For this segment of Marketing Mavericks, a series initiative by Paul Writer that gives an inside look into some of the greatest marketing teams in the field, we interviewed Sowmya Moni, Marketing Director at Unisys to find out their team aspirations for 2018.
1. What is the topmost priority for the marketing team this year?
Our top most priority is to tell our story compellingly across solutions, services & technologies with stronger positioning, packaging, pricing, content with special emphasis on interactive use case demos and videos.
2. How is AI viewed within your organization or as an offering for your client?
Unisys recognizes that it is just a matter of time that majority of the large and midsize organizations globally will deploy analytics applications as a platform to improve business decision-making. Unisys has been offering its clients access to tools, methodologies and best practices in following areas of AI:
- Machine learning: Clients have access to subject matter experts and machine learning algorithms to help them build predictive models to serve their specific industry needs. Our banking clients can use the tools to build models to help predict and prevent credit card fraud and airline clients can build models to analyze passenger flows at airports or improve flight connections.
- Cognitive computing: Clients can access chatbots and automated intelligent assistants for faster incident resolution.
- Cyber analytics: We are providing intelligence tools to predict cybersecurity threats by detecting anomalies in user behavior, monitoring business applications and detecting vulnerabilities using data from the user’s security operations centers and security information and event management tools.
- Internet of Things (IoT) analytics: We have location-aware software tools to help users leverage the immense amount of machine data generated by IoT devices. We see the that IoT analytics using sensors, beacons and mobile apps can help banks or retail businesses support customer analytics.
3. What are a few team building initiatives that have worked for you in the past? What do you do for continuous learning for your team?
We host knowledge sharing sessions with in-house and external subject matter experts on trending topics related to our industry and function regularly. We also participate and conduct briefings with peers in the industry on a frequent basis. Unisys has a robust learning & development resource library called Univirtual Learning with lot of curated content relevant for developing marketing and role specific functional competencies. The team leverages this resource quite regularly. As a team, we set and measure learning goals in the individual personal development plan and it is an integral part of the performance. To quote our CMO, “You are the CEO of your career”; at Unisys, we believe in empowering the team with self-help resources to build a successful career.
4. How do you use data to make marketing work in your organization?
We set and track marketing objectives in relation to business objectives every year. Unisys marketing team is focused on building top-line revenue (defined X% of pipeline) for bringing in a) new clients and b) new scope with clients. We track and measure all the marketing activity and this global dashboard is available to all associates in the marketing department for review and course correction, as necessary.
5. What was the last campaign you worked on? What were the challenges you faced and how did you overcome it as a team?
We’ve worked on launching several new offerings this year. The offerings are available on this link.These launches were time bound global campaigns with finite duration of three months from start to finish! Launching global campaigns in a short span of time with content covering all phases of the technology buyer journey is a complex process and an ambitious task. Creating and mapping content and tactic relevant to each stage of the buying cycle requires intense collaboration with multiple stakeholders involved with the launch. Aside from all the challenges of a global campaign − platform, infrastructure, content, measurement, there is one defining factor that makes a difference and that is “glocalization” − making the campaign relevant to the local market. As a team, we’ve worked on building a standard process for identifying target buyers, managing the content lifecycle by mapping assets through several stages of the sales process and customizing campaigns for local markets.This process is beginning to show early results with increase in marketing qualified leads and marketing generated pipeline.
Profile
Name: Sowmya Moni
Designation: Marketing Director
Organization: Unisys
Size of the Marketing team: 7-member marketing powerhouse!
CMO: Ann Sung Ruckstuhl
Awards and accolades won in the last 12 months: The team has won several team and individual performance awards for execution excellence in marketing campaign management in the last one year.
