Meet Maik Smolen. He joined SuperOffice back in 2020 as Marketing Manager at our office in Dortmund, Germany.
Only two years later, in June 2022, Maik was appointed the Head of Field Marketing at SuperOffice. A few months have passed, and we’ve decided to check how he was doing in his new role and find out what “Field Marketing” even means. 🤔
It’s been a few months now since you became the Head of Field Marketing (FM). Can you tell us what FM means, and how did you become interested in it?
There are many definitions of FM on the internet. And each company may have its own interpretation of the field.
At SuperOffice, we see FM as an important link between central and local marketing that helps sales perform better. Another way to describe it – FM is the glue between marketing and sales that ensures a tighter alignment of marketing activities across countries.
Personally, I’ve always loved working closely with sales. I like seeing how we can achieve better results together. And we all know that it can be rather difficult to make marketing and sales see eye to eye.
Finding opportunities to bring marketing and sales closer together is my biggest challenge today. That’s the mission that I am excited to take on! 💪
Why was this role introduced at this time?
Introducing a new way of working for the team is always a challenge, because it means change. And change takes time. Especially when the organization was used to working a certain way for quite some time.
But the world changes, and so does SuperOffice. As we plan to grow and evolve, FM is helping us become a unified and renewed CRM leader.
So, what are your new duties and responsibilities?
I have two sets of responsibilities: internal and external.
Let’s start with internal responsibilities:
- I am responsible for ensuring that all countries are working in the same way as much as possible when it comes to central marketing campaigns and initiatives. If we want to have a global impact, then our global strategy should be the daily Bible for local teams.
- But, of course, we also have the following mantra in mind: “think global, act local”. Local field marketers need to be aligned with local sales to better understand their everyday challenges and develop the best local strategies and tactics.
Talking of my external responsibilities, the goal of every company is to be successful and to reach the revenue goals. It’s my duty to contribute to these goals in terms of brand awareness, demand generation and pipeline creation. Together with other marketing teams we aim to create a lot of noise and visibility for SuperOffice in European markets.
What FM activities are the most exciting for you in your daily work and why?
Unfortunately, the most exciting activities are not always the most successful. So, we focus on the activities that actually work and have a tangible impact on our markets and the CRM industry.
While working together with sales, we always need a good mix of initiatives that make a long-term impact and activities to support our short-term goals.
Using our own SuperOffice Dashboards allows us to make better-informed, data-driven decisions, such as: which activities work or which not so much, in what areas we should improve, where we should invest more and which we should ditch, etc.
Of course, partner marketing is always important. So, we also focus on collaboration and joint activities with our local and App Store partners.
When it comes to my day-to-day favorites: I love to work with my FM team and sales reps to find the best ideas, come up with campaigns and messaging for our target groups. Also, I am excited to find and support individual strengths of FM team members.
How do you think you’ll help SuperOffice grow and improve the company’s marketing activities?
To my mind, to grow means to focus on the right things and to prioritize the right activities.
I also want to make sure that local resources and individual knowledge and talents are made use of effectively.
Next, I love planning all central and local marketing activities from A to Z. Because I believe that all marketing and sales processes need to go hand in hand. And it is our own product – SuperOffice CRM that helps us achieve this synergy.
Do you plan to introduce new initiatives in your new field of work? If so, maybe you can mention some?
Of course, I don’t want to spill the beans too much. 😉
All I can say is that we have great plans. Right now, I will focus on digital and live events that create value for our target groups and ICP companies. For SuperOffice it is all about building relationships, and this is what I intend to help us succeed in.
