A meeting with Hamilton Mann (EDHEC Executive MBA 2010), Group Director of Global Digital Marketing and Digital Transformation at Thales

Hamilton Mann is a graduate of EDHEC Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management and INSEAD. Having started out in entrepreneurship and later worked in a major consultancy firm, he joined Thales in 2013.

Hamilton is the president of the Digital Transformation Club of the INSEAD Alumni Association France (IAAF), mentor at the MIT Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Center, contributor at Harvard Business Review France, speaker on topics related to digital transformation and innovation, and was voted among the “Top 10 Global Thought Leaders & Influencers on Digital disruption” by Thinkers 360 in 2021.

Through his expertise, the objectives inherent in his mission and the work he does at Thales to achieve them, Hamilton closely engages with all of the strategic components of the digital transformation. 

Could you describe your position and functions within Thales?

I am the Group Director of Global Digital Marketing and Digital Transformation of Thales.

I lead the Digital Transformation in Marketing to drive enhanced customer engagement and experience, and Integrated Digital Marketing Campaigns excellence in support of revenue generation. 

In support of Thales’ Digital Transformation, I also lead the implementation of Group transverse Digital initiatives, focusing on helping make the company an exceptional place to drive Business Innovation and Growth by making experimentation the norm.

What are the main challenges of your role?

I think the Marketing function is going through a profound change, accelerated by digital and data. In this change, or more explicitly this transformation, several shifts are at stakes: 

Data is King for customer knowledge requiring to shift from:

Buying Center focus to Persona Segmentation aiming at developing and capitalizing a common knowledge of the different center of interest of our key business stakeholder.

Contract-based focus to Customer Journey centricity aiming at knowing the customers’ preferences that influence their journey and help improve their personalized experience, to support faster meaningful sell and upsell.

Content is King to drive demand generation requiring to shift from:

Marketing Content to a well-articulated Sales Enablement Content addressing the particular interest of different audiences depending on the market sub-segment, the industries, the geographies, the Accounts. the persona

Siloed Campaign approaches to well-Integrated Campaigns (whether we are talking of “Product-based”, “Segment-based” or “Account-based” campaigns) to support the entire buying cycles, beyond the limit of physical interactions.

Platform is King to enable the next level of collaboration and collective intelligence requiring to shift from:

Different Marketing Technology used across organizations for the same purpose, to common platform avoiding the costly vicious-cycle of having information that need to be shared or consolidated to be scattered across multiple systems and ease the teamwork effectiveness globally.

Different siloed contact database to a unified Customer Data Management to support a robust customer intelligence and customer data analytics that support effective and agile business decision 

Experiment is King to anchor new digital ways of working requiring to shift from: 

Only main stream Marketing activities (“The Navy”) to incorporate some Agile and Growth Hacking ones (“The Pirats”), allowing to crack the code for the customer/users’ adoption of new (digital) services and support sales, upsell and renewal, equipping Customer Success Team.

Occasional business experiments and Landing Pages waterfall developments to A/B Testing to test and learn what’s work better to generate the highest level of traction towards our targeted audiences before deploying at scale with greater impact

What are your main actions implemented for the digital transformation of Thales?

We have anchored the foundation to make Experimentation the Norm, in terms of ways of working and mindset. As an example, we established the Thales’ BIG (Business Innovation & Growth) program aiming at achieving customer’s BIG ambitions in an innovative way, bringing the opportunity to over 10,000 Thales staff to embark in the Digital Transformation journey and giving birth to new Thales ventures and business models, leveraging AI, Big Data, IoT and Cybersecurity technologies.

We also engaged in a global multi-year transformation to reinforce and build strong business capability about what Marketing should be in the digital era.

This has been a cross functional teams, jointly with Marketing, Sales and Communications in large matricial organization relying on the change leadership at Global Business Units (7), Business Lines (31) and Countries level (68).

We frame this transformation around four pillars:

Customer Intelligence, to continue to be at our best when it comes to putting ourselves in the shoes of our customer, mastering customer and user journeys enriched with data to really understand what really count, what they value and why.

