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Marketing Trends
The Power of Being a Customer-Obsessed CMO
00:49:24
On this episode, Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and Chief Customer and Marketing Officer for WebEx by Cisco, discusses the importance of being a customer-obsessed CMO and leveraging data and analytics to drive customer-centric strategies. She also emphasizes the power of personalized marketing and how AI is being integrated into Cisco's solutions to enhance productivity and customer service.
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- [00:01]
Aruna Ravichantran
This is mission.org.
- [00:05]
Jeremy Bergeron
What does it mean to be a customer obsessed CMO to you? And why is that really important?
- [00:10]
Aruna Ravichantran
Whether you're a product brand or a performance oriented cmo, the fundamental aspect is you have to be a customer ops cmo. Why is that important? Because everything we do on the marketing side is all about the customer. Why are we basically building products in order to particularly solve customer pain points? What do you need to do in marketing in order to basically create awareness and preference for the product is basically focusing on the customer pain points. So how does this actually translate into marketing? Because you might think that anything to do with the customer is mostly around the messaging. Yes, it is definitely around the messaging because the best way to do the marketing is to basically tell the story through the voice of your customers and then leveraging their voice, I think is the best form of marketing.
- [01:03]
Jeremy Bergeron
Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends, the podcast where we dive deep into the minds of the marketing leaders who are literally shaping the future. I'm your host as always, Jeremy Bergeron. And today we have an incredibly special guest. Our people contacted her people. We made this happen. This is a really epic brand, an epic executive. She's not only a powerhouse in the marketing world, but also the senior Vice president, Chief marketing and Customer Officer at Cisco for the WebEx collaboration business. Aruna Ravichantran is more than just a marketing leader. This is a wife, a mom. A lot of slashes to the way that she thinks about marketing and transformative marketing at that. I hope we get a chance to touch on the stuff she did with NASA and some of the partnership there. But let's get started. Aruna, welcome to the show.
- [02:01]
Aruna Ravichantran
Oh, thank you, Jeremy. I'm so excited to be here with you today.
- [02:04]
Jeremy Bergeron
So I noticed this little piece of detail and you have to make sure this is accurate, but I think this is accurate. As of June 24, Cisco is ranked number 74 on the Fortune 500, which jumped up eight spots from last. That's a significant jump up if you consider the Fortune 100 up to 74. Also, Cisco's been ranked number one on the Fortune 100's Best Companies to Work for for not one, not two, but three years in a row. So what is going on at Cisco, Aruna? There's some magic happening there, I would say.
- [02:40]
Aruna Ravichantran
I've been at Cisco now for about six and a half plus years and I've worked in four different companies before Cisco. And this is the company to be the way we operate at Cisco. Our message to the world is being able to build an inclusive future for all. Everything we do with Cisco holds up to that particular brand promise. How we collaborate, how we bridge with our customers, with our partners, with our employees. Everything we do at Cisco basically delivers on that particular brand promise in terms of being able to create an inclusive future for all. And having been here for about six and a half plus years, it's not a surprise. Everything we do is intentional. Everything we do holds up to that particular brand promise. The benefits we have for our employees, how people actually work with each other, how we treat all of our employees, our coworkers. It's truly amazing to be a part of a company like that. And there is no surprise there for me that we have made it to the most loved company for three years in a row.
- [03:43]
Jeremy Bergeron
It's incredible. I mean, I want to touch on that a little bit more just because I think about the culture of an organization. I also know Cisco's competing fiercely in a market in a lot of different ways. Hardware, software. And so I'm just curious about, look, you've been there several years, six years, about to be seven years. What's been this momentum behind the culture? What's happened? What do you think it is? Is it just everyone is values aligned and there's a lot of collaborative effort. Was there some kind of linchpin that happened the past several years where clearly there's nothing stopping this brand and you're competing against some of the biggest in the game to ever do it. But culturally, as a culture, what shifted? There's clearly some dynamic flow happening.
- [04:30]
Aruna Ravichantran
I think the culture is everything across the board. Right. Like it basically defines the people and it defines the passion people have for the company and the products they actually build. And so this has been, I would say, an evolution. I've seen this kind of a culture from the time I've been here at Cisco and it's continued to evolve. The pandemic happened couple of years ago and we continue to be the one of the world's leaders in terms of being able to help people to collaborate. During the pandemic. What was the means of communication during the pandemic? When everybody went home, it was video conferencing. And so we were right up there enabling our customers, our employees and everyone to seamlessly collaborate. We did not miss a heartbeat at that particular time. And in addition to that, there are so many different initiatives we hear do at Cisco in order to contribute to the community around the world again in terms of creating the bridge with our networking products, being able to Securely, comfortably and safely helping our customers as well as our employees. And last but not the least, with the WebEx technology being able to provide that collaboration platform which brings people together, whether you are working from home or in the office or anywhere in between, we are the powerhouse behind that. But ultimately the foundation underpinning the products is the culture. And the culture here at Cisco is about being able to treat people with respect, giving a lot of opportunities for people of multiple different diversities across the board and a voice and a seat at the table. Never seen something like that in my entire career of 25 plus years.
