Tag: CEO

MRP CMO Explains Why Predictive Analytics in Marketing Will Revolutionize the B2B Industry

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Predictive analytics in marketing is going to revolutionize the way CMOs and marketing teams do business. On this stimulating episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Drew interviews James Regan, CMO and co-founder of MRP.

James and his company are greeting predictive analytics with excitement and ingenuity. He shares why your company should be doing the same on this episode. This technology, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), is not something to be feared, contrary to what Hollywood may lead us to believe.

For a full explanation of this exciting new technology, why predictive analytics is NOT the death of big brand ideas and company storytelling, and how to start integrating this idea into your company, be sure to listen to this conversation.

Predictive analytics in marketing is something everyone needs to hear. Don’t be left behind, and give this podcast your full attention. Click here to listen.

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Predictive analytics in marketing is fairly new – what is it and why is it important?

Predictive analytics seeks to increase marketers’ ability to achieve the “holy trinity” of digital marketing – getting the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time. James offers listeners of this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite the perfect explanation of this technology. In a B2B sense, every organization has potential clients that are doing research on what they may need to buy that will serve their needs. Predictive analytics can track this digital data trail that tells your organization general geolocations and keyword sets that are spiking. The analytics program then automatically sends out tailored content that puts a problem-solving solution directly in front of the eyes of the potential client. James further explains that this is not being done at an individual level, rather at a group target market level. James’ description is best understood by listening to this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, so be sure to make time for the full audio.

Why the invention of predictive analytics is a death sentence for traditional campaigns, but not for big brand storytelling

Predictive analytics is moving marketing teams towards automating and programming their engagement strategies into an AI program, rather than focusing on traditional campaign methods. James claims that traditional campaigns are simply too slow in today’s lighting-fast environment. He argues that if you really want to deliver a relevant message, you have to be doing programmed customer engagement. You need to have an “always-on” approach that directly integrates your response with the appropriate message that is aligned to the content your potential customers are consuming outside of your firewall. Simply put, traditional campaigns create gaps in communicating with your customers that cannot be permitted any longer. This does not mean your brand’s big stories are irrelevant. Predictive analytics simply propels your values and stories at lightning-fast speed – it does not eliminate the story you’re trying to tell. You have to focus on the big brand of your company before you can focus on content delivery optimization. This episode is full of insights that you need to hear, so be sure to listen.

The future of B2B marketing in a predictive analytics world, removal of the human screen, and what is preventing mass adoption of this technology

AI and predictive analytics are going to reshape the world of B2B marketing as we know it. One of the biggest questions Drew asks James on this episode surrounds the perceived danger of removing the human element from the backend of content delivery. What will prevent an AI system from delivering the wrong message at an inappropriate time? James explains that AI will pull from an extensive digital repository of content that a marketing team has crafted. It will not be creating its own messages. Programming algorithms to know what message to pull and when is still a challenge, but one that is quickly being solved by the marketing world’s best and brightest. There is also the issue of what companies have access to massive data-ingestion technology. James predicts an arms race to see what company can get the best real-time input on customers and their behavior and that this will drive the future of predictive analytics. The next few years will see a huge uptick in this technology, and your company should not be left out of the loop. Be in the know by listening to this interview on Renegade Thinkers Unite.

What You’ll Learn

  • [0:29] Drew tracks down an expert in the field of predictive analytics for this episode, James Regan, CMO and co-founder at MRP
  • [2:05] The excitement surrounding predictive analytics at MRP
  • [4:20] James’ layman’s explanation of predictive analytics
  • [8:26] Specific actions that sales teams can take to take advantage of this information
  • [11:38] The death of traditional marketing campaigns
  • [13:57] James shares a real-world example to describe how predictive analytics works
  • [14:55] Creating the messages upfront and programming them into the analytics system is still a challenge
  • [16:10] Predictive analytics, the future of B2B marketing, and removing the human element
  • [20:50] What is preventing mass adoption of predictive analytics?
  • [23:48] Predictive analytics is NOT the death of the big-brand idea
  • [26:04] How a CMO’s plan can welcome predictive analytics
  • [28:33] Why an out of control marketing tech stack can be mitigated through predictive analytics tools and outsourcing
  • [32:33] James’ two overall “do’s” and a “don’t” for CMOs

