Top 4 Best Practices for Creating the Best Marketing Organization Structure, Learned from Mindtree’s CMO

Drew’s conversation with Paul Gottsegen, Executive VP and Chief Marketing/Strategy Officer of Mindtree, will provide new CMOs with a step-by-step playbook for creating the best marketing organization structure possible. Paul provides listeners with 4 best practices to follow for ultimate success in digital, content, and social marketing.

Paul explains that “I’ve learned everything by making every mistake in the book.” Don’t repeat his mistakes, learn from his experiences. Those experiences have allowed him and his team to bring in over 100,000 sales pipeline leads over the past few years. The company’s stock value has quadrupled, and Mindtree has become a globally trusted brand.

Learn from one of the industry’s best experts on this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite. Click here to listen now!

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#1: Find out what your CEO/Executive Board’s marketing expectations are

A CMO should not spend a single dollar or make a single decision until they determine what goals the company leadership team has for marketing. By having their expectations outlined ahead of time, you’ll save time, energy, and resources. Paul struggled with conveying the true importance of marketing to Mindtree’s executive board, but he summarized it by saying, “Marketing isn’t easy! If it was, everyone would be doing it in amazing ways. You just have to keep pushing good content, having great interactions, and build company credibility.” This mindset needs to be conveyed to company leaders before any of the other best practices can be implemented.

#2: Build the best marketing tech stack infrastructure you can afford

Once marketing expectations and goals are established, a CMO should focus on building the best marketing tech stack possible. Paul explains that marketing professionals should “hire and fire tech stack tools quickly; don’t just sign a longer contract for a better deal!” He goes on to explain that many organizations forget about the staffing needs that come along with every tech stack tool and that every tool should provide quality metrics. Your tech stack should always be evolving and changing to fit the needs of the company.

#3: Focus on building a competitive brand

Clear marketing expectations and having the right infrastructure then allows a CMO to focus on building a competitive, trusted global brand. Paul explains that small marketing organizations shouldn’t immediately focus on going toe-to-toe with brand 10x-20x larger than they are. That growth will come in time. However, every brand does need to focus on telling a better story that explains why YOU can solve a customer’s problem better than anyone else. Marketing can and should be about more than securing contracts. It’s about building a reputable, trusted, expert brand. All of this can be accomplished by following these 4 best practices, fully explained in the audio for this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

#4: Don’t be afraid to partner with experts and empower your team

Even the CMO of Mindtree wasn’t afraid of turning to outside experts when he and his team hit a wall. There are thousands of qualified professional marketers that can provide third-party insights into your organization. Empowering your team to become experts in different areas is also immensely beneficial to a marketing organization’s structure. Specialties are great, employee silos aren’t. Your team should be just that, a team, all focusing on one common goal. This final best practice is best heard from Paul himself, so don’t miss this episode.

What You’ll Learn

[1:38] Drew’s guest introduction and why this episode is a playbook for marketing organization structure
[4:45] Paul’s biggest challenges as a new CMO and how he learned the best marketing lessons
[10:50] Hidden costs to tech stacks that often go overlooked
[13:37] How can a small B2B company develop a competitive brand?
[17:58] Making Mindtree’s tagline, “Welcome to possible,” become reality
[20:26] Paul’s proudest moment of marketing execution at Mindtree
[23:57] Utilizing metrics and how to drive more leads to the sales pipeline
[30:12] The biggest area of uncharted territory in B2B marketing
[34:23] Paul’s 2 do’s and 1 don’t for CMOs

Connect With Paul:

Paul’s page on the Mindtree website
Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
Follow Paul on Twitter

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Meet the Guest

Paul has spent his entire career in enterprise B-to-B marketing, and since 2010 as a new-age CMO with demand-generation defining his team’s center-of-gravity. He combines the old-school craft of marketing with strong experience in modern marketing technology. In each of his roles, he became famous as the chief evangelist for the broader company, for his unrelenting push to create fresh ideas, and for developing and nurturing strong marketing teams. Paul and his team have been consistently recognized as best-in-class across multiple companies and industry sectors.

Paul’s first CMO role was stepping into a vacuum at a $10B company with no history of professional marketing, with a team spread across the globe with a heavy concentration in India. Paul quickly built a marketing plan from scratch, created the company’s new value proposition, created the brand identity, solidified the team and drove a full transformation and up-leveling of the marketing function at Infosys.

Paul has spent nearly five years at Mindtree, creating the first CMO role and bringing complete marketing transformation. Along with the dramatic changes in marketing technology, Paul has advanced his skills during his Mindtree tenure to become a leading practitioner of MarTechacross the entire sales funnel and brand awareness.

Paul earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University and a master’s degree in business administration from The Wharton School. He proudly serves as the co-chairman of The Gastric Cancer Foundation.

Quotes from Paul Gottsegen

By 2013, everybody in marketing had to be a technologist.
I've learned everything by making all the mistakes in the book. That's how you learn.
What are the odds that your tech stack is the best of breed? You've got to always keep trying new ones, even if they fail a little bit.
Marketing today is not so cookie cutter. If it was so easy, if you could put your finger on the one thing to do and just do more of that, everybody would do it. There's never any one thing. People are always looking for the one silver bullet. It's just not that easy.