- [06:11]
Jeremy Bergeron
We talked a little bit earlier and I want to touch on this. The customer obsessed modern day Chief Marketing officer and I've spoken to hundreds of executive marketing leaders across the Fortune 1000 and it's always interesting to talk about the customer. And now I'm talking to you, who has this really interesting right brain, left brain background who's now leading marketing at the helm there focused on the WebEx collaboration effort. What does it mean to be a customer obsessed CMO to and why is that really important?
- [06:45]
Aruna Ravichantran
So being a customer obsessed CMO I think again is fundamental for me in terms when I think about a CMO. Most of the CMOs usually come from three different backgrounds. You'll be a product oriented CMO meaning that you'll come from a product background or you'll be a brand CMO meaning that you'll come from a brand background or you'll be a digital and a performance oriented CMO who comes from a digital background. All three traits are extremely important. I can't basically weigh one against the other, but I would say I'm a product oriented CMO because I come from a technology background. I spent about 10 plus years of my career in various different engineering disciplines at Hewlett Packard when it was the Apple of the Valley eons ago. And then I moved on to the darker side of the business which became marketing and it never changed over the last 20 plus years when I've built my professional career in marketing. But having said that, whether you're a product brand or a performance oriented cmo, all of those three things become the linchpin for you. But the fundamental aspect is you have to be a customer of the cmo. Why is that important? Because everything we do on the marketing side is all about the customer. Why are we basically building products in order to particularly solve customer pain points? What do you need to do in marketing in order to basically create awareness and preference for the product is basically focusing on the Customer pain points. And so to me, everything the team and I do is we put our customer first. So how does this actually translate into marketing? Because you might think that anything to do with a customer is mostly around the messaging. Yes, it is definitely around the messaging. Because one of the fundamental things which marketing teams do is to basically come up with a message, the right message oriented towards the right target audience. And your target audience can be different. It can be your IT Persona, it could be a line of business, it could be depending upon your product, your target audience actually changes. And so when you come up with that particular right level of messaging, with the right messaging and positioning, in order to basically shine the light on your product, the best way to do the marketing is to basically tell the story through the voice of your customers. So understanding the use cases which your customers are actually leveraging your products, that how your products are actually solving those tough problems for the customer, building relationship with the customer and then leveraging their voice in order to activate your marketing, I think is the best form of marketing. And also I'm a servant leader. Being able to basically help solve the customer problems, whether it is through marketing or in any other way. Because I have a secondary role as the customer officer for WebEx by Cisco. And so here being able to basically help our customers tackle any kind of a problem is very, very important to us. And I take that very much to.
- [09:44]
Jeremy Bergeron
Heart in also thinking about how this connects to analytics and AI and customer data. Right. And I think about utilizing advanced analytics and AI to analyze customer data can definitely reveal insights into customer preferences and behaviors and trends. Data we know is playing a crucial role at Cisco. How do you leverage data and analytics to drive customer centric strategies at Cisco?
- [10:14]
Aruna Ravichantran
So one of the key things, we went through a huge transformation over the last two, three plus years. We built out an entire brand new Martech stack because like I said earlier, data is king. You got to have analytics and insights in order to basically drive the behavior in terms of marketing. And so being able to build the Martech stack, we brought in world class Martech Stack across the board, whether it is your CMS systems or whether it is your analytics platform, in terms of being able to actually understand customer preferences and their buying behavior, being able to understand where the watering holes are, where your customers are going to be. And you know the world has changed considerably. When you think about brand, most of the people will always think about advertising. Whether it is advertising online or digital or in physical forms, whether it's airport advertising, billboard advertising, doesn't matter. But they are your customers. So being able to understand who is your target customer, being able to understand where the watering holes are in order to activate your message, and then using the various different martech stack in order to basically slice and dice your data in order to understand where your customer preferences are and so that you can bring them to the right aspect of your marketing funnel journey so that you can create a preference whether it is top of funnel, middle of the funnel as well as bottom of funnel. And taking them from awareness to close is a huge part. And so data analytics becomes very important. There are so many different tools right there. And now with AI coming into the mix, it's made it even more insightful and helpful for marketing. And my teams are actually leveraging multiple different analytics tools out there which now have AI actually built in in order to make their job much more easier.