Sales Enablement, to build and sustain impactful content that enable sales, and deliver robust support to all the customer facing job in engaging more productive conversation with their customers and prospects beyond physical interactions, for faster sales, upsell and cross sell.

Integrated Campaigns, to develop a cross-functional processes relying on Marketing, Sales and Communications systematic collaboration, to augment the potential of our demand and revenue generation engine, to support our buying cycles.

Agile Marketing, to embrace a kind of new generation of Marketing approaches, such as Growth Hacking, to support the development of digital business models, based on Software as a Service, for example.

Operationalizing all of these at scale has also been the opportunity to install new processes and new practices while relying on platform Marketing Technology such as a CRM, while implementing new jobs, new skills and new ways of working. 

While everything is changing at a phenomenal speed, how do you anticipate and stay at the forefront in terms of innovation?

There is no miraculous recipe. This being the case, there are some key words:

Purpose: some start their business innovation journey by firstly calling for many ideas. In fact, many people assume that creating new ideas is the beginning of any business innovation funnel — Actually that’s not true. It is not the idea but the reason why you are looking for ideas that truly matters. The very first step of any innovation journey is about what you stand for, not because of the ideas, but because of the purpose you intent to pursue obsessively. In Thales, we are all in with our purpose: "building a future we can all trust". This is something that is the first reason why we strive to innovate.

Team: some people are afraid that their idea can be stolen. I have never seen an idea, as innovative as it is, run by itself. With all that it takes to innovate, it’s not the idea that makes the idea, it’s the team. Not the idea but the team is the most critical asset ever.

Diversity: seeking to work with people who look like us, act like us, think like us, went through the same experiences as ours, over and over again, while expecting different results, is a definition of insanity. The more you connect with different people, thinking, experiences, background, etc. the more you increase the probability to think about doing things that others would never think to try: new business models, new value propositions, new product development, etc. It’s being regularly in contact with what seems different to us that gives us the opportunity to evolve, grow and develop completely new thought patterns, and finally create new things.

Environment: there is a resource without which the will to innovate is limited: a Holding Environment. It’s a culture that encourages people to make room for what seems uncontrollable, inconsistent, imprecise, unpredictable, challenging our everlasting need for control, consistency, accuracy and predictability that continuously leads us to strongly believe that all we think impossible really is. Business Innovation starts with no proven business models, roadmap with no plan, business plans with no revenue, cost and expenses with no margin and even Go-To-Market with no Market — One of the biggest obsessions is to find them. Chances are that none of the planned plans will guide you until then, but a Holding Environment will do.

Speed: the more experiments you do, the more likely you are to find a formula for success. That’s not the perfection of outcomes but the speed of execution that matters most. A research shows that some dinosaur embryos took twice as long as the birds eggs of similar sized to hatch. That long waiting period likely contributed to non-avian dinosaurs’ extinction about 65 million years ago, when a 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into Earth, the researchers said. As an analogy, it illustrates the vital importance of speed when it comes to the incubation period that is needed before to “hatch innovation eggs” to the market. Taking the time for perfection is a formidable competitive advantage in an established order that does not move, but becomes a poison in an unpredictable world where adaptation and speed are life-and-death conditions to innovation.

Risk: there is no innovation without progress, no progress without transgression, no transgression without disobedience, no disobedience without questioning, no questioning without risk. Innovation does not happen from what is agreed by consensus. Innovation means taking risks.

Different: being better is temporary. Nowadays, it is a fragile advantage that can be compromised in the short term by any competitors. Better is not good enough anymore — different is better than better.

What would be your advice to EDHEC students?

Make an Impact. As Denzel Washington says: Don't just aspire to make a living. Aspire to make a difference.

Contact

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamiltonmann

Twitter: @HamiltonMann

More Info

The Digital Transformation Club - Hamilton Mann Conversation: 

Website: www.hamiltonmannconversation.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-digital-transformation-club