In the current market turmoil which customers will stick with you? Which will churn? And which customers can you grow and expand into further? Data is the key to answering these questions. So let’s ask Jenny Hooks, Senior Director of Global Customer Marketing at Cisco. Jenny thrives on data and leverages it in creative ways to give her team a strategic advantage. Learn what’s working for them, and what lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Jenny Hooks has led teams in almost every marketing function at Cisco. Over her 18+ year career at the networking giant, she’s mastered brand, demand generation, digital marketing, eCommerce, omnichannel, and most recently, customer marketing. Jenny leverages data as her North Star, bringing it into her work in creative ways. She balances her data-informed objectivity with a deep desire to help Cisco’s customers. Her team at Cisco knows Jenny as a compassionate and thoughtful leader, who’s always ready to do the right thing. In this regard, Cisco’s culture of caring is something Jenny really leans into, especially in her local community.
Sourabh:
Let's start first with how you are protecting revenue. Jenny, as a senior customer marketing leader. What data do you look at for customers to know that they are likely or unlikely to renew, or there's a problem coming up?
Jenny:
Absolutely. So, the number one predictor of whether or not a customer is going to renew is are they using the product to the best of its ability? Right. And so everything that we sell, or most things that we sell come with a pretty prescribed and clear path to success. And we work with our customers to measure through those milestones, to make sure that they're adopting the right features, that they're taking advantage of some of the advanced capabilities above and beyond the basic ones. And so, by working closely with our customers to make sure that they're using the products to the best of its ability, we're able to, you know, to deliver more value. Right. You're not going to get value out of a product if you're not using it. And so making sure that they are using it to the best of its ability is the number one predictor to whether or not they're going to renew the next time they come.
And so what we will look at is, you know, someone purchases a software product and, for the first six months, they're only using the most basic capabilities, or they've only, leveraged 1 or 2 of the ten licenses that they purchase. Like, those are indicators that things are going wrong and that we need to go deeper with that customer to understand why are you stuck? What is the problem here? And then proactively address it versus waiting until the renewal comes up and allowing them to step in and say, well, we didn't get any value out of it. You don't get value out of it if you don't use it. Right? So getting them to use the product is Step #1.
Sourabh:
And of course you work at, and not everybody does, but you work at a company that's known for legendary service. Right. Cisco Services unit is a multibillion dollar business of its own, not to mention the massive amount of partners you support. So you've got the ability to execute when you see red flags like that. But now let's step away from CX and CS. Let's get back to marketing and sales. Right. What do you or your team look for? And let me know if it's different by product or by company size or geo. But what do you look for when you're looking at opportunities within customers where you want to upsell?
Jenny:
Yeah. So a lot of the upsell opportunity comes from just intimately knowing that customer, their environment and what they're looking to achieve. And so we you know obviously Cisco has a massive portfolio, you know, across the network security collaboration observability like it's all there right. But very few of our customers buy the whole thing. Right. Like there's an entry point. And more often than not, that entry point is the network, but our superpower in the market. And the thing that only Cisco can deliver is all of these capabilities together. And so the way for us to take a networking customer and expand into security or observability is to really understand that customer and what they're looking to achieve. The path isn't the same for everyone. And so it's really understanding what are they trying to accomplish? Ours is a multi-vendor environment creating a ton of unnecessary complexity, really understanding very in great detail what the landscape in the environment looks like at that customer and then building those conversations based off of their business objectives versus based off of what Cisco wants to sell them.
Sourabh:
Okay. And you and I know each other well, you know, I don't ask easy questions. So I'm going to start drilling in here. Right. How is marketing privy to that information, and I’ll qualify that question. Customer success will know that, services will know that, right. The product teams and even the sales reps will know that. But traditionally, marketing doesn't know what a customer's specific goals are, how those goals have changed. We don't know that. How do you know?
Jenny:
So what... We're building out a relatively new practice at Cisco with lifecycle marketing and what we're doing right now, and the digital marketer in me has had to work really hard to unlearn and, you know, kind of untrain myself that everything has to scale to hundreds of thousands of customers. So what we're starting with is we're sitting down with the customer success reps, with the account teams, and we're having actual conversations about what's going on with their customer. And it's amazing what type of information you uncover when you simply ask the right people. Right.
And so it's not scalable, right? But if you sit down and you have 4 or 5 conversations with the account teams, with the customer success reps, you start to identify patterns and can make those inferences that if all five of these customers are running into this challenge, deploying this specific technology, it's a reasonable assumption that other customers are having that same challenge as well. And that's where the scale comes in. So if we can get, a decent enough sampling size and start to recognize that there are inherent, you know, inherent challenges or obstacles to adoption, then we can create, you know, content and campaigns and things like that that can scale to other customers that are likely facing similar scenarios.
