Tag: B2B

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

Posted on by Drew Neisser

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!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

#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:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

The Prophet Way of Utilizing Brand Storytelling to Engage With Audiences

Posted on by Drew Neisser

David Aaker, known as “Father of Modern Branding,” discusses the idea of B2B brand storytelling and being able to convey engaging messages on this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite hosted by Drew Neisser.

As the Vice Chairman of marketing consultant giant Prophet and renowned author, David has decades of experience in reinventing the way a company shares its brand message. He explains to Drew the importance of balancing hard facts with emotions as well as emphasizes the importance of becoming a brand other companies want to be associated with.

David also shares multiple personal stories that validate the importance of being a stellar brand storyteller. You don’t want to miss his explanation of how both T-Mobile and Barclay turned their companies around through brand storytelling.

David’s expertise will revolutionize your company’s way of conveying messages, so be sure to give this episode your full attention. Click here to listen.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

Why are stories so effective in engaging customers and employees?

Brand storytelling is more than just a hot topic in current B2B marketing environments. It is the key to truly connecting with your employees, partners, and customers. B2B customers feel the need to have a relationship with the business they interact with and employees need to feel that their work is important. Stories garner attention, change perceptions and attitudes, and inspire action – and stories are far more effective than fact-sharing alone. This is why your company and team need to be experts in brand storytelling. To hear the full reasoning behind why this idea is a critical issue for companies across the country, be sure to listen to this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

The importance of creating a signature story while balancing fact and emotion

When trying to convey a message, a CMO has two options: share facts or tell stories. Even though some may argue that “if it’s not fact-based how do you convince people’s it’s actually true?”, there is a balance that needs to be reached. The key in the B2B storytelling space is to either magnify the problem, offer a solution or accentuate the outcome. This can artfully be done by combining customer testimony with just enough facts to provide a reliable level of reality. Just listing data and facts is a record-keeping entry – not a compelling marketing campaign. David highlights that a signature story can be 200-300% more effective than data alone. To hear more about why brand storytelling is so impactful give this episode a listen.

Actionable items for creating brand storytelling initiatives

Take it from the best leader in storytelling. David lays out a plan to create a storytelling focus in your company on this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite. As a CMO you must first believe and buy into the power of storytelling marketing. Then you have to build a skilled team and develop an environment that allows storytelling opportunities to flourish. Drew also adds that you have to throw your content calendars away because all they do is allow you to get away with regularly producing mediocre content. Hiring a support crew that can take raw stories and turn them into engaging content can also drastically improve your storytelling ability. For more hands-on hints on brand storytelling, don’t let this episode go unlistened.

What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Drew introduces his guest for this episode, David Aaker
  • [2:58] Why is everyone realizing that storytelling is critically important?
  • [4:27] Why is a story so important in engaging employees?
  • [8:54] What will it take for B2B firms to recognize that story is a cultural opportunity?
  • [12:32] David’s personal stories behind effective storytelling
  • [16:39] Why does the story go away once a company reaches marketing evaluation stages?
  • [17:58] How does a brand find their signature stories?
  • [21:06] The balance between hard facts and “fluffy” emotions in storytelling marketing
  • [24:23] Actionable items behind improving your B2B storytelling marketing efforts
  • [29:13] David’s steps for creating a brand storytelling plan
  • [32:42] One of the most common problems when brands attempt storytelling marketing for the first time
  • [33:25] Drew summarizes his conversation with David Aaker

Connect With David:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

The Ups and Downs of Xerox’s Universal Awareness and Shifting Your Brand Perception

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The ultimate dream for marketers is universal awareness – the point in time when your brand becomes synonymous with a noun. Having your brand become a verb is an even better case scenario (think, “I’ll Venmo you the money!” or “I’ll Google it.”) This extremely high level of brand awareness can create issues though when your brand perception becomes “stuck” in this one-way thinking.

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, the CMO of Xerox, Toni Clayton-Hine, joins Drew for a conversation about how Xerox is embracing the new connectivity trend and how it is breaking through old brand perceptions to stay relevant in the 21st century.

