CMO Chats with Rosie Guest, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Apex Group Ltd.

As we continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world, we’re thrilled to have Rosie here with us today.

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO Chats. I’m Rosie Guest, and I’m the CMO at Apex Group.

Can you tell me a little bit about the Apex Group?

Apex Group is a global financial solutions provider. We predominantly service asset managers. I’ve been with Apex for 10 years, and it’s gone from 350 people to 13,000, a big global organisation servicing the asset management community.
My role at Apex is very broad. Marketing is often underrated when it comes to how many things we’re involved in. I cover all internal communications, external communications, marketing, and so on. As a CMO, your role is quite strategic with other functions across the business, really aligning with product, sales, and business strategy, and then filtering that down into the team to ensure that the marketing and comms function is delivering on business objectives.

How did you get into marketing? You’ve been with the Apex Group for a really long time. How did you find this passion or this desire to be a CMO?

I started my career in sales. People are always surprised when I say that because sales and marketing, people tend to think they lock heads. But the way in which marketing has evolved over the last 10 to 15 years, it’s become much more of a commercial job than it used to be. Would I be in marketing if it were this stage of my life, 20 years in the past? Probably not. I don’t know if I would find that version of marketing as interesting as I do this.

As I got into sales and commercial, it naturally evolved into more brand marketing, out of account management, into that marketing piece. I’ve just loved the way that the marketing function has evolved over the last decade in terms of the technology we can use, the ways in which, as I mentioned before, you’re involved in so much business strategy, and there’s such a variety of things to do, particularly when you get to be in the CMO role, so many different elements of things that you can work on. It’s been an interesting journey, not necessarily that I qualified with a marketing degree and was always wanting to be in marketing, but it’s just naturally evolved. It’s well-aligned with my skill set, and now I can bring those two things together, that commercial element of sales, but also with the creative flair that I have as a person.

Being a CMO, like you said, you manage a lot of things. You’re covering a lot of initiatives, a lot of responsibilities, and a lot of teams you’re interacting with right now. What is your main focus this quarter or this half of the year? What is one of the biggest things you’re focusing on this year?

The marketing focus at the moment is aligned with business objectives, as it always has to be, and our priorities at the moment are really defining our value proposition as a solution-selling business. We’ve made around 50 acquisitions in the last six to seven years. That means we’ve got a whole heap of products and services that we have to translate to the market, but we also don’t want to be selling things in silos. The reason that the business has made these acquisitions is to deliver value to clients, and our role as marketers is to really distil that value. What’s the proposition, and how is that specific to each different audience type? So a big focus at the moment is real strong alignment with the product team and the sales team, resulting in really clear go-to-market strategies that are really efficient as a marketing function.

One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot recently with the different functions across our businesses is that marketing can’t add value if you’re bringing us in at the end of the journey; we have to be there from the beginning. We have a responsibility in marketing. Even though we just talked about how marketing has evolved massively, unless you’re in marketing or very close to marketing, perhaps that evolution is not as well understood by other functions and departments. It’s our role to really help them understand so that we can deliver that value. That is another focus.

Then there’s the external piece, making sure that we’re messaging our products and our marketing effectively out to clients, prospects, etc., but also the internal marketing piece of educating the broader business on how we can add value. The other element for the marketing function is that we’re a relatively lean function for the size of the business in terms of the number of marketers, so we have to be really effective and really efficient. Process, discipline, and tech are my three core focus areas at the moment to make sure we can deliver.

What would you say is the biggest challenge marketers or CMOs like yourself face today when they’re doing their job?

It’s when the pace is fast, especially when the business is under pressure. There are big targets to reach and other business objectives that perhaps don’t naturally align with what people would think a marketing team would be doing. That pressure then has a knock-on impact on what the marketing team does. I can see in those scenarios, and I see it at Apex sometimes, that you fall back into these legacy ways of working, being more of a reactive function than a proactive function.
One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot with my leadership team is air cover for the broader marketing team. It’s our responsibility to protect the team so that they can get on with their roles, and it’s our responsibility to communicate that back and put those processes in place. Be quite rigid with where we have a process that’s agreed with another function, you have to protect that for the team.
Another thing that I always talk about is slowing down to speed up. We have to take it back a notch, slow down, figure out what we’re trying to achieve, and then we can deliver faster and more effectively. It’s a big challenge when you’re under pressure and you have to deliver, and you can fall back into that execution model, which is not the best way of delivering value as a function.

It’s harder to get new initiatives and new ideas approved. Sometimes it’s quicker to just do it the old way, that maybe isn’t the best way, but it’s pre-approved, and you can get it done. Let’s talk quickly about marketing and sales. Out of all of the marketing initiatives that you’re running at Apex, is there one that your sales team gets the most excited about, or is the most grateful for? This quarter, if you say, “We’re running this initiative,” and they’re like, “Yes, we know that that works.” Is there one that jumps out at them?

