B2B Marketing: How Cisco transformed its marketing strategy to better serve customers [Video]
“You’re not the people we want to sit down with,” Karyn Scott, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Cisco Systems, Inc., said during her B2B Summit 2012 presentation, echoing the voice of her target customers.
Years prior, Cisco’s reputation had perpetuated sales, but it was now losing sales on the margin.
According to the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, 42% of software companies relied on gut instinct for its non-analytical decision making, which is exactly what the team at Cisco was doing. When Karyn and her team began to investigate, they discovered the company’s target customers found only 3% of what the sales team had to say was useful to them.
The marketing strategy had to change.
The above video excerpt from B2B Summit 2012 underscores the importance of identifying customers and Karyn’s team’s goals to strategize marketing around customer motivations.
Once Karyn’s team identified their audience, they had to completely rebuild their strategy to create a relevant sale.
In the above video excerpt, you’ll see how the marketing team equipped the sales department and gave them the supplies they needed to make convincing sales, help the customer and incorporate a two-way conversation into the overall strategy.
To see the rest of Karyn’s presentation and see how she integrated role targeting into marketing strategy, watch the entire free presentation. See her metrics, what her sales team had to say and the new ways Sales appealed to diverse customer segments.
