Building Strategy, Culture and Diversity with a Global SaaS Marketing Team

Concur is a global SaaS leader in travel and expense management. David Hsu is the Global VP of Marketing Data and Technology and has worked in senior marketing roles at IBM and CA in the past.

At Concur, he leads a global 30-member team with the mandate to support marketing with analytics, automation, martech, and project management solutions and services. His team balances both transactional, problem-solving work and more strategic innovation projects.

Episode synopsis

In this episode, David and Erica talk about different kinds of diversity that are critical in a global team - regional and location-specific diversity, role and skill diversity within the team, and the more human aspects of diversity such as gender, race, and personal preferences.

David shares his experiences on the process he follows to set a common vision and strategy for the global team, as well as his take on addressing the diversity of all types in his agenda.

Highlights include: 

• How to cross-pollinate ideas and best practices across global teams
• The process of developing an annual strategy and how to get the team to own and lead it
• The conscious shift of moving from being a transaction-driven team to a strategic advisory function
• How to bring the diversity aspect into hiring without falling into the trap of familiarity bias
• The role of the leader in owning diversity – should they avoid it, proactively lead the discussion, or wait til the company is forced to surface the issues?
• How some companies are stretching the hiring brief to make room for diverse voices. For example, companies seeking out qualified candidates without college degrees, or not advertising the role on LinkedIn
• The rise of future roles in marketing - for instance, David recently created a Data Strategy role on his team to bridge the data gap between tech and business
• What leaders should do to ensure diversity on their global teams

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy