Join Elizabeth Kiehner, Chief Growth Officer at Nortal, as she explores the intersection of transformation, trust, and technology. From modernising governments to reshaping critical infrastructure, she shares how Nortal drives impact at scale. Discover her journey from advertising to AI, why storytelling matters in complex sales, and how modern growth leaders can build credibility, personalisation, and precision into every touchpoint.
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So delighted to welcome on this edition of the Business and Marketing Podcast recorded live at Advertising Week, Elizabeth from Nortel.
Hi.
Hey, great to see you today.
Likewise. Thanks for popping in.
Of course, of course.
So first of all, tell me a little bit about Nortel. Why do you exist?
We solve very big problems and fundamental problems that can result in the transformation of society. So no small task, a very big, hairy, audacious goal, if you like to use that term or phrase ever.
So Nortel is 25 years old. And although our US headquarters is in the Seattle area, our global headquarters is in Tallinn, Estonia. And some people, particularly in America, I will make the gross generalization that a lot of Americans are poor at geography. And many people are not even aware of where Estonia is on the map.
But Nortel led the digital transformation for the nation of Estonia after they became free of Russian occupation. And now Estonia is known as one of the most, if not the most, digitally advanced countries in the world, both on the side of government as well as even in health.
So I am also working on building up our global health practice. And we were actually this morning on a call with a hospital in the Netherlands that we were speaking about. And they were quite interested in our reputation. And as we get into the topics of marketing, we can address how a hospital in the Netherlands even finds us because we only have a few employees there.
So we are trying to spread our wings and small but mighty, but we are a bit over 2,300 people. So not terribly small, but not as big as some of our larger competitors, which tend to be the Accentures, Deloitte’s, and the IBMs of the world.
So we play a little bit of a David and Goliath story. But practically 40% of our clients and our revenue are on the government or public sector side. And then the other side of our client base is in the corporate side or mid-market companies.
And you started to sort of mention a little bit about it, but tell me more about your role.
Yeah, so my role with the company is that of chief growth officer. And I am focused on North America at the moment because we have just been the business has been active in the US, particularly for about seven and a half years now.
And our investors challenge us to say it’s sometimes difficult for a European-based business to get a true foothold in the States or more broadly speaking, North America. So the challenge that I received this year from our CEO was to say, Liz, you need to make this happen and lead marketing, sales, business development, as well as I’m heavily involved in our acquisition activity.
And with that, we are also actively expanding into Latin America as well.
That sounds like an incredible role. How did you, give me your career journey. How did you end up doing what you’re doing now?
Yeah, so I actually started my career, oddly enough, coming full circle here to Advertising Week. I started my career in advertising.
So my first job out of university was actually at Havas in Chicago. So I worked at Havas and then moved to Los Angeles, worked at an IPG agency in LA. And then when I came to New York, I made a promise to myself that I wanted to move out of advertising and do something slightly different, although adjacent.
So thus I got into design, UX, which slowly at the time was lots of flash sites and banner campaigns and the whole world of digital advertising opened up as well as branding and corporate identity and lots of different sorts of projects as I joined a Swedish-owned design firm.
I became general manager of another firm and then started my own company, which I owned and operated for eight years. And after that went to IBM, which is where I began my data and AI journey, so to say, as well as getting much more global client experience.
And that was something I craved. So I would say the first chapter of my career was very oriented towards clients in North America. And as I was seeing the world become smaller, I felt it was absolutely necessary to get global skills and depth and to know how to do distributed and global delivery when it comes to large projects, to be able to enable a follow the sun delivery model whenit comes to certain projects. And IBM definitely gave me those chops and that capability, both from the global delivery side as well as what was very important to me as I was a little bit enraptured by the IBM Watson Jeopardy Challenge and really still am to this day. We do a significant amount of data and AI work at Nortel, but I am endlessly curious to see where this AI journey takes us. Fascinating.