- [12:07]
Jeremy Bergeron
What about personalization and how that connects the customer experience? Now you know, I'm seeing a ton of marketing automation tools and AI driven personalization engines. I mean it's getting there a lot of options, segmenting customer base, tailoring communic to each segment that's specific to the needs and the preferences, et cetera. How do you think about that? How do you manage to personalize customer interactions at scale, especially in a large org like Cisco? Because you're doing this clearly right now, you're doing it great, but at scale, how do you think about that?
- [12:43]
Aruna Ravichantran
So like I said, the first thing is to really understand your customer based upon the regions, based upon the sub regions within a particular region. If you think about Emir, there are, you know, multiple different regions. Again in the United States you have the east, the west, the Midwest, so on and so forth. Being able to understand the geographical component is too important. The second important element is understanding your preference. So we have a large install base of our existing customers and being able to upsell and cross sell within the existing Cisco domain. So like for example, we operate in multiple different markets. Networking, security, collaboration. And now with the acquisition of Splunk, we also operate in the IT management space as well as in the security space. So we know our customers very well. And again using a lot of the marketing analytics tools, we have the ability to really understand who our customers are, not just based upon the geo, but also understand the preferences the customers actually are looking for. And so knowing that there are multiple different tools in the market, don't want to name a couple of them because we use multiple different tools within our martech stack, being able to personalize the customer journey. So for Example, let's take a CIO for abc.com and he's interested in identifying and bringing in a brand new collaboration solution, audio or a video conferencing solution or a contact center solution. And he probably goes to cio.com and he's looking at a narrative and there is an article which basically caught his eye. As soon as he goes to that particular website, we know that he's interested. So we have actually created the awareness because you create partnerships with multiple different vendors and so content syndication becomes very important as well. And so after we know that this customer actually has a preference and is looking for something, then you follow him. That is where personalization comes in. You know that this is a customer, he's potentially interested in buying a collaboration solution. And then a big part of your marketing strategy is to basically render personalized content for him because you already know that he's looking for something, he's interested in something. And then you surround him in all of the multiple different digital as well as physical channels with your relevant message. Again, the message becomes very important over here. And then you get invited to a particular event which you host which is going to be field driven or you basically invite him to an industry event. And so there is multiple different touch points. And this is why personalization becomes very important. This is where I would say ABM is going to become even more important. Because ABM used to be one to one mostly and it was really expensive. Now ABM account based marketing has, in my humble opinions is going to become so important in this new world across the board. So which we think that it's not just going to be one to one, it'll be one to one, one to many and one to few. And you will have an opportunity to really create that personalized messaging and surround your customer as you take them from awareness to close around their marketing journey.
- [16:01]
Jeremy Bergeron
I love it. You brought it up. I was really curious about your thoughts on ABM specifically. It's obviously a very powerful marketing strategy. I've also seen kind of the wide range of how organizations approach ABM specifically, especially in the B2B space specifically. I'm curious about Cisco in terms of executive C suite level initiatives. You're already partners with a ton of big brands and I also imagine there's probably some high value prospect brands across the Fortune 1000 and beyond that you still want to work with. How do you thinking just executive level content, not content for the influencers and the directors, maybe the VPs, but the C suite folks or the VPs at the highest level, how do you think about engaging, connecting, aligning with those folks and building relationships? Because they obviously unlock a lot in terms of future revenue opportunity for us.
