TrustRadius Trust Talks: Cisco’s Strategy to Attract the Self-Serve Buyer
Meet customers on their terms, with the content they want.
It’s no secret that Cisco makes listening to their customers a priority, but did you know that they also champion the customer perspective in their marketing? They truly believe activating the voice of the customer in their marketing is the best way to attract, retain, and expand customers. They maintain an active and orchestrated presence on the major review platforms and they syndicate quotes from customer reviews extensively to their website and other owned channels. In fact, they calculated that prospective buyers spent over 40,000 hours reading their TrustRadius reviews per year.
Rebecca Stone serves as both SVP, Cisco Customer Solutions Marketing, as well as CMO for Cisco Meraki. Rebecca currently uses customer voice and advocacy programs as an integral part of her overall marketing strategy to shape the narrative for a broader unified story across the entire Cisco organization.
TrustRadius’ Trust Talks series highlights B2B executives’ approach to building a culture of listening to customers, activating the customer voice, and creating a customer-driven company.
In this TrustTalk, TrustRadius’ Founder and CEO, Vinay Bhagat, sat down with Rebecca to discuss how Cisco uses the voice of the customer in their marketing to attract, retain, and expand today’s self-serve buyer.
“Build a marketing plan that allows them to come [to you] at their pace … Meet them on their own terms with the type of content they want.” —Rebecca Stone
Our Speakers
Rebecca Stone
SVP, Cisco Customer Solutions Marketing & CMO, Cisco Meraki
Rebecca Stone is the Senior Vice President of Customer Solutions Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer of Cisco Meraki. In this dual role, she is responsible for messaging, positioning and product marketing activity across Cisco’s portfolio and she oversees the global marketing team at Cisco Meraki.
With more than 20 years of marketing expertise, Rebecca is intently focused on demonstrating the value and return of marketing programs on sales. She has consistently demonstrated 5-10x growth in marketing-generated pipeline using strategies grounded in solid marketing fundamentals.
Prior to joining Cisco Meraki, Rebecca held marketing leadership roles for SaaS technology start-ups. Most recently, Rebecca was the Vice President of Marketing at LiveRamp, where she was responsible for product marketing, lead generation, sales development and marketing communications programs.
Rebecca holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from University of California, Santa Barbara and lives in Marin County with her husband and daughters.
Vinay Bhagat
Founder and CEO, TrustRadius
Vinay conceived TrustRadius after experiencing challenges when buying enterprise solutions at his last company. He founded Convio in 1999, the leading SaaS platform for nonprofits. In April 2010, Convio became a public company, and was acquired in May 2012 for $325 million. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he graduated as a Baker Scholar, an MS Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University, and a MA Engineering Information Sciences from Cambridge University with First Class Honors.