Case Study: Cisco’s marketing team transforms its business with Domo

This was a sponsored post by Domo under the Master Report series.

Cisco’s recent US$50 million investment in software technology has earned its marketing team accolades and industry awards – placing the company on the leading edge of B2B technology marketing. Cisco’s partnership with Domo as its marketing transformation partner shows how marketers can be a change agent for business transformation.

The problem

Cisco was in the middle of transitioning its business model from hardware provider to software and services delivery. As with any large enterprise, it grappled with common issues such as lack of systems integration, poor data visibility and low employee engagement.

“We reached a point where our technology stack needed to operate as a unified system. Everybody was investing in their own systems, but we needed to orchestrate the customer experience at scale across multiple touch-points,” said Chad Reese, Cisco’s director of marketing technology. The company also struggled with breaking the perception that marketing was merely a creative component of the business. In truth, marketers were crucial for driving revenue, increasing ROI and solving fundamental business issues with a strong technology platform and data methodology at hand.

“We needed to turn marketing into a rational science, so it’s imperative that we know which content and activities are performing well and which are not. If we can understand what’s going on digitally, marketing and sales will together be able to increase mindshare, increase sales and drive better outcomes for customers,” said Joseph Puthussery, VP of digital marketing at Cisco.

The solution

Domo is one of Cisco’s nine core marketing platforms. Its visual layer ties all systems together, giving more than 1,000 Cisco marketers a single place to view, collaborate around and make decisions based on their data. Almost all of Cisco’s marketing systems feed into Domo, including third-party and external vendors. In total, Domo handles more than 500 million rows of data for Cisco.

“Domo is dynamic and fast. It democratises data and puts control into the hands of users. It gives other organisations and teams the ability to build their own dashboards, find their own insights and collaborate around the data,” said Rune Olslund, senior director of omni-channel marketing at Cisco.

The results

The results have been exciting for Cisco. With data displayed in a clear visual format, real-time visibility has enabled decision-makers to forecast customer behaviour, predict demand and make strategic decisions based on actionable data.

“Domo offered unprecedented, complete visibility into what’s working and what’s not. It is extremely comprehensive. I have my business at my fingertips,” Olslund said.

Though Domo’s adoption is largely driven by marketing, Cisco’s in-house IT fully supports the platform. The strong partnership between IT and marketing means Domo is the only cloud vendor within Cisco that has full data security clearance to ingest any data, including revenue data.

“We’ll continue to invest in Domo, and I’m particularly excited about incorporating more machine learning and identifying the right balance of computer versus human-orchestrated experiences to continue serving our customers better,” said Karen Walker, Cisco’s chief marketing officer.

Read also:

The Master Report: Digital transformation – easier said than done

Digital Transformation: Why should marketing take the lead?