- [16:59]
Aruna Ravichantran
At least within my business. It's a huge part of our initiative, being able to basically build that relationship, cherish those relationship and being able to help convert that customer into an all in one Cisco customer. And so we have multiple different programs. It starts with abm, so we have a dedicated ABM program for C level as well as the underlying influencers, which is director and below. But specifically talking about it at a tactical level, I have an executor program which we have established and it's worked out very well for us. We have a customer advisory board which I run two times per year where it is an opt in program and CIOs actually opt in for a 18 month program. And so we hold the customer advisory board once a year in a very nice location. We basically share our product roadmap with our customers. We get their insights and their feedback and they opt in into this particular program because they also get a lot of networking opportunities with the other underlying customers. And not only does it basically helps us get feedback directly from them so that it further enables our innovation for the roadmap for the product, but it also helps create awareness for adjacent part of the portfolio. So within when you think about the collaboration business, we are a $5 billion business and there are multiple different product lines. A CIO could have adopted only one part of our product line by adopting into our customer advisory board. Now we have an opportunity to create awareness for all the product lines and we run it for a day and a half in multiple different locations. And then mid year we would do it as a virtual farm so that we continue to basically seek their feedback. This is one particular tactic. In addition to that, we run multiple different CXO field events. We run roundtables with thought leaders, we bring in thought leaders because what are the care abouts for the CIOs? Their care abouts are how do they basically keep their lights on? How do they continue to innovate? How does it translate from being a cost center into an innovation center? How can they get much more from their share of wallet in terms of their budget? We help them with all of that. And so we run multiple different roundtables around the nation. And this is run by my field marketing team and we bring our sellers over there, we bring our customers to basically talk to the other CIOs on how they actually conduct business with our portfolio. Again, going back to the customer obsession part, being able to leverage our customers to tell the story to the other CIO so they can do a better job with their business is an important part of the narrative. And so that is another tactic. And the third tactic is we get deeply engaged in a lot of the industry events. And at those industry events we usually end up having a keynote and we run an event within an event. So let's say there is an industry event and our teams will automatically build a CXO event at that particular event because no CIO. So for example, if you take Gartner IT Expo, a lot of the CIOs go to Gartner IT expos. We will host our own smaller event where the CIOs will have an opportunity to partake and get to know our products. And so we do a multitude of things. In addition to that digitally, we have partnerships with a lot of the top tier brands, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, economists, so on and so forth, that we have curated content which basically goes to a lot of our CXOs.
- [20:31]
Jeremy Bergeron
And I also, I imagine that, you know, you've got the, you know, you have a Bachelor's in Computer engineering, you have an MBA as well from Santa Clara University. So you've got, we talked about this a little bit earlier. You understand both the technical side of things and certainly the data and analytical side of things, and also the marketing and the creative side of things. And so I would imagine that you sitting at the table with a CIO or a CTO or a CISO that brings a level of dialogue and understanding because you know the world they're in deeply and you also know the world of marketing clearly. So what has that meant for you? Engaging with folks that, you know, you speak their language literally because you are also an engineer and leading marketing.
- [21:12]
Aruna Ravichantran
I think that is the customer obsess part. So while I am the cmo, I end up doing a lot of the executive briefings. I'm based out of San Francisco in our executive Briefing Center. That's where we bring our customers to basically show and tell. We have all the agenda CIOs, CXOs around the world. Come to the EBC here at Cisco where we give them an opportunity to know our roadmap, our portfolio of products. We give them a tour of our executive Briefing center where we have all of our products showcased and I present@ the EBCs. And that gives me an opportunity basically get a seat at the table. I understand what their pain points are. You know, I tailor my content based upon their pain points. And after the EBCs are done, I continue to build relationship with customers. And so I'm a little bit different. And this is where I'm deeply grateful that I have an engineering degree because as a marketeer it is a little bit tougher to get a seat at the table, especially with the technical community, because the way they regard marketing is a little bit different. And so I am deeply grateful that I have an engineering degree and I can talk the voice of the customer and I'm relevant with them. I have to basically mention that when I start the conversation saying that I come from a technology background. While I might have a fancy CMO title, my role is to basically meet the needs of the customer and solve their toughest problems. And so I continue to build relationships with a lot of the CIOs. And that's how I basically also have an opportunity to directly recruit them to be a part of our customer advisory board. I also have an opportunity to invite them to a lot of the field events because if you don't build that relationship, you're going to be dependent on a lot of people across the board, especially with sales. Our sales teams are phenomenal, especially our sales leader and his team. They are really awesome in terms of building relationship. And so I consider this as an incremental opportunity to basically help my sellers in order to further their relationship with the CIOs.
- [23:22]
Jeremy Bergeron
Amazing. You said a lot of great things. I'm like, what do I want to go into? Fantastic. I'm curious about just experimentation, thinking about experimentation. And obviously experimentation is a very critical piece of innovation. I also know without working at Cisco that Cisco certainly fosters a culture of experimentation and innovation. But I'm just curious about maybe double clicking into that. Like how do you look at fostering, you know, nudging people towards failing fast experiment, you know, what does that even look like inside of Cisco? And then what do you use to measure your success of experimentation or more innovative initiatives?
