This episode features an interview with Mary Wells, CMO at Cloudera, a software company that empowers organizations to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights.

In this episode, Mary discusses her maniacal focus on strong foundations and operational efficiency, and how it allows her to experiment and take calculated risks. She also dives into her focus on simplified, consistent messaging and why CMOs need to tap into their inner CIO.

Key Takeaways:

• Ruthlessly prioritizing foundations and operational excellence, especially with budgets, allows you to optimize, experiment, and take calculated risks.
• CMOs need to tap into the inner CIO. CMOs have a tech stack and their organization is an expensive line item for a company. Scaling back and leaning into data and reporting gives the CMO a seat at the table and insights into what their customers need.
• Mix matters to your audience. Do fewer things, but do them bigger and better, aligning behind one marketing strategy to find your customers where they are in the buyers’ journey.

Quote:

•  ”The other strategy is what we're not doing and cutting down on the quantity. What we want to do are fewer things, but bigger and better. By breaking down these silos, we're able to do that, so that when I wake up on a Wednesday, like today, I don't have 50 marketing things happening today. Everybody in marketing now has one playbook and together we're making it happen. And with the strategy though, again, it's not just events, it's not just hands-on labs. Mix matters, and knowing where a prospect or a customer is in the buyer's journey lots of times helps me and the team gauge where we need to dial up and down. Sometimes it's video, sometimes it's a deep dive technical presentation, sometimes it's an event, digital, et cetera. And the idea is that mix matters based on the audience.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(05:37) The Trust Tree: Prioritizing operational excellence

*(18:21) The Playbook: The value of comms

*(35:10) The Dust Up: Practice the pause – different day, different person

*(38:27): Quick Hits: Mary’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for pipeline pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Mary on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Cloudera
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Mika Yamamoto, Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Freshworks, a company that provides powerful, easy to use Customer service, IT, and CRM software.

In this episode, Mika discusses surgically blending the physical and digital world, to create a campaign experience that sticks with prospects. She also talks about encouraging innovation from her team, tying marketing victory to sales’ success and focusing on customer over function.

Key Takeaways:

• Blending the physical and digital world when creating campaigns can create more lasting impact and better returns.
• Allowing your team to divide and conquer different markets and functions allows people to specialize and be the best at what they do, an impossibility if they are doing too many things.
• Incorporating humanity and a recognition of the human on the other side, not only differentiates your marketing in a B2B space, it makes the whole job more enjoyable

Quote:

• ”In terms of signals, what helps is that we have one operations function that works across all functions. There's traditionally been, marketing comes up and celebrates and says, “Woohoo, we did all this work, we’re green!” And then sales is saying, “Well, what the heck you can't claim victory because we haven't met our numbers. So how can you declare victory if we haven't met our numbers?” And so again, the construct that we have is we have one operations group in our organization, Freshworks. So, we have one dashboard that essentially ties together and we're still working on making those ties, but that ties together, marketing doesn't declare victory if sales can't. So, it's driving shared metrics in one dashboard versus this view of the world that is a marketing view, then a sales view then a product view. We want to drive one view, which is more customer focused versus functionally focused.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(08:24) The Trust Tree: Divide and conquer different markets

*(24:12) The Playbook: Focus on demand capture

*(39:20) The Dust Up: Assumptions about sellers and marketers

*(42:49) Quick Hits: Mika’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for pipeline pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Mika on LinkedIn
• Learn more about FreshworksLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Niki Hall, CMO at Five9, a company that provides cloud contact center solutions, facilitating billions of customer engagements annually for 2,500+ customers.

In this episode, Niki discusses the role of a CMO as a business professional first, and how important it is for them to bring customer insights into the overall company strategy. She also dives into her approach to experimentation and enhancing authentic marketing with the customer voice.

Key Takeaways:

• CMOs should see themselves as business professionals first, and marketing professionals second. As a business professional, they need to be honest about what is not going well, so while you need to highlight wins, you can’t focus too heavily on what is going well.
• CMO's need to bring out insights to inform strategy, anticipating future issues that could arise. It’s essential to use customer insights to inform overall business strategy.
• Experiments are important, and you can pilot and prove new ideas at a small scale for proof of concept. Leaders should invest in and encourage experimentation.

Quote:

• “ Pilot, prove, scale. So, I always ask my team to try new things, pilot it, prove it at a smaller scale. Once we've proven it out, then let's scale it globally. So, I've always set aside money for experiments and encourage my leaders to do that.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:09) The Trust Tree: Having the right ingredients as a company

*(14:02) The Playbook: Having a clear, differentiated message

*(37:12) The Dust Up: Grounding in common understanding

*(39:25) Quick Hits: Niki’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for pipeline pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Niki on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Five9
• Learn more about Caspian Studios