Toni shares with Drew the story behind Xerox’s latest marketing initiative, Set the Page Free, and how Xerox is striving to be at the forefront of the intersection between digital and physical workspaces. They also discuss the pros and cons of such a risky marketing project and Toni’s top “do’s and don’ts” for current CMOs.

Join Drew and Toni for this engaging conversation – you won’t want to miss a single minute. Click here to listen now.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

Xerox’s latest Set the Page Free project and how they “marketed the marketing” so effectively

When faced with seemingly cemented brand perceptions, Xerox came up with a creative and big-picture marketing campaign: Set the Page Free. With 14 world-famous writers and creative minds in collaboration, Xerox told the story of the modern workplace – and the entire project was produced using Xerox technology. The end result were podcasts, videos, and a final free download book. After creating the piece, Toni and her team had to answer the question, “who is going to consume this content?” Drew asks Toni about how they “marketed the marketing campaign” so effectively and she explains that they really leveraged the celebrity collaborators and their social channels. For the full story behind the project, don’t miss this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

What does brand storytelling mean to Xerox in the 21st century?

Shifting Xerox’s brand perceptions became a balance of using the company’s history to their advantage, while still demonstrating to their customers that they are about more than just copying and faxing physical documents. The Set the Page Free project helped Xerox transition from the realm of a 1990s office verb into a frontrunner of 21st-century workplace technology. This engaging act of brand storytelling allowed the company to show the outcome of using their technology, not just the inputs. Since Xerox is a B2B technology company, Toni’s goal is to ensure Xerox is seen as fresh, relevant, and understanding of their different types of customers. To hear more of Toni’s marketing initiatives at Xerox that are continually shaping their brand perspectives, be sure to listen to the full audio.

The biggest lessons Toni has learned since joining Xerox and why taking marketing risks can be beneficial

While developing Set the Page Free, Toni explained that she often struggled with the desire to control every aspect of the project and subsequent brand awareness surveys. But when Drew asks her about the biggest lessons she learned while working on the project, Toni explains that Xerox had to take a risk in order to shift how people think about the company – and taking that risk also meant dealing with unpredictable variables. She also learned the importance of being more directive in her approach to help customers understand how to bring their Xerox technology tools to life. To hear Toni’s top “do’s and don’ts” for other CMOs, don’t miss this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Why does brand awareness matter when you’re trying to sell a product or service?
  • [3:15] Drew introduces his guest for this episode, Toni Clayton, CMO of Xerox
  • [4:52] The main strategy behind Xerox’s marketing
  • [9:31] The benefit of working with creators who deliver extraordinary content
  • [12:58] Once you’ve created the excellent content, you have to “market the marketing”
  • [15:47] Toni explains how she had the courage to approach her CEO with this big, untestable idea
  • [18:30] What does storytelling meaning to Toni and Xerox?
  • [23:29] How Xerox is currently demonstrating their broader platform and usability
  • [26:48] Combatting the loss of reach associated with using digital marketing tactics
  • [30:19] How Xerox is showing customers new ways to use their products
  • [32:11] The biggest lesson Toni has learned in her career with Xerox
  • [37:03] One “do” and one “don’t” for CMOs as a result of Toni’s experience with Xerox

Connect With Toni Clayton-Hine:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Story-Driven Content Marketing That Drives Leads

Posted on by admin

In her role as CMO of Tungsten Network – a leading global supply chain enabler – Connie O’Brien has taken on a huge task: she’s spearheading the first content marketing campaign for the company in a very long time, and she’s focusing on friction to do it.

How so? Through the collaborative efforts of a handful of agencies, including Renegade, it was discovered that one of the main places the accounts payable process experiences difficulties is through the friction that exists in the systems and processes involved. So the team Connie assembled set out to discover, from customers and prospects alike, where the key points of friction were and what could be done to smooth out those problems. THAT positioned Tungsten to custom-tailor solutions to the exact problems the marketplace was experiencing.