- [24:06]
Aruna Ravichantran
So within the WebEx marketing team, we have formed a culture which is again built upon the Cisco culture. But in order to create a sense of community, within my marketing team we have something which is called ice. The best way to remember it with the song Ice Ice baby. Right? So I stands for innovation, C stands for courage, and E stands for empathy. Everyone within the WebEx marketing team actually embody those values. So what do I mean by that? So if you don't have the ability to take risks, you're not going to create a culture of innovation. And so I have a simple ask of my team, right? So I want to basically have a culture where people have the opportunity to bring that new ideas. Without those ideas, it's same old, same old. You won't be able to innovate. You won't be able to actually activate something really creative and bring it to the market. And when I say courage, you might wonder what does. Why does courage actually mean? It is the courage to take risks. It's okay to take risks. If you don't take the risk, how do you know whether that idea is actually going to work or not? What I tell the team is that it's okay to take risk, it's okay to try out, but if it fails, don't repeat it again. That's it. You learn from the exercise. And we also have a culture. We not just celebrate successes, but we also celebrate failures. Because if you don't embody that kind of a spread within the organization, there'll be a. People actually won't have the ability to basically take risk. And so we have established, you know, an award system as well, which is based upon these three principles within the marketing team. And I have a quarterly award which is called the ICE Award and it is nominated by the employees. It's not nominated by me or nominated and picked by my direct senior leadership team. It's actually nominated by the team. People know what each of the values actually stand for and they nominate their peers, their, their employees across the board. And the winner is actually picked by the people too. So there is a voting system. So it's for the people, by the people, and that's how we have actually built this. And I also believe that you have to lead by example. For me, the whole thing is management by walking around. No job is small enough. While I might have a fancy title as an SVP and cmo, I would be happy to basically roll up my sleeves and go down and work with upcoming junior product marketing profession and help them out if they need my help. Because I always believe that you have to take accountability and you need to be there to basically help your team. Having said that, you also have to scale as a part of the organization. And so being able to establish a set of nomenclatures with your leadership team gives you that scale. But culture, like I said, is so important and that needs to be really prevalent across the organization.
- [27:16]
Jeremy Bergeron
Wow. Can you take a moment just to brag on your team? I mean, brag on. I mean, clearly there's some epic human beings that are supporting the vision and the growth of the brand. And many of them you get to work with, I'm sure, and lead and serve, like you said, every single day. But tell me about your team. Tell me about the capacity and the ability that they have because there's clearly some magic happening.
- [27:40]
Aruna Ravichantran
Where do I start? So in fact, we are just coming down to our performance evaluation. The hardest thing for me as a manager is that it's really hard to really measure and say one person is better than the other. I have such an amazing team right now. It took me about three plus years to get to where we are right now. But I'll tell you, there is no better place I would rather be than, you know, manage this amazing team which I've actually built from scratch. So let's start with product marketing and the product marketing. So everything starts with a message. Because if you don't get the right message, everything downstream is not going to work, right. So if you activate an ad or whether it is brand or demand, if the message is not there, there is no hook. The customer is not going to click on that ad or the customer. If you have a webinar, the customer is not going to come to the webinar. So everything starts with the messaging and the way my product marketing team functions. They are nimble, they're scrappy and they spend a lot of time really understanding the customer pain points and building a relevant message which is competitive and in part and if not better than what anybody's doing across the scope. So product marketing is where the whole thing starts. And my product marketing team is world class. Then I'll go into the second function which is field marketing. If you had asked me a year and a half ago, you asked about how are we building relationships with CxOs? Our sellers had very strong relationships with the influencers, but did not have relationships with the CIOs and CSOs. They had some, but I would say it was sparingly done, right? Like some pockets of sellers had those relationship, not all of our sellers. And so what we did with our field marketing team is build that rich set of relationship. They pick the right way to actually activate our feed marketing strategy. And so now it runs like a charm and everything is data based. And so, you know, I would give huge kudos to the field marketing team. And again, it is a small and dimple team and I have a regional leader in each of the regions. But the way the team activates and I get the messages I get from my sales team, that doesn't go a week when I don't get A message from a seller. I don't even know where they thank me for the work, which my affiliate marketing team is doing because they work hand in hand with our sales team. That is the level of partnership we have. Then if you think about the demand and performance marketing team and I'm going to combine that with the analytics team, like I said, there are two teams and two leaders who manage the analytics team. The same leader who manages the analytics team also manages webex.com, which is our website. Your website is the brand Persona which everybody actually sees. The level of innovation he's brought to the business as well as the completely redundant stack like we were driving blind without insight. If you had asked me two years ago. Now I can bring up my dashboard, I can slice and dice my data. I have a bi weekly pipeline call with my sales leader where we look at all the various different opportunities. We look at what do we need to do on the marketing side in order to basically help our sales teams. You can do it in quarter as you know, like marketing can basically bring in net new leads. And the sales cycle tends to be for enterprise sales, about six to nine months. But we can run a lot of activities to basically help close the sale. And so that kind of dashboard and insights we never used to have. And so huge kudos to my analytics and web and digital team in order to basically get that out. And then last but not the least, my brand team during the pandemic we lost a tremendous amount of mindshare. WebEx was known as a legacy brand. We lost mind share to a lot of our competitors. But we emerged from there. We transformed ourselves. And it was not just about. If you look@webex.com, we have a completely new brand system. And if you look at the logo, it was very thoughtfully done. And our brand promise is to enable inclusive collaboration for all. And so the whole WebEx logo is like two hands coming together. It is helix at a cross linkage W and the whole brand system, the iconography, the photography, everything was built during the pandemic in 2022. And that is how the new WebEx brand was born. But it's not just about the brand system. It's more than that. The brand team activates all those stories which the product marketing team builds. If you go to our website, you'll see hundreds of customer stories where they actually tell the story in the voice of the customer. Everything we do at events, how we show up, everything you see at various different activation points. We are now going to have a Huge billboard and Times Square. All of that beautiful work is done. I don't have agencies and the team is really proud of the work they do. Everything is done in house by my WebX marketing team.
