CMO Rishi Dave on Dun & Bradstreet’s Digital Marketing Transformation

rishi-dave-interview on digital marketing strategy

In this interview, Trent speaks with Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet. Rishi has been with Dun & Bradstreet since February 2014. Trent found Rishi after reading an article titled, “If a 173 year old public company can digitally transform, what’s your excuse?”

If you are a CMO or CEO of an organization that hasn’t yet fully embraced digital marketing, you will learn a lot. Hear what Rishi focused on in the beginning and how they shifted their culture to embrace digital marketing.

What are a few other highlights? We talk about how the buyer’s journey has really changed in the last few years and how content marketing plays a role in that. Rishi also shares some best practices for lead segmentation.

Listen now and you’ll hear Rishi and I talk about:

  • (1:20) Introduction
  • (05:00) What are some of the challenges you face in your new role?
  • (06:40) How did you get started?
  • (08:00) How did you get buy in to shift the culture?
  • (07:26) What advice would you give to other CMOs who need to shift culture?
  • (11:50) What was one of the first things you tested?
  • (14:25) How did buyer personas influence blog content?
  • (17:00) How are you using content to generate leads?
  • (18:15) How are you planning to increase ROI from paid media?
  • (20:15) Why doesn’t paid media scale as well as content lead media?
  • (21:40) What is the difference in lead quality between paid vs. content generated leads?
  • (23:40) How has the buyer journey changed & how is content playing a role?
  • (26:15) Which tools are you using?
  • (29:15) Tell me about your lead nurturing process.
  • (31:15) What advice would you give to other CMOs about lead segmentation?
  • (33:15) What kinds of mistakes did your team make early on?
  • (35:15) Which digital marketing pieces are you planning to outsource?
  • (38:15) What really drives today’s CMO?

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent:

Hey there bright idea hunters welcome back to episode number 178 of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help professional marketers to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business. So if you are a marketer and you are looking for proven tactics as opposed to just theories and untested ideas that will help you to increase traffic and increase conversions and ultimately attract more customers, well you are in the right place.

So how do I make good on such a bold promise? Well I can assure you, it is not all just me. I bring a proven expert on to the show every episode and I get them to share with you: A the results that they have achieved and then we go and we reverse engineer the whole thing and we unpack the results and we go into detail on the strategies and the tactics that they used to achieve those particular results and this episode is no different.

I am very pleased to say that my guest is a fellow by the name of Rishi Dave who is the chief marketing officer for a very large, very old public company called Dun & Bradstreet. As a matter of fact they are a 173 year old company. And I discovered Rishi when I was reading a post on ChiefMartec.com and the title of the post was If a 173 Year Old Public Company can Digitally Transform What is Your Excuse? So I thought that was very interesting and this turned out to be a very interesting interview.

So if you are a CMO of an organization or a CEO of an organization that hasn’t really yet started to fully embrace digital marketing you are really going to find this episode to be incredibly helpful. In it I asked Rishi to share with us a number of things, how they got started, what were some of the things that he needed to focus on in the beginning, and culture was one of them. And so how did he make the necessary shifts in culture.

And so after they did that they started to do a lot of testing and I asked him to share with us what kind of things

were you testing. How did you develop a content strategy? How did you figure out what type of content was going to work and what type of content wasn’t going to work. We talk about lead generation and we are talking about their marketing technology stack, which tools they are using to capture leads, to nurture leads, to convert those leads and get them ready for the sales team.

We also talked about how the buyer’s journey has really changed a lot in the last number of years and how content is playing a role in that. So if that is something that you are not terribly familiar with you are going to enjoy that. We talk about that at about the twenty minute mark of the interview. And then we talked a lot about lead segmentation around the 28 – 30 minute mark. I asked Rishi to share some advice with other folks on best practices for lead segmentation and the hint there is just because you can do something isn’t necessarily indicative of the fact that you should do something.