This conversation is a quick but deep dive into the process the team at Tungsten spearheaded to discover what customers really felt about the frustrations they were experiencing in their accounts payable process, address those concerns effectively, then use content marketing to get the word out about those solutions.

Connie’s brilliance is obvious in this conversation, as is her humility and desire to give credit where credit is due – to her team. Enjoy.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Urban gardening and content marketing: both require experimentation & work
  • [2:54] Who is Connie O’Brien?
  • [8:43] What Tungsten Networks does and what got them onto their current content marketing approach
  • [12:18] Engaging employees as advocates for the company on social media
  • [14:56] The decision to talk to customers in an unfiltered way
  • [17:32] The creation of the Friction Finder customer feedback and diagnostic tool
  • [19:51] How Connie manages a multi-agency team for content marketing
  • [23:10] Integrating storytelling into her content marketing strategy
  • [25:03] The difficulty of measuring the value of the campaign effectively
  • [28:23] The primary lessons Connie has learned: Listen & Watch Results
  • [30:02] A quick summary of what Tungsten did and the results so far

It’s not easy to get unfiltered feedback from customers or prospects, but Tungsten Network figured out a way to do it.

One of the primary things that enables effective customer analysis is the power of an honest answer from the end user. Those kinds of answers aren’t easy to get because not only do people simply want to be “nice” when asked direct questions about service and satisfaction, they also can’t always remember the details of their frustrations on the spot. That’s why Tungsten Network went about it a different way – by creating a free tool that offered real value to people they wanted to hear from, whether they were customers or not. It’s called the Friction Finder, and in less than 2 minutes it allows you to assess the extent of the friction in your accounts payable process and provides actionable insights into what you can do about it. That saves you time, money, and eliminates a lot of stress. Find out more by hearing Connie’s description of how Tungsten’s extended team came up with the idea, how they implemented it, and the kind of results it’s provided.

The “official” social media marketing your company is doing may not be enough. Here’s how Connie O’Brien engaged employees to compound the company’s efforts

When you stop to think about the way social media marketing works you’ll quickly realize it’s about a couple of things: compelling content, shared broadly. Each of those has its own challenges, but the broad sharing feels like something you as a CMO or marketing leader can’t really control. Or is it? Connie O’Brien realized that some of her best advocates for the company’s new campaign were the people working on it – her employees. In this conversation, Connie shares how employee involvement on social media helped the campaign’s reach and how she was able to get them to buy-in and be involved. As a result, the company’s ability to do effective customer analysis was increased dramatically. You don’t want to miss this part of the conversation.

Managing a multi-agency team effectively in order to reach the goal of better customer analysis is tricky business

As part of the team that came alongside Tungsten Network to build the Friction Finder content marketing campaign, we here at Renegade saw first-hand what it takes to manage a multi-agency team, and Connie O’Brien did so beautifully. During this conversation, she admitted the challenge but also pointed out that it’s much easier when you work alongside true professionals who know their piece of the puzzle backward and forwards. The end result? Tungsten was able to do the kind of customer analysis needed to create the solutions their prospects needed, and sales are climbing. Listen to the entire conversation. There’s a little bit of something for every company that’s looking to up its content marketing game.

Connect With Connie:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

B2B ≠ Better to Bore

Posted on by Drew Neisser

stay-normal-and-be-boringOnce upon a time in the realm of corporate America, there lived a stalwart named B2B. His purposeful walk and confident grin belied his unwavering subservience to all the almighty Sales King, who demanded daily tribute in the form of leads, leads, and more leads. Then one day, quite without warning, B2B died. No one mourned. The end. (Note: If this article seems familiar, then you read it first on FastCompany.com).

Or was it?

Okay, enough with the fairy tale, but here’s the truth: Long synonymous with “better to bore” communications, B2B marketing is in the process of being reborn. Leading this rebirth is a new generation of marketers like Jonathan Becher of SAP and Trip Hunter of Fusion-io, who are overturning conventional wisdom and establishing four new B2B marketing decrees that just might stand for years to come.

