Year One: A New CMO's Journey and 8 Lessons Learned Along The Way

It's hard to believe that it's been just over one year since I joined Persistent as #CMO — and what a year it’s been. Our business is now consistently growing, we are hiring aggressively (come join the team) and our teams continue to set new standards for customer excellence in the industry. The journey has been action packed with much #learning, #listening, #hustle, #teambuilding, #coaching, self reflection, #radicalcandor, #personalgrowth and a constant focus on raising our game. Over the course of the 12 months we've established a centralized and high performing marketing function that delivers continuous momentum for our brand and now executes a fully digital demand engine that embraces today's #B2Bmarketing reality.

I could not be prouder of the diverse team we've built and the outcomes we've achieved by setting a clear vision for the marketing function, collaborating across the company on priorities and keeping our clients at the center of all we do. As I reflect on the journey through this first year and search for the words to communicate what its meant to me, I find myself ironically landing on our Persistent brand idea -- See Beyond, Rise Above.

With that as context, I thought you might enjoy a glimpse into the journey so far and some lessons picked up along the way.

Reimagining our Brand System

In partnership with the very talented Saffron agency out of Europe, our senior leadership team and other key stakeholders explored and defined the necessary evolution of the Persistent brand. This important work elegantly modernized all aspects of our brand system to resonate with our global market, while embracing the 30-year legacy of the company. Even though I joined the company in the final stages of this project, I knew it would be up to me and my new team to maximize the ROI from this investment. And that is exactly what we did. I want to acknowledge Persistent's former CMO Sunder Sarangan for his leadership on this prior to my arrival — it wouldn't have seen the light of day without him.

"Launch the new brand system in three weeks" was the message I got on my second day in the job. On top of the normal firehose of starting a new job and not knowing the full capabilities of my newly inherited team, this was a bit hard to swallow (at least standing up). And for those that were in the room, they probably recall my face turning white as snow, as if I was about to pass out. However, I quickly shook off all the years of experience navigating massive corporate process and bureaucracy that would have forced a 6-9-month runway for an effort like this. I had to take a leap of faith that Persistent was nimbler than my prior companies — which it turned out to be, and then some. The only answer was to trust the team and dive into this with an Agile mindset.

Lesson #1: Get comfortable (quickly) with being uncomfortable.

Activating our Brand with 10,600+ Employees

Within a few short days of joining we assembled our core brand activation team across Marketing, HR, Sales, IT and swiftly developed our goals and plans for the upcoming year. This collective moved swiftly into execution from preparation of internal enablement materials to rebranding of key content, to planning our external reveal at key events like Dreamforce and AWS re:Invent. However, the single most important and effective component of this work would prove to be the in-person #brandactivation sessions we held in the majority of our offices around the globe. These sessions, led directly by various members of our executive team, touched thousands of our employees and helped us to quickly spark new energy and commitment to our brand. Sincere thanks to the hundreds of volunteers across Marketing, HR and Admin teams that helped mobilize these sessions across the world. Importantly, as we completed each session, we captured our learnings and continually iterated on enhancements to improve our messaging, content and activities. I personally could not have asked for a better way to get to know the organization I had just joined. These sessions allowed me to quickly meet and connect with hundreds of employees that I now collaborate with and speak to on a daily basis. The picture below (from our office in Nagpur, India) is just one of many that captures the engagement in these sessions.

Lesson #2: To understand your brand you must understand your employees.

Developing a shared agenda with our clients and partners

In my first few days and weeks in the role I learned a tremendous amount from our leadership team and experts across the company about the role we play with our clients as they navigate the current era of digital transformation. And at the core of our role is helping our clients manage through the complexity of choice and integration inherent in the increased adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments and the growing number of API enabled solutions available in the market. It is also apparent that our value to clients is bolstered by a robust partner ecosystem that had been cultivated over many years at Persistent. As our teams worked to tackle these issues across many clients and with our various partners, some clear, repeatable patterns of success emerged — we call these digital mosaics.

In an effort to clearly articulate our point of view on this topic and communicate the value to our clients and partners, we decided to develop a signature #thoughtleadership document entitled "Unlocking Competitive Advantage with Digital Mosaics." This document gives readers context for the current era of digital transformation and makes the case for why approaching business transformation through the lens of digital mosaics will yield differentiated and accelerated value. This PoV ultimately provided the foundation for many derivative pieces of content throughout the year as well as served as a useful framing for many of our industry solutions.

Lesson #3: Test, iterate and refine your thinking with MULTIPLE stakeholders.

Revisiting our 30 year legacy to frame our future potential

Coming into the role, I admittedly lacked the experience of working in a smaller, founder-led organization. For better or worse, my prior management and marketing experience stemmed largely from IBM as well shorter stints at PwC and Conduent. However, working in this new environment has proven to be deeply rewarding and enjoyable — as the roots of the company and the passion for our future shine through on a daily basis. In this first year I was fortunate enough to be able to bring this to the forefront in our work, as we drafted our?30th Annual Report?and planned our first Virtual Annual General Meeting. Through this work I learned a great deal about our the many years of product engineering and data work we've done for so many of the titans in the software industry. At the same time I looked back at the evolution of the company as it grew into a global IT services and solution provider, helping hundreds of organizations take full advantage of technologies like AI, Cloud, Mobile and Automation. Alongside the technology leadership and continual focus on delivery excellence is a continual focus across organization and from its founder to support the communities we operate in through various CSR actions, including the Persistent Foundation. As an example, we?announced?a significant donation of $3.3M to support pandemic relief around the globe. It is an honor to help Dr. Anand Deshpande, our leadership team and thousands of employees tell this story?in the market and celebrate our 30 years of growth and leadership.

