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Reinventing Xerox: Transformation, talent, and tech

38 min listen

How does a legacy giant reinvent itself for the modern age?

Buckle up, because this episode is a must-listen! Deena Piquion, Xerox’s Chief Growth and Disruption Officer, reveals the company’s daring transformation from a print-centric titan to a cutting-edge, software-led powerhouse.

In this episode, Deena dives into:

  • How Xerox is shaking up its revenue mix and boosting profitability.
  • Aligning marketing with business goals and using AI to streamline operations.
  • The cultural shifts that are attracting fresh, new talent.

Tune in for some top-tier advice on leading big organisational changes and breathing new life into a legacy brand for lasting success. 

Watch the full episode below, or tune in on your favourite audio platform!


If you're looking to elevate your career by engaging with and working alongside the best in B2B marketing, look no further than ANA and Twogether to achieve it. Get in touch now!

We'd love to hear from our listeners whether this is something they've explored yet - get in touch and let us know!

View the full transcript here

Jon Busby: Welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. I'm joined today by Deena Piquion. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. And you've got a, you've probably got one of the most interesting job titles I've ever interviewed. I've had the pleasure of interviewing many CMOs, but never a Chief Growth and Disruption Officer at Xerox.

That's a mouthful in itself. Can I ask a question? We've just seen your talk up on stage. You were announced as CMO in 2021. Are you still the CMO now and growth officer? So what made you decide to make that change to your title?

Deena Piquion: Sure. So thanks for having me first of all. And yes, it is a very unique title.

I have kept the CMO function, so I have all marketing and comms, but I've added responsibilities to my remit. And it really was part of A broader operating model and organizational structure redesign at Xerox. So our COO and president has all go to market. Whether it be for print, IT services, digital services, those are three kind of business segments.

We went from a geographic organizational structure to a business segment led organizational structure. So our CO and president, he has all business segments, plus supply chain, service delivery, product engineering. And my team, which is really at first when they presented it to me, it was sales enablement and pricing and PR and marketing and comms.

And I was like no, I can do a much better job with the title that encompasses all of those functions. And so I started thinking about it and really what the mandate was. The mandate was really to change how we work. It was to disrupt the silos that had been created in Xerox over time. And so I wanted to intentionally call out the disruption portion of my mission.

Jon Busby: I think it's a theme that we are seeing over and over again just in the last, we are we're halfway through this conference. I'm going to say, and already I've seen this concept of, you've got to under, as a marketeer, you've got to understand the business deeply. You've got to understand the outcomes that they want, you want to achieve.

And I, so if anything your talk really spoke to me in how marketing may not be the right way to describe what we do anymore.

Deena Piquion: I think people sometimes have a An association with the word marketing, right? You don't want to be marketed to, you don't want to be sold to. And so I think realigning marketing as a growth lever as an engine of growth in the organization, as a commercial enabler is really the future of marketing.

Jon Busby: When you change from being just CMO to. Chief Growth and Disruption Officer title that I now think I might try and steal. Did your day to day change? Did it how did it change? What was the impact?

Deena Piquion: It did a lot. First of all, I the organizational size grew. So not only, the disciplines or the types of functions that I was responsible for, but the organizational size changed a lot.

I went from, 115 or so person organization to now about a 650 person organization. So I went from really, being able to have virtual town halls in a very intimate setting, people knowing me and, me being able to have skip levels at an easy pace and really knowing every employee to having to now learn a much larger organization, being able to cascade through a bigger senior leadership team that I had to trust and depend on.

But the day to day changed as well, where I could spend so much time in, marketing tactics, marketing planning, marketing performance reviews. I now had to lean on my team and divert to getting to know our pricing operations teams, our sales enablement teams, our client experience teams, our inside sales teams.

Jon Busby: Wow. So those Extra 450 people. If I do the math there correctly, that was pricing sales, all the, all those new elements that normally don't sit as part of marketing.

Deena Piquion: Correct. So, it was yes. So, I took on revenue ops, which is really the business analytics and the CRM management, as well as sales enablement and sales ops, pricing ops.

We're just tactical deal pricing as well as more strategic pricing, client experience inside sales.

Jon Busby: Yeah, so true sales and marketing enablement, really.

Deena Piquion: True sales and marketing enablement.

Jon Busby: Would you say you saw, did you see an instant impact to the business just aligning them together?

What was, if you were to pinpoint kind of one memory where you're like, this is really working, what would you say that would be?