Connect With James Regan:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Diversity Matters for Marketers – Not Just HR

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Inclusion in the workplace has been on the agendas of companies for quite some time. Rarely, though, do the potential marketing benefits of diversity get addressed when taking on the initiative. After all, a rich assortment of team members provides unique insights into the various demographics your brand may be targeting.

Award-winning entrepreneur Jennifer Brown preaches equality to business professionals, explaining why this social issue must be addressed and outlining the path to change. Jennifer understands that we live in a fast-changing world and many organizations may not be ready to take the bull by the horns. Although inclusion cannot be achieved overnight, she believes companies can take big strides by instilling themselves with the will to change.

Jennifer dishes on diversity in this Renegade Thinkers Unite episode. She tells Drew about some of the ways enlightened companies are working to diversify their employees, citing the importance of inclusion to the younger generations as a major driver for change. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are a few of Jennifer’s inspirational responses from the interview:

 

Drew: Is there research that shows having a diverse workforce actually helps the bottom line?

Jennifer: Yes, there is a ton of research about it. There are studies that quantify, for example, the number of women that a company may have on its board or in its senior executive team correlating to bottom line results, better shareholder returns, better eBid. They get very very technical about it. They’ve actually linked the representation to the way the company shows up in the world and the way that the company succeeds. It’s not just optics, but it’s actually bottom line results that these companies that tend to prioritize diversity and inclusion as a corporate value and as something that they are targeting in terms of hiring. They have linked it to company performance. There’s a lot of studies, and I won’t go into those, but you can actually Google it and there’s more than you could ever know what to do with. Even though that’s been out there though Drew, it’s still hard to make the case for why this is important and to help companies or urge companies to put this on their radar screen and really take it seriously. It’s interesting notwithstanding what we might call the business case over and over again, which I have to communicate and teach about. When I called my book The Will to Change, the big question mark for me is – what does motivate people to change? I think there’s still a lot of resistance to change.

Drew: If you’re part of a marketing department and you’re struggling to add diverse talent to your workforce, what should you do?

Jennifer: It plagues tech. A lot of other industries are struggling to get engineering talent of color, for example, let alone women. So it is a pain point that’s felt across many industries. How you set your founding team really really matters. When you’re an early-stage organization, I would recommend being very dogmatic about who you recruit because the optics and the message of who is particularly in the leadership or the founding team or that original group really matters. It sets the compass a certain direction and makes everything that happens after that easier to attract, especially diverse talent when they see themselves on a company’s masthead and they see that it’s a priority that the company talks about throughout its marketing and its outreach when it comes to recruiting. All of that are elements that people, particularly diverse talent, pay a lot of attention to. So what you say and the decisions you make and whom you hire matters – especially at the beginning.

Drew: What does it mean for a company to take a stand for diversity right now?

Jennifer: Brands are being judged by the stances they take and the conversations they jump into or not. For example, both the ACC and the NBA pulled games out of North Carolina saying we’re going to deprive you of revenue and we’re going to get all the teams behind us and we’re going to really make it hurt because of the transgender bathroom bills that were going on in that state, and there’s some similar ferment that’s going on in Texas. We see corporations banding together and watching what each other do. There’s strength in numbers, so it’s not even like a company has to necessarily stick its neck out alone. There are families of brands that can make these decisions together, and it’s interesting to watch the dominoes. It’s almost like the companies and the CEOs who walked away from the Trump business councils. The news is happening so fast. I watched which companies went first and then which were in the second round. I was noticing that and I was putting myself in the position of the employees of those companies watching their CEOs say, “Not on my watch. I’m not going to be party to something that I think is harmful for our society.” I was imagining how good that felt and how reassuring that felt in particular, not just for diverse talent that works for that employer, but even I’d say the allies – the people who believe in equality and inclusion.

