Carrie Palin is expected to generate more revenue from Cisco’s marketing organization every year. She’s also expected to do it with essentially the same budget.
For the tech giant’s chief marketing officer, that has meant identifying where the company is losing potential customers, challenging established spending priorities, and finding stronger evidence of marketing’s contribution to revenue.
Shortly after joining Cisco in 2021, Palin discovered that more than 80% of visitors to the company’s website were leaving within seconds, despite Cisco’s substantial investment in campaigns designed to bring them there. The site ran on 17-year-old technology, and that year’s annual budget didn’t include a major overhaul.
Palin asked her team to identify spending they could cut to finance the overhaul, including brand advertising. Fortunately, she says, those cuts proved unnecessary. Her then-boss, Cisco’s former chief customer and partner officer, brought the proposal to CEO Chuck Robbins.
Following a board meeting, the company found a way to fund the project without taking money from Palin’s existing marketing budget.
Over roughly two-and-a-half years, Cisco rebuilt its website, replacing a structure organized around internal business divisions with one designed to help customers find and compare products based on the technology problems they were trying to solve.
According to Palin, bounce rates have fallen by at least 30% and, at times, as much as 50%. Clicks indicating an interest in purchasing Cisco products have increased by more than 200%.
Although those figures measure website activity rather than completed sales, they indicate that more prospective customers are engaging with Cisco after arriving through its marketing campaigns.
The website revamp addressed one costly weakness in Cisco’s marketing operation. Now, Palin faces a broader challenge in determining which marketing investments contribute most to sales.
Cisco’s marketing-sourced sales pipeline, the value of potential deals originating from marketing campaigns and other outreach, currently runs into the single-digit billions of dollars, according to Palin. Its marketing-influenced pipeline, the value of potential deals that marketing helped advance but didn’t originate, reaches into the tens of billions, she says. Both figures represent potential sales, not realized revenue.
Palin says Cisco is setting an even more aggressive marketing-sourced revenue target for the coming fiscal year. “We’re raising that bar every year on the same budget,” she says.
Determining which marketing investments contribute to those deals is difficult. For Cisco’s largest enterprise deals, Palin says the company averages roughly 14,500 marketing touchpoints across multiple employees at prospective customers, ranging from website visits and digital content to product demonstrations, conferences and meetings with Cisco executives.
Among those interactions, Palin places particular value on time spent with customers in person. She considers three days with a customer at Cisco Live, the company’s annual technology conference, more valuable than having that customer download five white papers. Other Cisco executives share her enthusiasm for live events. During recent budget discussions, leaders across product, sales, and customer experience advocated investing more in conferences and company events, she says.
The challenge is measuring how much these expensive gatherings contribute to sales, especially when enterprise deals can take months to close. Cisco uses AI to recommend conference sessions based on attendees’ interests, then tracks which presentations they attend and which technologies attract their attention. Marketing teams use that information to tailor subsequent outreach around the products customers explored.
Palin also looks for evidence that conference attendance translates into additional business. Her team compares the value of potential deals involving attendees’ companies before an event with their status 60, 90, and 120 days afterward, examining whether deals have grown, customers have expressed interest in additional products, or new sales opportunities have emerged.
Palin acknowledges that a conference is only one of several factors influencing a purchase. But with thousands of marketing interactions behind a single enterprise deal, tracking which investments are followed by more business helps her decide where the next dollar should go.
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