Deena Piquion: We did see it right away. It took, it changes painful, right? It's not easy to orchestrate change at this level. But we saw it right away because the light bulbs went off for people where they started to say, no, I understand why you put us all together because, I was off doing this over here and I didn't really even understand what this person was doing over here or how we could learn from each other.

Simple pricing team didn't have any contact with the market intelligence team, which lives in my portfolio marketing group. And pricing strategy recommendations, and I would say did you where what's our market share in that category? What the pricing strategy is to gain share, defend share where I don't have that.

I said, sure, you do just go talk to so and they came back and they said, Oh, no, I'm going to change the pricing recommendation. I was giving you yesterday based on the data that I just received. so much. So just those light bulbs of being able to make those connections very quickly and, saying this is your team, this is who we are, this is why we're together.

It's to be able to have these conversations.

Jon Busby: I think you mentioned pricing a couple of times and I think that's really intriguing as someone that came from being in marketing and now taking responsibility for deal pricing and how that can represent itself externally. Yeah. Do you have a view on how pricing should be included as part of an outgoing strategy or should be included as part of a marketing strategy?

Deena Piquion: It's so closely tied to sales objectives and to the portfolio strategy, right? Your portfolio strategy and your pricing strategy have to be integrated because you have to understand where you are. How do you compete? Who do you compete with? Is pricing a lever in that category? For you, and if so, adjust it.

I do think there's a really close connection. You have to obviously have a CMO that has business acumen and has lived in an operator world at some point in their life, I think, to be able to make those connections. But I think it's a really powerful one if you can harness it.

Jon Busby: I think for me that, and this is just a personal passion actually. And we saw yesterday's talk. if you were here to quote David's talk on. personalization, but I see pricing and personalization actually go hand in hand. Like from an enterprise standpoint we tend to hide pricing behind a sales wall.

And I think that puts off many customers now when they're looking to do much of their research before they speak to sales. Have you seen any kind of impact in the customer journey as you've integrated some of these functions together?

Deena Piquion: I do think it makes a huge impact. And I think one of the things we're also trying to do is to be faster to market with the right price and we're actually using AI, so we're piloting some AI behind the scenes but to just to make us more agile and more intelligent and how we're pricing at a customized level,

Jon Busby: let's bring us back to this, I'm going to use the word disruption because that's part of your title, like When did Xerox decide, okay, now we need to reinvent ourselves?

What was the kind of defining moment where this all came together? Became, you turned into reality.

Deena Piquion: So I'm going to walk you through a little bit of the journey. So I joined four and a half years ago. I joined December, 2019, right before COVID. I joined Xerox at a time when Xerox was making a hostile bid for HP, right?

We knew the print industry was ripe for consolidation. We had a very bold leadership team who was trying to lead that consolidation. And that was the plan, right? It was to. Create synergies by getting two of the largest competitors in the industry together. HP definitely has some, personal products that we don't compete in, it was the right compliment of we're very enterprise focused. They're very, they have a lot more in the personal space, but then COVID hit and our business changed, overnight, 2 billion of revenue like this because of, the pandemic and how workplace trends shifted. And we abandoned the bid on HP and it really was about preserving cash, preserving the company, keeping our employees healthy.

We have thousands of technicians that still needed to be on site at people's offices. There, there are still many customers that we serve that were printing during COVID. We, CVS is a customer, like tons of, businesses that still needed to print. And so it, the focus changed and it really was about preserving, stabilizing the company during the pandemic.

We came out of the pandemic and it is, how do we, set up this company, 115 year plus company for another hundred years. How do we make sure we're sustainable? We're profitable. We're relevant in the next hundred years. And It's about being truthful and objective about the world you live in and operate in and addressing the macro trends rather than trying to fight them.

We knew hybrids here to stay. We knew work has changed forever. So the reinvention is about addressing those macro trends. Making it easier to do business with and within Xerox. So making it easier for colleagues to do business with each other, but also making it easier for clients and partners to do business with us and enabling their success.

And we have to enable their success in different ways than we did in the past. So it really was coming out of the pandemic and saying we we've got to shake things up ourselves.

Jon Busby: We think of Xerox as quite a modern company being part of. Obviously, part of many advancements in technology with some of your R& D efforts, but obviously we recognize mostly for printing and document reproduction part of that stewardship, I would say as being CMO and being such a key part of the growth and disruption as you reinvent yourselves is finding And coalescing it down to a key point of purpose, like how, what's your memory of how you got to that process?

