It’s an exciting time here at Zymplify HQ. We’re celebrating our recent Google Technology Partner status, and enjoying the excited rush of new clients and new team members.
Another huge cause to celebrate is the recent promotion of our year-long team member, Jemma Irwin. Jemma started with us back in October 2018, as Head of Client Success. Since her start, she has totally transformed our success team and our client processes, helping to reduce our churn rate down to practically zero. Happy clients = happy team Zym!
It was from this success, that Michael Carlin saw Jemma as the perfect fit to take on the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Jemma is now our CMO, overseeing our Client Success and Marketing teams, helping to take the success of both teams and mould it for the future.
So, on that note, here’s a short blog from Jemma, and what she sees as her goals for this upcoming year and beyond.
Q. Tell us about your new role, and what you see as your key critical upcoming goals:
I am the newly appointed CMO here at Zymplify, a member of our senior leadership team, and I report directly to Michael Carlin, our CEO. I oversee both the Client Success and Marketing multidisciplinary teams, consisting of success execs, data analysts, product and demand gen marketers, customer care team, content marketers and creatives. We work cohesively to improve our marketing comms across our key audience segments.
We have several big focuses for this year. The first project I will be working on is improving our brand image. We have had a face lift to tie into our new brand repositioning as a professional B2B prospect and marketing automation platform. This means we’ve got a brand new logo, and new website launching soon within the coming weeks. So we’re working hard as a team to bring our branding in line with the powerful product that we offer, and to represent that consistently across all of our channels.
Another big focus for us will be to improve our data optimisation, to ensure that we are using our platform to harness customer acquisition, which will help increase our customer lifetime value.
At the highest level, I am to achieve strong revenue and profitability goals, driven through marketing and client success.
Q. What are your core skills that make you such a great fit for this role?
To be an effective CMO you need to be adept at wearing multiple hats! The creative skills that were historically required in this role have merged with improved technology understanding and data analytics.
I need to understand the creative side to drive my team forward with our brand and content, but I also need to analyse and manipulate big data to understand our campaigns and what is bringing me a return.
Being a software company, it’s critical that I understand our platform and roadmap from a development perspective too. Because of my success background, I am in a good position to help work with our dev team to ensure the platform exceeds our client’s needs.
The CMOs of the future have to be both creative and analytical – using the left and the right side of the brain to achieve a balanced approach. All while running at 1000mph! I feel that I am a good fit in this sense.
Q. What brands have you been most impressed with in recent times when it comes to digital experience?
I am most impressed by brands that use disruptive business models, that upended the ‘dinosaur’ players – such as Air BnB, Uber, Dollar Shave Club. Zymplify is a disrupter, and I intend to feed off of the clever use of digital channels like these companies did, to disrupt our market.
Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to become a CMO in the future?
Be ambitious! But be respectful. It might seem like a great idea to come into a business and start toppling tables, but in reality, you have to have a more collaborative approach.
It’s vital to build relationships with the various teams you’re going to work with, such as finance, development, product marketing, etc. It’s important to take time and understand each team, the individuals and their skills and goals, so you’ll be able to collaborate together to achieve your shared goals.
CMOs must really understand data and it’s role within a B2B organisation. It’s critical that the marketing and sales teams work together more closely than ever before, and really understand the power of prospecting and how to do this at scale, and with pace.
Teamwork makes the dream work here at Zymplify! And that’s why we have been so successful to date. I intend to continue on in this thread, to help take us to the next level.