Drew: How are millennials impacting the workplace diversity initiative?

Jennifer: One of their top values is inclusion, regardless of what their own demographic is. This is not just important to people of color or female talent. It’s actually important across the board generationally. I think we’re entering a day and age where what brands do really matters. Is it risky? I have to tell you, I’m not sure the boycotts that have been threatened and the bottom line impact has really been felt. There’s a lot of bluster and a lot of social media activity for a while, but I have to say I don’t think that brands have really paid a negative price in my experience for standing up and being counted when it comes to social issues that impact equality.

Building Your CEO Relationship

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Honesty is at the heart of the CMO-CEO relationship. No matter what your marketing data may show, it won’t mean much to your CEO if the context is unclear. Few CEOs are as brutally honest as Alan Trefler of Pegasystems, who is also the company’s founder and chairman. Alan urges marketers to really understand the metrics they share with the board, and also be able to communicate why those facts are so critical.

This episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite covers some of the most important factors for the CMO and CEO to maintain a healthy relationship. Alan brings decades-long wisdom to the table, as he discusses some of the best—and worst—things CMOs can do for their organizations. You can listen to the episode here, or continue reading below for some selected questions and answers from the interview.

Drew: When you bring in a CMO, what are your expectations of the role that they’re going to play in and how they’re going to be successful?

Alan: I have the pleasure of working with what I think is a terrific CMO, and I also have the ability and routinely do interact with dozens and dozens of CMOs every quarter because our products are actually used in power. What CMOS are often trying to do, I find that CMOs make a number of interesting, perhaps predictable, but actually very serious mistakes when they talk to the CEO…There’s a tremendous challenge in the industry in which CMOs and marketing in general is hungry to prove that they’re having an impact. And there’s a tendency for CMOs to want to really I would say over-rotate on attribution. I’m going to go demonstrate that the sales in this region that this particular big deal for a to be to be company this particular launch for B2C Company was empowered by marketing because that’s how I justify my budget and I make things good for everybody. The trouble is CEOs are very by their nature suspicious of what I would describe as soft estimates. And so when they hear things that sound like grand claims and they look at the data and they say, “Well, that’s really an estimate. This isn’t really a great estimate. This isn’t something that can be provable,” they become very critical. And I think CMOS set themselves up sometimes.

Drew: If you had a group of CMOs sitting here, what’s one bit of advice you would give them in terms of interacting with the CEO and the board?

Alan: The interactions obviously with the board are going to be much more brief and episodic. I would say from a CEO point of view a great CMO is constantly working with the CEO. If you think about it, arguably the brand of our time, Apple, that CEO came to love the concept of branding and marketing and lived it. I think that CMOs will do a great service for the whole company if they really invest the time and effort to these concepts as opposed to just “delivering measurable results.”

Drew: What should marketers do to get next-best action?

Alan: What you need to be able to do is when you touch a customer, either because the customer is coming into your owned property or this customer is one which you’re choosing to make an outreach to or this customer perhaps is in a paid channel and you’re looking to push some form of promotion to them, you need to think of it in terms of: What is the customer seeing? What has the customer done? Is this a customer who’s typed something anxiety-producing on your website, for instance, by searching for “termination fee,” which should definitely raise some red flags. Pulling this information in real-time or near-real time is critical because you really don’t want to inundate the customer with things that they don’t care about. Traditionally targeting starts to feel like abuse to customers. I remember I looked at the TiVo site for a TiVo I bought. For months after I bought it, I was chased around the Internet by TiVo. It was really quite irritating and menacing to go back to that site.

Drew: Are companies wasting a lot of money on chasing acquisition?