Like, how did you manage to get that purpose out in order to then come up with the wonderful campaign slogan that you launched internally and externally to the market?

Deena Piquion: So our purpose has been since before I joined and continues to be, we make everyday work better. And Xerox has evolved as work has evolved.

We always have. And, you think about. Some of those amazing inventions that came out of park that were commercialized in other places, right? Laser technology, ethernet, the mouse all of this came out of park. And last year we made the tough decision to donate actually. So park is no longer a Xerox entity, but I think.

What we did actually will set park up for success to, to contribute more to society, right? SRI is where we donated park and it's such a better fit for park to do that kind of work. And so while we focus on making everyday work better in our, our core and adjacent technologies, park can think about making the world better, many years from now, but our purpose remains the same.

And what we did was We looked at how do we have a campaign strapline that kind of can encompass everything we do not just print and copy, but everything we do and we went through many iterations and came up with we make work because at the end of the day. You get to work, you just want things to work.

You want things to be automated. You want them to be as easy as possible. They want them to give you back time so you could do the thinking you need to do so you can power down and actually make it home to read your kids a bedtime story or make it to a soccer game. And that's how it really resonated with us was we just, we want to be known as your partner, your office partner that makes things work easier.

Jon Busby: Can you remember the moment when you came up with that tagline and when the, what was the process to get to that single point?

Deena Piquion: So we have I have a great team and two ladies in particular, one that leads brand and one that leads demand gen. And they were really bold about how we approach this campaign.

And they said, we're going to go straight to some folks we've used before. Some freelancers, we're going to get some iterations for you. And they came back with many and we all settled on this one as our favourite. And then I brought it to the EC, the executive committee, but I really commend them cause they wanted to save their dollars as much as possible for our dollars, as much as possible for.

media placement, right? And so they did a lot of the hard work of briefing the freelancers, explaining to them who we wanted to reach, with what messaging, what were the use cases, and came back with these ideas. And I remember it was it's probably December 2022 when we settled on this strapline.

Jon Busby: The fact that you had both brand and demand working together to come up with that. I think is a story in itself.

Deena Piquion: It was the first time in Xerox's history that it was in a brand and demand an integrated campaign from start to finish.

Jon Busby: And how would you say, what's the, what was the reason for that alignment?

Deena Piquion: I think what, first of all, we work really well together. These two ladies and myself plus the rest of the team as well. But what we did was we took our challenge, in the fall. When we had our budgets finalized and we said, if we're gonna make these budgets stretch and maximize the output of our team's time, energy and of our dollars, we've got to be super aligned.

And so we took it as the mission of how to really stretch our dollars. And, it's amazing. And it was a great process for them to go through together. And I think we're more aligned than ever in that way.

Jon Busby: What would you say your biggest success has been throughout this entire journey?

Could you pinpoint one moment when you were like this is where we've made it, or this is where the difference is made.

Deena Piquion: So I'll give you a couple. In an internal one was when our CFO stopped asking to see business cases. He literally wanted to see how we were going to spend what our projected ROI was on so many things before we did it.

And that was part of the trust I needed to gain for the team and for our organization. And so for me, one of the big aha moments was he stopped asking to see all that stuff because we created a cadence of updates that were sufficient for him, right? Post, not pre and then externally, I would say when we launched in May, so many people reached out to me, actually employees with pride.

I never realized. How much our employees were also missing the external investment. Employees went to the NASDAQ tower to take pictures and videos in front of our, signage, people went to JFK and LaGuardia to take pictures. And it, that kind of pride that it created, it wasn't necessarily something I planned for with an external campaign, but the internal employee pride was really amazing.

Jon Busby: I think that CFO story is incredible. We've got Jeff Lowe and his CFO joining us tomorrow on the podcast. What does your relationship look like now with your chief financial officer?

Deena Piquion: It, we have a great relationship, a lot of trust. And I think, one of the things that he needed and that he appreciates is that.

I give financial updates in all of my decks, right? I, they can be very qualitative and I can go through the copy and the images and the tactics and the, KPIs, but I also give financial updates And it's thorough. I understand the business. I understand when I need you to give back, maybe not spend my full budget in a particular quarter because of how we're tracking.

I also know how to play well with others and help fund, investments and things that are enterprise wide needs.

Jon Busby: Were there certain metrics that the CFO was looking for that your predecessors weren't providing? Like how did, what kind of made them feel more comfortable?