And when did the move to Nortel happen? It happened close to two years ago. The end of November will be my two-year anniversary with Nortel. So in between IBM and Nortel, I also set up a digital transformation office at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center during the pandemic, which was no small feat. And then after that, went to Capgemini and was leading a global practice called Reinventing Work, which also coming out of the pandemic was a very hot topic. Arguably, it still is because there are still many corporations that are working on their return to office strategy and go forward plan of what works looks like in the future is still far from salt. So that was very interesting as well because that was bringing together some people, HR and org topics, as well as the technology and processes that you need to support or underpin those.
It’s amazing. You have such deep subject matter expertise, practitioning expertise. How do you bring all of that sort of experience and expertise into the role that you’re doing now?
Yeah. So I am a big, big believer in consultative selling. And a lot of the business problems that companies are facing right now are large, complex, multidisciplinary problems. So they’re good to think about in a non-siloed way. And if you have experience across a few different domains and corporate functions, you can appreciate and empathize for different people who might be impacted as you even look at organizational change management. And for something to succeed, it isn’t just designing or creating a great product or service or piece of technology. It is how it is fundamentally deployed and adopted and what that journey looks like. So I think because I have worked in different angles and sides of the business, it gives me a profound and lived experience around what some of these things look like. So I really do appreciate what it takes not only to get the work done, but to see it through.
Couldn’t agree with you more. Real kind of authenticity and authority in terms of that conversation that you’re having with the organizations that you’re looking to partner with.
Tell me a little bit about sort of the relationship between growth and marketing.
Absolutely. So marketing is intrinsic to growth. And I think with a lot of the sorts of projects that we do in Nortel, working with governments, doing highly sensitive work, like such as in the area of corporate security with some of our larger Fortune 500 clients that we work with, trust is essential. And so it’s interesting for me to contemplate how do you tell marketing stories? What does B2B or B2G, because we’re doing government work, how do you immediately convey your brand in a way that feels trusted and authentic? Because beyond the fact that you assume the company has the capabilities and skills to get the work done, so much of the work that we do require so much high trust and high integrity. That to me becomes the most essential thing that needs to cut through marketing or communication immediately.
So we have a lot of success, therefore, I would say, in field marketing, where we can get in front of and face to face with people, because that is sometimes like the quickest way to win someone’s trust. But when we cannot do that, I think we rely on a lot of client referrals and people who can vouch for us. And I even last year was at a conference that happens every year in Estonia called Tallinn Digital Summit. And the prime minister at the time even gave Nortel a shout out in her introductory remarks at the summit. So when you have like a prime minister of a nation endorsing you, that’s a pretty good endorsement. And I was sitting in the audience chuckling and thinking to myself, wow, can I record this, put it on our website or something? But that is the level of endorsement that I try to leverage as I think about our marketingand our positioning, because so much has to do with our credibility in building new client relationships or even in expanding existing ones. How do you find it best to kind of try and tell the stories of what you do and the impact you have?
Yeah, so for us, the stories always wrap around the results or the outcome or the business value that we were able to achieve either for a company, for a nation state, for a state or a province, depending on the level of the government that we’re talking about or even a city, that we need to see business results. And where this has been really interesting for me to watch unfold on the government side, that we have had some projects that we have won when an elected official knows he or she has only two or three more years left in office and they need to do something profound that really makes an impact and really makes a positive mark on really the legacy that they’re leaving behind. And in those moments, we can really shine and help to come up with something that is not just the art of the possible, but it’s the art of the doable. And those sorts of results and the guarantee that we bring, which is going beyond giving you a fancy PowerPoint presentation and pitch to we deliver a real working product and code and transform financial management systems for countries and are trusted with data engineering of really proprietary data with some of our corporate clients. So it is the level of outcome and the level of results that we try to then turn into the corporate antidote and anecdotes that we are able to share.
And how have you defined selling in that sort of level? It’s hard to kind of imagine what the kind of ideal customer kind of profile looks like, particularly when you’ve kind of you’re cross cutting kind of numerous kind of parts of the C-suite or government departments even. How do you kind of reach the right people with the right message?
