us evaluate whether this change and strategy made sense. When I presented that slide back to stakeholders and teams, I felt really confident about the change because everything was very clear, including from the SMB perspective. I think that changed the mindset - they were willing to join us on this journey of exploring change. If it didn't work, we knew we could think about ways to adjust it. What I really appreciated was having that clear communication about our strategy, vision and goals we wanted to achieve, and how to bring people on board to explore this with us.

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

I think there are two examples I want to share. The first one is from a couple of years ago when we did a project called the Travel & Expense Maturity Model. We were getting lots of feedback from different regions about our customers being happy with the status quo - they didn't want to make any changes, didn't really see a reason to change. Other regions wanted to promote this 'cost of doing nothing' message because there was a lack of motivation from customers to move forward and improve their programme performance. So we had this idea to create a maturity model for the T&E programme performance.

We really looked at how organisations in general adopt their T&E tool management - every organisation is at a different stage. At the early stage, there are typical things that organisations think about achieving and improving. But because it's the beginning stage, what are the challenges they might face, and what's typically the next step they'll take to improve? So first, we built that model to help our customers evaluate their current performance. But that wasn't enough to push our audience forward.

What we did additionally was look at our own customer data. We're the number one leader in the T&E space - we own the most data in this industry. We actually looked into our customer data to identify the top-performing customers. For example, how many days does it take their employees to submit expense reports or get reimbursed? What percentage receipt attach rate does a top-performing customer usually have? We looked at all these different metrics, matched them with the maturity model, and shared that with our audience.

"I believe if you don't move forward, you fall back. This philosophy has been central to my entire career"

I know most of the time, organisations want to know where they sit compared to their peers. They love the benchmarking mechanism and it's a wonderful way to motivate them to rethink their process and improve it. Organisations want to get better, but they need something to compare against, and also guidance. When they have new commerce, what should they do next? There are so many things they could start with, but what's most important according to industry best practice?

The outcome has been really impressive. This content is still generating pipeline three years later - the lifespan of that content is going strong every quarter. And it's not just marketing - our value consultants, our salespeople, all our different cross-functional teams have been using this model to talk to customers, whether they're existing or prospects, regardless of their maturity stage. It's a tool for starting conversations.

The second example is our current CFO Insights programme (with alan. agency). Finance is our core audience and CFOs are the most important people in this buying journey, but they're also the hardest to reach. I'm pretty sure no CFO likes to receive sales pushes every day. We really look at what they worry about in their job and try to put ourselves in their shoes, talking to them about topics based on their needs and interests.

We want to help them with their day job and their personal career development. We want to be there as a trusted resource. So we started working together to really put ourselves in the position of a finance leader: “What do we want to hear? What information do we want to receive day-to-day?” We use that story-led approach to identify different topics and ideas, then create conversations through content, roundtables and events.

The end goal for me in using storytelling for this CFO Insights programme is developing long-term relationships with CFOs. We don't want to just engage when we're trying to sell something. We want to be there with them and build a relationship that's sustainable for both sides.

What is the biggest change needed in your view in B2B marketing right now and how do you feel like you're contributing to that shift?

Efficiency and scale are huge focus areas for us. We're fortunate to live in an era where technology like AI is helping us enormously. But as technology evolves, it raises expectations both internally and externally. This creates new challenges - how can we match this rapid pace? How can we operate more efficiently at scale to meet these higher expectations? It's our biggest opportunity but also our biggest challenge moving forward.

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

I always encourage our team to pay attention to the details because I think (and this has happened to me as well, that a lot of new ideas come from trying to solve challenges or wanting to make improvements. So paying attention to these details gives us many opportunities to identify new ideas.

The other thing I recently discussed with my team and our partners is that we're not afraid of taking risks. We actually like taking risks because, I mean, when we deliver good results, it's brilliant - our stakeholders love it. But at the same time, they start raising their expectations, right? They want to know what more we can do, what's next?

I do believe taking risks is one of the ways to help us grow. But at the same time, I remind anyone who wants to take risks that while it's good to go for it, you need to set a loss point. You can't risk all your resources, budget and time; we have to make sure we have that balance. I definitely encourage risk-taking, but you need to think about when and where you'll need to adjust if something's not working. That's what I encourage my team to consider.

What makes B2B marketing 'changemaking', in just one word?

After giving this a lot of thought, I'd say 'catalyst'. In B2B, marketers do extensive research to understand our audience, journey, and trends. We're leading change by identifying what needs to change, finding strategies, coordinating resources, enabling sales teams, and communicating across organizations. We're catalysts for change, making sure the entire organization understands and joins us on the journey.

‍

What is your one piece of advice to future changemaking marketers on how to be more effective in their roles?

Take risks, but start small. Any risk will face some resistance and different perspectives. Starting with proof of concepts helps - even if you fail, those learnings prepare you for what's next, whether you're evolving your project or starting something new. Try something under your control, then think about how to evolve it. This will definitely improve your success rate in the future.

‍