Digital Marketing Strategies that Fuel a $64 Billion Software Giant with Michael King, Sr. Director of Cloud Marketing at VMware

Pipeline Visionaries

This episode features an interview with Michael King, Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at VMware.

Inside the $64 billion cloud computing and virtualization software giant, Michael is responsible for the VMware Cloud Marketing team and is tasked with transforming the customer perception of VMware’s cloud services and products.

On this episode, Michael expands on the demand gen strategy that he calls “the relentless pursuit of whatever works,” illustrates his audience-action-measurement playbook, discusses the importance of a consistent customer experience, and explains why your channels must reflect your audience.

Key Takeaways

• How the seismic shift away from “broadcast” marketing tactics is ushering in a new wave of conversational marketing tactics that are generating massive ROI
• Why marketing’s fundamental measure of success should be revenue-based, and how to make this transition in your organization
• Ways the most successful demand gen marketers are pushing the envelope to eliminate friction in the buying process and speed up sales cycles

Quotes

• “Demand gen strategy at VMware is the relentless pursuit of whatever works. I tend not to be dogmatic about these things. I work with a team that is always challenging me, always pushing me to think differently.”
• “No matter what, things are always changing. You may come at it thinking, ‘I know the audience, I know the market, I know the benefits, here's the play I'm going to run.’ But things change…Anytime you go into any demand gen or any other marketing situation thinking that you have it cooked, you're probably cooked.”
• “The longer the time frame is from hand-raising activity to benefit achievement, the fewer customers you're going to convert, and then you'll just see leaky funnel left and right...reduction in speed is what kills all good demand gen programs.”
• “There's a lot of things that you can measure…but when it comes down to it, marketing, I feel, should measure itself on one thing and one thing only: revenue through the door.
• “As marketers, as product people, we spend 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours a day thinking about our product. The average customer spends 20 minutes a quarter thinking about your product. So you have a very limited amount of time to earn that ear.”

Sponsor

Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

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