Yeah, so we need to do a very sophisticated amount of customer segmentation, both looking at different industries. So I would say historically our strongest industries have been in government and health and manufacturing and in energy and utilities. But then within that, breaking down the various roles and personas that we sell into. So it is multiple mapping of what might be relevant to these people right now. And of course, we want to have the conversation ultimately around, you know, what’s keeping you up at night? But before you can do that, you need to demonstrate some kind of value point or some sort of hook that gets them to even give you the time of day to enter into such a conversation or meet you for a tea or a coffee. So this is where we need to really rely on business intelligence, looking at what the industry analysts are reporting and staying as far ahead of where trends and where the industry is going. So when we show up, we of course have our credibility, but hopefully we have something industry leading to have a slightly, you know, a provocation that we can lead with.
And how are you using digital channels to do that?
So we’re definitely using digital channels as far as I think, you know, over the past 12 months, we have started to get more sophisticated in our email marketing and creating sequences that I have had, you know, it’s always a fine line of reaching, being too persistent, I guess, and being the right level of persistent. But I had somebody compliment our team this week about having the right level of persistence that we did not cross the threshold of being annoying, but we’re like making ourselves top of mind. So I think that there’s more digital channels and ways of outreach than ever before. And some days, even when I am working, I feel like my phone is ringing off of the hook with various people calling me and trying to sell me things. So myself as a consumer, both a personal and business consumer, see how oversaturated people are. So with the digital channels, I think it’s important to be as clever and as creative as ever before, as far as how you reach people. And I am personally a very, very big fan of very shortmessages and keeping it brief and trying to figure out what is this little spark that’s going to ignite the person’s curiosity on. Little spark that’s going to ignite the person’s curiosity on the other side. So they’ll at least react and respond and at least ask a question or say, hey, this piqued my interest. Can you follow up and send me X, Y, Z? But it’s definitely hard. It’s definitely hard. We, of course, leverage LinkedIn and do webinars and all of the typical things that a lot of other folks are doing out there. But yeah, I think looking at all of the different digital channels, I’m always mindful of not oversaturating people.
And then in some cases, we still print out some of our white papers in very traditional paper-based format because sometimes these artifacts live with the person or that person then passes them around. So also figuring out what is the right intersection and mix of digital channels and then still having something that feels like you want to save it and savor it and even maybe share it with a colleague. It’s, you know, you’re selling something very big, very complicated, in some ways a big investment involving multiple stakeholders. And I completely subscribe to kind of everything you’ve sort of said there.
Tell me about sort of the, you mentioned field marketing. What is kind of, how do you kind of execute field marketing kind of in 2024? So we have a lot of really impressive subject matter experts. So when we go into a conference or an event, for instance, we will typically not be very interested in doing that unless somebody has a keynote or is like speaking in some way that we can create a positive halo effect around that. So that’s been one thing and investing in events where we can have scheduled one-to-one executive meetings, that has been very successful for us that we can do pairing and matchmaking with like-minded people who want to sit down and at least have a 30-minute conversation.
What doesn’t work for a company like us and maybe works for, you know, SaaS or product businesses or businesses that are slightly more commodity businesses is having a booth somewhere or something like this because we will, that’s not how we can convey the value that we bring. But it is, I think, necessary now more than ever before. And thankfully, the event we’re sitting in today, there’s a live and in-person is alive and well. And people, I think, are, you know, very, very excited to be back in front of one another again. And I think that there’s a lot of value and there’s a lot of serendipity of just who you bump into or who you can pull into a conversation or who you come to an event and had no idea you would meet and you meet and they’re the person you launch a next big project or initiative with.
And, you know, growing the US, which is obviously, you know, the brief as well as kind of obviously health. Tell me a little bit about sort of the US as a market for you.
