Interview with Sheila Mori, Chief Marketing Officer, CoveoWelcome, Sheila! Could you please share your marketing journey and how it influences your decision-making as the CMO at Coveo?I started my career in 2000 at Procter & Gamble in the sales department. I worked there for 2 years and then joined L’Oréal for a position as the Assistant Product Manager for Garnier Fructis. I worked at L’Oréal from 2002 to 2014 in Montreal and Paris. I touched on many types of positions in marketing, sales, category management, trade marketing, brand, product creation, and more. I learned everything at L’Oréal. It’s an incredible marketing school!Then I worked for Danone for 3 years before joining Cirque du Soleil, first in brand and strategy, then as CMO (interim). I’ve been with Coveo since January 2021.Because I’ve worked in several types of industries (CPG, Entertainment, Tech) and worked several jobs (marketing, sales, category management, trade marketing, brand, and product creation), I’m more of a generalist CMO. I can touch on anything and adapt to any situation very quickly. I’m used to working in fast-paced environments. I’ve always been motivated by growth and transformation. The status quo is not for me!What has been the common uphill battle for CMOs of B2B organizations in the past year?An important one was Digital Transformation. Before Covid, a lot of B2B business was done in person. During the pandemic, we searched for new ways to find leads to grow our pipeline without live events. Many B2B organizations are still grappling with the need to adapt to the new digital landscape effectively. This includes implementing digital marketing strategies, optimizing online sales funnels, and leveraging technology to better engage with customers.Data and Analytics: We need to base our decisions on data. What messaging is working? What initiatives should we stop doing? What should we double down on? What is the return on our investment? The data exists. There’s no reason to drive blindly anymore. This is something that’s very important to me.Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Some B2B organizations have adopted ABM strategies to target specific high-value accounts. Effectively implementing ABM requires aligning sales and marketing teams, account lists, personalized messaging, and account-specific campaigns. At Coveo, we started our ABM journey officially last year. We have embarked on a major transformation that will take several years to complete. The idea is to modernize the way we do B2B marketing so we don’t get bogged down in forms to fill, MQLs, and leads.SEO and Content Marketing: Creating compelling and relevant content for B2B audiences remains challenging. CMOs and their content teams have to develop content that addresses the specific pain points and needs of their target audience while showcasing the value of their products or services. This content needs to fit the SEO strategy so we can win from an organic standpoint. There are so many areas we need to cover — we need the right strategy, the right data, and the right prioritization. AI can also be a great help in creating this content.Adapting to new technology and rapid changes in the market: This year, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and alternatives have taken the world by storm. We had to react and react fast. Thanks to the fact that Coveo is very quick to adapt and was already very advanced in the field of LLMs — in addition to its 10 years of experience in AI — we were able to announce our generative AI offer very quickly. We like to say that we were the last to hype but the first to have a real product with real tangible results. We successfully changed our entire marketing plan over the course of 1 month.How does Coveo enable businesses to “personalize everything” through its AI platform?Large tech-enabled companies have been able to deliver remarkable, effortless, relevant experiences tailored specifically to the individual and designed for maximum consumer satisfaction.Their tools are massive amounts of data, powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as armies of data scientists and engineers.The results? An understanding of who people are on an individual level. These companies know what we want and where we came from and can even predict where we’re going next. They use this rich understanding of us to deliver relevant, personalized digital experiences at scale. These experiences put people first, not products. They’re tailored for persons, not personas.This is what we do at Coveo.Because delivering relevance and personalization at scale absolutely requires AI.Being relevant to one million individuals by manually writing rules is simply not humanly possible. But it is possible with AI. It is possible with Coveo AI.The Coveo Relevance Cloud is a world-leading AI platform specifically built to…Head over to read the full interview…
https://medium.com/@martech-edge/martech-edge-interview-with-sheila-mori-chief-marketing-officer-coveo-491e28ede917
MarTech Edge Interview with Sheila Mori, Chief Marketing Officer, Coveo | by MarTech Edge | Aug, 2023