All the details are on the 30 minute mark. With that said we are going to hop over to the interview real quick. Just before we do that a very quick announcement: If you are looking for help with creating a strategy for demand generation and inbound marketing or you need help with content production or you need help implementing a marketing automation tool that is what we do over at Groove Digital Marketing and it is at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com.

So with that said please join me in welcoming Rishi to the show.

Hey Rishi welcome to the show.

Rishi:

Thank you.

Trent:

It is a pleasure to have you here and before we get into the nitty-gritty so to speak of our conversation I want to make sure my audience knows who you are and who they are going to listen to so let’s start with that. Who are you and what do you do?

Rishi:

Yes, so hi my name is Rishi Dave. I am the chief marketing officer at Dun & Bradstreet.

Trent:

Okay, you are new in that role, correct?

Rishi:

I am, I joined Dun & Bradstreet in February of this past year. So I am relatively new.

Trent:

Okay, what put you on my radar screen was an article that was written on ChiefMartec. If a 173 Year Old Public Company Can Digitally Transform What is Your Excuse? So when you came in to D&B did you find that there was going to be a lot of challenges in this new role because of the way they were doing things or if there was a predecessor because of the way the predecessor was doing things?

Rishi:

Well what I found when I joined Dun & Bradstreet is a company that has an incredible asset in terms of its large commercial database and a company that was well regarded and has a large customer base. What I did find which was why I got excited was a new CEO came in; he was very focused on high growth. He was a CEO who understood modern marketing and modern sales and he brought me in to take on the challenge of really modernizing both the brand as well as the marketing engine behind it.

So for me I got really excited about that challenge. Historically the company had not grown and obviously the marketing investments; the whole system of activity was not focused on high growth tech related company.

The main challenge I had is how do you build a modern marketing machine that really drives growth. Since we put in

place a new management team the beginning of this year we are actually seeing pretty strong growth. So a lot of things that we have put into place are coming to fruition.

Trent:

Nice, so where did you start? Did you start with you and your team setting some goals? Did you start with brainstorming a strategy? What’s the first thing?

Rishi:

So the first thing I focused on was establishing a very strong set of purpose and values and focus. Historically I came from the digital marketing world. And I was hired for my digital marketing experience.

My gut told me when I came in to immediately jump into tactics. So start to think about inbound content, analytics, start to look at my marketing stack, agency partnerships etc. But what I very quickly found was more important than doing that was to be very focused on both the strategy and the culture first because once you have that in place you have a much stronger understanding of what your life space is and what you can execute against and how you organize etc.

So what I did was I actually stepped back and worked with our chief people officer and worked on the culture first; the type of culture we needed to really execute this more modernized brand and execute the marketing machine. Not just marketing but across the company. We also brought in an agent to help us really look at our brand as well.

Trent:

So let’s talk about the culture for a minute because that is something that I actually did another interview on. If you go to BrightIdeas.co/165 you will hear an interview with Krista Kotrla from a company called Block Imaging and we talked a lot about culture in that interview and the importance of getting buy in and so Rishi I am very interested in understanding.

When you first started to deal with the challenge of culture what was the challenge do you think? And what were some of the things you did – because I am assuming you wanted to get buy in to support the digital marketing would be in effect of use of time and energy?

Rishi:

The first thing I did was have a strong partnership with our chief people officer. He was also new, so he and I came in within a few weeks of each other and we were the first two external hires the new CEO made. Then what we very much focused on first was “What does a hi tech / high growth company culture look like?” It looks like a culture where you have a social media policy where everyone can engage. It is a culture where people feel comfortable testing and learning versus overly planning things.

It is a culture which is very participatory from the employee perspective. It is a culture that uses new tools and technologies to interact with employees. We drastically increased the use of Chatter. We drastically increased the use of Crowd Soliciting as a way to get feedback from employees. It is also one that things that a tech company in the bay area take for granted from simple policies, procedures, processes we saw a lot of opportunity to just fix those very quickly and we did.

