Amber Sellens: Building a Horizontal MarOps team, Brand Consistency, and MarTech Leadership

I had an amazing business partner, Cassie Hextead, who is phenomenal. Without her and the trust we built within the business, none of this would have been possible. I also want to give a shout-out to Scott Brinker, who provided the foundation for what I elaborated on and ran with. His 4-box model—the orchestrators, builders, modelers, and makers—was key. It helped us bring together all the different pieces needed for cohesive conversations around building successful capabilities.

One of the first big things we did was eliminate any division between our IT team and the business folks. The digital marketers, who sit closer to the sales team on the business side, are a core part of the delivery team. They’re embedded with us, attending daily scrums, planning meetings, and joint strategy calls.

We also worked with external partners like PwC and IBM, especially because some of the skills were new areas for Shell. We brought in external resources, and I was even lucky enough to hire some of those phenomenal resources in-house. My solution architect, for instance, came from the external market.

When developing what we manage and our strategic roadmap for scaling, we’ve approached it like an agile product. Digital marketing is not a project, so our team runs in agile scrum cadences with two-week delivery windows. We’ve focused on establishing a global capability with regional flexibility. We’re also technology agnostic and have taken a very intentional approach, buying rather than building unless we can monetize it, to stay strategic and lean.

Initially, it was expensive, but now we’ve extended the model into other regions. Recently, we stood up an extension of this capability in half the time and at a tenth of the cost, proving its value and generating internal buzz.

Another pivotal moment for me was when one of my mentors, Mary Jarrett, advised me on how to approach internal stakeholders. I was telling everyone about this great solution, but they weren’t taking it up. Mary told me, “It’s one thing to tell them; it’s another to show them.” That shift in mindset—showing instead of just telling—became a turning point for our team.

Amber Sellens: We just decided to put our heads down and do it and do it really well and then, once we started to essentially tell the value story on the back end of that, that’s what caught some buzz. And that’s where we’re able to extend the capability across lines of business into other areas. But it’s really that mindset and mentality that is driving us today.

Anthony Lamot: Very cool. Thank you, Amber, for elaborating on that. There were so many things you said that were of interest to me. First, Scott Brinker loved the shout-out. Scott is, of course, the man who leads the Martech landscape for those who don’t know, though I think most people on this call will be familiar with Scott’s annual paper that he publishes. So that’s super cool.

With regards to what you’ve been doing, Amber, it sounds like, first of all, congratulations on creating that first with the latest project and seeing that you can deliver and roll it out for a fraction of the cost. That’s super cool, especially at your scale—very important. And it sounds like what you’re doing is front-loading, maybe more of an upfront investment, but then afterward you’re going to see economies of scale.

Amber Sellens: Yeah, and we’re also really looking at how we create a horizontal marketing operations team that can manage all these different pieces together. I think we have somewhere around 16 different Martech tools that my team actively manages, and we’re in them all day, every day. It’s all of the Lego blocks that build out the things we’re working with.

It’s the product pillars that we reference, and referencing the model that I’ve built, we’ve got marketing and communications as one pillar, customer data management as another, sales data management and enablement, and then services and offerings delivery. So it’s really four key pillars of the capability that we’ve established. Because we’re starting with capability, what we’re able to do is, say we take a tool like deselect, for example.

Initially, we have the segmentation right, and that falls under marketing and communications management, specifically around the capability to segment our audiences. But then let’s say you guys extend into another space. Instead of us having to go looking for something else, if we were viewing it from a technology-first standpoint, we’d be leading with functionality rather than the why or the how. We might seek tools that have overlapping functionalities and costs.

It takes a lot to spin up a new tool in my environment. So where I can essentially take deselect and copy and paste you into other spaces, it extends the value of the initial investment into the tool itself. Plus, it extends the capability and connectedness where we already have data integrated. That’s the best-case scenario.

We’ve really taken the traditional architecture approach and flipped it on its head so we can be more efficient and scale globally.

Anthony Lamot: Very cool. You mentioned building a horizontal team. Could you speak to that and explain what that means to you?

Amber Sellens: Absolutely. Shell is incredibly matrixed. What I’ve done is essentially built an operations team that sits within one element of our Shell Energy brand in one region. Now, I’m actively extending that team’s allocation across to Europe.

In addition, I’m talking to other lines of business within our downstream efforts that are customer-facing and have similar needs, and seeing if we can’t put together a proof of concept. What does it look like realistically if we have this team or center of excellence? You need digital marketing support? You come to us. You extend our tech stack, which we’re already paying for most of, so you only pay a fraction. You get our tried-and-tested tactics—templates, journeys, SEO learnings, and all the things.

