The Power of Being a Customer-Obsessed CMO

0:00What does it mean to be a customer-obsessed CMO to you? and why is that really important? Whether you're a product, brand, or a performance-oriented CMO, the fundamental aspect is you have to be a customer-obsessed CMO. Why is that important? Because everything we do on the marketing side is all about the customer. Why are we basically building products in order to particularly solve customer pain points? What do you need to do in marketing in order to basically create awareness and preference for the product is basically focusing on the customer pain points. So how does this actually translate into marketing?

0:35Because you might think that anything to do with a customer is mostly around the messaging. Yes, it is definitely around the messaging because the best way to do the marketing is to basically tell the story through the voice of your customers. And then leveraging their voice, I think is the best for marketing.

0:57Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends, the podcast where we dive deep into the minds of the marketing leaders who are literally shaping the future. I'm your host, as always, Jeremy Bergeron. And today we have an incredibly special guest. Our people contacted her people. We made this happen. This is a really, really epic brand and epic executive. She's not only a powerhouse in the marketing world, but also the senior vice president, chief marketing and customer officer at Cisco for the WebEx collaboration business. Aruna Ravishandran is more than just a marketing leader. This is a wife, a mom, A lot of slashes to the way that she thinks about marketing and transformative marketing at that.

1:47I hope we get a chance to touch on the stuff she did with NASA and some of the partnerships there. But let's get started. Aruna, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you, Jeremy. I'm so excited to be here with you today. So I noticed this little piece of detail, and you have to make sure this is accurate, but I think this is accurate. As of June 24, Cisco is ranked number 74 on the Fortune 500. which jumped up eight spots from last. That's a significant jump up if you consider the Fortune 100 up to 74. Also, Cisco's been ranked number one on the Fortune 100's best companies to work for for not one, not two, but three years in a row.

2:30So what is going on at Cisco, Aruna? There's some magic happening there. I would say I've been at Cisco now for about six and a half plus years. And I've worked in four different companies before Cisco. And this is the company to be. The way we operate at Cisco, our message to the world is being able to build an inclusive future for all. Everything we do with Cisco holds up to that particular brand promise. How we collaborate, how we bridge with our customers, with our partners, with our employees. Everything we do at Cisco basically delivers on that particular brand promise in terms of being able to create an inclusive future for all.

3:07and having been here for about six and a half plus years, it's not a surprise. Everything we do is intentional. Everything we do falls up to that particular brand promise. The benefits we have for our employees, how people actually work with each other, how we treat all of our employees, our co-workers, it's truly amazing to be a part of a company like that and there is no surprise there for me that we have made it to the most loved company for three years in a row. It's incredible. I mean, I want to touch on that a little bit more just because I think about the culture of an organization. I also know Cisco is competing fiercely, you know, in a market in a lot of different ways, hardware and software.

3:50And so I'm just curious about, look, you've been there, you know, several years, six years, about to be seven years. What's been this momentum behind the culture? What's happened? Like, what do you think it is? Is it just everyone is values aligned and there's a lot of collaborative effort? Was there some kind of linchpin that happened the past several years where clearly there's nothing stopping this brand and you're competing against some of the biggest in the game to ever do it? But culturally, as a culture, what shifted? There's clearly some dynamic flow happening. I think the culture is everything across the board, right?

4:28It basically defines the people and it defines the passion people have for the company and the products they actually win. And so this has been, I would say, an evolution. I've seen this kind of a culture from the time I've been here at Cisco and it's continued to evolve. The pandemic happened a couple of years ago and we continue to be the one of the world's leaders in terms of being able to help people to collaborate during the pandemic. What was the means of communication during the pandemic when everybody went home? It was video conferencing. And so we were right up there, you know, enabling our customers, our employees, and everyone to seamlessly collaborate, we did not miss a heartbeat at that particular time.

5:09And in addition to that, there are so many different initiatives we here do at Cisco in order to contribute to the community around the world. Again, in terms of creating the bridge with our networking products, being able to securely, comfortably, and safely, you know, helping our customers as well as our employees. And last but not the least with the WebEx technology, being able to provide that collaboration platform, which brings people together, whether you're working from home or in the office or anywhere in between, we are the powerhouse behind that. But ultimately, the foundation underpinning the products is the culture.

