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Susan Vanin, Director of Global Marketing Operations at Juniper Networks, came to visit us here at Allocadia recently, and she was kind enough to give a presentation to our entire staff. Juniper is a $5 billion networking infrastructure provider and was one of our first enterprise customers; we started working with Juniper Networks back in 2011.
Susan is what we would call at Allocadia a true marketing futurist and change agent. She is also a seasoned Allocadia product expert — many of our software’s features have been guided by input from Susan and her team. We’ve learned a lot from her over the years, and this visit was no exception.
Here are some of the business lessons that this visit from Susan reaffirmed for us:
Be Mindful of the Journey
One of the ideas Susan talked about was how it’s vital to remember that your customers are on a journey. While many of your customers have similar pain points and challenges that need to be solved, the stories and situations surrounding them vary tremendously.
Because of that, it’s crucial to empower customers to be the internal change agents in the best way that we can. It’s not always an easy task — Allocadia affects the jobs of not just a handful of people, but the whole marketing organization. But the better we understand the journey the customer is on, the better chance we have to helping them solve their business challenges.
Build a Chain of Trust
Relationships are built on trust — it’s that simple. Fostering trust as you work together is key for success. Everyone invests time, money and reputation capital in each other and the solution, all the way up and down the line.
Juniper Networks chose to trust Allocadia, but that started internally at Juniper, when the CMO had trusted the marketing ops team to choose the right solution for the entire marketing organization. We have similar values and strengths — Juniper considers itself a challenger brand in its industry, and so do we — and that helped us align our goals and trust each other. And now, Juniper Networks continues to trust our customer success team daily in its journey along the path to performance.
How does an organization build this chain of trust? A lot of companies try to establish “authenticity” as a value, but it’s something you either have or you don’t. Susan says it wasn’t just Allocadia’s uptime, domain knowledge or software features that won her trust. It was our authenticity, responsiveness and willingness to work with her to meet Juniper’s needs that cemented our relationship.
The relationship we have with Juniper Networks is an excellent model for all business relationships: The best learning comes from customers. The better we help them along their journey, the more we can learn from them. Having Susan visit and talk to the Allocadia team was a great way to reinforce these important ideas about customer relationships.
We thank Susan again for her time in coming to talk to our team.
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