A CMO’s Guide to Cultivating Customer Champions

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

How important are your customers to your business? This one should be a no-brainer—the relationships you build with your customers are vital to success. Leaders that actively focus on customer engagement and satisfaction are able to nurture a customer-base that will champion your product on your behalf and help push innovation. With a wealth of experience under his belt, Chip Rodgers, CMO of WorkSpan, knows the quantifiable value of cultivating customer champions and is here to tell us how he nurtured these relationships from WorkSpan’s early startup days to now.

Chip puts a special emphasis on building and retaining trust, and shared a perfect Bill McDermott quote on the subject: “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.” For more gems like this, listen in to this week’s Renegade Thinkers Unite and learn about how cultivating customer champions can boost your business value, shape your product, and bring in new prospects. Plus, for additional material on the subject, take a look at the aptly named 8th chapter of our guide to effective B2B brand strategy, “Cultivate Customer Champions.”

Keep Calm and Acquisition On

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

It’s tough enough to build a company’s marketing engine from the ground up, but Isabelle Papoulias, CMO of Mediafly, successfully navigated through not just one, but two acquisitions within a six-month period. What did she learn? Not all acquisitions are created equal: it was two weeks before their second acquisition announcement when Isabelle, in conversation with her CEO, realized they had an opportunity to completely pivot their brand messaging for the better and decided to scrap their original plan. While this would be considered risky to most, the decision ultimately elevated Mediafly to a new level within the sales enablement category.

Join us on this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite to hear all about Isabelle’s experience during these back-to-back acquisitions, how their campaign brought both expected and unexpected successes, and why ABM goes beyond marketing to give a company a surround-sound approach to targeting valuable prospects. If you’re looking for additional materials on polishing a brand—which can be helpful in scenarios like Isabelle’s—take a look at our comprehensive guide to effective B2B brand strategy, here!

Digging Deep into Corporate Purpose

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

When purpose moves front and center, a company can attract better talent and better customers. This is not conjecture. Dov Baron, via his leadership consulting practice, has proven it over and over. Dov, who is also a top podcaster, best-selling author and speaker, gets to purpose by asking the tough questions. No wonder he sees himself as the “father of dragons,” helping executive teams find their own distinct purpose, and a collective purpose for the organization. This means digging deep and even exploring one’s biggest fears. There’s obviously a lot more to it and we spend a lot of time in this episode exploring why “starting with why” is in fact just the beginning of every organization’s purpose-seeking journey.

On this week’s episode, Dov and Drew are also joined by a live audience of industry-leading CMOs, who weigh-in and help shape the engaging discussion. Listen in for more about the best way to find the why of your why, which questions you really should be asking to get there, and how to get tangible results from shining a light on your company’s purpose.

Finding Your Brand’s North Star

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

Sometimes, the big ideas sort of just happen. That said, some magical brand moment isn’t going to just appear without some planning or effort—but sometimes, some small bit of genuine authenticity can grow into a brand pearl. That’s part of what happened with White Ops, and on this episode, Dan Lowden, CMO, discusses how.

White Ops is fueled by their purpose-driven mission to disrupt the illicit economy built by cybercriminals; that mission has caught fire and stands as a sterling example of why purpose is a must. Tune in to hear about how they formed their mission, how they show it to the world, why they shun the hard sell, and how an overarching purpose came from a simple t-shirt that just read “human.”

Turning Obstacles into Opportunity

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

“It’s not if—it’s how.”

That’s how Karen Jones, CMO of Ryder, a supply chain management and logistics company, started wrapping up our interview. It’s also what she tells her team often, and an integral part of how they approach business hurdles. The key to their success, though, isn’t just relishing the opportunity to overcome a challenge—they also rely heavily on a deliberate, test-heavy approach where they have room to explore, experiment, and find bold solutions that work. Another crucial element is the CEO relationship—for Karen to succeed, she noted the need for support from the CEO and board to have leeway in her marketing endeavors.

In this episode, we’ll hear more about how she’s formed her marketing mindset through her career, and how learning from failures has helped shaped her current approach. Listen in for a candid conversation about the pitfalls of marketing in a silo, marketing’s limitations within a business, and how effective marketing can accelerate a product’s demise.

Effective B2B Brand Strategy: The Appetizer Version

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

In this interview, host & Renegade CEO Drew Neisser actually sits down with, well, Drew Neisser. Maybe it’s half interview, half monologue. Either way, on this episode, Drew explores the concept of CATS. Not the fluffy, loveable-yet-tempestuous pets, but the four key traits for being an effective marketer that are absolutely crucial in developing an effective B2B marketing strategy.

Listen in to learn about being an effective, creative marketer, crafting a brand, cutting the clutter in your efforts, and much more! For the main course on How to Develop an Effective B2B Brand Strategy in 2020, please chomp on Drew’s Special (17,771 word) Report: http://renegade.com//b2b-brand-strategy-report/