Monthly Archives: September 2015

We just completed our first annual CMOs Leading Innovation Conference (CLIC ’15) in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Although this full day session deserves more reflection than a David Letterman-style Top Ten List, I wanted to pass along my initial thoughts.

Twenty-five CMOs and CEOs gathered from cool companies such as Twitter, Informatica, H&R Block, SageWater, Gannett/USAToday, Decision Lens, XO Communications, Celerity, and DestinationDC. Adobe’s CMO.com, a globally reknown publication reaching over 22,000 marketing leaders, partnered with us to cover the event….

 

Let’s talk about how we design our marketing communities. In Buddhism, we have a term called sangha. This has to do with surrounding yourself with like-minded people who support you in whatever you’re doing.

We need to find our sangha as mindful marketers. In this video, Jamie Gorski, CMO of The Bozzuto Group, and I discuss what’s worked for us over the years. Some of the points we cover include:

The importance and benefits of a peer group (for example, our Marketing Leaders of DC™  community)
Guidelines and ideas for designing your own peer communities
How surrounding yourself with champions can also make you a champion

I invite you to take four minutes to enjoy the video….

What does the term “customer data” mean to you?

Many tech-savvy marketers will imagine a magical dashboard showing customer churn rates,  pipeline velocity, lifetime customer value and the cost to acquire a customer. And the topic of customer data is top of mind for many CMOs in my community. Let’s examine why a frenetic level of focus on technology-generated customer data is often a waste of marketing resources.

We just completed our third annual CMO Innovation Trends study….