Those were the many things that we did almost immediately. Not only did we publish employees that for a long time wanted to do this kind of things, they wanted to engage directly with customers and social. They wanted to have a more collaborative environment. They wanted these things, we unleashed them pretty quickly but the second thing we also got was a lot of feedback on what is working, what is not working etc.

Both those things served that strong guide post for me to understand what I need to do and that is really what helped me figured out, “Hey you know before we jump into tactics there is actually a broader set of things that we have to figure out.”

Trent:

There is undoubtedly another CMO that is going to be listening to this and they’re thinking, “Hey I know our company needs to embrace digital marketing and I know maybe our CEO is not onboard” or maybe there is some people in some departments that just aren’t on board for whatever reason.

What advice would you give them having gone through this process on how they can try and break down that resistance to be able to begin the cultural shift that is necessary for everything else that we are going to talk about later in the interview to actually do any good?

Rishi:

That is a great question. I am assuming that the company has a strategy set of messaging and go to market. The most important thing that they can do is have a test and learn mentality and methodology within the organization so that they can take small investments, test them in digital, show results and use those for the next set of investments.

One of the biggest leverage points once you have a device strategy and culture is demonstrating and testing and adjusting on the fly.

Many companies don’t have that mentality or the employees don’t have that comfort level to make mistakes and actually test things but the beauty of digital is that you can test a whole number of things and have them fail very quickly at a low cost but when things work you can show the value and once you showed the value that is what you use to change the culture. The next question I often get as well is, “That costs money, how do I do that?”

And what I would say is that if you look at the portfolio of spend that you have in marketing, there’s always a set of things that are just not working or not high value. Start to peel off some of those and start to test new things and you’ll start to see the results.

Trent:

What was one of the first things that you tested?

Rishi:

One of the first things we tested was starting to really build out our top of the funnel content. We launched a blog and it is still kind of in testing phase but we just got it out there. It is being called Connecters; The Connecters Blog which focuses one of our fastest growing segments which is sales and marketing solutions. We got it out there pretty quickly and we got a good sense very quickly of the type of content that people liked, the type of content that maybe didn’t work, the type of articles you should be writing etc.

That also helps guide and helps guide us in terms of how we think about our own messaging and strategies as well and it was very inexpensive to launch.

Trent:

Yeah absolutely, did you have people who were on staff go ahead and write those blog articles or how did you get that done?

Rishi:

Yeah we did, the beauty is (a couple of things) often in a B2B company you have a lot of thought leaders in a company that are publishing a lot of existing content in many ways so really kind of taking that messaging and content that you already have and putting it into digital form whether it’s blog post or some other form is a very fast and easy way to do that. That was one way that we could get content out very quickly because we had a lot of messaging, we had a lot of thought leadership, we had a lot of very smart people we just had to take their messaging and content and get it into digital.

So we did that initially and then I did eventually hire a person right out of journalism from Time Inc to lead my actual content strategy.

Trent:

Now when you are focusing on top of the funnel and this testing is ongoing at this point in time, is it?

Rishi:

It is.

Trent:

Okay so prior to publishing any of these articles was there a project that involved developing buyer personas or did you think, “Hey we are just going to publish some content and see which content resonates with the audience that we already have”?

Rishi:

No we absolutely did focus on personas. That was one of the big changes that I made in the company and we are going to start launching them next year but one of the big ones is having this true persona based going to market and using that to guide what we do. Now we’re doing it together. We have done a lot of research on our buyer persona, CMOs is one of them and we’re building a whole set of content for our sales channels, our different channels in go to markets.

But also in parallel was experimenting and testing a lot of things as well to help them find it. So it was kind of happening in tandem with one guiding the other.

The challenge is that in digital you can do things very quickly and test but for your direct sales team you can only do things at points in time because they can only absorb so much. So we have a point in time where we do a big launch to our channel teams, our direct sales team etc. But we also use that do guide our digital strategy as well as the digital content even what is happening in digital and social help guide the go to market persona strategy as well.

They work hand in hand.