Essentially, it’s building an internal agency where we provide a squad dedicated to marketing operations to different customer groups. We’d have the oversight to bring pieces together, tell consistent stories across audience segments, and amplify our effectiveness and spend—not just in my business unit, but across Shell as a whole.

Anthony Lamot: We’ll just say a hundred x.

Amber Sellens: Sure, it’s arbitrary.

Anthony Lamot: You mentioned storytelling, which leads to my next question. Your mission is to create and deliver compelling stories. Is there a recent campaign or strategy where storytelling played a critical role?

Amber Sellens: On my side, it’s less around the actual content. My role isn’t necessarily the words, it’s the delivery and cohesiveness of the integrated story—how we pull all the pieces together to address the pain point end to end, right?

Amber Sellens: So it’s less about that single piece of content, or that single piece of, you know, whatever that asset is, and it’s more about how do we break it down into its bite-size pieces.

Amber Sellens: So that the customer journey, which is not linear for any business ever, it’s more like a Jackson Pollock painting where you’ve got, you know, you’re just dropping little bits of paint all over the canvas, and you’re trying to follow the footsteps to see, you know, are they more interested in this side or that side? And then, what have you put over there to help them on their journey?

Amber Sellens: It’s a little bit like an RPG in that way. You’re just building a world for them, and then you’re setting up resources along the way for their side quests.

Anthony Lamot: I love your references! As someone who both likes to paint and loves to play RPG video games, you’re hitting all the nerd.

Amber Sellens: But it really is around, you know, those Lego blocks or those bits and pieces, and how you segment it out, and then how you connect the data so that it’s easy to find. You don’t want your customer to have to search for the next piece that’s going to be useful for them. You want to be able to make it really accessible and easy for them to get at.

Amber Sellens: So that they are continuing along on whatever their journey looks like, at the rate that they want to progress it.

Amber Sellens: I think one of the main challenges in this space, especially for a business like Shell, is that at any given point a customer could be a supplier in this part of our business, and a competitor in this part of our business. And so, when it comes to going through and really identifying what that journey should be, it can’t be at the domain level alone, right?

Amber Sellens: We have to ensure that everything we’re building has the right context around the domain, and what that relationship should be for that specific piece, for that asset.

Anthony Lamot: You just reminded me—sorry, go ahead.

Amber Sellens: It did, really fast.

Anthony Lamot: So it’s a puzzle.

Anthony Lamot: It’s also interesting, and maybe you can relate to this because you’ve been in insurance. I remember insurance use cases in segmentation and prioritization where, in a complex B2B2C environment, some insurance brokers have these overall suppression and waterfall rules on what message can be sent by whom under which circumstances, because there may be conflicting messages going out from a broker. If you’re not careful, sometimes there are even legal considerations. I’m kind of starting to visualize, as you talk about how you have such a complex landscape of products and services with individual recipients sometimes having multiple hats—not just at the personal level but also at the company level.

Anthony Lamot: But it must become quite a complex maze or maybe some kind of matrix of, “Okay, I should send this communication to this kind of company, but this company is also a competitor, let’s say, and they should not receive that.” This probably happens all the time for you guys.

Amber Sellens: Yeah, it’s a significant part of why CDP implementation is a bit of a challenge for us, right? It’s because the business rules that we would have to put in place to ensure that we are not infringing on legal elements like insider trading, or you know, some of our businesses, their customers are direct competitors to some of our other businesses, and therefore we can’t even disclose that information. And it’s a significant hurdle when it comes to being able to build that horizontal capability that I want to build.

Amber Sellens: Because there are just simply legal implications and restrictions in a lot of instances. So first, we have to understand not only who this company is on a spreadsheet to this business, but also what it means if that company ends up on this database or this report. You know, we definitely don’t want to be spending money on advertising to our competitor for a product that they wouldn’t consume.

Amber Sellens: And so, the complexity around those business rules can be straightforward. It can be regional. It is really, really complex. And you know, throw in mergers and acquisitions activity on top of that, and it changes, right? So it’s not even like you can do all of the crazy math once and it’s fine. Nothing about this environment is ever “set it and forget it.”

Anthony Lamot: Oh, no, absolutely not. And it’s funny that you mentioned that because on the last episode I interviewed Lucas Lunow from Maersk, so huge enterprise environment, too. And we were talking about the same thing where that wasn’t in a build or buy context. But the idea was that if you are going to have technology, whether you build or buy it, it’s going to evolve. And your data model is going to evolve, especially when you’re doing M. and A. the whole time. But even if you weren’t, it’s going to change over time. So yeah, huge challenge.