- [33:00]
Jeremy Bergeron
Wow. So no, no agencies?
- [33:02]
Aruna Ravichantran
Nope. We built the team from scratch.
- [33:05]
Jeremy Bergeron
Has that always been the case or is that only in the last few years?
- [33:08]
Aruna Ravichantran
Last two, three years.
- [33:10]
Jeremy Bergeron
That's pretty incredible, man. Okay, let's talk a little bit about, about WebEx. I want to touch on that. I know you know, WebEx has been at the forefront of enabling work and virtual collaboration, no doubt. How do you ensure that the customer feedback and pain points are really integrated into like new marketing, new features, new services. Like how do you ensure that feedback and those pain points get back into the story of WebEx?
- [33:39]
Aruna Ravichantran
I think if you had asked me like two, three years ago, everything used to be, we used to have regular launches probably once in six months because you have to think about the rest of Cisco. And I used to fit into the largest Cisco machine in terms of activating a message. While we had, you know, we have morphed a message and our storytelling, rebranded everything. One of the important elements is how do you keep the drumroll going. We are one of the world's largest SaaS based products as well. And so, you know, we have now established a regard over the last two years where we have a monthly launch process. And so like clockwork, we have hundreds of customers, analysts and press who basically launchpad on a monthly basis. And that's become our platform in order to continue to morph our story, in order to continue to basically showcase our net new innovations as we bring them to market. In addition to that, we also partake in multiple different industry events. And at each industry event, if it is a tier one launch, we'll come up with something really groundbreaking and we'll activate that. And in addition to that, during the pandemic, WebEx1 was born. WebEx1, like we have Cisco Live, which is Cisco's annual conference within the WebEx business unit. We created our brand new customer conference. And for the first year we had like 10, 15,000 people who joined us virtually. And last year was the first time we went virtual in as a hybrid event. And my events team, I forgot to mention about that team, have a very small team. That team actually leverages small agencies, not large agencies I would say. And last year we had an opportunity to bring 40,000 people who joined us for the two days online and several thousand people who joined us in Los Angeles at our location. And this year WebEx1 is going to be done at the amazing Diplomat Beach Resort in the Miami area. And we're hoping to get more than 40,000 people this year.
- [35:42]
Jeremy Bergeron
Amazing. And you keynoted this last year, didn't you? Didn't you?
- [35:45]
Aruna Ravichantran
I have always keynoted WebEx once. I also keynote a lot of industry events as well. But WebEx1 is our customer conference and that was the first time we did it as a hybrid event, meaning that as an in person event because it was born during the pandemic and at the end of the event, one of the highlights for me and is like I said, I'm a customer oriented cmo. We were able to close multimillion dollar deals because of the event.
- [36:14]
Jeremy Bergeron
Wow. Says a lot about what was done before, during and after. And that's amazing. I'm curious about your dance. With growth and sustaining such high levels of customer satisfaction, I mean, it's clear you truly are obsessed with the customer. How many times you brought my questions right back to the customer. You've trained yourself to be obsessed with the customer in a really interesting way. I love that. I also know that you're working with an incredibly badass ELT and you're balancing the shareholders and you're balancing growth and demands. So there's this dance of like velocity and growth and also sustaining, right, this high, high level of customer satisfaction. How do you dance with those things?
