Tell us about yourself.

My name is Lily Robertson, and I am the head of EMEA marketing at Sodali & Co. My background includes a mix of roles—between some growth-focused startups and the bigger professional services firms—but always B2B. 

At Sodali & Co, we've been tackling the really interesting challenge of combining multiple acquisition brands under one master brand—Sodali & Co. 

The journey we're on is twofold. Reintroducing ourselves to the market as Sodali & Co—still the same trusted partner but with a broader set of services and client offers. As well as an internal marketing exercise to help all our global colleagues articulate our new story to clients. 

It's a challenge, but it's exciting to be building a marketing strategy from scratch, and finding the right blend of what was done before and what needs to be done in the future. The hardest thing is knowing there you want to be as a function and as a brand, but having to be realistic about how fast you can get there—not running before you can walk. 

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

For me, the word 'changemaker' is more about society and industry rather than just my individual career. I'm passionate about climate change and sustainability, and I spend a lot of time thinking about my personal impact and how to minimise that, which includes what my professional impact can be. 

Marketing and the creative industries have a really great, interesting, and compelling role to play around climate change. Our role as marketers is to think about how messages are crafted, how they land, and how they inspire people to take action. At its best, marketing is incredibly influential in changing customer behaviour. And in B2B, your customers are business leaders. So, if you believe that the actions of businesses can drive change, then you can have a lot of potential influence through marketing. 

I think there's also a responsibility to look inward as a marketer at how you make decisions about your function and its environmental impact. Marketers spend a lot on suppliers and agencies, and being conscientious about who you're working with can make a difference. 

There's a great organisation called Can Marketing Save the Planet? that has some great resources around carbon literacy. There's also a really lovely organisation called Marketing Kind that does a lot of purposeful marketing meetups. And there's a brilliant book, Greener Marketing, by John Grant, all about marketing's role in the green evolution and the green future journey.

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

I think sometimes the most provocative thing you can do in B2B is just to challenge the status quo a little bit. A great CMO I used to work with would say that part of our role was 'speaking truth to power.' 

In larger, more established firms, getting people to think outside the box can be difficult, and sometimes even asking, "Why are we doing this?" can be seen as quite provocative. But when the pressure is on to sell or grow, and everyone's in a rush, it's easy to jump straight to the first or most familiar answer – which isn't always the right one. For me, asking questions isn’t about finding a way to say "No" but about getting to a "Better Yes" that everyone is bought into. 

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I think sometimes the most provocative thing you can do in B2B is just to challenge the status quo a little bit.

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

I'm thinking a lot about how to use stories and use cases to bring our proposition to life—internally and externally. We've just gone through a rebrand, so by definition, we have spent a lot of time looking inward and thinking about ourselves and what we offer. Now, we need to shift into thinking about ourselves from a client's perspective and see our proposition through their eyes. And stories are one of the best tools to shift perceptions.

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?

A shift I love to see is more marketing representation on c-suite and boards and the respect and acknowledgment that it's a strategic function. 

I don't have an academic marketing background; I've learned 'on the job', but I did Mark Ritson's mini MBA not that long ago. What was interesting for me was seeing my day-to-day life in the form of a curriculum. It was a great reminder just how broad the marketing discipline is! 

There's strategy, data analytics, communication, creative, project management, etc. And that’s before you even get into the softer side of patience, resilience, interpretation, and diplomacy skills. The multifaceted nature of what we do can often get overlooked. But when you consider the breadth of competencies great marketers have and the things we think about, who wouldn't want them leading the company in some capacity? 

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

Similar to my point before, what happens behind the scenes can sometimes be the boldest, most provocative part of our roles. There's a lot of misunderstanding around marketing that needs to be addressed up front.   

Given that baseline of misunderstanding, you're often asking for a lot of trust, a lot of patience from stakeholders. And that can be hard when you're in a busy, growth-focused environment where people want to see results yesterday. Being super clear and transparent on the 'why' and focusing on the measurement and the agreed outcomes right from the start is so important. 

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

Influence. 

I think marketers have more influence than they realise both within a company and industrywide.

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

I feel like there’s no rulebook for marketing anymore, and there’s so much to learn from other companies and industries – even the ones that look nothing like yours. So I think as you move through your career it’s important to be open-minded and flexible and find learnings wherever you can. 

I feel like there’s no rulebook for marketing anymore, and there’s so much to learn from other companies and industries – even the ones that look nothing like yours.

Prior experiences and successes can be useful as a guideline, but I think you have to be willing to break things down and put them back together again in a way that fits a new strategy and new requirements of every company you're in.

But also, finding a way to be comfortable with not knowing everything. There’s a huge amount of science to marketing today given how much data and digital tools we can leverage to really understand our customers. But I think there's still a lot of art as well, and often you don't know categorically if something is going to work. So, I think being honest about not knowing the answer but saying, "Let's find out", is a great attitude to have.  

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