5:47And the culture here at Cisco is about being able to treat people with respect, giving a lot of opportunities for people of multiple different diversities across the board, And a voice and a seat at the table. Never seen something like that in my entire career of 25 plus years. We talked a little bit earlier, and I want to touch on this, the customer obsessed modern day chief marketing officer. And I've spoken to hundreds of executive marketing leaders across the Fortune 1000. And it's always interesting to talk about the customer. And now I'm talking to you who has this really interesting right brain, left brain background who's now leading marketing at the helm there, focused on the Webex collaboration effort.

6:33What does it mean to be a customer-obsessed CMO to you? And why is that really important? So being a customer-obsessed CMO, I think, again, is fundamental for me in terms when I think about a CMO, most of the CMOs usually come from three different backgrounds. You'll be a product-oriented CMO, meaning that you'll come from a product background, or you'll be a brand CMO, meaning that you'll come from a brand background, or you'll be a digital and a performance-oriented CMO who comes through a digital background. All three traits are extremely important. I can't basically weight one against the other, but I would say I'm a product-oriented CMO because I come from a technology background.

7:13I spent about 10 plus years of my career in various different engineering disciplines at Hewlett-Packard when it was the apple of the valley, eons ago. And then I moved on to the darker side of the business, which became marketing, and I've never changed, you know, over the last 20 plus years and I've built my professional career in marketing. But having said that, you know, whether you're a product, brand or a performance-oriented CMO, all of those three things have become the linchpin for you. But the fundamental aspect is you have to be a customer-obsessed CMO. Why is that important? Because everything we do on the marketing side is all about the customer.

7:50Why are we basically building products? in order to particularly solve customer pain points. What do you need to do in marketing in order to basically create awareness and preference for the product is basically focusing on the customer pain points. And so to me, everything the team and I do is we put our customer first. So how does this actually translate into marketing? Because you might think that anything to do with a customer is mostly around the messaging. Yes, it is definitely around the messaging because one of the fundamental things which marketing teams do is to basically come up with a message, the right message oriented towards the right target audience.

8:29And your target audience can be different. It can be your IT persona. It could be a line of business. It could be, depending upon your product, your target audience actually changes. And so when you come up with that particular right level of messaging, with the right messaging and positioning in order to basically shine the light on your product, the best way to do the marketing is to basically tell the story through the voice of your customers. So understanding the use cases, which your customers are actually leveraging your products that, how your products are actually solving those tough problems for the customer, building relationship with the customer, and then leveraging their voice in order to activate your marketing, I think is the best form of marketing.

9:13And also, I'm a servant leader. being able to basically help solve the customer problems, whether it is through marketing or in any other way, because I have a secondary role as the customer officer for WebEx by Cisco. And so here, being able to basically help our customers, you know, tackle any kind of a problem is very, very important to us. And I take that very much to heart. And also thinking about how this connects to analytics and AI and customer data, right? And I think about utilizing advanced analytics and AI to analyze customer data can definitely reveal insights into customer preferences and behaviors and trends.

9:58Data we know is playing a crucial role at Cisco. How do you leverage data and analytics to drive customer-centric strategies at Cisco? Wow. So one of the key things, we went through a huge transformation over the last two, three plus years. We built out an entire brand new MarTech stack because like I said earlier, data is key. You got to have analytics and insights in order to basically drive the behavior in terms of marketing. And so being able to build the MarTech stack, we brought in world class MarTech stack across the board, whether it is your CMS systems or whether it is your analytics platform in terms of being able to actually understand customer preferences and their buying behavior, being able to understand where the watering cones are, where your customers are going to be.

10:48And, you know, the world has changed considerably. When you think about brand, you know, most of the people will always think about advertising, you know, whether it is advertising online or digital or in physical forms, whether it's airport advertising, billboard advertising doesn't matter. but they are your customers, right? So being able to understand who is your target customer, being able to understand where the watering holes are in order to activate your message and then using the various different market stack in order to basically slice and dice your data in order to understand where your customer preferences are and so that you can bring them to the right aspect of your marketing funnel journey is so that you can create a preference whether it is top of funnel, middle of the funnel, as well as bottom of funnel.