Trent:

Okay, so I want to make sure I understand what you just explained. You talked about testing two things in tandem. One of them was the blog content that was influenced by your research on buyer personas but I am not sure I’m clear on what the other thing that you are testing in tandem is. So can you help me with that?

Rishi:

Yep, so there is a set of research we do on the persona and that obviously guides. A lot of it is pain point oriented but it is also we are putting content out constantly and seeing how people react to what content helps us to find what we communicate to our buyer personas to other channels like direct sales team –

Trent:

Okay.

Rishi:

– as well we are in social and so we obviously have a good sense for what people are talking about as well. All those things work together to help us define and refine our persona but it is a circle, right? So we also have differentiate thought leadership that we put against those pain points and that differentiate thought leadership also guides digital so it is a circular kind of thing.

Trent:

Is one of your objectives to capture leads from the blog at this point in time or haven’t you gotten that far down and you just looking at what content is getting traction in terms of social shares or whatever other metrics you might be looking at?

Rishi:

Yeah definitely, one of the biggest focus areas that we are doing is really driving our inbound content model. That is a big shift that we are doing and the blog is a piece of that as is all our other channels. We are just beginning to drive that and definitely lead gen is a big piece of it. Historically we have driven a lot of leads through paid media and now we are looking at how do we get more sophisticated and more ROI by also bringing into the mix inbound content lead leads as well.

Trent;

Alright, so excellent point; there is lots of people out there who are very, very familiar with using paid media to drive leads and they may have not tried or considered using content to drive leads organically. Why did you decide to make the shift? Is the goal to eventually replace the need for the use of paid media or simply to augment it?

Rishi:

The goal is to overall increase the ROI from paid media. I would reframe it that way. So what I mean is that unfortunately nowadays it is impossible to 100% rely on organic because of the way the social channels are changing, the decrease in organic reach etc. So what I would say is if you look at the goals to increase ROI from paid media – kind of the old model which I think you were referring to which most people are using today is you spend a lot on paid media, you get a set of leads, you give it to your sales team, and you just keep going that way.

It is kind of like a drug right? Because it is very measureable, you spend money, you get leads, the sales team loves it and it is a very easy thing to get stuck on. The problem is scaling right? But once you move to a content lead model you never scale that model so what we are trying to do is what I mentioned earlier is take some of the campaigns that may not work as well and start to move them to a content model where with a content lead model, once you get your SEO around that those content pieces generate leads for a long time without you having to spend as much money.

If you can move more and more preportion of your spend towards content versus paid media then you start to get that nice ROI lift on your spend. That is what we are in the middle of right now. It was actually one of the most difficult things that I would say CMOs deal with because it is very difficult to get off that pure paid media “drug”. It is not just the marketing, it is finance, it’s sales. Everyone kind of loves that spend but you can’t scale massively lead gen once you move to that inbound model.

Trent:

Well why can’t you scale, why not? Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. Why not just turn up the spend, spend even more that seems to me like a simple way to scale it?

Rishi:

[Laughing] Yes if people had unlimited spend. So there is a couple of things there. One is clearly there is a limit to how much you can spend. Two is that if you actually focus on content and you focus on creating content experiences then once you have the SEO and that content shows up for the right keywords you don’t have to spend money and people will just come in to your content for a long time.

Even if you spend more money you get much more ROI from that money by putting it into that content and so it becomes a much more economical way of doing it as well as you drive your brand, you drive your thought leadership etc.

It is just that next dollar, if you spend it on paid media versus spending on content you just get a higher ROI over time from the content.

Trent:

Absolutely.

Rishi:

And if the content then does really well you start to promote that content instead of doing purely old school paid media.

Trent:

And I would think that the quality of the leads that would come from content would be much better than the quality of leads that would come from paid. Do you agree with that?

Rishi:

Oh absolutely. It is a great question. If you think about the CMOs job as owning the customer experience and owning a long term customer relationship when you build a content experience for your customer the customer will come in and look at your content but they’ll keep coming back to look at what other content you’ve created so that when they are ready to buy they think of you, right? And you convert them whenever their ready.