And what you mentioned about challenges in implementing this in a CDP. I don’t know if it’s related, but one thing that I’ve noticed that is a limitation of CDPs is that ultimately the vast majority of them tend to work at the segment level, not so much at the subscriber level.

Real-life conversation happened with a very well-known fast-moving consumer goods company, a customer of ours, and they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to do orchestration in the CDP.” But then you ask the question of, “Okay, but how are you going to intervene in the fifth email in a journey at the subscriber level?” And then it’s like, “Oh, right.” So it’s good in theory to do this in the CDP because it’s a center of data, and all the data is going to be there, but it doesn’t necessarily allow you to intervene at the moment of an activity.

So, that’s also where we made that very specific design choice to, for our tech, be at the level of engagement. That has limitations, but at least it allows us to intervene a little bit better there. Bit of a tangent here, but I did want to ask you more about how you think about this in an Omni-channel context, applying that messaging, and how it integrates into your very complex tech stack.

Amber Sellens: Yeah, I mean, we’ve got—it’s a lot of fun, first and foremost, because it’s never dull, it’s never boring, right? And as we mature, we’re able to bring more and more elements of that end-to-end Omni-channel experience together.

Where it gets especially interesting is when we have a, you know, a B2C consumer, for instance, somebody who has Shell Energy as their provider of electricity within their own home. And then we also find out that that individual is also the sustainability manager at a large company that we’re targeting.

So, when it comes to Omni-channel for us, especially, it’s not just across the channel, are you receiving a consistent experience, but also at a persona level. Are you receiving a consistent experience? So if you are somebody who, in your B2B life, are a platinum customer or the highest level concierge, but then people won’t pick up the phone for you in your personal life when you’re providing your own dollars, right? That’s a significant disconnect. And so, that’s less about channel Omni-channel and more about, you know, the consistent experience across the board.

Specifically, where we see it is the kind of the CDP conversation is one that we really haven’t dug a lot into yet, to be honest. And it’s because of our marketing maturity. We haven’t been ready for it. We’ve been on a long kind of people and process journey, where we’ve been trying to get folks to really take the Crm seriously and help them understand what the lead object is for, and implement queues, and do automation where we can, and really starting to get the foundations right in a lot of ways.

Shell itself has been around for over a hundred years, but Shell Energy is really still a baby when it comes to especially the B2C side. We’ve only been in business for two years. So, Omni-channel for us in this area is even more challenging because we are—we’re building brand recognition still. We are trying to establish who our customer base is. We’re still doing a lot of that foundational business stuff.

Anthony Lamot: Stuff, one would say.

Amber Sellens: Right. So we’re a bit of an intrapreneur, I think is what it’s called, where we have the financial safety to really pursue this because we think it’s the right direction to go in. But in a lot of ways, we’re still very much starting up a business and a brand. So, Omni-channel is a little bit different from a Shell Energy approach than it would be from a Shell approach.

Anthony Lamot: And within that mission of Shell, working more towards renewable energy, I wonder, how do you think about the future of Martech? So if you look ahead, how do you think marketing technology might continue to evolve at Shell?

Amber Sellens: Yeah, so I would say it’s definitely continuing to evolve. Where I think it’s really interesting, the intersection of sustainability and marketing technology is really AI. The main reason why I say that is because I recently read an article that had a claim stating something like generating a single email with AI requires three bottles of water in order to keep the servers that process that information cool, you know, to output one thing.

That, to me, is wild. So, when we look at the scaling of marketing technology and how it interacts with responsible energy consumption, I think we need to be asking ourselves more often than not, not can this be AI, but should it be AI? A lot of the problems that we’re trying to solve with AI still could be done through process improvement or just through straight automation and some simple logic. I think a lot of folks are jumping straight to AI as the shortcut to the problem, whereas I do worry about the data center availability and the sustainability angle of that.

Now, when it comes to marketing operations or just a digital marketing capability within Shell, I see that growing. Shell started to take a turn in the last 10 years or so, where they’re definitely becoming more customer-focused. And in order to do that, you need to be able to build a relationship with your customer. The stickiness in it is understanding, beyond just when does Bob order his standard order—it’s usually the 15th of the month, and if we don’t see him by the 17th, if we send him an email, he’ll submit his order. Or, you know, if prices increase by more than two cents a pound, then he’s probably going to hem and haw about it. But if we stay within this threshold, we can usually stay pretty consistent. That’s transactional, right?