This is not new, but we’ve had a big focus recently on campaign alignment. That’s another thing that we have to think about in marketing or as a CMO. Just because you’ve done something once, or you’ve implemented a process once, doesn’t mean that it’s going to continue to be followed, or that it’s going to continue to be effective. Always revisit how things work, especially when you’re in a high-growth, fast-paced environment. Things change all the time, so you’ve got to be able to adapt. What we’ve been focusing on at the moment, in terms of alignment with sales, is the tied-up campaign process and the end-to-end process. What is marketing doing? What is sales doing? Almost going back to the basics of what, in the RACI model, is everybody doing, just to remind everyone what their roles and responsibilities are and how we can be most effective. Revisiting that model and how we work together and how we collaborate, and making sure that marketing is involved early on and understands the objective that the sales team has, we can deliver. That’s definitely been beneficial for the sales and marketing relationship for us recently, just revisiting that process and tightly aligning on it. Another one would be being able to quickly react to market changes and provide the sales team with toolkits to go to market. An obvious one in the financial services industry recently has been the impact of tariffs from the US administration. That’s massive for everyone. It’s particularly big for our industry. For us to be able to work with product, work with sales, get a sales toolkit together, get some comms out to the clients, and support them in their messaging on that topic quickly, they appreciate that. It’s that juggle of the longer-term campaign. How do we work together consistently over time, but also just be able to react to market conditions and provide them with some support and a buffer to talk to their clients?

Is there a marketing strategy or initiative that you think has yielded the most success? Obviously, we’re talking about running long-term campaigns and being aligned, and then giving them the toolkit when things are changing and the industry changes. Is there one initiative that you’ve run that you feel has yielded the most success, or is continuously successful?

There’s no one specific initiative. I’ve talked previously in interviews about a short story strategy: “Kill your darlings.” That’s when you’re writing a short story. Usually, your favourite part of the short story doesn’t fit that well or isn’t that good, and it’s really difficult to let it go and just delete it from the story. I learned this when I was doing literature, and I apply that same methodology to how I market and how I run the team, because you can get quite attached, as marketers, particularly to certain creatives or certain campaigns that you spend a lot of time on and think are really great. Going back to what we just talked about, market conditions change, or there’s a structural change within the business. For example, Apex has just restructured its product department, so we’ve had to realign the marketing function to align with the product function. Without a specific initiative, the ability to adapt has been very successful for us. Also, a longer-term thing that’s been important for us is the ability to communicate the funnel and talk about the right metrics with the right people. Those aren’t specifically outbound marketing initiatives, but they’re things that have enabled us to be successful within Apex.

Who is Apex’s ICP?

We have multiple audiences, but I would say the biggest priority audience for us would be CEOs and CFOs. If we’re talking personas, CEOs and CFOs within asset managers with upwards of a billion assets under management would probably be our perfect target audience. Because of the way in which we’ve grown so much with so many acquisitions, we’ve got multiple different audience segments. It would really depend on the products or the value proposition as to who the ideal target audience would be. 

When we speak to companies as large as Apex Group, and having done so many acquisitions over the last nine years as well, there are so many different audiences that you can sell to and market to. That question’s always a little harder for bigger companies, given what artists do. I’m interested in understanding a little bit more about Field Marketing, and maybe now, as a CMO, or previously in the past, it’d be interesting to know what is in store at Apex. Do you guys do Field Marketing?

Field Marketing, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? We’ve, I would say, over the last three years, brought Field Marketing in, then we removed Field Marketing, and then we’ve brought Field Marketing back. During COVID, for example, Field Marketing didn’t really exist. Because for us, the Field Marketing team are supporting on the ground in the region with more traditional marketing. Then we, as most people did, really shifted towards digital after that, which continued for a while. As people started to come back to offices, in-person events started to ramp back up. Everything moved back off. Although webinars are still a thing, they’re not as effervescent as they were then. We’ve recently brought it back. It’s a pared-down version, so the other teams are bigger, so you’ve got your marketing ops, portfolio marketing, demand marketing, comms, all of those, those are bigger, so it’s a smaller team.

But I still think there’s a place for Field Marketing, because there’s still a need there for those, particularly for us and a global business where you’ve got offices in lots of different locations, digital can be omnipresent, and especially if the predominantly the language that you’re speaking for us is English, irrespective of location, in most cases, so that team can market globally. When it comes to field marketing, or that on-the-ground support, you do need a different specialism. There’s a place for it, but the function is much smaller than it used to be.

Given your ICP, how do you think about where to host in-person events or place your marketing teams, especially when your target audience has such specific roles, responsibilities, and asset volumes?