Not only are you getting that better economic value from your spend but you are also creating these longer term relationships with these customers and they’re bringing in their friends so you are getting more people into that content experience and you’re building a relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy they are thinking of you.

Once you built that relationship that is based on content you can actually sell them things and they actually won’t mind because you’ve helped them.

Trent:

Absolutely. I know that’s been my experience. I want to be cognizant of folks who maybe are still “doing it the old way.” The buyer’s journey has changed a lot as a result of the internet and how easy it is to get information. How do you think that that has affected D&B’s sales process and how is content playing a role in that?

Rishi:

It has been a big change. Obviously the buying process is all over the place, right? People look at content, they go to events, they do a whole host of things. Essentially what I view my role in – and again I’m moving from old school to new school in this role but if I could push to where we want to go and what best practices is that, a customer can be nurtured a lot further along through marketing, digital, email, etc than ever before.

So historically in the old model the sales team has to do a lot of cold calling has to work leads that are much earlier in the process and they have to kind of generate leads themselves. The model is shifting and I am trying to make that shift as well in my leadership here of say this relationship with a customer to be maintained by marketing, to be nurtured by marketing and can be taken much further down the funnel before it goes to sales so that the sales teams are much more productive.

It is a big change but it is something that we are moving towards.

Trent:

Absolutely, the CEB is famously quoted as saying that 57% of the buyer’s journey is now happening when the buyer is invisible to the seller simply because – when I look at my habits and I’m sure everyone listening would agree; when you are researching a purchase I’m not ready to talk to a sales rep yet.

I don’t want somebody saying, “Hey do you want a proposal? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?” I’m kind of like, “Leave me alone, let me do my research. And when I’m ready and I have got questions that I can’t find the answers to easily then I’ll call you and then I will become visible to you.”

And I think that is a profound shift to the sales process. And so obviously content can play a big role in that, yeah?

Rishi:

Absolutely, content plays the biggest role in that because content plays the role that sales used to play around opening accounts and giving the broad story and all that kind of stuff. Content can play a big role in that.

Trent:

Alright, let’s shift from talking about content and personas to talking about technology because obviously being digital marketing it requires some pretty critical foundational technology pieces to make it all work. I heard you talk about Chatter so I’m guessing you probably use Salesforce.com as one of those tools, would that be correct?

Rishi:

Yes.

Trent:

So let’s go back to the blog, you got this top of funnel content and you are capturing leads. What are you using for a marketing automation? Because you need a way / a mechanism to be able to take traffic and convert it into leads and then nurture those leads to the point where they are ready talk to a sales rep. There is lots of tools on the market that do that, which one are you using?

Rishi:

We are looking at Eloqua. So we are using Eloqua, Salesforce to drive us back.

Trent:

Okay, and why did you choose Eloqua? Did you look at other ones and why did you choose Eloqua?

Rishi:

Actually when I came in we were already using Eloqua and Salesforce which is great. At the end of the day there is a lot of advantages and disadvantages to a lot of automation vendors out there but the big difficulty is how do you use them in an optimal why within your strategy. That is the big question, it is how do you build this whole end to end funnel process with your customers from promotion to content type, to content creation, to nurturing, to really the hand off to the sales team. That is the big difficult piece that we are working towards.

And obviously the marketing stack plays a role in that but the process and the strategy is much more important.

Trent:

So let’s go a little deeper on that because we can really compare some notes, I’ve been doing this for quite a number of years myself now. Folks there are lots of tools for you to choose from, you can use Pardot, you can use Eloqua, you could use Marketo, you could use Hubspot, those are kind of the major players in the mid level to enterprise space. And more or less they all have the same set of capabilities some are better than others in one area, and some are better than the others in the other area.

Salesforce is the king of CRM so they are all going to integrate really well with Salesforce. So take your pick of your marketing automation tool and use Salesforce. There is more than one CRM obviously but the thing about Salesforce, it has by far the biggest ecosystem of complimentary vendors that make add on products that bolt seamlessly right into Salesforce so it gives you the widest amount of flexibility. Would you agree with that Rishi?

Rishi:

Yes.

Trent:

Okay, so let’s talk tactics for a little bit because probably a lot of people out there who are listening to this use these tools because the tactics are incredibly important. So walk me through, someone comes to the blog they read an article, the article has a call to action at the bottom of it. They click it. They go to a landing page. It says, “Hey give us your name and stuff and we’ll send you this ebook.” They go, “Yeah okay, that sounds good.”

So they type in their name and their company URL, whatever you are asking for. Hit the submit button, they get their ebook, and you get your top of funnel lead. What happens in your automated follow up and work flows after that to try and segment and nurture that lead to the point where they would be ready and wanting to talk to someone on the sales team?

Rishi:

What we focus a lot on is clearly their profile. What we know about them. And then building the right nurturing stream so that as we talked about it earlier we’re building that relationship with them, we’re understanding them and moving them down the funnel.

We have a large amount of nurturing streams that we use across our different personas and strategies and campaigns etc. And so that is really the next step and then clearly when we have decided we have a hand off to the sales team about when things can move over to them, we move them to the appropriate sales team.

We have a very complex business, from the smallest SMB all the way up to the largest enterprise customer and so there is a fair deal of complexity in terms of when things move over and when we keep things etc to them and all that. But we establish those rules with the sales team in terms of when we pass things over.

Trent:

Now in your role as CMO it is probably not your responsibility to plan the actual campaigns and build them. So driving down deeper into what those campaigns look like is not something that you are directly involved in. Let’s not go down that hole but if you did have some kind of influence I would like to ask a few more questions.

Rishi:

I probably can’t talk about the detail campaign level unfortunately.

Trent:

Okay.

Rishi:

Yeah.

Trent:

Alright, so let’s go back up a little bit then. When you were thinking about how to most effectively nurture and follow up with the leads that have been captured, in the planning phases what were some of the questions that you asked your team or that your team asked you so that you could figure out well how should we segment these people.

Because if you have too many paths down your funnel it can become a real bare to maintain the whole thing.

What I’m trying to say is there is a million ways to skin a cat; what advice would you give for other people who are at this point and thinking about, “Well how should we think about segmenting and nurturing our leads?”

Rishi:

It kind of goes back to – and this is really the CMOs role – what is your strategy and how are you going to market. And so for us we have very specific personas that we are going after. And organizing our go to market, our measurement, our nurturing as well as our sales enablement around specific personas and the essential thought leadership we have for those personas is the main organizing mechanism we’ve used and we are going to really drive next year as well.

This is a great question because what I find is that most CMOs nowadays as well as marketing organizations don’t put enough value in a strategic piece they immediately jump into execution and then what you find is what you just described; really sophisticated, overly complicated, detailed segmentations.

Because you can do it, because Eloqua can do it, because Salesforce can do it. The challenge that you have is that as humans we can only react and optimize on so many things. What we are very focused on is, “Okay ultimately what personas are we going after, what are their messaging, what are their pain points, what is the thought leadership against it, and how do we organize our nurturing streams across those personas or people within those personas.

And I think that is the most important thing that a CMO can do.

Trent:

Are there any mistakes that you guys made that you would be willing to share and the lessons learned from those mistakes?

Rishi:

I would say that a lot of it is where I described because the technology enables you to be complex, well sometimes overly complex. Overly complex in the supporting, overly complex in the way we divide customers and segment them, overly complex in how we go to market; all these kind of things.

What I focused on really coming in was really simplifying complexity both for our customers as the owner of the customer experience as well as for our employees as the owner of my culture so that we can very simply go to market, have a very simple go to market strategy and have a way that we can constantly test and optimize it against a set of variables.

Trent:

Alright, when you are making this change that we’ve been talking about and you need additional resources in terms of people to get stuff done; so you’ve mentioned you’ve hired some people, are there pieces that you have outsourced or are there pieces that you are planning on outsourcing now? And this could be within any of the following areas: Content production, marketing automation tool optimization, strategy, anything at all where you are not going to be using internal folks.

Rishi:

Yeah, I think we are definitely looking at a portfolio of internal and external providers. I really like to go external when I can, when it makes sense because of that specific expertise and that specific technology. Clearly we are looking at potential ways we can scale up content with external content providers. We are looking at content operations type of vendors like Newscred, Pokalite, Capost, that whole portfolio.

We are always constantly looking at ways to optimize our conversion on the site and there are a lot of providers who help with conversion optimization so we are always looking at that. And we always look at people who help across the board. We pulled in Yoga Five to help us with our brand, help us with look and feel, help us with purpose and values, help us with some of the production creative etc.

Yeah so we are looking at a lot of external type vendors across the board. And one thing I try to do as well is try to talk to a lot of VCs and people in the valley to understand what technologies and what companies are coming down the pipe in marketing as well and I am always looking at those type of technologies as well.

There are smaller companies that are doing very innovative things. There is a company called Captora in the bay area which are doing very interesting things around landing form and inbound content optimization and clearly there is a lot of companies in the analytics space too that we are looking at as well as internal.

One of the things that I’m trying to do with the culture of my organization is have everyone feel comfortable with managing the complexity of a portfolio of external providers because that is really the way to your question. The industry is going where there’s no one provider today. Salesforce that is maybe the closest that has the whole end to end stack and things are innovating along that stack constantly; having the ability to manage a diverse stack and also be on top of how it is changing and what’s changing and optimizing that stack is something that I’m trying to put into our culture as well.

Trent:

You mentioned the company Captora could you say that or spell it or what the URL is?

Rishi:

Yeah it is a small startup Captora.

Trent:

Captora. Okay, folks I’ll be putting that in the shownotes so if you are driving please don’t try and take notes while you are driving. At the end of the show I’ll give you a link that you can get to.

Alright Rishi before we wrap up given what we’ve talked about so far, if you were interviewing yourself is there any other questions that you would ask that if you were the CMO listening to this you would think, “Man I really wish they would have talked about X”?

Rishi:

I think the biggest one is what ultimately drives today’s CMO. The CMO of today, how is he or she different and what ultimately should drive them? The way I like to think about it is what ultimately drives a modern CMO is customer experience and the relationships that marketing can make with customers over time as we talked about in this interview. A lot of CMOs – and I do this as well – get very bogged down in the analytics, technology, content, all these little things that are going on and changing and it’s stressful frankly.

But I think ultimately thinking about it from the customer’s perspective and the customer experience perspective and how they’re actually interacting with your company; if that is kept as a true North then that helps guide everything else.

Trent:

Sage advice. Rishi thank you very much for making some time to come and be my guest here on the show it’s been a pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. If anyone wants to get a hold of you is there a way that they can do that?

Rishi:

Oh definitely, Twitter is the best way. I’m on Twitter quite a bit, it’s @rishipdave.

Trent:

And that will be in the shownotes as well. Okay Rishi you have yourself a wonderful day. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Rishi:

Thank you.

Trent:

Alright to get to the shownotes for this episode just head on over to Brightideas.co/178 and if you enjoyed this episode I would love it if you took a moment and headed over to iTunes and left us some feedback in the iTunes store. So that is it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid.

If you need some help with demand generation or content production or developing a strategy for inbound marketing that is exactly what we do over at our agency. It is called Groove Digital Marketing and it is at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com. You can find out everything you need to right there. So that is it for that. I look forward to having you back for another soon. Until then take care. Bye-bye.

About Rishi Dave

Chief Marketing Officer of Dun & Bradstreet. Rishi runs all marketing globally including brand, demand generation, digital, communications, PR, AR, operations, channel, events, sales enablement, corporate social responsibility, and product marketing.