- [37:04]
Aruna Ravichantran
That is the. One of the points, you know, we are leaders. Who we are today is to basically have that balance. You know, you have to basically balance the growth and scale your organization while continuing to basically spearhead innovation. So what I would say is the mentality here within collaboration and you know, the. Jeetu Patel is the executive vice president of both collaboration as well as the security business. For him, again, he is a customer obsessed executor. And so everything you do in the product matters how you basically think. So it's not just about the marketing side, right? Like it has to start with the product. And since he's come into the business, how he has actually changed the name of the game, both on the security as well as the collaboration side, is a story to be told. And he's really obsessed about that particular customer satisfaction and the way we actually operate with our customers, nothing is small enough. The voice of the customer always gets heard. And our customer success teams, we have a customer success team. The level of interaction our customer success teams have with our customers, I've never seen that kind of a collaboration, you know, ever before. So you have, it's the changes have to start with the product it needs to basically move into, you know, the marketing function, the sales function, the support functions, the tap functions. Everybody has to have the same mentality of being able to meet and serve the needs of the customer. And that value system is there across the entire business. And it always starts with the leadership. And like I said, you have to scale and grow. But if you keep that in mind, if, whether you are an engineer, you are a product management person, you are a marketeer, whether you are a customer support person, if you always put your customer first, keep that in the top of your mind, it's not very hard in order to basically actually scale and grow and continue to basically rapidly bring innovation to market.
- [39:11]
Jeremy Bergeron
I love that. It's like, so you bring it back to this very simple yet profound concept of being obsessed with the customer and how that just it infiltrates everything you're doing. I think that's really amazing. Aruna. Cisco recently launched a range of AI powered solutions. Right. I mean, incredible. I want to touch on AI as we have about 10 minutes left. I'm wishing we had another hour, but I know there was a big announcement. The billion dollar global AI investment fund. Really interesting. What can you share around just the driving force behind that initiative? How do you see that big initiative shaping the future of Cisco?
- [39:50]
Aruna Ravichantran
AI is huge for Cisco. So we have launched our own AI assistant, the Cisco AI Assistant to market. And now it is prevalent across all of our underlying technology around networking, security as well as collaboration. And it's going to become forefront for everything we do. But one of the most fundamental things we also care about is to be able to do AI safely. And you saw with the recent thing which recently happened this week, as security is going to become even more important. And so we have established a very clear cut AI framework as well from a security perspective. And everybody here within Cisco also adheres to that. Because while AI is going to basically help you with velocity, with agility and make people much more efficient and increase your productivity, but it also is going to bring an element of security which you have to keep top of mind because you don't know what you don't know. And so here we at Cisco, we definitely are going to focus on AI, but we are going to do it in a way where our customers feel safe about all of the underlying technology which we are actually doing with respect to AI. Now if I can specifically talk about some of the capabilities we have actually brought to market within the collaboration business within WebEx, I would say there are so Many different features which I am in love with because it's completely changed my productivity levels to the next level. So for example, let's say I'm late to a meeting by five minutes because I'm running an errand. No longer do I have to basically join the meeting and have to message my coworker and say, what did I miss? I just can go to the AI assistant and say, catch me up and it'll give me a beautiful summary without even having to ask someone what I missed in the last 15 minutes. Or let's say I went on vacation and I want to catch up and who wants to listen to those long recordings? Now I can watch a movie trailer of that particular meeting and it'll give me a one minute highlight summary on what I actually invest. And if I missed opportunity to basically message with people. Now I'm in this podcast with you and I missed one hour of my messages which have happened. And in one hour there'll be a whole bunch of spaces which will light up and you're like, oh my God, which one should I Basically, so I can go to the AI assistant and say, give me a summary of all the spaces where my name was mentioned. Give me the action items which were called out for me. So it'll give me a very clear cut summary and which will help me prioritize which are the important spaces I needed to act on immediately. Right. So those are some of the innovations which are now built into our portfolio, which we already have out there. And then if you look at an adjacent market we play in, which is in the contact center world, this is about providing phenomenal customer service. When you call into anything with respect to a product. That is another area where AI is going to play a huge role. And we are going to unveil some groundbreaking innovations at our upcoming conference, WebEx1. And I hope everybody's going to register and watch what we're actually going to unveil and bring to market with AI.
- [43:08]
Jeremy Bergeron
Okay, when is WebEx1 happening?
- [43:11]
Aruna Ravichantran
October 21 through 24. And if you go to webex1.com the online registration is not up as of now, but the physical registration is live. And so if anybody wants to join, the online registrations will open by early September.