That’s why you just have to be strategic about where you’re spending and where you place your marketers. That’s another thing that is a luxury and also a curse, in some ways, being a global business, is that the decisions about where you put your marketers are quite important, and we have a mix of different specialisms in different locations. With field marketing, you either need to have them working strange hours if they’re in a country where they’re not next to the people, or you need to place them in the office with those people. What we tend to do is focus on our priority regions for Field Marketing.

Today’s day and age, and like you said, the field marketing function and team are much smaller. Budgets are also smaller. You really have to be strategic on where you’re spending. Speaking of budgets and spending, how do you measure ROI from an event? What are you looking at the end to achieve? Is it brand awareness or ops created? It’s very different for everyone I speak to, so I’m always interested to see what someone has to say.

In our industry, event spend is a big spend. It tends to be a really solid place for the sales team to generate leads. So there’s always that push-pull between how much we want to spend on events and how much we want to spend on digital, and getting the balance right, it shifts really within the year. And again, going back to what we said earlier, you need to be able to adapt, but we’ve taken quite a surgical approach, in a way, to events. We’ll decide up front what the purpose of the event is, and if the purpose is, it’s just a speaker slot, it’s a brand play, or it’s thought leadership. Perhaps we’re not looking necessarily to generate leads, although we will always hope for that. Whereas, if it’s a sales event, and we’re sending several salespeople, we will be quite measured in what we expect out of the event to measure on ROI, and we put that all into our CRM system. We’ll agree with the sales team up front, the number of opportunities that they expect to create value, of opportunities that we think would be a good return on investment.

As all that goes into the CRM system, we’re able to then look at that over time to see what events are delivering, because otherwise you fall into the trap of, “Oh, this event was great last year,” and all you’ve got to go on is hearsay. It’s important to have a mix of, first of all, understanding what you’re aiming to achieve, and some of it’s not measurable, as well as the brand stuff. If the purpose of the web event, which in most scenarios for us is to generate leads, then you have to have an agreement between sales and marketing, clear KPIs before you attend, and a way of measuring that through whatever system it is that you use.

Like you said, tracking it through the CRM is hearsay. If I say, “Well, last year, we had a great time at this event,” but I never added that tag to any of those opportunities or leads created, you aren’t getting any recognition for that event. So, everyone has a similar stance on data, and making sure your data is clean and organised is a big part of tracking it. What advice would you give to someone starting out in marketing?

Don’t be afraid to get close to departments that don’t seem like a natural fit. As a marketer, to be taken seriously, you need to align yourself with the business, which we’ve discussed a fair bit today. That might mean spending time with the CFO or with compliance. You’ll find you need all of those departments. The CFO controls the budget and ultimately all the tech. Compliance can stop marketing campaigns if they need to, particularly in a highly regulated industry. So, your social capital within the business is really important, but your understanding of the other functions and their drivers is key, and I wouldn’t underestimate that, even starting out early on. Also, for a brand new marketer, if you can attend marketing events where you’re learning about different skill sets and specialisms within marketing, because there are so many different avenues you can take.
When you end up in the CMO role, you have all of that. But before you get there, if that’s your ambition, there are so many different avenues to explore, whether that be the tech side in marketing operations or digital, or more on the comms side. So, I would say, explore the industry, connect with people virtually or in person, and don’t be afraid to figure out the business and get to know other departments.

Amazing. Your social standing and understanding of compliance, their wants, and their challenges are how you get buy-in from everyone to get it done. CMOs today have very different opportunities than CMOs might have had in the past. What do you think is the biggest positive opportunity that CMOs have now compared to maybe 10 years ago?

CMOs have the ability to move into something different now. With that role broadening so much, taking on more of a commercial lens, and being so spread across a business, you have visibility of all those different things. Therefore, if your next step would be looking at becoming a COO or a CEO, that’s open to marketers now, and I don’t think it was as much before, also board positions. Previously, boards looking for new people were always looking for people with finance, legal, compliance, or audit backgrounds. There’s more of an appetite for marketing now because people can see the commercial benefits and the connectivity that can open up. The mindset of a marketer is a slightly different skill set that is now potentially seen as valuable, and it wasn’t before.

If you could describe marketing in one word. What would that word be?

Exploratory. I would say exploratory for so many reasons, because what are we trying to achieve as marketers? We’re trying to explore and understand the products and services we’re selling. We’re trying to explore and understand our clients, their needs, and their wants. We’re trying to explore and understand the business and how we fit into that, and technology. All of these things that we now have, we need to explore every day. Every day is different. Every day there’s something new. That’s the great thing about marketing: it’s changing all the time, so there’s always something new to do. You’ve always got something to explore.