Alan: There’s a lot of money that’s being wasted out there. There’s simply no question that by blindly targeting with traditional campaigns, you really have very low hit rates and it can be expensive, particularly when you’re buying digital media. I think that acquisition needs to be thought of in two contexts. One context is: How do I increase what I can sell my existing customer base? That’s sometimes the absolute best way to magnify your portfolio of products that you’re selling because those customers are ones that you already have reasons to contact. They have reasons to come to you. If you can get them to give recommendations to friends, you’ve got something that is a much warmer introduction. If you could reach out to those friends based on their suggestion, they get some sort of benefit from that. Those sorts of approaches, which is leveraging your existing customer base are ones that can be extremely valuable. You have to make sure you don’t offend those customers. It’s so easy to upset a customer by bugging them about things that you’ve bugged them about the seventh time, or going and blindly doing things without being sensitive to aspects of how you work with them and their demographics. Blind acquisition, just reaching out blindly or buying ads, can be effective though only in very limited circumstances. You really need to be able to also target those where they have no hope at all. There’s just so much noise out there.

Renegade Thinkers Unite

Exercises to Improve your Marketing Fitness

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Brace yourself for the most inspiring episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite thus far. In fact, our guest Coss Marte, had us choking back tears. His story begins a little over a decade ago, when he kick started his own enterprise as a teenager in front of a New York City bodega. By age 19, Marte’s business was raking in over $2 million dollars a year. He ran into trouble shortly thereafter, and in less than ten years he was scrubbing toilets at a reconstructed hotel to pay his rent.

The reason for Marte’s struggles is simple: his business was the business of selling drugs. He was incarcerated at 23 on charges related to peddling drugs, and spent seven years in prison.

Marte, now 31, is a free man and an up-and-coming marketing phenom. Upon his release from prison, he founded ConBody—a prison style fitness program where students work out with minimal equipment. Thanks to Marte’s marketing guts, ConBody is now one of the fastest growing fitness programs in NYC. To be frank, the young entrepreneur probably knows more about advertising than most CMOs. [Note: Drew was first introduced to Coss Marte at this year’s PSFK conference, a must attend event for any renegade thinker.]

You can listen to Marte share his inspiring story on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast episode embedded above.

As you might expect, the seedlings of ConBody—which is short for “convict body”—came while Marte was incarcerated. “I got my first medical examination and was told that I could die in prison because of my health issues,” he says. “As soon as they told me this, I went back to my cell and I started doing lunges, and any type of exercise I probably knew.” Marte lost 70 pounds in six months after customizing his own exercise routine. Not long afterwards, he helped over 20 inmates lose over a thousand pounds combined.

Having inspired others to make positive lifestyle changes, Marte started thinking about his past—and his future. “I started realizing that I was creating a web of destruction,” he says, “and for the first time I started praying and asking God, ‘How can I give back?’ And that’s when ConBody was born.” Marte mapped out a plan for an exercise center while he was in solitary confinement, and then turned those blueprints into action when he was released a year later.

Marte’s bold marketing tactics helped put ConBody on the exercise studio map. He began marketing his business by speaking to women who were doing yoga in public spaces. Simply talking to them about ConBody, Marte managed to steadily build a customer base. “There [have] been times,” he states, “where I stood on the train and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, pay attention.’… I tell my story and I’ll tell about ConBody.” Marte says he continues to share his story about 20 times a day, never underestimating word-of-mouth.

ConBody has boomed since its inception. Upon speaking at a conference, Marte was approached by a woman who offered him the opportunity to open a ConBody location in one of New York City’s most famous luxury department stores, Saks Fifth Avenue. This change in fortune still gives Marte goose bumps. He says, “Every time I go up to the second floor [of Saks], I start smiling because the first thing [I] see on the floor is a mannequin with a ConBody t-shirt on.”