- [43:28]
Jeremy Bergeron
Amazing. Okay, you touched into some things that I'm like excited about because you're giving me real utility when it comes to AI and your role as a marketing leader. This is what I've been so curious about. When I get folks like you in the show on the show is like how are you using it in your day to day as a leader? How is it augmenting any other thing that you're thinking about? I also think about your specific background, Aruna. Right. You have this technical background which makes you a really interesting developer and left brain thinker. And then you have the creative marketing leader in you. And now you have ChatGPT and Claude and some of these LLMs. What other ways are you finding it to be utility for you in your role? How are you using any of these tools to be helpful in addition to what you just mentioned, summarizing meetings, all that stuff. Amazing. Anything else that you're finding has been as helpful to you in just day to day Being a leader, being a marketing leader plus AI messaging is another important.
- [44:26]
Aruna Ravichantran
Right? Like how many, if you think about your 10 or 8 hours per day you're actually working, in, what part of your day is about texting or messaging with someone or writing something, an email? That's another area where AI is going to play a tremendous role. And definitely for me, as things get tough, people's tempers start to rise, everybody gets tired and now AI can help you with that too. So one of the core fundamental things which I told you in terms of culture is empathy, ice. And so I've definitely leveraged AI, I would say to basically help me out as my day gets longer and longer and as I start to lose team across the board. And before I type out a message, I can bring up AI and I can ask it to help me to set the tone of the message. Right. So instead of being short with someone which you could have preferred previously, now you can basically ask AI to help you with lessen the tone of your message. You can ask it to help you to make the message professional. And so there are other interesting ways where you can actually leverage AI to basically give you velocity and agility as you conduct business.
- [45:44]
Jeremy Bergeron
Incredible. Are you finding any challenge around the hallucination inaccuracy component? Right. Obviously it's not quite near 100% yet. Sometimes the information is like, is not accurate. Sometimes it's very helpful and accurate. How do you navigate that? Part of just. Okay, if I'm using this tool, there is an element that I need to make sure that it's got some consistency there.
- [46:05]
Aruna Ravichantran
I only use our Cisco's own, you know, chatgpt tool.
- [46:10]
Jeremy Bergeron
Okay, okay.
- [46:11]
Aruna Ravichantran
And, and so I trust that because it's based upon our data. And then though when I talked about the typing the message, the AI assistant is built into webassembly. I Have the ability to do it automatically. I don't have to go to ChatGPT. Right within when I'm messaging with someone, I can just bring up the AI assistant if I choose to do so, in order to basically help me with the message, change the context of the message because it's automatically built into the product.
- [46:36]
Jeremy Bergeron
Ah, okay. Okay. So looking ahead, what are some of the key trends, opportunities, like what do you see for Cisco in the next few years and how are you preparing to capitalize on them?
- [46:51]
Aruna Ravichantran
I would say specifically talking about my domain. The two domains which are really going to see major transformation. With respect, I think all markets are going to get a lot of help with respect to AI, but I think security is going to have the biggest boost because AI is going to bring in net new security issues which for which potentially there are. There has to be solutions. So I think security is going to become a very important trend, but outside security, which is not in my domain, I would say on the collaboration side, the AI tools are going to play a big role in terms of being able to help people with the productivity part, bringing in much more agility, bringing in much more scale, especially for marketeers. Being able to have a lot of AI tools to basically help you with your content creation, whether it is image creation, whether it is, you know, an ad creation or a video creation. We actually use, you know, some of the Adobe tools, the AI tools. Because I don't have agencies, we were basically jamming with my creative director. I wanted to basically set the direction for this year's WebEx one. We were able to come up with three different concepts using AI and then we picked one of the concepts and that is what is going to be built by my brand and creative team in house. Right. So what would have taken an agency a couple of weeks? We were able to do it in three days, come up with three concepts, finalize on the concept, and then give it to our creative team to take it to the next step. How cool is that? So I think that AI is going to play a tremendous role in all aspects of marketing. But my caution is that you have to be careful in terms because that data becomes somebody else's data. And so being able to exercise AI in a secure way is going to become very important and relevant in the market.
- [48:39]
Jeremy Bergeron
Agreed. I love that. Well said. As a final note, Aruna and it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I mean, I know I speak for myself and the production team. I mean, your insights into Cisco strategies and how you approach marketing leadership like there's no doubt you are obsessed with with the customer and really inspiring. Incredible to just have you in our midst. So thank you for being here and sharing your journey and a huge shout out to the whole Cisco family. Really appreciate you being a part of marketing trends.
- [49:09]
Aruna Ravichantran
Jeremy thank you for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that your viewers will find it helpful and useful too. Thank you so much.
- [49:30]
Jeremy Bergeron
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