11:36And taking them from awareness to close is a huge part. And so data analytics becomes very important. There are so many different tools right there. And now with AI coming into the mix, it's made it even more insightful and helpful for marketing. And my teams are actually leveraging multiple different analytics tools out there, which now have AI actually built in in order to make their job much more easier. What about personalization and how that connects to customer experience now? I'm seeing a ton of marketing automation tools and AI-driven personalization engines. I mean, it's getting there.

12:15A lot of options, segmenting customer base, tailoring communications to each segment that's specific to the needs and the preferences, etc. How do you think about that? How do you manage to personalize customer interactions at scale, especially in a large org like Cisco? Because you're doing this clearly right now. You're doing it great. But at scale, how do you think about that? So like I said, the first thing is to really understand your customer, you know, based upon the regions, based upon the sub-regions within a particular region. If you think about Amir, there are, you know, multiple different regions.

12:49Again, in the United States, you have the East, the West, the Midwest, so on and so forth. Being able to understand the geographical component is important. The second important element is understanding your preference. So we have a large install base of our existing customers and being able to upsell and cross-sell within the existing Cisco domain. So like, for example, we operate in multiple different markets, networking, security, collaboration. and now with the acquisition of Splunk, we also operate in the IT management space as well as in the security space. So we know our customers very well.

13:23And again, using a lot of the marketing analytics tools, you know, we have the ability to really understand who our customers are, not just based upon the geo, but also understand the preferences the customers actually are, you know, looking for. And so knowing that there are multiple different tools in the market, don't want to name, a couple of them, because we use multiple different tools within our Martech stack, being able to personalize the customer journey. So for example, let's take a CIO for abc.com. And he's interested in identifying and bringing in a brand new collaboration solution, audio or a video conferencing solution or a contact center solution.

14:07And he probably goes to cio.com and he's looking at a narrative and there is an article which basically caught his eye. As soon as he goes to that particular website, we know that he's interested. So we have actually created the awareness because you create partnerships with multiple different vendors. And so content syndication becomes very important as well. And so after we know that this customer actually has a preference and is looking for something, then you follow him. That is where personalization comes in. You know that this is a customer. He's potentially interested in buying a collaboration solution.

14:43And then a big part of your marketing strategy is to basically render personalized content for him because you already know that he's looking for something. He's interested in something. And then you surround him in all of the multiple different digital as well as physical channels with your relevant message. Again, the message becomes very important over here. And then you get him invited to a particular event which you host, which is going to be field driven. or you basically invite him to an industry event. And so there is multiple different touch points. And this is why personalization becomes very important.

15:19This is where I would say ABM is going to become even more important because ABM used to be one-to-one mostly, and it was really expensive. Now ABM account-based marketing has, in my humble opinion, is going to become so important in this new world across the board, So which we think that it's not just going to be one-to-one, it'll be one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-few. And you will have an opportunity to really create that personalized messaging and surround your customer as you take them from awareness to close around their marketing journey. I love it. You brought it up. I was really curious about your thoughts on ABM specifically.

16:00It's obviously a very powerful marketing strategy. I've also seen kind of the wide range of how organizations approach ABM specifically, especially in the B2B space specifically. I'm curious about Cisco in terms of executive C-suite level initiatives. You're already partners with a ton of big brands. And I also imagine there's probably some high value prospect brands across the Fortune 1000 and beyond that you still want to work with. How do you, thinking just executive level content, right? Not content for the influencers and the directors, maybe the VPs, but the C-suite folks, right? Or the VPs at the highest level.

16:42How do you think about engaging, connecting, aligning with those folks and building relationships? Because they obviously unlock a lot in terms of future revenue opportunity. For us, at least within my business, it's a huge part of our initiative, being able to basically you know build that relationship you know cherish those relationship and being able to help convert that customer into an all in one cisco customer and so uh we have multiple different programs it starts with abm so we have a dedicated abm program for you know c level as well as the underlying influencers which is you know director and below but specifically talking about it at a tactical level, I have an executive program, which we have established and it's worked out very well for us.

