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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 2017, Jeff Perkins was champing at the bit to get started as CMO of ParkMobile, a parking assistance app based out of Atlanta. He saw the 7.5 million users, the hundreds of thousands of new users each month, and the awesome product driving everything. However, when he got going, he began to notice his enthusiasm wasn’t exactly the norm. Jeff joined the team following some significant board changes, executive changes, and turnover. As a result, the company morale was experiencing a sort of slump, despite the app’s early success, and the leadership decided to step up.

Jeff was quick to spot that this relative malaise could be remedied with a clearer articulation of the company’s vision in a clear set of core values. Following that, an emphasis on employee engagement would help that mission—and a new positive spirit—spread through the company. Listen in to this episode to hear more about how ParkMobile built a thriving culture around core values and an engaged internal team, and how that culture has helped the company grow to 17.5 million users.

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.

One of the integral questions most marketers face is: How do I expand my audience? Well, you could draw up a new campaign, make a new product—heck, you could even bite the head off a bat; Ozzy Osbourne definitely reached quite a few new people in the 80’s with that stunt. Well, maybe that last one isn’t the best idea for businesses. Anyways, an important aspect is: you have to do something that works with your brand, resonates with the people who want to use your product, and is relatively product agnostic. Now, while they may not be dining on any small nocturnal mammals, Twilio’s marketing efforts certainly capture the aforementioned guidelines, and take on a spirit of boldness and experimentation, all in the service of expanding their audience.

In this episode, Sara Varni, CMO of the cloud comms company Twilio, discusses how they’ve created marketing that they know their users will like and respond to. It ranges from gamified tutorials, to dev conferences, to sponsored hackathons at client offices and so much more. To learn more about these efforts, and the scrappy, startup-mentality that drives them, tune into this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

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.

A/B Testing with Optimizely

As a veteran of Silicon Valley with tenures at multiple massive, industry-leading tech companies, Carl Tsukahara has developed a serious taste for adventurous testing, especially in B2B. That doesn’t mean just running around pushing buttons and selecting metrics at random, it means breaking free from the common snare of planning multiple meetings and emails before adjusting a small facet of the landing page for A/B testing.

Speaking of A/B testing, Tsukahara’s career path has led him to currently serve as Chief Marketing Officer of Optimizely, which is essentially the home of the A/B test. They also call themselves “the world’s leading experimentation platform,” painting the company as a fitting place for a bold marketer and tester like Tsukahara. In this interview, Carl discusses what different companies ought to be testing for, how to properly set up certain guardrails to guide your testing, what we can learn from big brands like Amazon and Netflix, and much, much more. Check it out!

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 Matrixx started out in 2008, they were a David among Goliaths. People thought they were crazy to even try cracking a pretty crowded SaaS market for communications and digital services provider. Skip ahead a few years and they’re boasting 70% growth (for 3+ years!), 15% responsibility for the lead pipeline—which in a niche market like Matrixx’s is quite a feat—and, perhaps most impressive of all, a 100% renewal rate for the multi-year subscription model. You don’t see 100% all that often (Citizen Kane’s 100% on Rotten Tomatoes is certainly good company to share), and with good reason: it takes some simply stunning work from the company to achieve.

In this episode, Jennifer Kyriakakis, Founder & VP of Marketing, talks about their journey from startup to top-5 brand in their industry. She shares how they’ve celebrated customer loyalty (hint: don’t make your case studies about your product), how to boldly approach new business acquisition, how they manage to show each prospect a live demonstration of how the Matrixx software can support their specific needs, and more. Matrixx has maintained a David mentality, even as they’ve grown to the Goliath level, listen in to this episode of RTU to learn how.

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.

Ask most senior marketing executives to describe their company, and you’ll often hear words like “workflow,” “optimization,” or “disruption” get thrown around. When you ask Dave Brotton, Vice President of Marketing, about Purple Wave, you’ll get something a little different—they like to say they “sell big, dirty, greasy equipment.” Now that’s a description with character. Purple Wave is, in fact, is in the business of big, dirty, greasy equipment—they are an online auction platform focused on things like construction and agricultural vehicles. So, think of it as eBay, but instead of a cute, $30 vintage sweater, you’re bidding on a $43,000 2012 John Deere S660 RWA combine to help harvest your next corn or soybean crop.

Believe it or not, marketing a company geared towards industrial agricultural equipment is a little different than marketing a company where you can sell your sibling’s old sweaters for some pocket cash. Purple Wave has devoted significant time to ensuring proper persona slicing for their efforts and have committed to building a strong community that can help them draw in both buyers and sellers. On this episode, Dave and Drew meet in Tampa at The CMO Club Summit in their escapes from Manhattan, KS and Manhattan, NY, respectively. They talk about company growth, community forming for customers and prospects, meaningful customer relationships, and more. Check it out!

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.

Things to Consider Before Abandoning Your B2B Brand Name

What happens when you put an incredibly articulate CMO in a cab with the host of Renegade Thinkers Unite? Genuine fast-paced goodness, that’s what!  Jennifer Renaud, CMO of Vertiv, a $4.5 Billion company that spun out of Emerson Power in late 2016, is absolutely riveting as she shares the stories of two large companies that abandoned well-known brand names with frightful results.

The first company in question was Oracle. During her time there, Renaud witnessed the disappearance of both the Eloqua and Responsys brands in favor of the new Oracle Marketing Cloud. The initial results were not pretty as thousands of Eloqua and Responsys lovers searched in vain for those brands. Site traffic dropped off dramatically until they returned to using the old names at least on landing page.

Amazingly, the same thing happened at Vertiv, the parent company of brands like Liebert, Avocent and Geist. While none of these are household names, it turns out they are well liked in their vertical markets. Shortly after her arrival at Vertiv in April 2018, Renaud visited a customer who had not heard of her new company, but when she shared the name of the other brands, he said proudly, “oh great, do you want to see my Liebert?” It was at the moment that Renaud realized that bringing back the Liebert name, at least online, as well as the others, could have a dramatic impact on their business. She was right!

If you’re thinking about abandoning a brand name, then do listen in both to understand the risks and to hear ways of mitigating the downside. And for anyone who wants to make a case for growing brand awareness, you’ll find it especially interesting to hear what happens when that awareness is suddenly taken away. Fascinating insights await you. Enjoy.