The Analytical Creative Unicorn

"The most important thing for me is that people have an understanding of data and that they can read the data in the right way. Marketing for me is all about data. It is basically having a look at one test versus the other, determine what works best, and just do more of the best. For me it is very important that I ask questions which show me that people are street smart. I give them a report and they can tell me what to do next. Or I give them two sets of creative and they tell me which they prefer and why."

Weis is describing a hiring test that assesses both analytical and creative judgment simultaneously. The report question tests whether a candidate can move from data to implication, the what to the so what. The creative preference question tests whether they can articulate a judgment rather than just expressing a preference. The combination of the two is what Weis calls the analytical creative unicorn, the rare person who is genuinely rigorous about both measurement and expression.

"In every single business when I came on board, the first thing I always questioned was whether we are using the right metric. Because most of the times, the marketing metric does not necessarily align with a sales metric. As marketers for a B2B company, you can create a lot of leads. If the leads do not have the quality the sales team expects, those leads are worthless."

The metric question is Weis's version of a standard operating procedure for entering a new organisation. Before changing anything about the programmes, the channels, the content, or the team, he establishes whether the measure of success is the right one. In his experience, the answer is almost always no. Marketing is being measured on something that does not translate into the commercial outcomes the business needs, and the first structural change required is to the metric, not the tactics.

"Ideally, you optimise towards SQLs. If the sales cycles are short, it is even better to optimise towards revenue. But for most of the companies I was working for, the sales cycles are like one and a half, two years long. So you cannot really optimise towards revenue."

The two-year sales cycle creates a practical measurement challenge: you cannot wait two years to know whether a marketing programme is working. SQL generation is the leading indicator that is close enough to commercial reality to be meaningful while still being observable within a planning cycle. Weis describes the alignment process as a structural conversation with sales about what a good opportunity looks like, baking those criteria into lead scoring, and then measuring marketing's contribution to SQL generation rather than MQL volume.

"I think it is important that you have diversity in the team. I was working with people from all around the world. We had people from APAC, from Europe, from the States, from South America. It was really a multinational team and that was one of the best work experiences I had all around the world because there was so much input coming from every single person. Everyone had a different way of thinking about things. That combined approach just created the best campaigns."

Weis's argument for diversity is not primarily ethical but creative. Teams with diverse perspectives do not just reflect a broader range of human experience, they generate a broader range of hypotheses about what will work. Different cultural backgrounds, different professional histories, and different demographic contexts produce different creative judgments. When those different judgments are in conversation with each other, the output is more rigorous and more creative than what any homogeneous team would produce.

"Especially for B2B, it is incredibly important that you talk to sales. And in every single business, when I came on board, the first thing I always questioned was if we are using the right metric. Marketing metrics do not necessarily align with sales metrics. You can create a lot of leads. If the leads do not have the quality the sales team expects, those leads are worthless."

Global demand generation for a professional services firm like Infosys requires a level of localisation that makes the alignment question more complex than in a product company. Different markets have different buying norms, different competitive landscapes, and different seniority of buyer. The metric alignment challenge is compounded by the fact that sales teams in different regions may have different definitions of what a good opportunity looks like, requiring marketing to work at both the global and regional level simultaneously.