Pilot, Prove, Scale

10/15/24 • 42 min

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:

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.

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:

Links:

Previous Episode

Create Content People Will Love or Hate

This episode features an interview with Karl Van den Bergh, CMO at Gigamon, a company that helps IT organizations better secure and manage their hybrid cloud infrastructure.
In this episode, Karl talks about shifting from a lead-based model to a demand unit model, the impact of investing in brand when budgets are tight, and balancing awareness with demand. He also talks about his approach to content, creating something that stands out and that people either love or hate.

Key Takeaways:

Transitioning from a lead-based model to a demand unit model can better align with complex B2B buying processes because it allows for more accurate targeting of entire buying committees.
Maintaining brand investments during economic downturns is a way to seize opportunity to win market share. Companies that continue to invest in brand awareness during tight budgets will emerge stronger when the market recovers.
Leveraging humor in campaigns, and embracing that some people will love it and some will hate it, is more memorable and can have better results than content that blends in.

Quote:

“We said, look, I'd rather put something out there that people either love or hate, as long as it's done, again, it can't be offensive, but people love or hate. I'd rather have something that stands out than something that's bland that no one would object to. And sure enough, as I said, it way outperformed benchmark.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(04:30) The Trust Tree: Shifting from a lead-based model to a demand unit model

*(20:26): The Playbook: Put out content people will love or hate

*(38:06) The Dust-Up: Authentic Dialogue

*(39:47) Quick Hits: Karl’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Links:

Next Episode

Customer Focused Over Functionally Focused

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:

Links: