Fostering Innovation – Eloqua Experience Day Two Keynotes

The morning of keynotes at day two of Eloqua Experience provided attendees an opportunity to learn from two of their peers and get inspired by one of the most compelling and inspiring speaker’s today. We heard from Kendall Collins, CMO of Salesforce.com and Heidi Melin, SVP/CMO of Polycom, and thought leader and pioneer in business visualization Tom Wujec, Senior Fellow at Autodesk. Each of the presentations offered attendees insights and inspiration.

Enjoy a summary of some of the key learnings.

Kendall Collins – Chief Marketing Officer – salesforce.com

Kendall shared many experiences about what its like being the CMO of a company with over 80,000 customers and revenue exceeding $1.5B. He stressed the importance of openness and transparency (depicting their internal use of Salesforce Chatter), testing and measuring, (allowing data to inform your decisions and not feelings of “oh, I like that.”) and meritocracy (the idea that merit and individual effort determine success). He also shared the following insights:

• An improved relationship and collaboration between marketing and IT is just as critical as the alignment of sales and marketing.  Today with so many technologies available to improve how you market and what you measure, it is vital to have a partner in the IT team to assist you in utilizing, selecting, and implementing the right tools.
  • You can’t ignore the importance the IT team plays in your success.

• In the past year, the salesforce.com marketing department took a page from the world of development and reorganized and shifted to Agile Marketing. Agile marketing has paid off in many ways including:
  • Major shift in velocity
  • Prioritization
  • Resourcing Clarity
  • Approval Process

• Video has been the single most important thing Salesforce.com has done in the past year, because of the ‘fidelity’ of the message. We captured customers telling their success stories.  ”There really isn’t a better way for the message to be shared than through the words of our customers.”
  • Another important piece of information Salesforce.com learned about video is that “people who view video on our site are more likely to fill out a form (by a lot).”

Heidi Melin, SVP/CMO Polycom

The theme of Heidi’s presentation was celebrating the Art of Conversation and communicating the value and the impact of the marketing team. She shared six key learnings for today’s CMO.

1. Importance of roles and responsibilities
   • It must be clear who is doing what and why.
2. Sales & Marketing alignment is critical
   • Sales and marketing are not two different processes, it is one process from response to revenue.
3. Consistently demonstrate value…measure, measure, measure.
   • Even in the absence of perfect data, measuring performance is critical to provide direction and insight.
4. Leverage best practices
5. Hire the best people
   • Look for people who have deep, extensive expertise in their area and create a good balance on your team of creative and analytical people.
6. Infrastructure investment must be coupled with process improvements
   • The technology is just one piece of the puzzle, effective systems must be in place to support the success of the team.

How do you communicate the value and impact of the global marketing team?
It starts with the premise of communicating “the right information to the right audience in the right format.” Know your audience. The Executive Team and Board don’t care about campaign reports, so keep them out of the board room. Develop a consistent dashboard and common metrics to communicate your value. Change the mindset of marketing as an expense to marketing as a profit center.  The categories Polycom uses in their marketing dashboard are:

1. Awareness and Thought Leadership
2. Demand Gen Programs
3. Solution Oriented Sales Tools
4. Partner Programs
5. Web Metrics

Tom Wujec, Senior Fellow, Autodesk – Fostering Innovation

Tom Wujec’s keynote was the best presentation I have ever had the opportunity to attend. Not only due to the message Tom shared but also because the presentation had you amazed, engaged, learning, and thinking about new ways of doing things, all at the same time. Simply incredible.

Littered throughout his presentation were amazing examples of design innovation and strategy being made visible. He shared wonderful stories and information he’s learned conducting The Marshmallow Challenge. A summary of the keynote by me would likely do it more harm than good. So I’ll simply share some of the words of wisdom he shared with us.

• Innovation starts with a clarifying question.
• Strategy is much more effective when you can visualize it.
• Ultimately, innovation boils down to the questions we ask.
• Make strategy visible, make ideas persistent.
• “Continuous partial attention” is a symptom of today’s media overload and affects our ability to be present and innovate.
• Images have the power to move us and connect us at the level of meaning.
• The act of representing customer visually allows companies to make decisions “on behalf” of their customers.

To quote an attendee, “Tom Wujec (Fostering Innovation Skills) keynote just made this conference absolutely worth attending!” I couldn’t agree more.

Author: Jeremy Victor | Website | Twitter

Jeremy's the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is a B2B Marketing online magazine discussing the evolution of B2B marketing. Topics include content marketing, B2B social media, demand generation, marketing automation, and more. Sign up. Get all the articles via email.