Seeing the big picture | Profile of Sarah Watson

Head of Marketing, AWS Strategic Accounts

For Sarah Watson, Head of Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Strategic Accounts, marketing has an important role to play in business success. Marketing for marketing’s sake is not good enough. Driving growth for customers and the business requires deep connection with the business. Marketing teams should partner with the business and customers to drive meaningful outcomes—and, most importantly—revenue.

She says marketers are naturally always obsessing over customers, the customer's customers, and the end goals of business stakeholders. With that perspective, marketing teams can help keep those needs and goals front and center in building solutions and programs that lead to tangible results. “It’s looking at the end goal of what will drive value rather than getting distracted by smaller, tactical things along the way,” Watson believes.

Watson owns the marketing and customer experience strategy for AWS Strategic Accounts—the largest, most advanced AWS customers—and works with business leaders to set overall messaging. Since she started in her current role two years ago, her team has quadrupled in size allowing it to deliver increasingly bespoke experiences for their customers and is establishing the template for how AWS markets to these essential customers.

Watson’s team is integrated into the account teams and often works directly with customers on joint marketing for their customers. Blurring the traditional boundaries between marketing and sales is something that Watson believes should happen more often. “People love to talk about the eternal conflict between sales and marketing, and I feel like that just doesn't need to be there,” she says. “We're all working for the same company, and we should all have the goal of making our customers' lives easier, helping them be better at what they're trying to accomplish.”

Helping customers become heroes

This means understanding customer goals and setting joint marketing and sales objectives that align and drive revenue. It’s critical for marketing and sales teams to communicate closely with each other and regularly update goals and tactics.

Watson’s team aims to be more than just a service provider to customers, partnering not just on joint marketing initiatives but in any way that can help. This not only includes providing technical expertise, but also support in operational areas such as change management, building soft skills, or helping break down silos within the organization. “When we're doing our best work,” she says, “we should be helping our customers become heroes in what they do.”

“When we’re doing our best work, we should be helping our customers become heroes in what they do.”

For example, during the pandemic, the Strategic Accounts Marketing team launched a customer virtual 5K run, eventually scaling the project to other customers to operate as joint fundraising efforts. Watson’s team has also worked with customers on inclusion and diversity initiatives and launched a sustainability symposium last year to partner with customers on creating more sustainable business practices.

Varied experiences expand strategic thinking

Watson didn’t begin her career in either marketing or sales, but as a research scientist with a degree in physics; her undergraduate thesis was on computational neuroscience. After college, she worked at a lab where she built informational structures that mapped phenotypes for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The lab developed software to help neuroscientists collaborate; Watson took on the marketing and public relations efforts for the product. She helped to secure funding, launched the solution at an international neuroscience conference, and ensured that it was featured in high-profile publications such as The New York Times and Wired.

Watson was hooked. Although she enjoyed research, she discovered, “What I really love doing is thinking through the business strategy of how you build and launch products, how you create things that others will benefit from.”

She went on to work at a small software company, starting in market research, but gravitating once again to a strategy and marketing role where she worked on a cross-functional team seeking new markets for the company’s product. Then, she decided to take the next step in her new career and get a master’s degree in business administration.

Leading cross-functional team

After earning her MBA, Watson went on to marketing roles at GE and Aon before landing at AWS. At Aon, she built the marketing team for the company’s Financial Services vertical for compensation data and human capital advisory services. The company’s core product was collecting market compensation data and then delivering insights and analytics.

The organization had been doing things a certain way for over 50 years, but they realized there was an opportunity to deliver higher value to customers with a new structure to their product. Watson once again found herself on a cross-functional team leading a change management effort. As the organization restructured its core offerings, she owned the overall customer strategy and communications, working cross-functionally with HR, data analysts, computer scientists, compensation experts, and advisory experts. Her team ultimately redesigned the delivery of the company’s core product and UX to mirror the new vision.

The project had a profound impact on the way people did their jobs across the company. Effective change management—not an easy task—was key to the project’s success. “Change is really, really hard,” Watson acknowledges. “No matter how open-minded you are, uncertainty and newness can be destabilizing, so it is natural to have emotions and reactions.”

In Watson’s view, success depends on clear communication about what’s happening and why. It’s about earning trust with both internal stakeholders and customers by truly understanding their goals and challenges.

Connecting the dots

Throughout her career, Watson has focused on making connections that help companies and teams achieve their larger goals. Often, different parts of an organization can be very focused on specific customers and points of view. Watson works to understand perspectives among various leaders and asks the right questions about customers to drive alignment and help groups articulate a cohesive strategy. Each customer challenge provides learnings that can apply to other customers, and Watson loves to connect the dots so that one customer’s challenges can provide learnings for others.

“From the outset of any project, we need to define the mission and how we measure our progress.”

To see those insights, it’s important for Watson to keep the big picture in mind. “I try to clearly state my objectives and do a root cause analysis of what we’re really trying to accomplish,” she explains. “From the outset of any project, we need to define the mission and how we measure our progress.”

Balancing hard data and soft skills

Taking marketing to the next level, Watson believes, requires rigor around setting revenue-driving goals, effectively gauging progress toward those objectives, and having the ability to pivot when needed.

It also takes empathy. “Humans make business decisions, so understanding how humans make decisions is key,” she says. “That means understanding what people are trying to accomplish, whether in their career, their day-to-day, or the big, complex goals they have for their organizations.

“It's understanding the different people you're working with and what's driving them,” she concludes, “what really brings them joy and success.”

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