Yeah, the US as a market is, without saying the obvious, highly complicated, highly fragmented. And whether you look at it from a geographic standpoint or an industry standpoint, people know who they know and get used to, you know, their vendors and their business rhythm. And there can be a lot of loyalty, actually, which is good. We were talking to a customer yesterday who’s based in California but is coming out to New York next week. And we had some potential work that we were discussing in the cybersecurity area. And, you know, he was expressing his loyalty to those incumbents who came before but then found some areas that maybe that they have gaps.
So I think that, you know, the different countries and, or sorry, different parts of the country, I think we have found, for instance, in the San Francisco area and Silicon Valley, that is so, so competitive. That is not always where we play the best. So we have been leaning pretty hard recently on a strategy around critical infrastructure and looking at manufacturing and looking at clients that are in the wholesale distributionspace and looking at things that, dare I say, are not the sexy consumer brands, but they are the brands that make our world tick and our days tick and get food onto our table and make the transportation and supply chains work and things like this. And also, you know, given our track record and the level of trust and credibility that we have, when we focus on these critical systems and critical infrastructure, it is, you know, situations where the error rate is zero. There is no margin for error at all. But it’s in those situations that I think we shine. So that is where I have been trying to look at pockets. Certainly, there’s a lot of these sorts of businesses in the Midwest, but not only there, but looking at these parts of the country where we can really make a difference and where we aren’t, you know, competing with a bunch of Silicon Valley startups necessarily, where we’re looking at how can we fundamentally and positively change, again, back to the aspiration to change society is real or make societies work better and more seamlessly.
What are the metrics that you live by? So the metrics that I live by is top line revenue and profitability. So in the growth role and focusing on marketing, I’m, of course, looking at revenue and what revenue we have impacted. But we are pretty firm believers in the fact that we don’t really care so much about vanity metrics like clicks and likes and number of people who read this. How can we show attribution to revenue? And if we can’t show direct attribution, the fact that the revenue is going up at a certain rate and not declining, then certainly the mix of activities that we’re doing and the investments that we’re making are at a whole paying off. But yeah, the metrics are very much top line, bottom line driven. But I think that they should be. And I think that that’s the value of looking at growth rather than looking at marketing and looking at growth as a combination of marketing, sales, business development. And you probably, you know, also in that bake in your comms and your PR activity that it all needs to work together as one. And the goal is, you know, to grow the business. And that’s what we try to do.
And I think that’s a really nice segue into my next question, which is around how do you like to kind of structure your teams? Yeah, so we have been, I guess, massaging the teams in some way since I have joined because we are operating in 25 or 26 countries. So we have global or group growth and marketing function and team members and then people that are local and in country. And figuring out the right balance of, as many companies face the same challenge, what is done globally versus what is done locally? And then what sort of shared services do you create that can do things like help with pitches and proposals and design and copy editing and things like this, that in some cases we have a team that we created last year that has not a very creative name, but it is called the Creative Service Desk. They’re based in Europe. So for us in the US, we can wrap up a project or proposal, shoot it to them, say, hey, can you work on designing this and copy editing and things like this. And then we, by the time they work on it, it’s morning our time. So you’re following your, following, yes, doing the follow the sun thing. So I think this is how we are trying to take advantage of distributed delivery even for our own work. So I think that that’s been since I joined figuring out what to centralize, what to keep decentralized. Of course, knowing that all of our client relationships are very local. So there’s a certain amount of marketing that needs to always be very local to create that client or customer intimacy. But then there’s other things that can be handled more globally.
What do you look for from a behaviors, competencies and skills perspective? Whatdo you need to win to succeed, to grow in 24? So I definitely appreciate people who are very into data because that is like, we live or die based on the success of the investments that we’re making, the campaigns we’re launching, and the work that we’re doing. So I want somebody that can understand data and without going into some complex reporting, at least because we’re a Microsoft shop, be able to use Power BI and roll up the right summaries and analytics of things. And that’s, of course, more on the measurement side.
I think otherwise it is because the type of work that we’re doing is a complex sell. It is somebody that is inherently good at making complex things sound simple or effortless. And that is not always easy to do. And that’s maybe a core communication skill, but certainly not everybody has it.
