In the age of conscious-technology, it may come as no surprise that digital marketing has true potential to transform and revolutionize traditional businesses. Unfortunately, few enterprises succeed in utilizing and adopting this media to generate better sales leads for amplifying market growth and capital influx. Marie Klok Crump, the Chief Marketing Officer of DATUM, LLC commands a significant influence of digital media on the modern business landscape. According to her, today’s digital media is the key pillar in technology sales, because it is the way customers expect to engage with vendors. From a lead-to-revenue management perspective, digital marketing has become the pivotal method for engaging with a trusted brand.
Having an impressive academic portfolio and a well-rounded background of business strategy and execution, Marie has played instrumental leadership positions for renowned high growth companies. Her experiences and contributions span productizing information management services into software solutions, formulating, and forging strategic alliances with major software companies such as SAP, and building strong authentic brands through organic nurturing. Marie has also developed communications strategies and formal relations with analyst organizations, lead sales territories for software as well as technology enabled services sales across a wide range industry verticals, and managed operations and finance as well as international expansion.
Serving as the CMO of DATUM, Marie provides the leadership, management and vision necessary to ensure that DATUM has the proper brand identity, strategic marketing presence and alliances, lead generation and growth strategy to ensure the company’s financial strength and operational efficiency.
Trip down Marie’s Professional Voyage
After finishing her Master’s degree from the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark in Business Administration and International Marketing & Management, Marie possessed a sound understanding of all the business elements. However, as she expresses it “getting your business degree is like getting your driver’s license. Not until you get behind the wheel and test your driving skills in all conditions, do you really learn to be a good driver. Theory and studying other people’s experiences is valuable and becomes amplified when you add the practical experience”. For the CMO of DATUM, this involved getting comfortable in driving hard negotiations, in-depth financial models, learning new technologies and systems, and bringing people along on a vision.
Marie’s favorite part of her job is enabling a team of highly collaborative and capable people in building and marketing products. Leveraging all resources of an organization to focus and deliver on customer experience require tight feedback and knowledge sharing across organizational functions.
Improving DATUM’s Sales and Marketing Capabilities
During the initial days, the team of DATUM enjoyed strong customer referrals and a low cost of marketing. However, the era of digital revolution shifted the traditional marketing strategies for sales and lead generation into building and operating a digital marketing platform. As Marie and her team recognized this paradigm shift in enterprise sales and the impact of digital marketing, they focused on eliminating hand-off points between team members, integration of marketing automation tools and CRM tools and eliminating the traditional barrier between sales and marketing. By merging inside sales with marketing, the overall sales and marketing team became a cohesive unit all focused on the same end-goal; revenue and delighting the customer.
A collaborative effort between sales, product management and marketing makes the world of difference in responding to market changes and demands in a way that can have measurable impact on in-flight opportunities as well as early pipeline opportunities.
With efficient team interactions and tighter feedback loop, everyone from the sales and marketing team of DATUM were able to respond quickly to the market needs. While emphasizing traction measured by revenue, Marie and her team can tweak campaigns and interactions much faster, resulting in more efficient marketing spend and better qualified opportunities. The dynamic CMO always looks for the “why” to better understand the trends and how it will ultimately impact revenue and customer growth. Hence, Marie and her team of versatile individuals tie all these metrics together with tight inbound and digital programs, which helps them identify the data needed for everyone to work as a high growth team.
Embracing Holistic Approach with Fluent Customer Experience
Placing the customer experience at the absolute center of everything, Marie and her team have taken a holistic approach in personal interactions, which helped DATUM engage customers through digital channels as well.
According to the well-versed CMO of DATUM, so much of the communication between vendor and customer takes place before there is a person-to-person connection, so it is important to understand the personas, the buyers’ journey, the motivations, and the triggers. Subsequently, there is a real need to capture all this in solid marketing automation tools that link in with CRM and other key systems in the company. Following a detailed methodology, Marie believes that marrying the art and science in marketing means to be deliberate about the data collection along the way to better inform the activities and truly determine if there are valuable outcomes and results and not just a lot of activity.
Marie’s Proudest Achievement in her Professional Life
Everyone has an impactful professional achievement that they are genuinely proud of during their career. For Marie, her proudest career achievement till date cannot be measured at one point in time. Rather, it is the culmination of identifying a market, predicting the trajectory of that market, and setting a strategy for how to capture that market to finally turn around years later and realize the predictions were sound and the team executed well on the thesis and the challenges along the way. She further adds, “Being part of a team that set out to be a market maker and ultimately culminated with a position as a market leader determined by the most credible voices in the market, will long be one of my proudest achievements.”