17:31We have a customer advisory board, which I run, you know, two times per year, where it is an opt-in program and the CIOs actually opt in for a 18 month program. And so we hold the customer advisory board once a year in a very nice location. We basically share our product roadmap with our customers. We get their insights and their feedback and they opt in into this particular program because they also get a lot of networking opportunities with the other underlying customers and not only does it basically helps us create get feedback directly from them so that it further enables our innovation for the roadmap for the product but it also helps create awareness for adjacent part of the portfolio right so within when you think about the collaboration business we are a five billion dollar business and there are multiple different product lines a cio could have adopted only one part of our product line.

18:23By adopting into our customer advisory board, now we have an opportunity to create awareness for all the product lines, and we run it for a day and a half in multiple different locations. And then mid-year, we would do it as a virtual form so that we continue to basically seek the feedback. This is one particular tactic. In addition to that, we run multiple different CXO field events. We run roundtables with thought leaders. We bring in thought leaders because what are the care abouts? for the cios their their careabouts are you know how do they basically keep their lights on how do they continue to innovate how does it translate from being a cost center into an innovation center how can they get much more from their share of wallet in from in terms of their budget we help them with all of that and so we run multiple different round tables around the nation and this is run by my field marketing team and we bring our sellers over there we bring our customers to basically talk to the other CIOs on how they actually conduct business with our portfolio.

19:25Again, you know, going back to the customer obsession part, being able to leverage our customers to tell the story to the other CIOs so they can do a better job with their business is an important part of the narrative. And so that is another tactic. And the third tactic is we get deeply engaged in a lot of the industry events. And at those industry events, you know, we usually end up having a keynote and we run an event within an event. So let's say there is an industry event and our teams will automatically build a CXO event at that particular event because those CIOs. So for example, if you take Gartner IT Expo, a lot of the CIOs go to Gartner IT Expo.

20:02We will host our own smaller event where the CIOs will have an opportunity to partake and get to know our product sales. And so we do a multitude of things. In addition to that, digitally, we have partnerships with a lot of the top tier brands, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Economist, so on and so forth, where we have curated content, which basically goes to a lot of our CXOs. And I also, I imagine that, you know, you've got the, you have a bachelor's in computer engineering. You have an MBA as well from Santa Clara University. So you've got, we talked about this a little bit earlier, you understand both the technical side of things and certainly the data and analytical side of things, and also the marketing and the creative side of things.

20:46And so I would imagine that you sitting at the table with a CIO or a CTO or a CISO, that brings a level of dialogue and understanding because you know the world they're in deeply and you also know the world of marketing clearly. So what has that meant for you engaging with folks that, you know, you speak their language literally because you are also an engineer and leading marketing. I think that is the customer obsessed part. So while I'm the CMO, I end up doing a lot of the executive briefings. You know, I'm based out of San Francisco in our executive briefing center. That's where we bring our customers, you know, to basically show and tell, right?

21:23Like we have a whole agenda, CIOs, CXOs around the world come to the EDC here at Cisco where we give them an opportunity to know our roadmap, our portfolio of products. We give them a tour of our executive briefing center where we have all of our products showcased. And I present at the EBCs. And that gives me an opportunity. Basically, get a seat at the table. I understand what their pain points are. I tailor my content based upon their pain points. And after the EBCs are done, I continue to build relationships with customers. And so I'm a little bit different. And And this is where I'm deeply grateful that I have an engineering degree because, you know, as a marketeer, it is a little bit tougher to get a seat at the table, especially with the technical community, because the way they regard marketing is, you know, a little bit different.

22:14And so I am deeply grateful that I have an engineering degree and I can talk the voice of the customer and I'm relevant with them. I have to basically mention that when I start the conversation saying that, you know, I come from a technology background, while I might have a fancy CMO title, my role is to basically meet the needs of the customer and solve their toughest problems. And so I continue to build relationships with a lot of the CIOs. And that's how I basically also have an opportunity to directly recruit them to be a part of our customer advisory board. I also have an opportunity to invite them to a lot of the field events.