Deena Piquion: We're very transparent. I'm very transparent. That's how I like to work. If something's not trending as I want it to, I still show the KPIs. So we show, clicks, we show engagement type KPIs, but we also show leads and opportunities, conversions, wins, how much revenue. what profit we're estimating to get from any particular demand gen tactic and how we're trending to that.

These are the things he wants to see. He wants to know these are top of mind. I think any CFO wants to know these are top of mind for a CMO as they're making their investments. So that's just become part of, our monthly cadence and our quarterly cadence. And I think what helped me there is that.

I elevated a leader on our team to be marketing ops and analytics. That person is extremely aligned with our sales force and sales ops analytics, right? So it's come integrated dashboards. And that helps because it shows how it all, it's a circle of impact to the business. And so I think that's one area where I say a lot of CMOs need to make sure that they're investing the right time is on the data and analytics.

Jon Busby: Would you say that's something that you've, that sales marketing alignment again, something that you only really have to achieve through the increase in the remit of your role?

Deena Piquion: No, it happened before, and I think it actually led to part of the increase in the remit of the role, right? Because in order to be successful, you have to be aligned with your sales organization.

And so we started that journey since way before this organizational redesign.

Jon Busby: I mentioned Jeff a moment ago. He was a previous guest last year, if you've had a chance to meet him yet. You certainly should because your job titles, although they're different, are still very similar in some of the responsibilities you have.

Do you feel the evolution towards chief growth and disruption, or it's, In this case, might be chief commercial officer. Do you feel that's the evolution of where CMOs are going, especially with the importance of marketing now as part of the customer journey?

Deena Piquion: I do think so. I think it's the logical evolution of the role, quite honestly.

And I think It's a great one, actually. It's a great path for CMOs to be able to have more impact, more influence in a company. And, I think it's a trend we'll see a whole lot more.

Jon Busby: So coming back to when you made that transition to Chief Growth and Disruption Officer. Did your integration into Xerox's strategic goals change during that or did they deepen?

Or would you say that it's really up to the CMO leader to, to make sure they're focusing on the outcomes of the business?

Deena Piquion: I think you really have to understand first and be part of the design of the business strategy and objectives. And I think that's one area where you know as an AC, you need the, whether you're in a CMO role or a CGO role or a CCO role, you need to be part of that discussion to really understand the business objectives.

And I think now more than ever, yes, I'm part of crafting those. And even from coverage, segmentation, how do we What's the best route to market to cover different customer segments, right? We're designing that we're redesigning that together, and it's a great place to be because then you can also align marketing tactics to your, it's to your segmentation and coverage tactics.

Jon Busby: I'm going to now focus on the transformation side. You mentioned, I think we did talk about AI earlier. It's hard to avoid talking about artificial intelligence. In any large scale transformation. Change can be hard. What strategies have you found most effective in order to get buy in from both your leadership and the wider workforce?

Deena Piquion: I think, that's one of the things that I pride myself on and that Xerox prides itself on in terms of our leadership culture overall. We went through a reduction in force, we made this public in Q1 and we made the tough decision of pre announcing it. To our employees and internally and externally that we were going to reduce 15 percent of our workforce.

And. That's a tough message to manage but we felt it was important to be transparent with people and that people knew what was coming up and they could plan, decide, how, what kind of big financial decisions to make in their own lives, knowing that this could happen. So I think transparency is really important when you're going through this kind of change.

I think you also have to bring people along the journey and explain to them why, right? Why the need for a change and what are we trying to achieve as a result of the change? You also have to recognize that it's not going to be easy and it's not for everyone. And I think you can publicly state that, right?

You don't, you need people energized and motivated to be on the journey with you. And it's not for everyone and that's okay.

Jon Busby: As also someone responsible for transformation, it's about striking that balance between direction and transparency, because I think you need to be able to say, we need to head in this direction but not necessarily know all the answers and to rely on your employees and your teams to be able to help democratize some of that decision making.

Deena Piquion: Absolutely. One of the things we do is We have reinvention is our transformation word. It's we're reinventing the company. We have big R little R. So big R reinvention is the direction, right? It's the strategy from the leadership, but little R can be any day, any person in any process.

You can innovate and reinvent, people, process, technology, and we encourage people to send us little R ideas.

Jon Busby: Okay. What's been the most successful little R idea? Is there anyone that you can pinpoint?

Deena Piquion: Oh, there are tons on a daily basis. It's little things from, we, we created a friction hunter.