Culture Trumps Strategy
When he became the new CMO of software behemoth SAP in 2011, Jonathan Becher (pronounced Becker) was keenly aware of the imbalance of power between Sales and Marketing. Sales demanded leads and Marketing kowtowed. To make matters worse, his team battled internally about metrics, tactics, and budget, not to mention the overall strategic approach.

To fix this, Becher eliminated departmental silos, moving staffers around every six months and committing all to the same primary goals. Staffers no longer just had “majors” but also “minors” that broadened internal expertise. As Becher explained recently at The CMO Club Summit, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so fix your culture to make your strategy work.”

The focus on culture went well beyond reorganizing his staff. Becher banned empty adjectives from internal documents in an effort to eliminate “SAPanese” and other self-indulgent communications. Applying this same “eliminate barriers” mindset to SAP’s external activities, Becher encouraged his team to get to know their customers as individuals, reminding them that “big glass buildings don’t buy products–people do!”

Pursue Hearts, Not Just Minds
When your product is truly disruptive and offers significant price and performance advantages over entrenched competitors, the conventional wisdom would be to focus on rational, feature-heavy messaging. As VP of Corporate Marketing for the rising tech star Fusion-io, Trip Hunter has taken an entirely different approach, finding uniquely “emotional” means of connecting with his targets.

Following the highly successful he engineered in 2011, Hunter has taken Fusion-io marketing to the top of the world–literally–by partnering with mountaineer and U.S. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis, who is currently making his second attempt to summit Everest. Along the way up, Dellis is also testing his memory and raising money for Alzheimer’s research.

Chronicled on a Fusion-io microsite, Dellis’ climb is a multi-dimensional metaphor for the new era of B2B marketing. Explains Hunter, “The Everest Memory Challenge is about getting to know us a bit better, beyond bits and bytes, by sharing something that we think is worthwhile, compelling, and has an emotional connection.” (Proud disclosure: My agency, Renegade, LLC, designed and architected this microsite.)

Less Really is More
As companies grow and products multiply, there is a tendency among B2B marketers to carve up budgets and splinter messages. When Becher took over as CMO, he heard from customers that they received as many as 50 different emails about SAP events and products in any given month; at one point, Becher even realized that multiple events were scheduled in the same week within a few blocks of the same customer. As you might suspect, this marketing onslaught did not endear SAP to its clientele.

In response, Becher and his team created a new evaluation process for events that emphasized quality of engagement over quantity of attendees; in doing so, SAP ultimately reduced the number of events around the world from 3,500 to 1,200. The event overhaul proved its success: A tiny 10-person event led to two deals valued at 70 million euros.

This process of optimization, Becher argues, is a marketer’s best friend, and he practices what he preaches by placing a small number of bigger bets in each of SAP’s communication channels. This also means avoiding what he calls “ego metrics” such as Facebook “Likes” and instead shifting to outcome-focused KPIs that also acknowledge the lengthy sales cycles that are inherent to many B2B efforts.

Content is the Message
Much has been made of content marketing as a powerful new discipline and complement to traditional messaging approaches. Inspired next-generation marketers aren’t bothering to make the distinction between what they say in their ads and the content that they create. For them, this “content” is in fact the message–a message they consider just as effective, if not more so, than traditional ads.

This is certainly the case with Fusion-io’s two-year partnership with Nelson Dellis. Hunter notes: “The Everest Memory Challenge represents qualities that Fusion-io values and embraces. Like Nelson, the Fusion-io team and our customers are people who are adventurous, and take calculated risks to overcome obstacles.”

Prior to his climb, Dellis also appeared at several Fusion-io customer meetings where he could demonstrate his astounding memory skills, including one stop in Japan where he remembered the names of over 70 attendees after meeting them just once two hours earlier. Hunter concludes, “Attaching ourselves to something that is inspirational and representative of who we are as a company says much more about what drives us and our business.”

Final Note: Becher, also known as the “Social CMO,” delivered a keynote at The CMO Club Summit that was well-received by fellow CMOs and well-chronicled by other bloggers (link here). For more on Hunter, see my complete interview with him right here on TheDrewBlog.com.