Kimberly Storin strongly believes that culture beats strategy every day of the week and that you can be the best strategic marketer in the world, but if you fail to build a sustainable culture, your strategy is irrelevant. It’s one of the reasons why when she joined the Zayo Group, she made a plan for her first 100 days, during which she would be relentlessly focused on making sure that within her organization, the sales and marketing teams remain aligned in their vision.

“The biggest impact that we’re going to have is to get that sales alignment right off the bat so that we can see a great account-based marketing approach. The biggest win that we can have in the next six to 12 months will be to implement account-based marketing.”

Kimberly has extensive experience in enterprise technology, having overseen brand refreshes and strategy implementation at some of the world’s biggest technology companies — including Dell, AMD, and IBM. Now, as the CMO of Zayo Group, she helped to implement similar strategies. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kimberly explains why having a strong ABM strategy is integral to the growth of Zayo Group, she also dives into why every marketing department should devote resources to its own creative services department, and how every new CMO can earn quick wins.

Main Takeaways:

• Building a Plan For a Plan: When you enter any new organization, you have to understand the values and benchmarks the organization needs to hit. A good practice is to start by meeting with all the internal stakeholders of the business to best understand where you earn quick wins. Once you identify these, you can then gain a better understanding of what the key elements and goals of the business are.
• What Makes for a Good ABM Strategy: A good account-based marketing plan starts with a strong alignment between sales and marketing departments. When both sales and marketing have the ability to leverage market data, combined with the internal data the organization has, it makes for an incredibly streamlined process for identifying the proper prospects to target.
• Let’s Get Creative: Brand consistency is key, but in order to make sure you are building a strong and consistent message, marketing teams should invest in having their own internal creative agency. When creative services are in-house, it allows you to highlight elements of the brand that matter while building a strong and consistent approach.

Key Quotes:

“From a market perspective, we talk to analysts and we talk to our customers. We try to learn where their mindset is and we build our roadmap. So the question becomes, can you win in that environment? And that’s where the agility of marketing and the leadership of the CMO can really drive the business forward.”

“CMOs gravitate toward being aligned [with sales] and owning the customer experience, because it enables us to more clearly articulate our value, which is to be the voice to the market.”

“The creative services team is an agency within itself and continues to be. Having that strong creative services department built a lot of trust in the organization and enabled us to stay true to those elements of the brand that mattered, versus giving every marketer a matrix to not be consistent.”

“I am a big believer that brand consistency equates to preference. But I also believe in being an agile marketing organization. While I don’t believe in the 27 steps to being agile, I believe we really need to be agile in terms of how we work and think. It is finding that balance.”

“The biggest impact that we’re going to have is to get that sales alignment right off the bat so that we can see a great account based marketing approach. The biggest win that we can have in the next six to 12 months will be to implement account based marketing.”

“Having a rinse and repeat one-size-fits-all approach feels good because it makes you feel like you’re getting quick wins, but in reality, that’s what every marketing leader comes in with. The value that we can bring as CMOs, is to actually not have a one-size-fits-all approach, and to really spend those first 30 days understanding what that core initial quick win outcome needs to be.”

“It’s up to us as leaders to figure out how our organizations make decisions around what the future of work looks like which, we all believe will be a hybrid approach.”

“There’s a lot of CMOs who are amazing growth stage CMOs, and they are great at that work. They are focused on that demand generation and are able to scale a marketing organization fast. And what I realized was my secret sauce is really understanding and being able to drive against a business strategy and transformation strategy.”

Bio:

Kimberly Storin is the CMO of Zayo Group, where she leads the global marketing strategy and organization for the business. Previously, Storin was the CMO at RapidDeploy, a growth stage SaaS company bringing data and innovation to Public Safety. Her past experience also includes time marketing for IBM’s Cognitive Systems, and helping enterprise clients understand and see the path for value-driven AI implementations from technology development to culture integration.

Storin is an active member of the Austin, Texas community working on creative solutions to solve the equality gap locally and in the tech industry.

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