Kyle Christensen, VP, Marketing, Invoca
At Salesforce in the mid-Aughts, Christensen was among employees confounded by Marc Benioff’s move to the cloud. “Marc was all about it. ‘Cloud, that’s the word,’ he’d say,” Christensen recalls. “Others thought it was a fad, but it turned out to be an entirely new way to sell contact management solutions. The stones on that guy! I learned from him to think big, and then think bigger.” That’s what Christensen is doing with call analytics and attribution at Invoca. “People are giving Facebook and Google credit for the calls they’re driving, but what’s lost is the customer voice experience and what happens after they call,” he says.
Defining moment: Learning the power of positioning at Salesforce. Launching the Service Cloud product line in 2009, we pinned our entire positioning around social media as a component of customer service. That changed the game for us.
Words to live by: “Think bigger.” Too often, we impose limitations on our own thinking. We come up with excuses and reasons for why we can’t do something bigger.
Strategy shift: For Invoca, the rate of mobile engagement with our digital marketing is off the charts, so we started investing in ways to allow for easier conversion on landing pages with mobile-optimized forms, as well as easier connections with call-now buttons.
Up next: We’re using predictive data technologies to proactively identify and prescreen high-potential accounts that we can target with additional marketing dollars.
Advice to young marketers: To really be successful with direct marketing, you need to understand the complete system: how PR drives awareness, which translates into Web visits, which initiates content consumption. The more you know about each part of the process that ends in a sale, the better you’ll be at your job.
–Al Urbanski