ConBody’s studio atmosphere is no doubt responsible for part of its success. With the intention of motivating participants, Marte designed the studio like a prison. Brick walls and prison bars line the fitness center. Signs that read “five minute showers” and “do the time” line the interior. At ConBody, you’ll find all the same body weight equipment as you would in a prison. This gritty appearance is one of the business’s most popular features, giving members a hardcore workout experience.

Following Marte’s lead, marketers should strive to provide consumers with a similarly exceptional experience. This is the driving force behind ConBody. “If I keep going and I keep delivering a great product,” Marte says, “no matter what I’m going to wake up, I’m going to be okay, and I’m going to live life.” (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

The Recipe for Marketing Success + Chuck Roast

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Customer experience is at the core of marketing success. Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara explains where and how brands should be targeting their messages in Part II of his interview on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast. (If you missed Part I of the interview, click here to listen.) Ferrara grew Nimble out of the idea that brands do best when customers recommend them to their networks. Nine years later, Ferrara’s business is stronger than ever and venturing into new marketing frontiers.

Listen to the interview above, or continue reading for the episode’s highlights:

During his extensive tenure in marketing, Ferrara learned that business doesn’t have to be impersonal. In fact, his experience at GoldMine CRM—and eventually Nimble—demonstrates that the best marketing strategies are personal in nature. Ferrara says, “I think the mistake that many businesspeople make is that they make business about business…[but business] is about connecting with people. That’s why they’ll remember you.”

Jon walks the walk on that philosophy, sharing both his personal and private social accounts with the people in his network to this day.

Ferrara didn’t originally foresee GoldMine, his first business venture, taking a turn towards customer-centricity. “GoldMine actually started out as an accounting software company,” he says. “I needed something to manage the relationships, so I built and designed GoldMine to do that. It turned out that GoldMine really was our future and we had to pivot.” Ferrara’s strategy at GoldMine was to “build relationships with editors and writers so [consumers would] see us being written about in publications; and then we started slipping in radio ads and airplane ads.”

Nimble, which launched in 2008, capitalizes on that same influencer-driven approach. “We’re here to help those influencers build their brands in social sales and marketing by helping them inspire and educate our customers,” he states. “So it’s a win-win situation.” The company anticipates user counts of multiple millions in the near future.

One of Ferrara’s top priorities is helping Nimble’s marketing team strike the right balance between telling a unified brand message and genuinely opening up to potential partners. He says, “The relationships happen at that one-to-one level across your team members, but you still need to have a unified message, be consistent about that messaging, drive the high level stuff, and then integrate.”

Knowing that he’s serving his customers is Ferrara’s biggest reward, and he takes every compliment to heart. “When somebody stops [me] on the street and says, ‘you know, Jon, you changed my life with GoldMine,’ or ‘you’re changing my life with Nimble,’ that’s the best,” he claims. “That’s why we do what we do.”

CMO Insights: Building Loyalty Through Sampling

Posted on by Drew Neisser

This is part 2 of my interview with Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of KIND Snacks and author of Do the KIND Thing, a book I’d recommend to anyone, especially those intrigued by the notion of doing well in business while doing good. In this post, we dive deeply into the evolution of KIND’s loyalty building activities.  Several items of importance will become clear as you read this:

  • It’s easy to give product away–it’s far harder to create a memorable experience that drives loyalty;
  • Loyalty programs are tricky to get right even if you have a great product;
  • It’s hard to get consumers to go from an offline sampling experience to an online program;
  • There is such a thing as being too clever when it comes to designing loyalty programs;
  • Never underestimate the power of kindness!

Drew: In your book, you mention that sampling was an important way of building loyalty. How did you approach this?

So in New York City, for example, you have men or women handing out stuff for people to try. And it’s such an unemotional experience. It just feels like a commodity. I just feel that there’s a way to elevate that experience. We’re giving people something for free, an expensive, premium product that we worked so hard to craft. We don’t want to just hand it out and push it into people’s face. The opportunity to give a KIND bar as a kind act and say you’ve been “kinded” helps people hopefully appreciate it more.