And that’s essentially where we’ve played in the past because we’ve been such a large provider of so many different products that we were afforded the luxury, quite honestly, of a transactional relationship with our customer. And the customer expectation was very different at that point in time. So now, when we evaluate the strategy, it’s really around customer-back. And that’s on the B2B as well as the B2B2C side. Realistically, we’re evaluating H2H (human to human), because at no point in time do two buildings do business with each other. It’s really important to consider that human element in everything that we’re doing because it’s humans that are driving the process.

So, the scaling, the evolution—all of that is definitely going to continue to grow. I mean, I know myself personally, I’ve already got projects slated for next year and beyond, and it’s really, really exciting stuff.

Anthony Lamot: There’s a lot of things you say that resonate here at R. These. We have the saying that companies don’t buy software, people buy software. I think it’s true. I’d also love to call out, especially because you’re in energy, but also in Martech, this consideration, this concern over the energy consumption of technology. People say we already have so much data, but truth be told, I think we’re not even storing that much data or not that much unique data. If you think how much more humanity is going to discover and do and capture in so many myriad ways, I think we’re only at the start of this whole data journey. How we’re going to store, process, serve, and preserve it is a really interesting challenge.

Now, I feel we could go on for a long time, Amber. We do need to round up this interview. I have two more questions. First, I know from my own personal experience by connecting you with people in my network that you are great at giving advice to aspiring Martech leaders. Are there some parting words of wisdom you’d like to share with our listeners?

Amber Sellens: Sure, I would say for folks looking to continue to pursue this space, I would focus on what I consider the four C’s: curiosity, communication, confidence, and community. The main reason I say those four is because—first off, curiosity is pretty self-explanatory. There are over 14,000 different Martech solutions in the landscape today, and that’s only going to continue to grow exponentially at a rate we’ve never seen. So it’s so important to remain curious.

In that same breath, failure is a blessing. It’s one of my favorite F words because if you never fail, you’re doing one of two things. You’re either not exploring, you’re not innovating, or you’re just not trying, right? Or you’re incredibly lucky. And neither of those things are sustainable.

Amber Sellens: One of my favorite quotes is by Nelson Mandela, “I never fail. I either win or I learn.” Inspired by this, I’ve created a “Mandela Master Award” for my team. At the end of the year, the entire team votes on the most impactful learning of the year. The winner gets a little trophy, a light bulb with their name on it, and becomes the Mandela Master for the year.

Communication and storytelling are vital in anything you do. I went to school for management information systems, which I jokingly said was just learning how to translate geek to English and back again. But that’s been my bread and butter throughout my career—the ability to tell the story to the audience that you have, not necessarily the one that would be easiest for you to relate to.

It’s really about seeking to understand more than to be understood, focusing on what the audience needs in that moment, and tailoring the message to make the most impact.

I also say confidence is important because, especially in marketing operations, there’s rampant imposter syndrome. About 10 years ago, I had a mindset shift: If you’re in the room, there’s a reason you’re there. Own it. That was massive for me. Also, make sure you’re investing in yourself—attend the conferences, take the course, go to the webinar. It’s important to keep growing in the space, and that’s how you build confidence.

Finally, community. This is a new and constantly evolving space. There are amazing marketing communities that help us all learn. A rising tide raises all ships. We mentioned Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma earlier with Chiefmartec.com, but there are also great groups like MarTech.org, Gartner, Forrester, Mike Rizzo’s MO Pros community, and events like Mopsapalooza, where I’ll be a speaker this year. Carlos Doughty with LXA is doing amazing things focusing on capability over technology, and Anticon is another great event.

Don’t be afraid to reach out. This community is universally committed to supporting one another. It’s a safe space that I haven’t experienced in other industries. So, send the LinkedIn request, ask the question—the worst thing that can happen is not asking and being stuck with incorrect information or not progressing at all.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. It’s been surprising to me that many in marketing operations or automation feel isolated. Often, they’re part of small teams or even working alone, even in large organizations. They don’t have a lot of peers to learn from or lean on. That’s why we do things like customer dinners or host virtual industry meetups, like the one we have for higher education, for instance.

Also, I totally relate to the imposter syndrome. When I started my company, I didn’t even feel comfortable calling myself CEO on LinkedIn. It took me a while to let go of the “consultant” title. Once I did, it was a big shift. As you said, once you let yourself overcome that, everything changes.

So, you mentioned not being afraid to connect—where can people find you?

Amber Sellens: I’m on LinkedIn under Amber Sellens. I’m always happy to connect, do a virtual coffee, or chat about any issues or questions people may have.

Anthony Lamot: Awesome, Amber. Thank you so much for your time. This was a great conversation.

Amber Sellens: Of course! Thanks for having me.