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Lessons We Can Learn From The Transformational CMOs At Cisco, GE And American Family Insurance

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The world is changing around us and marketing leaders must transform their organizations to keep up. In this post, the fourth installment in profiles of finalists for the Cojones Awards, the focus is on three change agents who have had the courage to transform their marketing teams to accelerate their firms’ progress toward becoming modern marketing organizations.

Blair Christie, CMO, Cisco - Tweet2Vote

Cisco has been an early thought leader on the subjects of a connected world and the Internet of Things. But to “land the parachute” and connect these high-level thoughts to real business benefits, CMO Blair Christie needed to transform marketing at the company. “It was a big challenge. We’re moving from selling products and hardware to a much broader, more solutions-oriented approach. We couldn’t talk about the Internet of everything and then drop 30,000 feet to a box or a router. All of our various business units had to come together and build reference architectures and roadmaps, where we wouldn’t just integrate, we would actually create turnkey solutions for the customer.”

Under her guidance Cisco also became an effective content marketer that used customer journey maps to build highly relevant engagement with distinctly different segments and personas.

Her advice on leading a modern marketing transformation initiative:

  1. You’ve got to be “customer in.” It doesn’t sound like rocket science but it is amazing how many marketing organizations fall in love with what they’re offering or are so influenced by internal forces that they forget that messages have to be customer-centric.
  2. Don’t ever underestimate the power of a process. The process by which things get done and the process by which you engage with your team, sales and engineering — whoever is required — is almost as important as the technology you’re leveraging. So don’t underestimate the power of honing your process.
  3. Content is still king. The content that you create — whether it’s customized or reflective of what the customer needs, or truly pushing the edge in terms of focusing on business outcomes and what is going on in the market versus what is going on within your own walls — it’s just so important.

To Christie courage means following your gut even though you don’t know for sure if you’re right or if you’ll be successful and getting your teams behind you to drive to the best possible outcome. “Don’t spend too much time analyzing. Try it anyway. Playing it [safe] simply doesn’t work anymore.”

Beth Comstock, CMO, GE - Tweet2Vote

GE is facing the most significant technology disruption it has seen in decades — the industrial Internet. As CMO, Beth Comstock knew that this disruption would require a transformational approach from the company if it was to prosper in the decades ahead. “As a company have had to define what it means to us, this idea of the Internet of really big Things. In our case jet engines, trains, energy generation and all the software data and analytics that come at industrial scale. This is a transformation for our company, this notion that the physical and the digital world are married.

Marketing at GE is changing to lead this transformation. It is focused on bringing strategy into the product development process earlier, aligning with the sales organization to improve go-to-market and commercialization, and forging partnerships with other companies in the industrial Internet ecosystem. And it is focused on the way it communicates. “[We’re] continuing to make sure our story is very clear, very simple, very approachable. For us it’s been trying to explain what this marriage of big iron and big data means. So it’s taken us into some very inventive methods of storytelling.” This certainly includes the provocative two-minute film, "The Boy Who Beeps.

Her advice on transforming a company:

  1. It’s a team sport: You can’t do it alone.
  2. Marketers are the integrators and must bring their teams together around the customer.
  3. Just start: Don’t be paralyzed waiting for the right strategy or the right data.

To Comstock courage means following your passion. “It’s having the passion to just pursue the passion. I think if you're passionate about something it makes you courageous.”

Telisa Yancy, CMO, American Family Insurance - Tweet2Vote

According to Telisa Yancy, at many financial services companies the words marketing, customer and brand are not commonplace, and that understanding has shaped how she approaches her role as CMO. “It’s not enough for me to have a great marketing team locked up in the part of the building that marketing fits in; I think it is part of my job to turn us all into marketers. This means that we all have a customer sensibility, that we all know what it means to be customer-driven, that we all know that whatever role you play in the building links back to the customer.”

“We made a major shift last year. We shifted to our vision for the company from being a service-driven company to being a customer-driven company. And that changed the role of some of my marketing division as to what they should be doing with the rest of the building.”

Her advice for marketers wanting to transform their companies:

  1. Know the customer.
  2. Love your data as much as you love your creative.
  3. Never start with a solution, start with an idea and make it work across all platforms. Become channel agnostic. Consider yourself a publisher as much as you are a content creator and figure out how to leverage that in the world we live in.

To Yancy courage means speaking truth to power. “That power might be the old way of doing things — the leaders in the organization who hold on to the old way of doing things. But it could also be speaking truth to your internal team: ‘You don’t get to own this anymore.’ For marketing to be successful it needs to become the lexicon of the whole building. Courage also means knowing when to stop doing things that are not adding value for the customer, even if that means that the traditional ideas of marketing have to change. If it’s not adding value to the customer, if it’s not delivering the results that you are expecting to deliver, you got to have the courage to stop.”