22:51because if you don't build that relationship, you're going to be dependent on a lot of people across the board, especially with sales. Our sales teams are phenomenal, especially our sales leader and his team. They are really awesome in terms of building relationship. And so I consider this as an incremental opportunity to basically help my sellers in order to further their relationship with the CIOs. Amazing. You said a lot of great things. I'm like, what do I want to go into? fantastic. I'm curious about just experimentation, thinking about experimentation. And obviously, experimentation is a very critical piece of innovation.

23:33I also know without working at Cisco that Cisco certainly fosters a culture of experimentation and innovation. But I'm just curious about maybe double clicking into that. How do you look at fostering, nudging people towards failing fast experiment? You know, what does that even look like inside of Cisco? And then what do you use to measure success of, you know, experimentation or more innovative initiatives? So within the WebEx marketing team, you know, we have formed a culture, which is again, built upon the Cisco culture. But in order to create, you know, a sense of community within my marketing team, we have something which is called ICE.

24:18You know, the best way to remember it with the song, Ice Ice Baby, right? So I stands for innovation, C stands for courage, and E stands for empathy. Everyone within the WebEx marketing team actually embody those values. So what do I mean by that? So if you don't have the ability to take risks, you're not going to create a culture of innovation. And so I have a simple ask of my team, right? So I want to basically have a culture where people have the opportunity to bring that new ideas. Without those ideas, it's same old, same old. You won't be able to in a way, you won't be able to actually activate something really creative and bring it to the market.

24:58And when I see courage, you might wonder what is, why does courage actually mean? It is the courage to take risks. It's okay to take risks. If you don't take the risk, how do you know whether that idea is actually going to work or not? What I tell the team is that it's okay to take risks. It's okay to try out. But if it fails, don't repeat it again. That's it. You learn from the exercise. And we also have a culture. We not just celebrate successes, but we also celebrate failures. Because if you don't embody that kind of a spirit within the organization, people actually won't have the ability to basically take risks.

25:38And so we have established an award system as well, which is based upon these three principles within the marketing team. And I have a quarterly award, which is called the ICE Award. And it is nominated by the employees. It's not nominated by me and picked by my direct senior leadership team. It's actually nominated by the team. people know what each of the values actually stand for and they nominate their peers their their employees across the board and the the winner is actually picked by the people too so there is a voting system so it's for the people by the people and that's how we have actually built this and so and and i also believe that you have to lead by example right like it's for me the whole thing is management by walking around no job is small enough while i might have a fancy title as an svp and cmo i would be happy to basically roll up my sleeves and go down and work with a upcoming junior product marketing profession and help them out if they need my because i always believe that you have to take accountability and you need to be there to basically help your team having said that you have also have to scale as a part of the organization And so being able to establish a set of nomenclatures with your leadership team gives you that scale.

27:03But culture, like I said, is so important. And that needs to be really prevalent across the organization. Wow. Can you take a moment just to brag on your team? I mean, clearly there's some epic human beings that are supporting the vision and the growth of the brand. And many of them you get to work with, I'm sure, and lead and serve. like you said, every single day. But tell me about your team. Tell me about the capacity and the ability that they have because there's clearly some magic happening. Where do I start? So in fact, we are just coming down to our performance evaluation. The hardest thing for me as a manager is that it's really hard to really measure and say, one person is better than the other.

27:49I have such an amazing team right now. It took me about three plus years to get to where we are right now. But I'll tell you, there is no better place I would rather be than, you know, manage this amazing team, which I've actually built from scratch. So let's start with product marketing and the product marketing. So everything starts with a message, because if you don't get the right message, everything downstream is not going to work. right so if you activate an ad or whether it is brand or demand if the message is not there there is no hook the customer is not going to click on that ad or the customer if you have a webinar the customer is not going to come to the webinar so everything starts with the messaging and the way the my product marketing team functions they are nimble they're scrappy and they've spent a lot of time really understanding the customer pain points and building that element message which is competitive and in part and if not better than what anybody's doing across the scope.