Tool. So we said, okay, if we want to make it easier to do business with and within Xerox. What are the friction points? Send us friction ideas, little r friction ideas and simple things like how you set up a customer, how you onboard a customer and the way that their meter is read, the print meter is read and how they're, how accurate their bill is, right?

These are frustration points for customers in their journey that you can fix with little R, process changes.

Jon Busby: Very similar journey to us. Like you've got to really distil it down to those I'm going to say niche and we use the American term. They're not niche use cases that help to drive that change in one person's day from, I took me two days to do this and now it takes me two minutes.

Deena Piquion: Correct. RPA, we've used a lot of RPA internally, so we sell RPA solutions, but before we started selling RPA solutions, we started using them internally. And so then we publicized those as well, right? Somebody, automated a process and something that was super manual and took tons of hours is now done like this.

Jon Busby: And it's about telling, bubbling up those stories and telling them across the business. What's been some of the KPIs you've used to measure that transformation? Like how do you know when you're on track?

Deena Piquion: Yeah, so for us one of, there's a few metrics that we're using and they're at the highest order level, but they're the ones that are the most important.

When you think about repositioning this company for long term profitable success, right? We're a mixed shift. So we're intentionally orchestrating a mixed shift in this company from being 90 percent print dependent. 70, 75 percent in three years. That's a KPI. Like we have to know how we're doing against that KPI.

And it's not because We're expecting print to plummet. It's because we want to grow it services and digital services to offset the secular decline and actually outpace the secular decline in print. So the mixed shift is one. And we've said this publicly to investors. So that's why I'm sharing it. The other is operating margins.

We, we need to improve profitability. We have to that's our way to attract investors. It's our way to be able to create investment capacity to fuel that growth. And so we're very much looking at operating margins and EBITDA. They're financial metrics, but what we do is we tie them to how it allows us to, to improve the employee experience, the client experience, the partner experience.

Jon Busby: So when you say profit margin which is a language that we all speak again, wonderful talk yesterday on how CFOs speak the same language and quite often CMOs don't making that translation is key. It's very enlightening to see you talk in some of those CFO type terms. Like what would be your kind of, underlying metric from something like operating profit?

Are you looking at employee productivity? Are you looking at we are bubbles up into those? Yes.

Deena Piquion: So obviously when you're trying to orchestrate, going from single digit to double digit, operating margin productivity is huge. And so we are looking at productivity and we're looking at ways that we can help improve with technology.

And one of the things that as part of this new group that I'm responsible for, one of the things we were able to do is we negotiated LinkedIn sales navigator for our sales force, enterprise wide contract deployed to the entire so Indirect and direct Salesforce, because one of the hardest things that you have to do as a salesperson is really be able to identify those key contacts in your prospects, who to speak to.

If you had a great contact at this company, but they left and now they're at this new company, you want to make sure you maximize that previous relationship, right? So productivity is huge return on working capital, right? We want to make the decisions. That actually we're shifting our investment into the areas that will give the most return for the company.

I always tell my teams, think of it as your own dollar. It's your own company. You had your own company. There is no big mothership Xerox giving you money. It's your own company. Where would you put your marketing dollars? That's how scrappy we have to be and how we shift in between tactics. It's not who came up with the idea or how great it sounds or that it, we haven't let it be, live for 18 months yet.

If we think we can get a better return here than there, we need to be proactive in shifting those dollars. I think

Jon Busby: that's a mindset that we should really apply across all businesses, be them 200 people or 2000 people or 20,000 people. It's, it empowers people to make some of those decisions more autonomously.

So moving to the next level of transformation, like what are the next horizons you're looking at Xerox? You've reinvented the purpose, you're, yeah, you're shifting the, moving away from print and into a more of a mixed model. What are some of the things that excite you about what may be coming next?

Deena Piquion: So there's tons of things to be excited about at Xerox. First of all, just trying to move from A hardware centric to a, software led services enabled company is a huge undertaking in and of itself, right? Huge culture shift which is really exciting, but also attracting like new talent to Xerox, changing the demographics of the company.

We're stewards of a brand. That has loyalty, not only from clients, but from employees, there's tons of loyalty there, but we also want to make sure that we balance that with new energy, new perspectives and just new ideas for growth. So I'm excited about that. I'm really excited about.

We have a young professional employee resource group and they're great reverse mentors for us inside Xerox. So Xerox has a really long legacy of diversity and inclusion and employee resource groups are part of who we are. But I love talking to the young professional employee resource group because, it's a different perspective within the company.