I think with any company or culture that is very engineering based, engineers tend to sometimes overexplain something or how it’s built, how it’s made, rather than speaking about the why and what was the value that it delivered or will deliver and telling the story from that point of view.
So it is somebody, there’s a woman on our marketing team, not dissimilar from myself because way back when I was in high school and university, I wanted to be a journalist. And I have always enjoyed interviewing people and that was what I did growing up. It was a real passion of mine. And I’ve said to many people throughout my career, that single skill is so valuable because as a marketer, you could be interviewing subject matter experts in the company to figure out:
Where’s the gold or the diamond here?
What’s the secret sauce that makes this so unique?
And you need to keep investigating and investigating until you reach that, the vein or the golden thread that you can then say, oh, okay, this is the story that I want to tell. So you need to have that sort of relentless curiosity and also be somebody who enjoys talking to people and talking to people who may also be more introverted than extroverted, getting them comfortable to really unleash and unlock what’s in their brains or on their minds.
That’s a great answer. It’s the 20th anniversary of Advertising Week. What are you most excited about when you look at the future and the innovation going on at the moment?
I am most excited, I think, for the past 10 years, maybe even more than 10 years, we’ve been hearing about personalization. And I think what I’m excited about is personalization that gets to the level of if I share any sort of personal data with you, then know me and share back products, services, whatever it is that is relevant to me because I love learning about new things. Not in all cases, but in many cases, I’m an early adopter, but I don’t like, nor does anyone like being bombarded with stuff that just doesn’t make sense to them or their stage in life or their age or their whatever the case may be.
So I am excited, and this is where even data and AI and at least advanced analytics comes into this equation of really bringing a level of intelligence to advertising. So it isn’t as I guess we typically call it, it isn’t the spray and pray anymore. It is the being very precise and thinking about precision advertising or marketing in a way that even in cases where it is not a one-to-one marketing or advertising engagement or message, it somehow feels that way, like it made me feel that way.
So I think when brands can achieve that, they really win. But then that goes back to our earlier conversation about being really, really detailed on your segmentation and knowing what resonates with X audience located in X geography and on and on andon. But yeah, I think the relevance is getting better and better, and these sorts of recommendation engines for lack of a better way. of calling it, will continue to be refined and hopefully then bring people better experiences.
What are your favorite formats for sharing those stories and building that relevancy? Here we are on a podcast, we’re looking at a Snapchat billboard out of our window right now. What do you think is really kind of the right medium for the message?
Yeah, well I have to say I do love podcasts and because I tend to sometimes spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer, when I’m not working I don’t want to be looking at screens even more. So it’s interesting to see what the mix can be between online and offline channels, I guess. And when I’m traveling a lot I’ll sometimes distract myself with social media, you know, while I’m waiting in an airport or taking a ride share back home and then we’ll pass the time looking at something like this.
But otherwise I think people are really appreciating right now as well the experience economy and whether it’s installations and pop-ups and again back to the what you can touch and feel and see and smell in an in-person environment, meaning a lot right now.
And we’re sitting down here in Advertising Week 2044 and we’re talking about sort of your great successes in the States and in health. Describe that world. What’s that world that we’re aspiring to build, to create together?
So I think a lot of this and it’s very challenging in the States to do some of the things that Estonia has achieved because the fundamental difference between Estonia and the U.S. is Estonians own all of their own personal data and here in the States we don’t.
So there’s things that are very easy in Estonia when it comes to data interoperability that I hope we will be able to achieve here one day in the U.S. Meaning a classic example in health is if you’re going in for any appointment or procedure and get moved from room to room and you enter the second room or the third room and people address you like you’re a total stranger and you’re asked what is your name, what is your social security number, fill out the 24th form over and over again.
That I think where we have a lot of space to advance and progress is around digital identity and interoperability and having individuals permission who can get various information but once I permission that to you it can flow and I’m not treated like a stranger if you should know me and I’m not asked the same question 24 times moving from one part of the building into the next.
That’s a great answer. Liz, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely, it was a pleasure to be here.