Lesson #4: Embed organizational DNA into the core of your brand story.

Clarifying our "why"

Despite our initial brand work, the clarification of what we do and development of a point of view on how we do it, we had yet to define our "why" that represented the Persistent we are today. For many companies this can be a very hard task, which I have certainly experienced in my past roles. Fortunately for our leadership team, the answer came naturally, and we just needed to write it down. Our "why" is anchored in four fundamental business needs that our clients count on us for every day we show up. We exist to help our clients Imagine, Engineer, Modernize and Manage. While simple, these four themes frame much of our thought leadership, innovation, offerings and campaigns in the market. We recently developed this brand video to articulate our value proposition and bring these themes to life.

Lesson #5: Embrace simplicity when it comes to your "why."

Accelerating to a post-Covid B2B marketing reality

February 2020 was quite a jarring month for all of us, as the world initiated its pandemic-induced shut down. First and foremost, we all worked through the continuous prioritization during this unprecedented time to ensure health and safety of our families, friends and employees, as well as business continuity for our clients and our own organization. And in addition, the pandemic brought on a whole new fully digital reality for our marketing function that we had only begun to dip our toes into pre-pandemic. Overnight, many of our key platforms for demand generation were completely eliminated and the ability to cultivate relationships and foster dialogue in person was immediately taken away. Significant industry events like Mobile World Congress, HIMMS and IBM Think made the very tough, but responsible calls to either cancel their annual event completely or shift to a virtual format. Quite frankly, I could not dream up a bigger, faster, or more disruptive event for B2B marketing and sales. It was no longer about embracing a progressively more #digitalfuture in the marketing world, it was "we are digital, now".

Despite the many distractions we all faced during this time period, my team worked incredibly hard to salvage what remained of existing events that converted to virtual and began to pivot to a constant drumbeat of webinars and digital content. While there is now notable market fatigue with digital events, we initially saw very solid reach and engagement in these sessions. As we moved forward though, we continually tweaked our approach to ensure we maintained strong engagement and interactivity with our target audiences.

In addition to the overnight shift to 100% digital, I believe this new era will also be the defining moment for #AccountBasedMarketing (ABM). While it has been part of the marketing mix for a long time, I believe it should now be the #1 B2B Marketing priority — with both Sales and Marketing co-dependent on one another more than ever before. However, this isn’t your father’s ABM, this is an ABM that must be backed by a strong MarTech stack and a data-driven approach. My marketing roots started in ABM and I look forward to seeing it become the new core for B2B Marketing.

Lesson #6: The post Covid-era will require continuous marketing innovation.

Exposing it all to the world through a new digital front door

As you can imagine, when I joined Persistent, I spent a good deal of time asking questions and listening to our employees, clients and partners (and still do). What do you think of Persistent? How do you describe our work? What role do we play in our client's digital transformation? How do you see us compared to competition? What do you think our value proposition is? At the end of the day, how do we describe who we are and what we do?

What I observed is that everyone had their own way of answering the questions above. And while none of them were wrong, none of them were consistent. They all saw an isolated slice of the bigger value Persistent was delivering to clients every single day. So as a natural extension of the brand work, our marketing team worked with the leadership team to better codify the various dimensions of our current business. We crafted a clear description for our business and worked to visualize the service line and industry portfolios we have breadth and depth in. And importantly, this new "taxonomy" would provide the foundation for a completely new website.

With this taxonomy established and all of the foundational marketing work behind us, our team set out to build a bold new experience for our "digital front door". After months of work with our partner?Ruca?and collaboration across all facets of Persistent, we finally released our #newwebsite MVP in October 2020. This site puts the success of our clients at the core of our story and brings to life what our business has become after three decades of growth. We are all extremely proud of the new website and look forward to continuing to optimize the experience for better engagement with all our stakeholders, including not only our clients and prospects, but also those looking to join the growing Persistent team. Massive thanks to Piotr Gajos and Israel Barriga for their stellar leadership as well as our entire marketing team for the Herculean effort to make it happen.

Lesson #7: There is no better day than when the full team's potential shines.

The sun sets on year one with great pride

Launching this new digital front door was such a great way to close out my first year at Persistent, as it so cleanly encapsulates much of my team's efforts over the last 12 months. We set the overall vision for what our first-year marketing journey would be when we kicked off our brand activation work and turned the vision into reality, exactly as planned. I can't thank my team enough for sticking with me on the vision and pushing themselves outside of their comfort zones to grow and learn new ways of thinking and executing. I sincerely hope they are all as proud of their personal growth as much as I am of them.

Lesson #8: A successful marketing transformation requires employees from well outside the function itself to not only understand and believe in the vision, but to embrace a new way of working and engaging with customers.

While it has certainly not been an easy one, it has been the single most exciting and rewarding year in my 20-year career. I now move onward to year two, with many tangible learnings captured and even greater conviction about our path to $1B.

Thank you to my team for an incredible first year -- we have so much more to do together.

Thank you to Anand Deshpande and Chris O'Connor for the opportunity to join Persistent.

Thank you to our new CEO, Sandeep Kalra for your guidance, support and leadership.

Thank you to all of Persistent - the world has only just begun to understand our potential.

#SeeBeyondRiseAbove