Sourabh:
I love it, I love it. What I'm hearing is personalized conversations, personalized content, and then scale the learnings. Right. But don't peanut butter this, right. I mean, it's crazy. This is a very ABX approach. You almost sound like a startup. You sure you work at Cisco?
Jenny:
Well, and that's what it feels like. And this is, it is not lost on me. How much... This is a once in a career opportunity to build something so consequential from the ground up at a company like Cisco. Like, I don't know why they picked me. I'm so glad they did. But it feels like a startup, right? And it's all about, you don't bring a new product to market without knowing exactly what need you're meeting for your customers. And so that's what we're on the mission to learn is not only the need that we're meeting for our end user customers, but also for our sales and CX counterparts as well.
Sourabh:
Okay, so let's take this now into, the sort of nuts and bolts because, you know, as you know, 2025 is not a year for strategy. This is a year for results. Right? There's too much uncertainty to think about things 9, 12, 18 months out. So with traditional, you know, contact acquisition or account acquisition, you've got your usual suspects in digital marketing, which is first and foremost, if you have an established brand, which Cisco built the industry, so obviously you do, right? You've got the website, right, then you've got your social channels, right, then you've got your third party sites wherever people are. And you can join the conversation. And then of course we've got email and now we've got things like whatsapp in text, right.
It's a valuable channel. And a lot of these channels you can experiment with because, hey, if it doesn't work out, as long as we're not disrespectful, you know, we'll get them later. But with customers things are a little bit more sensitive. So how do you want you determine an opportunity to, like you said, expand somebody into collaboration, because they're not buying collaboration from Cisco, but they're solid on the networking and maybe networking security side. Right. How do you execute a customer campaign when you're sensitive about reaching them in too many places and maybe overstepping on sales?
Jenny:
One realization that I've had fairly recently, and I’m kind of testing this live with you right now, it's been kicking around in my brain, though, is that oftentimes the customer is the right channel, right? Like you're going to have champions within that customer that want this to be successful or, you know, want to de-risk things entirely. And so sometimes it's as simple as us going in and helping craft that story that they can tell internally to gain the buy-in and the support and the advocacy that they need internally. And so being able, you know, whether it's expansion or even adoption or value realization, a lot of it is storytelling. It’s consistently reinforcing. We know your business. We know what you're trying to achieve. And then enabling the customer to take that forward to all of the different stakeholders within their business.
Sourabh:
So I love that, obviously, right. As a storyteller, I love that. To me, what I'm hearing is less traditional digital marketing and a lot more sales enablement. How would you say your team's time is split between what you do with sales and what you do direct through channels?
Jenny:
So we build the direct channels in partnership with sales, which I know sounds a little odd, but I'll give you a very specific example. One feedback that we got from a customer is that there's too much information and they want it streamlined, right? But they don't want to go to cisco.com web page, even if we were to personalize it just for them, we actually built out a internal to the customer SharePoint site where we pulled—marketing took the lead on pulling together all of the relevant documentation, handed it over to the customer, and now they're able to host that internally. So we're not directing their end users and their people to another spot. Another example is, you know, our customers are big and complex just like we are. And collaboration is really difficult. But there's a lot of intelligence that lives within the different teams that are using our products and bringing them together to help share ideas and successes is really difficult. So we actually, on the Cisco Community platform, built a closed community just for this customer to collaborate with themselves, with their services reps, with their account team.
And so now, you know, instead of needing to know who I ping for this question, or you can bounce an idea off of the entire community users, but it's very specific to this customer. And so it's, you know, it's very untraditional. We're obviously delivering things like custom microsites and email and, you know, your traditional what's in a marketers toolkit. But when you unlearn scale, you can do things that are a lot more innovative and therefore a lot more impactful because you're doing it one time and not worrying about how you're going to do it 10,000 times. Do we want to do it 10,000 times? Absolutely. But I'm not going to let the fact that we can only do one right now stop us from testing and learning, which is a really, really fun, you know, kind of mind freeing thing to do.
Sourabh:
And it sounds incredibly exciting because what I'm imagining is on the Cisco Community space, like you said, I'm imagining a Bank of America, Cisco community, a Deutsche Bank, Cisco community, and I'm going to cross the chasm over to the customer side because I've been there, right? I've been been a customer am a customer lead. So I see all of Lead2Pipeline and many, many tech products, right? On the customer side. You know, when we're running campaigns, folks are always asking for somewhere between 5 and 15 decision makers, right? Because like, oh, that that should be enough. But I'm pretty sure when you start to count all the folks that are at a client that you're interacting with, which is essential for growing revenue, what are the numbers like? Jenny, are we talking dozens or hundreds?