Drew: So how do you sample KIND?

We do a program today, where we give people two KIND bars and say, “one is for you to do a kind thing for your body and one is to do a kind thing for someone else.” It helps elevate the experience and it’s just a little bit warmer of an interaction. It’s just a warmer way to connect with people. But, it’s still authentic, also in that we’re authentically trying to inspire people to start chains of kindness.

Drew: You’ve tried a number of loyalty programs. Can you talk about the black card and why you don’t think it worked?

The original aspiration was that people got the mysterious black card that would not explain to them anything other than somebody would do a kind act to them and they would get this black card and then that person would disappear. And we hoped that people would be so curious that they would go online and find out that they’ve been KINDED and that now it’s their responsibility to pass that on. The truth is, people are so busy and so skeptical of strangers approaching them that when we just handed them the secret card a lot of people thought, “what is this?” They were just too busy and they just wouldn’t engage at a significant enough pace. It’s hard to get people to go from an offline encounter with a stranger to online so it didn’t work as well as I would have liked.

Drew: Then you moved on to another loyalty program which encouraged people to do everyday acts of kindness but that one didn’t work out quite as planned either, right?

Yes, it was a bit disappointing. Instead of elevating the standard for what kindness should be, they were lowering it, and in that sense I felt a little bit guilty that I was contributing to making what should be a magical moment a little dirty. A lot of young people would enter the acts like, “I opened the door for my sister or I closed the door for my sister!” These obviously didn’t capture the essence of what we wanted to do. But many others supported the causes that they cared about, and the causes were doing something important. One of them was helping reunite war veterans with their families so we sent them care packages. The good news was everybody was doing something good for others. None of them were doing something horrible.

Drew: So why do you think this one didn’t quite work as planned?

It’s our fault that the system didn’t work. And in retrospect we gave up on it too quickly because at that point we didn’t use Facebook for authentication. So anybody could just say whatever they wanted. There are a lot of lessons from that experience and we’re still learning. It’s always a give and take. It’s quality versus quantity. The higher the standard, the higher the quality of the kind act, the more meaningful it will be. But you’re going to have to sacrifice quantity. So you have to find the right ratios.

Drew: How are the #KindAwesome cards working?

At the quality level, I think they’re awesome. I think at least when I give them out. I always give them in moments where they’re deserved. I don’t just give them out to give them out. I usually give one a day, I sometimes give a few a day. But if a day goes by where nobody deserves one, then I don’t feel compelled to just give one out. I wait for a person that really has done a kind act. And I give it to them and it’s authentic and people feel good. It’s very nice. But currently, they are limited by the fact that only a small community (the KIND team and some of our partners) gives them out. So there’s you know, five hundred of us. We are in the process of researching and designing a platform that’s going to help us scale that. And hopefully maintain the authenticity.

Drew: Have there been any surprises with the #KINDawesome program?

I did not expect that people were going to cry when I gave them #KINDawesome cards. I actually can think of three moments where people shed tears from feeling really touched that I recognized their act of kindness. And they couldn’t care less about getting a couple KIND bars and a #KINDawesome card to pass on to others. What drives their fulfillment is that appreciation – that someone else had recognized and celebrated their kindness. Particularly when they were having a hard time and a long day, and they were not feeling appreciated.

Drew: Talk a bit about the power of kindness.

You know, all of us are complex human beings. People sometimes have a harder life than we acknowledge and realize. And they’re having really tough moments. And somebody, a fellow human being just stretches out their hand and it really can mean a lot. There are some people that are fragile and feeling completely isolated and then a stranger just shows some warmth and kindness to them. And it completely transforms their lives. And they have a reason to believe that life is worth living. Just imagine how powerful that is. I would not pretend to say that from getting a #KINDawesome card that has happened, I’m just saying the power of kindness really can help do so much good.

Drew: So, a little kindness can go a long way.

Yes.