“Not all inventions are the right solutions, even if with the right intentions. Companies who quickly jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon may have found unwanted results from this, in particular, the exposing of sensitive, proprietary information – a risk to the business.”
Hi, Janet. Welcome to the Interview Series. Please tell us about your role at Rimini Street.
As the VP of Global Brand, Content & Communications, my team and I own the success of our corporate brand which includes brand expression, brand experience, content, communications, events, as well as creative and digital services for both external and internal audiences.
I also have the honor of serving as the Committee Chair of the Rimini Street Foundation, our company-funded philanthropic program led by employees across the globe, which I founded in 2015 with the support of the company.
As a CMO, how do you stay updated about the latest technologies and trends related to your industry?
Information is readily available at our fingertips, but so is misinformation. To stay up to date on the latest, I read, watch, listen and connect to various sources – on and offline – to get both a general sense of what’s happening out there, but also to help me distinguish between what may or may not be factual.
At Rimini Street, we have many subject matter experts and technology enthusiasts who I continuously learn from. And, in my role, I also connect with clients, analysts, journalists, investors and a wide range of professionals in many regions, where I gain a broader perspective of what’s trending, what’s top of mind, and what’s as factual as Skittles rain.
Another great source of information are young children. I’m curious to know what technology my nephews and nieces are glued to, what my friends’ kids are using to connect, and what they think is possible to solve with technology.
What types of content do you create and subscribe to, in your marketing roadmap for –
– Sales Enablement
– Customer Experience Management
– Events and Webinars
My team partners with functions across the company to identify what assets and resources we need to create or to uplevel, to ensure we reach our business goals, ease change management, and deliver extraordinary experiences to our external and internal audiences.
With Sales Enablement, it may be a series of creatives, in video, print or digital format, to help the educators deliver their message effectively, or to help the learners absorb the message effectively through various mediums. Everyone learns differently, so we keep this in mind when producing materials to support the team’s requests.
For Customer Experience Management, the Global Client Engagement, Global Service Delivery, and IT team are launching the latest and greatest client portal which merges multiple technologies and features and delivers a unique and highly valuable platform for various ticketing and tracking services. We are assisting with its branding, change management communications, and helping to enhance the user experience.
For Events & Webinars, we’re always evolving our aesthetics, virtual and in-person brand experiences, fine-tuning processes, and exploring new technologies that can help differentiate our webinar experiences from competitors.
How do you measure the success of your Marketing efforts? Which martech and sales tech tools due to you currently use to reach your ICPs?
Some are easier to track than others, but gathering and analyzing data before and after a marketing project to measure effectiveness is very important to my team. It may not be a tool directly in our house, but when making decisions on which vendors or channels to invest in, interviewing third-party options that offer objective data may be quite useful.
For example, we are about to launch our new commercial across multiple TV channels. How do you know if it reached your target audience, and what should you be looking for to signal that it has? We engaged with a media-buying agency that provides data on reach, guaranteed placements, and other info that we can then compare against w**********, inbound inquiries, or other notable spikes in interest. Some may be more long-term trends to watch for, such as an increase in Share of Voice (SoV).
What is the most influential factor in your corporate marketing efforts? How do you use AI and automation in Marketing to your IT customers and partners?
As a technology service provider that helps our clients reach their business goals, the most influential factor in our corporate marketing efforts is our prospects and clients. Acutely understanding what challenges they are facing in their respective industries, what the macro and microeconomic, geopolitical movements are that steer their strategies, what their short and long-term vision is for their organization or for their specific function, all helps us in our plans to amplify the right message, at the right time.
Internally, we use our patented and patent pending AI tools to deliver resolution for tickets 23% faster, provide additional insights and predictions and proactively assist our clients. Externally, we are exploring various AI and automation solutions and solutions providers who can help us achieve our own business goals and drive top and bottom-line growth.
The partner economy has changed significantly in the last 4 years. How is Rimini Street staying ahead of its competitors by forging new partnerships?
Client success is the core of Rimini Street, and, so we are always evolving our partner programs to deliver unique solutions that solve complex, and/or critical needs such as cybersecurity. We engage in partnerships both on the corporate and global scale, and some partnerships may be specific to a region based on the needs of the business or our clients.
There are always exciting activities happening in this space, so be on the lookout for more news ahead!
Last year, Rimini Street revealed in its survey that CIOs and CTOs are fighting for authority over their current IT roadmap for software vendors. Could you please shed some light on how you keep the two forces together to meet the CX and service expectations?
