How to Create a Seamless Customer Experience

I'm Meagen Eisenberg and I am the CMO at MongoDB. We are a modern open source database for mission-critical applications. We love being the database for giant ideas. 

You haven't taken—what I would call—the normal path to becoming a CMO in the tech field. Can you explain that path you took and how it helped you get to where you are today?
I started out in computer science / MIS at Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo and worked as an IT engineer for a couple of years at Cisco Systems. I quickly saw that most management at Cisco had MBA's, so I went back to school to get mine at Yale School of Management. 

During my time there, I switched from a finance focus to marketing. It's good to figure out what you are good at sooner rather than later. I was quick to see that I was not going to be the leading finance expert in my class, but marketing for tech was an area I could accelerate in. 

After getting my MBA, I joined IBM. They had a marketing leadership development program where I learned a lot about product marketing. Product marketing is really about understanding your customer, their persona, and why they buy your product. Then presenting your product in a digestible way. You have to understand the pain you’re solving and then arm your sales team to talk with the customer. 

I think that was a really good foundation on the marketing side to then move into the programs and demand gen side of things. That's where I became comfortable with different marketing tools, starting with Eloqua and Salesforce.

As I've made my path to CMO, I’ve learned that companies need someone who knows more than product and brand marketing. They also need an expert in demand gen, building pipeline, and partnering with the sales team.

You brought up going back to get your MBA. I read an article a few days ago (the article is a couple years old now) that features Elon Musk explaining that he’s not the biggest fan of the MBA. You having gone through for yours, what do you think about that?
Well, I don't necessarily know the background of the article, but for me, it's been a key part of my success. It's helped me take a step back and look at companies I've worked for as a whole. 

As you grow in your career, success is more about collaborating, solving problems, and understanding what the business needs. Understanding what the rest of the business needs to be successful and knowing your role is important. Yale School of Management gave me an amazing foundation to be successful in almost any business venture.

Now shifting to the topic of the day... the 'modern' customer experience. What about the customer experience has changed over the last decade?
There's certainly a few things that have changed. What's modern about it is that there's so much information that's accessible through a number of channels. The whole space is full of so much noise. 

There's more data you can pull and draw insights from and it's so much easier to have people love and yelp about your product. Consumers today are used to getting everything in real-time with a personalized and customized experience. So for marketers, when people expect that customized real-time experience, you have to deliver it or they will find an alternative that will. 

All this disruption that's occurring in different industries is by the companies that have found ways to take friction out of the process. I think that is what makes it modern. If you can make a seamless experience that reduces friction then people will naturally gravitate towards you. 

I've heard you talk about the importance of having the CMO and CIO (or equivalent roles) very well aligned in order to deliver a great customer experience. Why are those two roles so crucial?
It's very important to bring the marketing, creative, understanding of the customer side together with the data and technology side. Most experiences—on a large scale—are occurring online or on mobile phones. 

Companies that have figured out how to harness the technology out there and marry it with your customer experience strategy, can deliver a truly modern experience, and it comes from those two groups (CMO and CIO) partnering. 

Now looking at your career path, you've gone from HP to a smaller company, DocuSign, and now to MongoDB. How has your experience at those bigger companies helped you understand different best practices to implement and scale at MongoDB?
I joined HP through an acquisition - ArcSight, where we were focused on enterprise security software. 

One of the things I’ve learned over my career is that it's much easier for a smaller company to acquire, test, and implement different technologies. At ArcSight, we acquired maybe a dozen different technologies that we were able to implement very quickly, learn from and drive pipeline. 

Working at larger companies has taught me more about people, process and how to implement change at scale. And that you cannot be successful if you do not know how to navigate an organization and collaborate across divisions.

The blend of experiences at these different sized companies has allowed me to have a better understanding of what we are building at MongoDB - a long-term sustainable business. 

Have you taken some of that success you've had in the past, and are currently having with MongoDB, and passing along that knowledge to the different startups that you're working with as an advisor? What kind of advice do you give them?
Certainly having helped scale companies from very small to mid-size, I've learned a thing or two about the different gates you have to pass through. 

I also learn a lot from these startups. They try their best to grow their companies with minimal budgets, new technology, and they do so by taking risks. So it’s really valuable for me as an advisor to see what new tools they are using and what risks are paying off.

The key to offering a great customer experience is understanding who it is you’re targeting and what their persona is. Do some basic primary research to discover why they bought your product and what problem you solved. Find the pattern and figure out if it’s repeatable. 

My advice is to make sure you truly understand why people are buying your product and then market to others who face the same challenge(s). 

Part of that marketing is having a solid go-to-market message that's aligned with both sales and marketing (as well as the rest of the organization). What steps should companies take to craft that message and make sure it's well-aligned throughout the organization?
A company's ability to build a strong pipeline hinges on that partnership between marketing and sales. Both sides need to buy-in and work together to understand who their buyer is.

When I joined MongoDB, I saw that we have a ton of developers who love running, building, and developing on our product. But when it comes to our enterprise products, the largest value is when a customer is ready to go to production with a mission-critical app.  Our customers want the security, support, and monitoring tools to go along with that. So the contacts we're talking to includes IT operations, DB admins, and business analysts. It's a very different persona than a developer, so we need to deliver a targeted experience for all roles. 

Making sure we had the right message to deliver to the different contacts involved in the deal was a big focus. We needed to build out the process and train the field. Marketing creates engagement with the target audience and following that, supporting and training the field to bring prospects through the sale quickly.

A lot of that hinges strongly on sales enablement. So for us, while it sits within the marketing organization, sales enablement is a strong partnership between marketing and sales and a key to success.  

That's really interesting. Has sales enablement always lived under marketing at MongoDB or is that a change since you joined?
I would say that it was not as well developed until our current CRO, Carlos Delatorre, joined. When Carlos came on, it was one of his first priorities to get a formal sales enablement program. He really formalized and transformed sales enablement at MongoDB, and decided it should live under marketing.