In this edition of the interview, Wilhelm Frank, Commercial Marketing Director EMEA at Lenovo, shares insights from a marketing career spanning corporate leadership, agency experience, and entrepreneurship. From building award-winning campaigns to leading EMEA B2B marketing, he discusses balancing global and local strategies, proving marketing ROI, connecting brands with demand generation, and developing future marketing leaders.
Welcome to the interview series, Wilhelm. Could you tell us more about your journey as a marketer?
Well, I started my career in a local role in Austria after my studies. I wanted to have a marketing job from the very beginning, and the offer at HP was very attractive to me, as it covered product management but also included the creative part with campaign management responsibilities within the printing group. After 6 years and after winning a silver lion in Cannes for a Direct Marketing project, I wanted to see the other side of Marketing and moved to PKP Proximity (now “BBDO”), where I learned as Account Director for several clients all the essentials from an agency perspective. After a year, I thought I could do it all myself and established a marketing consultancy with a friend. One of the key outcomes was that we were core stakeholders in the establishment of the first e-gaming trade fair in Austria, called “Game City,” which is still the main event for gaming in my country. But I missed the corporate life soon and especially wanted to have an international role, so I accepted an offer from Lenovo and continued my career there 18 years ago as Campaign Manager for the Eastern European markets. After some years, I moved to the EMEA marketing team, was part of the Channel marketing organization, and then soon led it. In 2017, I further moved ahead and became Head of Commercial Marketing. After some years, I got promoted to Director for Commercial Marketing and owned the full end-to-end EMEA B2B Marketing for the PC business group from brand to demand generation, a great role with broad responsibilities and opportunities, where I especially further professionalized our Demand Generation approach and also established an Account-Based Marketing Program.
Having worked on both the corporate and agency side, how have these experiences shaped your approach to strategy and execution?
Although my time on the agency side was not super long, it was a great time to learn, and I can only recommend that any marketer, at least sometime in their career, see both sides of marketing. It helped me especially in the cooperation as well as in the selection of agencies for all the years after. Getting some understanding about internal processes and how much time different requests take is super helpful in evaluating proposals and quotes. And it overall improves the collaboration with agencies to finally optimize the joint outcomes over time. Especially when it comes to proper briefings, which are the key element for a successful and fair agency-client relationship.
You’ve worked extensively in pan-EMEA environments. How do you balance global consistency with local market relevance?
As I am from a rather small country in EMEA (Austria), I saw from the very beginning of my career as a local field marketer in Austria how difficult it is within corporate organizations to create really locally relevant campaigns. And of course, global consistency and a full alignment with the overall corporate strategy and CI/CD are key to succeeding in the long term and creating a consistent brand experience across all our customers across the world. On the other side, with my local experience, I also realized how important the local flavor is. Even in IT, where products and customers don’t seem to need too much of this local touch. But a really locally relevant approach starting from a close alignment with internal stakeholders, especially sales, but also creative-wise with some local touch, can really make a big difference, and that’s why I have always tried also in my EMEA role to balance out global consistency with local relevancy as much as possible and partly tended to focus even more on a more localized approach. With AI and modern MarTech, this is now also much easier, cheaper, and faster to adapt worldwide campaigns and add local flavors into it, while still remaining fully brand consistent.
“A consistent storytelling approach can be guaranteed from brand to demand, which always needs to start on the brand side first, before we can focus on leads and sales conversions.”
With increasing pressure to prove business value, how do you measure ROI and define success beyond traditional marketing metrics?
At the end, what counts most is the business success. Might it be achieving sales, market share, or profit targets? All that we do on the marketing side needs to have a clear impact on these meta goals. Especially on Demand/Lead generation side, we established an end-to-end reporting where we can clearly measure starting from engaged accounts towards marketing and then sales qualified leads, our contribution to the marketing-driven sales pipeline, and over time, our attribution to won revenue. Even more in our ABM program, where lead velocity and customer lifetime value can be added for a more in-depth ROI measurement. Also, here modern MarTech, ABM tools, and finally AI help us further to visualize the customer journey and conversions across the journey better and finally help us to calculate ROI, but also forecast results more easily and accurately.
As a marketing leader, what has been your approach to balancing brand awareness and demand generation?
First of all, it’s key to analyze your data and the current status of your brand and demand generation achievements. Based on that, it needs to be clearly defined where the main gap is, whether it is on the awareness, consideration, or conversion side or more of a topic around retention, etc. With that, a fact-based discussion with the leadership team is possible to get their buy-in on where the priorities need to be set. At the end, it cannot be only one or the other, but it should be clear where more focus should be set for a given timeframe. And my key recipe is to connect the dots as closely as possible and esp. focus on fully integrated marketing approaches, where a brand and also a product campaign connect closely with a lead generation campaign or, e.g., even a Co-Marketing activity in the IT Channel. With that, a consistent storytelling approach can be guaranteed from brand to demand, which always needs to start on the brand side first before we can focus on leads and sales conversions.
What would be your advice to marketers looking to grow into leadership roles?
Always stay curious, and the more you move ahead, ensure you are not only an expert in marketing, which is the basis, but also understand business, strategy, and sales in more detail. Try to grow your skills also outside your comfort zone, and be part of different non-marketing projects. Try to take ownership, e.g., as a project or team lead, where possible to train your people management skills but also to showcase to your leaders that you are willing to take on broader responsibilities. And finally, you also need to be capable in the “finance language”; as I mentioned before, all that we do in marketing finally needs to contribute to exceeding the financial goals of the company.
About Wilhelm Frank
Wilhelm Frank is a seasoned B2B marketing leader with extensive experience across global technology companies and advertising agencies. His expertise spans strategic planning, brand marketing, demand generation, ABM, digital marketing, channel marketing, and event management. Known for building high-performing international teams and driving measurable ROI through MarTech innovation, Wilhelm is an award-winning marketer, respected industry speaker, and guest lecturer recognized for his contributions to modern B2B marketing.