With technological advancements happening at incredible speeds, CIOs and CTOs hold great power in their ability to influence the direction and investments needed for the business. Working together, they must be able to bring to life, the board and C-suite vision by way of technology tools and platforms in a timeline that makes sense for the business. When the vision, strategy, and resource goals are agreed upon by stakeholders, the vendors then should be brought in to help show a path forward to achieve this, not the other way around.
Our survey showed that software vendors often dictate “when” a customer should upgrade to a new release or migrate to the cloud without a clear ROI, and this causes unnecessary stress to the IT and Finance leaders. Rimini Street, by offering high value and choice in the software support and services market, we empower our clients to ask “why” when asked “when,” and to do so confidently knowing they have a trusted partner who can help them achieve their business goals, innovate boldly, and benefit from quality software support, guaranteed.
What has changed in the IT Marketing landscape since the launch of ChatGPT? How did you prepare for this massive AI disruption at Rimini Street?
Not all inventions are the right solutions, even if with the right intentions. Companies who quickly jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon may have found unwanted results from this, in particular, the exposing of sensitive, proprietary information – a risk to the business.
There are interesting use cases where ChatGPT can help speed up searches or time to reach the right department to speak with. At Rimini Street, where we already have a guaranteed SLA of 10 minutes or less for priority cases but actually have a human primary support engineer call back in less than 90 seconds, we’re ahead of the game!
I’ll take RMNIChat over ChatGPT any day!
What should be the marketing approach toward developing and enforcing organizational security policies in the SaaS market?
Empathy.
Cybersecurity is downright scary, and it shakes up our feeling of safety to know companies, hospitals, municipalities, agencies, and so on, are under constant attack. There is no single solution to this crime on the rise, so I personally believe in a multi-dimensional security approach to protecting your assets – physical, virtual, on-prem or in the Cloud.
Humans are the weakest access points to cybersecurity vulnerabilities, so working closely together with employees, clients, partners, vendors, and everyone in your greater ecosystem to protect your digital assets is key.
No one wants to be a victim, so help one another understand its importance, to take part in change management, to remain vigilant, and to commit fully to best security practices.
Read More: CIO Influence Interview with Meredith Stowell, Vice President of IBM Z Ecosystem
What is your advice to the marketing professionals working in enterprise SaaS and IT domains – what has kept you motivated so far in Marketing leadership?
What a great time to be in this space! Everything is constantly changing, evolving, and being reinvented. I still remember days before this thing called the “world wide web” (omg, I’m d***** myself here – lol), and the changes in human behavior that have come since. Since then, the speed in which the world is adopting new technologies is incredible.
But at the end of the day, we are all humans. And we still have core human behavioral traits and desires that remain a constant. So as marketers, we need to strike that perfect balance between filling a human need and promoting our offerings, which is part science and art. And who doesn’t love a good challenge?
Lighter notes
One thing you remember about your employee(s)
I chat and connect with all my team members very frequently and have a team chat going at all times to share gratitude, celebrate our wins, applaud outstanding achievements, and share fun memes too. During our 1:1s, team meetings, and gatherings is where I pick up what I think is most important: What makes their faces light up?
It can be a hobby, their family, a favorite activity, pets, specific work-related projects, etc. Once you know what sparks joy for them, then you can channel that further to discover where they shine most.
For example, one of our content writers was assigned as a general copywriter, covering ad copy, eBooks, product messages, and more. When I had the pleasure of taking over the content function, I noticed she always had on a big smile whenever we talked about the impact of our services to clients. She now is dedicated to telling client stories, interviewing them directly, writing case studies of their success, partnering with the creative and communications functions to amplify the story, and that smile is now a permanent ray of sunshine magnified by a million megawatts!
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Thank you, Janet! That was fun and we hope to see you back on the CIO Influence Interview Series soon
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]
serves as VP, Marketing Brand, Content, and Communications, as well as committee chair of the Rimini Street Foundation. In these roles, she is responsible for amplifying Rimini Street’s extraordinary story through expert strategy, execution, and management of all brand expression, communications, and global events. This mission includes brand experience, content and creative services, public and analyst relations, client storytelling, and the engagement of employees through the creation of culture-rich programs.
Rimni Street is a global provider of end-to-end enterprise software support, products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software and a Salesforce and AWS partner.
