Every company has a secret sauce —it’s the differentiator that  separates one company from the rest of the pack and keeps it successful long-term. For Juniper Networks, CMO Mike Marcellin says that secret sauce centers around how the company is getting its customers to actively engage with its product.

“How someone engages with a brand, with a company, is hugely important. 84% of [consumers] said that experience that a company provides is as important as its products and services. If you’re a startup going into a completely new space and you’re the only game in town, then the features and capabilities are there. But if you’re in a mature industry where it’s competitive, the customer experience must be there.”

On this episode of Marketing Trends, Mike explains how his team has evolved over the last few years to take a more data-centric approach to its marketing efforts. He also dives into how marketers can effectively use A.I. in their decision-making, and how organizations can reduce operational costs to improve their customer experience. Enjoy!

Main Takeaways

• You Want a Holistic View of Your Customers: The best way to gain an entire understanding of who your customers are — what their buying habits are, how they like to be communicated with, and what their preferences are— the first step is to make sure all the first-party data you have on-hand about your customers resides in a single place that is clear and easy to read. This will help in organizing customer portfolios while also giving you a better idea of customer trends in real-time.
• Good A.I. Starts with Good Data: When using A.I. as a tool, whether that is personalizing certain experiences for customers or in your messaging efforts, you have to start with a solid understanding of where your data is coming from. Without good, clean data, your algorithms will give you unreliable results and skew your customer insights.
• Are you Hearing Feedback? It’s important to create consistent feedback opportunities for your customers to engage with your company, but it’s equally important to make sure you are not chasing your clients to participate in these conversations. When you have active and willing participants, that means you have stakeholders that are invested in the overall product and want to see you succeed.

Key Quotes:

“We’re on the precipice of a new world and that new world is something we have the power to shape. But we also don’t have that playbook, so we have to figure out what the right things to do are. If growth is a goal, investing in marketing as an investment in the future de-risks whatever growth expectations you have.”

“What’s the critical data that we need to know to provide a 360 degree view of our prospect or our customer. The first step was to bring that all together. It can be a bunch of first-party data, what a customer has bought from us if they’ve bought in the past, how they’re engaging with all the different marketing or other sales touch points that we might have with them. We know a lot just based on the data that comes in, so that first-party data is the first step [in a holistic customer view].”

“Anytime you widen the aperture, that’s where marketing has an opportunity to add real value. There are lots of other industries and customer targets you can go after, and marketing can help with that segmentation. But we also can help with the scale and high-touch sales. That’s our opportunity.”

“You shouldn’t have a hard time finding customers who want to provide feedback, and who find value in the forum. If you’re doing a lot of arm twisting, you may be talking to the wrong possible advisory board members.”

“Don’t get enamored that it’s A.I. or M.L. or what it is. Just think about the outcomes, think about what you’re trying to accomplish and get a clear view on that, and then figure out the right tool for the job.”

“How someone engages with a brand, with a company, is hugely important. 84% of [consumers] said that experience that a company provides is as important as its products and services. If you’re a startup going into a completely new space and you’re the only game in town, then the features and capabilities are there. But if you’re in a mature industry where it’s competitive, the customer experience must be there.”

Bio:

Mike Marcellin is the Chief Marketing Officer of Juniper Networks, leading the global marketing team responsible for marketing Juniper’s product and services portfolio and stewarding the brand, driving preference for Juniper in the market, training our partners and account teams, and developing a differentiated information experience for our customers. Before joining the global marketing organization, Marcellin led business strategy and marketing for Juniper’s industry-leading portfolio of high-performance routing, switching and security products.

Prior to joining Juniper in 2010, Marcellin served as Vice President of Global Managed Solutions for Verizon, where he oversaw product development and marketing of its managed IP networking, hosting, security and IT solutions for businesses around the world. He also served as Vice President of Global Product Marketing for Verizon Business, executive director of Verizon Business’ IP and Ethernet portfolio as well as leading the company’s eCRM marketing division. Marcellin began his career with MCI in 1994.

Marcellin is a Board Member for the Telecommunications Industry Association and a Board Member of US Ignite, an NSF-sponsored initiative. Marcellin holds two patents and was a Rodman Scholar at the University of Virginia, where he received a bachelor of science degree with distinction in systems engineering.

—

Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.