Jon Busby: And would you say some of the newer technologies and newer processes that you've spearheaded have they helped to democratize some of those younger employees and involve them more in some decision making where previously would have been very hierarchical?

Deena Piquion: Absolutely. We get them involved in a ton.

We also have a Vista. Our early talent program, and we get them on as part of the program each year, we have a cohort, it's a small cohort, they get exposed to the executive committee, but they also get exposed to real problems that we want to solve. And so we, leverage and tap into their different perspective on how to solve those problems.

Jon Busby: Has there been any. success that you're screaming from the rooftops around where they've solved a problem differently to how you solved before.

Deena Piquion: Yeah. Even they even informed a lot of our marketing campaign. Cause remember part of our marketing campaign, a huge tenant of it is reaching that 25 to 44 demographic where Xerox is not as strong.

Xerox is very strong with 45 and over people who know about all the products. Park innovation and such, not so much in that 25 to 44 digital native audience. So those groups, the young professionals, the Vista cohorts, they've helped inform us and our tactics. They partnered with us on our TikTok pilot and content.

And it's been fun to be able to tap into that.

Jon Busby: That's awesome. As you look to move Xerox's strategy forward, how are you planning to drive the consideration of new areas of the business?

Deena Piquion: So first is people need to know that we have these new offerings to consider, right?

And so that's what we've focused on, building the awareness. We're also really focusing in on specific vertical industries and trying to go. To meet those decision makers in places that matter to them, whether it's, an association of charter schools or healthcare professionals or legal professionals.

So very different than the traditional print trade show. Tactic, which we still use for that segment. But in the in when we're trying to build consideration for services, you've really got to speak the language of your clients. You've really got to understand the pain points that are particular to their day and the technology stack that you have to integrate into that matters.

In their industry, their vertical industry. So it is really about being very specialized, very focused and speaking their language.

Jon Busby: But across a wide range of different verticals that I guess that's like, how do you manage? How do you reconcile that as a CMO?

Deena Piquion: We have some of our teams when market intelligence that are focused on verticals and we do try to pick with sales.

Okay, this year, which, what are our top three verticals? It doesn't mean we're not selling into all verticals, but where are we really going to focus our content publishing efforts and our marketing campaign efforts? And so that's what we try to do no more than three per year and make sure that we do them well and go deep from marketing investment perspective.

Jon Busby: So I'm going to start bringing us to a close now, and I'm very, having led transformation in a much smaller organization I'm intrigued to understand what leadership principles do you apply that have helped you bring Xerox along this journey? What are the principles that you've used?

Deena Piquion: So I very much believe in empowerment of my team, right? No matter if you're an individual contributor or a leader. You have to, I have to allow you to feel empowered. And part of that means failing means that you have to recognize things that didn't go well, just as much as you do successes.

Because if you want people to try things and keep trying things, then you can't make them feel bad when it doesn't go the way that they want, they thought it might. And so that's a big part of how I lead is empowerment and Empathy, really. I try to make myself as approachable as possible, as human as possible.

We all go through. Tons of personal stuff, right? That gets sometimes in the way of work and I make sure that's just who I am. I bring my whole self to work. Doesn't mean everybody has to be that way, but it's about part of how I relate to my team and allow them to bring their whole selves to work as well.

And then having fun. I think, especially as CMOs, we have such a unique opportunity to be the fun people in the organization and While we're all trying to get around our heads wrapped around the data, the analytics, the ROI, the impact, we also have to allow ourselves to have some fun with what we do because at the end of the day, we spend a lot of time together doing this.

Jon Busby: Yep, I love that. So empowerment, empathy, you've got to show that you're vulnerable. And then I'm going to, I'm going to, rather than fun, I'm going to say enjoyment. So we've got our three E's empowerment, empathy, and enjoyment. I think that's really key because. I like to say some people work to live and some people live to work.

And if you can integrate the two, you show up with your whole self and enjoy it and on the process that just becomes a superpower. So Deena, it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast today. I'm going to ask you one final question for any future CMOs that are out there. If you were to summarize in five words or less, one piece of advice, what would it be?

Deena Piquion: Alignment. You've got to get alignment with all the stakeholders around the organization. Strategy. You got to understand the business strategy and communicate.

Jon Busby: Thank you very much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been a real pleasure.

Deena Piquion: Thank you for having me.

Jon Busby: Hope you have a good rest of conference.

Deena Piquion: You too.

Jon Busby: Brilliant.

 
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