Renegade Marketers Unite

Customer experience is at the core of marketing success. Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara explains where and how brands should be targeting their messages in Part II of his interview on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast. Ferrara grew Nimble out of the idea that brands do best when customers recommend them to their networks. Nearly nine years later, Ferrara’s business is stronger than ever and venturing into new marketing frontiers. During his extensive tenure in marketing, Ferrara learned that business doesn’t have to be impersonal. In fact, his experience at GoldMine CRM—and eventually Nimble—demonstrates that the best marketing strategies are personal in nature. Ferrara says, “I think the mistake that many businesspeople make is that they make business about business…[but business] is about connecting with people. That’s why they’ll remember you.” Jon walks the walk on that philosophy, sharing both his personal and private social accounts with the people in his network to this day. Ferrara didn’t originally foresee GoldMine, his first business venture, taking a turn towards customer-centricity. “GoldMine actually started out as an accounting software company,” he says. “I needed something to manage the relationships, so I built and designed GoldMine to do that. It turned out that GoldMine really was our future and we had to pivot.” Ferrara’s strategy at GoldMine was to “build relationships with editors and writers so [consumers would] see us being written about in publications, and then we started slipping in radio ads and airplane ads.”  Nimble, which launched in 2008, capitalizes on that same influencer-driven approach. “We’re here to help those influencers build their brands in social sales and marketing by helping them inspire and educate our customers,” he states. “So it’s a win-win situation.” The company anticipates user counts of multiple millions in the near future. One of Ferrara’s top priorities is helping Nimble’s marketing team strike the right balance between telling a unified brand message and genuinely opening up to potential partners. He says, “The relationships happen at that one-to-one level across your team members, but you still need to have a unified message, be consistent about that messaging, drive the high-level stuff, and then integrate.” Knowing that he’s serving his customers is Ferrara’s biggest reward, and he takes every compliment to heart. “When somebody stops [me] on the street and says, ‘you know, Jon, you changed my life with GoldMine,’ or ‘you’re changing my life with Nimble,’ that’s the best,” he claims. “That’s why we do what we do.” Meet the Guest Jon Ferrara is a social marketing sensei. As a co-founder of GoldMine CRM, he innovated new ways for marketers to build relationships with customers. Ferrara launched Nimble in 2008, the next-generation CRM product for small businesses. Ferrara provides top-notch social customer relationship management to marketers everywhere. He currently serves as Nimble’s founder and CEO, where he specializes in entrepreneurship, product innovation and brand and identity development. What You’ll Learn  How customer experiences can expand your brand more rapidly than advertising can. Best practices for managing customer relationships. The importance of helping social influencers succeed in your audience’s niche. The value of having a unified brand message. How to cook a chuck roast (seriously!)

Jon Ferrara grew the social selling platform Nimble from scratch to 100,000 users in just a couple of years without spending a dime on media.  He has also converted 15% of those users to paid subscribers making Nimble a model for bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Having been a CRM pioneer with Goldmine which Jon sold in 2000, he is a wonderful font of insights and inspiration so much so that we recorded two episodes.  This episode will teach you how to develop a clear-cut selling strategy for your brand, and look good doing it. You’ll also learn how to institute an effective CRM strategy that won’t overwhelm your business. No matter the bandwidth of your organization, Jon offers his testimony to describe how sharing content and networking with influencers can reel in dollars. Jon is a pioneer of CRM, and has used outside the box thinking to connect with influencers. After co-founding GoldMine three decades ago, Jon discovered new ways in which businesses can discover and engage with potential customers. His work resulted in the launch of Nimble in 2008, the next generation CRM product for small businesses. Jon believes that the key to marketing is using professionals who your target audience trusts to recommend your brand, rather than advertising to them yourself. He boldly claims, “I think it’s more powerful when other people talk about you than when you talk about you.”

Is the key to immortality for brands simply about finding the right moment for reinvention? When Ron Chemow’s Hamilton became Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway sensation, Global Head of Corporate Marketing Aniko Delaney recognized the opportunity for BNY Mellon to reach new audiences. Affectionately called the Hamilton campaign, “Invest In Our Legacy” managed to not only to honor BNY Mellon’s founder Alexander Hamilton but also to modernize the brand. So far, her team’s modernization efforts have paid off in big ways, with triple-digit increases in engagement and brand awareness on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. In this podcast, we’ll examine how Delaney and her team capitalized on the Broadway Show, Hamilton, to help BNY Mellon’s marketing cut through. You’ll learn how to identify moments of opportunity for reinventing your brand, the importance of having a message that resonates across all social platforms, and the keys to keeping a seasoned brand relevant.

  Keeping a brand fresh means evolving with trends, but Alma Derricks, former VP of Sales & Marketing of the Retail Sales Division at Cirque du Soleil, knows that not every trend is right for every industry. As someone who runs towards moments of inflection, that’s exactly what Derricks walked into when she joined Cirque during an ownership change in 2015. Believe it or not, Cirque had relied on organic growth for over 30 years but finally found itself in need of an organized and inventive marketing strategy. With a diverse background in media and entertainment, Alma Derricks helped differentiate Cirque’s many shows and make them top-of-mind for show goers. She also launched SPARK, a brand extension of Cirque that serves as a learning laboratory for corporate teams. The new business took off and not only created a new way to access the brand, but also a strong statement about who they are. In this podcast, we’ll take a special peek behind the curtain of one of the world’s top-earning theatrical companies and the marketing that helped revive its brand. You’ll learn about identifying which trends are suitable for your business, making sure your company cuts through the noise, differentiating your product or service offerings, and more. While Derricks has since moved to another role, you’ll find that the insights she shares are timeless.

