Kirsten Cox on how to build a long-term marketing strategy for sustainable future growth

The VP EMEA marketing for ServiceNow is focused on translating the explosion in organic demand for the workflow SaaS platform into a sustainable, long-term growth strategy

If you build a better mousetrap, the old marketing wisdom goes, then the world will beat a path to your door. If you develop a cheese that makes every pre-existing mousetrap irresistible to rodents, then the world will get to your door even faster.

That’s the situation in which ServiceNow has found itself over the last year. The cloud-based platform enables customers to develop workflows that cut through complex IT systems and make it simpler for a business to get full value from the tech it’s already invested in. At a time of economic uncertainty, that’s a proposition with real appeal – and it’s creating a welcome set of challenges for ServiceNow’s VP EMEA marketing, Kirsten Cox.

“Companies are looking to make the most of the investments they’ve already made in big legacy systems,” explains Cox. “They want to be able to transform these for the future without having to rebuild them all. We’re adding this value layer that enables companies to get the benefits they need: employee workflows that onboard people easily, customer workflows that cover the entire lifecycle. ServiceNow started off as a particular solution for IT service desks, but our proposition of making the world work better is actually very broad. Our platform delivers on the desire to reduce time to business value, and our main challenge is managing the demand for that.”

Putting the long-term marketing foundations in place

That task involves looking to the longer term, and building a marketing strategy that ensures ServiceNow’s explosion of organic demand translates into sustainable future growth. “My job at the moment is to make sure we’ve got a really strong foundation – making sure we’ve got the right people in the right places, focused on the right objectives,” says Cox. “It’s about accelerating some key areas like vertical-specific marketing, building up industry use-cases and elevating the conversation around business value by getting across key decision-makers and buying centers.”

Cox knows that the understanding of ServiceNow that IT departments already have isn’t the same understanding that other business decision-makers will need. Addressing that requires her brand to show up in different places – and in different ways.

“Marketing involves going to the watering holes where risk and compliance people gather, or people who are interested in sustainability or HR challenges,” she says. “Once there, we need to become part of their business conversation, because they don’t want to hear traditional software marketing about a new version of our platform with new capabilities. They want to hear about the challenges that other customer service leaders are having, for example. They want to hear about what their peers are doing in their industry. It sounds a bit retro, but the best way we’ve found to share our story is by showing what it looks like. We do a lot of demonstrations to help create the vision, both in-person and through digital channels.”

Those demonstrations provide an obvious touchpoint to align marketing with sales. It’s a relationship that Cox has focused on throughout her career – but which she looks at in a richer, more multi-dimensional way than previous B2B marketers might have done.

Existing to support sales – but not just in visible ways

“I think it was my first ever job when my CMO told me that the only reason marketing exists is to help sales – and today we are really focused on what we need to do to support our sales organization,” she says. “However, it’s about the total value that we can bring, rather than just the visible things like the number of leads or the number of people who turn up to an event. At the very top level it’s about using branding and awareness and thought leadership to make sure the ServiceNow brand is known for something before they walk in the door. It’s about introducing new customers into the mix and creating opportunities for connections that didn’t exist before. And because we’re a Software as a Service (SaaS) business based on recurring revenue, we also have to keep customers engaged and motivated and leveraging even more of our platform’s capabilities for impact.”

Quantifying all of these different contributions to revenue is, of course, one of the great challenges in marketing. It’s one that Cox tackles with a discerning approach to the data points that matter – and why they matter.

“Marketing is traditionally measured on what we create: engagements, pipeline, opportunities,” she says. “But sales is measured on what closes – and it’s really important to bring those two things closer together. It can’t be one metric like how many leads we’ve produced – because those leads might deliver absolutely nothing at the end of the sales cycle. There are so many things we can measure now, huge lakes of customer data, prospect data and engagement data, but I’m a huge believer in choosing the three things that are really going to help us drive the right behaviors and settling on those. What are the insights? What’s the data telling me? That’s the real capability that I want to see in marketers.”

Hiring for character and creativity

Nurturing the right skills and characteristics has been an increasing focus for Cox over the course of a career that included leadership positions at CA Technologies and VMware before joining ServiceNow in June 2021. “The transition to leadership for me is that marketing becomes all about people,” she says. “Leadership is really about hiring, retaining and developing the right talent – because with that, you can handle any situation. Of course, we hire for marketing competencies, but it’s really more about the will than the skill. We want to take on people who aren’t going to say to us, ‘well we’ve done that before and it doesn’t work.’ We want to take on people who are creative and engaged, provocative and thoughtful, and ready to put on new lenses when it comes to how to engage our audiences.”