Category: Show Notes

Renegade Thinkers Unite has 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.

With physical events and direct sales canceled, the idea of filling the pipeline with valuable leads may seem daunting. However, many CMOs see this challenge as an opportunity to prove that it can be done digitally, and it’s become glaringly apparent that when it comes to B2B demand generation, content marketing is king.

One such CMO, Richard Jones of Cheetah Digital, has made quality, valuable content his top priority. Why? Because he knows that a well-oiled content engine will not only help their salespeople find and close leads, it will also engage customers and attract new talent in profound ways. In this episode, Richard and Drew discuss everything from building your content strategy to measuring its success. There’s a wealth of valuable insights to be found, so be sure to tune in!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How Cheetah Digital built their content marketing engine
• How good content marketing helps close sales and attract customers
• How COVID-19 shifted Cheetah Digital’s marketing strategy

Renegade Thinkers Unite has 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.

“Zoom, Zoom, Zoom” may seem like the title of a children’s song, but for many of us, it’s the reality of the workday—a string of Zoom meetings that take up the brunt of one’s time. And while virtual meetings have been a great way to stay connected to colleagues and hold brainstorming sessions, they can be a real hindrance to productivity.

It’s important for CMOs and other leaders to help their teams Zoom smarter, not harder. In this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Smartsheet CMO Anna Griffin shares tips and tricks for facilitating effective brainstorming sessions, like starting meetings with a frame break and assigning ownership. The process passed the test, as the Smartsheet team pulled together and published their recent global survey within a week of their initial Zoom ideation session. Be sure to tune in, you won’t want to miss it.

P.S. You can now watch the entire interview on our YouTube channel!

Renegade Thinkers Unite has 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.

A rebrand is not a campaign, it’s a new direction. That’s why NI (previously known as National Instruments) brought on their first-ever CMO, Carla Piñeyro Sublett—they wanted someone to guide them through the brand refresh process, to shake up their foundation and challenge their entire business strategy for the better.

Knowing that this would be a bold undertaking, Piñeyro Sublett and her team, with full C-Suite support, worked from the outside-in. Then, with the help of an outside marketing agency, a cross-functional internal team, six months of brand strategy planning, 800+ interviews, and a month of employee prep, NI initiated an electrifying process of discovery for the business—one whose identity is encapsulated in two powerful, purpose-packed words: “Engineer Ambitiously.”

This episode is a special one, as NI live-streamed the launch this week in a global celebration of their new brand. Tune in to hear about how they did it.

Renegade Thinkers Unite has 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.

Brands must be handled with care. They are emotional, enduring, and convey everything a business stands for, so it behooves CMOs to ensure that their company’s brand purpose and the messaging around it are not tone-deaf, but accessible—so accessible that they become a rallying cry for employees and customers alike and speak to any challenge that may come your way.

Now, how can you achieve this? At Renegade, we suggest finding a common story and articulating it in six words or less, which is exactly what Altair did when the software engineering firm launched its “Only Forward” campaign. As CMO Amy Messano explains, they knew that their decision to rebrand during COVID was the right one; firstly, because they had previously put in nearly a year of hard work to find their brand story, and secondly, because their purpose gave employees hope in an otherwise unpredictable moment—the true acid test for a successful brand refresh.

In this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Amy shares the story behind Altair’s mid-COVID rebrand, including how she used her “engineering pocket translator” to discover their purpose-driven story statement, how they activated their employees with the new message, and how they’ve measured its success thus far.

Renegade Thinkers Unite has 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.

When do company values matter? Just ask today’s guest Peter Finter, the SVP and CMO at Couchbase: “It’s when you have to make a hard decision, that’s when values matter.” Speaking with conviction, Peter knows what it takes to prepare a business to take on any challenge. This conviction was made clear in Couchbase’s nearly seamless response to the COVID pandemic and how it took care of employees, customers, and prospects.

In this week’s interview, Peter shares the six unique values of the open-source cloud database company that they’ve brought to life in the recent months across the spectrum of their ecosystem, starting with “Be a good human always.” With a commitment to personalizing marketing through things like employee talent showcases on Zoom and a free community edition of their software, Couchbase’s priorities are evidence that the human, purpose-driven B2B brand will always outlast the two-dimensional, poster board one (and they’ll probably see higher demand generation, faster once things start picking up again).

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 on renegade.com.

Enter overused marketing advice: Be authentic. Understand your customers. Helping is the new selling. Clichés, yes, but they are as true today as when they were first uttered. You can’t skip these steps, and most people get it wrong by assuming they can, ultimately undercutting their “authentic” image with overtly salesy content or “authentic” messaging with no steps taken to back it up. In our opinion, the true renegade marketer will be able to bring these platitudes to life through innovative actions and strategy. The leaders that can achieve this are sure to see a growth in demand generation and value-added conversations, because working off of a strong foundation will set you up for a lifetime of success.

One such renegade is Christina Bottis, the CMO of Coyote Logistics, a 3rd-party logistics (3PL) provider with a pack mentality. The business is focused on enabling its customers with industry-specific data, forecasts, and content because you can only be as good as the people you serve. Not only do they get e-commerce and the supply chain right; they have established themselves as reliable thought leaders who are committed to their purpose-driven tagline: “Drive your business forward.” Tune in to this week’s episode to hear how Bottis has helped Coyote articulate their promise, align it with the organization to make it real, and measure the results of their successful growth.