This episode will help you understand the state-of-the-art for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and how forward-thinking businesses are capitalizing on CRM to improve customer experiences and drive revenue.    

In this podcast, you’ll learn about where to start your brand transformation, why your brand should be a “sage” instead of a “hero,” the importance of creating a tangible customer experience and the strategy behind CA's new ad campaign, "The Modern Software Factory." Over the last four years, CMO Lauren Flaherty repositioned CA Technologies’ global brand, helped it adapt to the fast-paced blur of digital disruptions and masterfully co-created an app with CNN to cover the 2016 presidential election. This app enabled CNN to experience higher-than-ever levels of engagement and reach while demonstrating the power of CA's technology. Flaherty has since initiated a similar co-creation venture with Eurosport, helping to make the brand more tangible.   Think of this episode as a master class in transformation B2B marketing. 

As Chief Revenue Officer, Meredith Kopit Levien is a driving force behind The New York Times’s digital transformation and their stunningly timely “The Truth is Hard” campaign. When the news became the news during the 2016 presidential election cycle, Kopit Levien’s challenge was not only to remind people why real journalism matters, but also to reach a new base of paid subscribers hungry for high-quality journalism, effectively changing the news category. What you’ll take away from this podcast, among other things, is why the story you tell is more important than how often you tell it, and why it’s important to adapt to the times—no pun intended—without losing sight of your brand’s core mission. In addition to sharing why and how the new campaign came to fruition, Kopit Levien provides an inside look at building T-brand, their highly successful content creation studio. Although she admits that The Times was late to the content creation game, they entered it with gusto hiring top talent and holding the bar extremely high – so high that they will and have told the client “no” when they don’t think an idea will in their publication. Noting that there are only 10 million people that pay for their news online, Kopit Levien says that the real work, is only beginning as The New York Times continues its transformation from print to all other current and future news channels. For example, The Daily, The Times’ first podcast has dramatically exceeded expectations and is now a coveted slot for their reporters. She also discusses a new channel on Snapchat Discover, yet another indication that her brand ain’t your grandmother’s New York Times!

When Tom Libretto joined Pegasystems as Chief Marketing Officer, he recognized that his new company was on the cusp of huge changes. Applying his experience at major companies like IBM, Nokia and Chase, Libretto dove headfirst into his role, first by assessing star performers, past successes and failures and opportunities for growth. The good news was that one of the company’s star performers was its own platform, PEGA. What you’ll learn in this podcast, among other things, is the importance of being able to “drink your own champagne,” as Libretto and his team have found it to be an invaluable source of authentic marketing, not to mention troubleshooting. Today, Pegasystems is considered a top vendor of software for customer engagement and operational excellence. As a leader in martech (marketing technology), Pegasystems provides a window into the future of automation and artificial intelligence, which Libretto breaks down over the course of the conversation. Without giving too much away, check out the podcast to hear about how Libretto helped the company achieve this amazing transformation.  

Described as both a bulldog and a warrior, Intuit’s VP of Marketing Patti Newcomer-Simmons built her reputation by seeking out the difficult challenges most mortals try to avoid. One such challenge was to dramatically improve departmental performance at a company that was already filled with “happy campers.” To do this, she first focused on the getting the metrics right. Rather than dwell on how satisfied employees were they with their jobs, she focused on employee engagement, a metric that corresponds with answers to questions like, “Would you stay with the company even if you received a higher offer from somewhere else?” Ultimately, through a series of actions, including adding new hires, moving team members around and aligning around core goals, Newcomer-Simmons helped drive a 30-point increase in employee engagement. In case you were wondering, that is a very big jump, especially when you consider that Intuit already enjoyed a very high employee retention rate. So, if you’re wondering how you can get your marketing team operating at a higher level, this is definitely the right episode for you.

Dara Royer sat alone at her desk pondering the seemingly impossible--how do you rebrand a global organization with only a $50,000 budget?  She knew in her heart of hearts that rebranding was not just a nice next step for Mercy Corps, but it was a critical requirement for the organization to realize its global ambitions. She also knew there is little glory in being right, what really mattered was getting the rest of Mercy Corps to join her on the journey and embrace the forthcoming change.  Royer's journey as Chief Development and Marketing Officer is chronicled in detail in this epidsoe and it is profoundly instructive for all businesses especially those with modest budgets and massive expectations.  And just in case you were wondering if we're hyperbolizing, the outcome of Mercy Corps rebranding was an increase in awareness, revenue via donations and recognition by the Harris Poll as the 2017 EquiTrend “Brand of the Year” and “Most Loved Brand” in the category of International Aid Nonprofits. Those are results that would delight any marketer and leads to the question, how the heck did Royer and her team accomplish so much with so little?  Well, without telling the whole story, let's just say that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.