Jenny:
I would still say it's probably in the dozens, maybe, you know, 20, 25. And it really just depends on how consequential it is. Right? Like when we were selling to customers just to connect them to each other and to be the backbone of the internet, like it wasn't as consequential. Our customers are building their business on Cisco. Right? Like if the app doesn't work the bank, the customer can't transact, right? Like if they if their call center, if they can't answer the phone, like their service scores go down. And so the higher end consequence obviously, the higher the more people that are involved. But a lot of what we're seeing now are actually like board level, C-level level conversations that are driving the technology strategy.
Sourabh:
Yeah. And for a company with such a vast portfolio, like you said, that makes a lot of sense, right? Because like you said, there are certain critical functions like communications, like internet, like connectivity, like security. Right. But then there are many others that are business performance, you know, platforms to where even if observability as an example, right. If you're able to tell that there is an unbalanced, you know, load that's going to affect, for example, your storefront, you need to get ahead of that before it becomes a Tier-One issue. Right. So I see what you're saying. It's like you're building this ongoing use case, using a marketing term, right, for each customer by just paying attention to what they're doing, right? Now... Here's a really, really tough question. And you can totally punt and say, Sourabh, this is for next year. You know, I'm still working on it, but more than 85% of your revenue comes through partners, right? Many of the customers that you're working with, even though they're massive now, they may have started with partners, may still have partners working with them. How does a customer marketing team work with a partner marketing team?
Jenny:
This is a next year question. And something that is super consequential, right. Like we, you know, one of our superpowers in the market is the power of our channel, right? And so we can't and we shouldn't do anything without partners in mind. And so there are a lot of really smart people that are out there talking with our partners and trying to understand what support they need. Our partners also have customer success practices, right? And they have customer marketing practices and so what we want to build is in conjunction with them and complementary to what they're offering to our shared customers. So, we have a lot of amazing thinking and we understand the importance of cracking that code, but we're just not there yet. Ask me next year.
Sourabh:
I will, I will ask you when you're approaching your 20th year. Right, at Cisco. And that'll be incredible. They should give you an award for that. I think they do, actually Okay. All right. We are going to run out of, of time here, but I'm going to try to slip in two more questions. Okay. First of all. Almost our entire client base is technology companies, right, for Lead2Pipeline. Cisco is one of the most legendary technology story companies, right. So I have I have a question about, we often help our clients understand that the very product or the value proposition they're selling may not be sexy or exciting, but its use case generally is what the technology enables is something most people can relate to or be excited about, even if they don't know how the technology works. Right? So we often will advise our customers to leverage customer use cases, customer success stories in marketing, and it just performs better than talking about yourself. Your customer marketing... Do you use customers to portray that to other customers, or is that like a nono?
Jenny:
I mean, I will write you your check for asking that question later, but this is a very passionate topic of mine. No one tells our story better than a happy customer, and we have the most phenomenal sales force in the world that is only exceeded by the power of a happy customer being our even better sales force. Right. And so we have been very intentional about finding the right customers to highlight the successes that they're having with our products. And at Cisco Live, that just happened last month in San Diego. We had over 50 customers that took the stage in different way, shape or form to talk about how they're using it, even acknowledging challenges, right. Like, there's a lot of knowledge that exists within our customer base and giving them the platform to share that is such a super power. And something that, you know, I anticipate you're going to see a lot more of from Cisco coming up.
Sourabh:
My last question, and I'm going to cheat because this is a customer marketing webinar. But I'm allowed one unrelated question, so I saved it for the end. Well, you and I are Demand Gen marketers. We're digital marketers. We have been, right, you for 20 something years, me for 30 something. Right? So what would you say if I just had to ask you point blank? Like I'm going to know, right? What would you say in 2025 2026 is the most successful channel for Demand Gen or Conversion? What is working better? And you can choose anything. You could choose events. You could choose, you know, webinars. You could choose anything. What do you think is most successful in conversion?
Jenny:
The digital marketer in me is painfully saying events. We are still a face-to-face human connection type of industry. And you know, there's just... there's just something about hearing a story in person, about seeing people in person about, you know, making those human connections that I feel like, especially, again, like the decisions that are being made are extremely consequential. Being able to shake the hand of the person who's delivering the message to you, I think, is still extremely important. It doesn't devalue any of our digital channels. But there's still the human to human element of it that I don't know if we'll ever be able to top.
