Joy Corso
The $4B Demand Gen Formula
Joy shares why she likens her digital demand gen team to brilliant mad scientists and explains why your greatest competition as a marketer is not your traditional competitor, but rather your customer’s last great experience
Vonage is making communications more flexible, intelligent, and personal to help enterprises around the world stay ahead. They provide unified communications, contact centers and programmable communications APIs built on the world's most flexible cloud communications platform.
INDUSTRY
Information Technology & Services
FOUNDED
2001

Joy Corso is the CMO of Vonage. She has more than 25 years of leadership experience in marketing and communications roles across multiple industries. In 2020, she was recognized as one of the ‘Top 50 Most Powerful Women In Tech. Prior to joining Vonage, Joy was Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Virtustream and earlier she held senior roles in top tier companies including Advanced Micro Devices, Raytheon, Fidelity Investments and Iron Mountain.

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Joy Corso, CMO of Vonage, a $4B global leader in cloud communications that helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Joy has more than 25 years of leadership experience in marketing and communications roles across multiple industries. Just last year she was recognized as one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech.

On this episode, Joy shares why she likens her digital demand gen team to brilliant mad scientists, and explains why your greatest competition as a marketer is not your traditional competitor, but rather your customer’s last great experience.

Key Takeaways

  • As a marketer, you can’t go wrong with meeting customers where they are and giving them a world-class experience every time. 
  • Your greatest competition is not your traditional competitor, it’s your customer’s last great experience. 
  • Your website is a gateway. It’s your receptionist. Your users are entering your HQ. Treat each experience like you’re greeting them yourself.

Quotes

“I liken my digital demand gen folks to mad scientists because there are so many levers to pull. And they’re really trying to find that beautiful formula. Digital demand gen is a complicated world. It's all about meeting the customer where they are and making it a great experience every time.”
“Your greatest competition is not your traditional competitor. Your greatest competition is your customers' last great experience. Because that's what they expect. Everybody's trying to build those experiences, which is what we help our customers do.”
“Make content personal for consumers. That’s what folks are really interested in. They want to be educated and engaged. We really want to try to serve up that blockbuster content that we think is going to be compelling for folks to help them make good decisions.”
“Whether it's demand gen or any kind of marketing, the customer wants to know that you understand their pain point. The small business wants to know that they're not going to be pushed to the side and that you're going to take care of them. The enterprise customer wants to know that you have every part of a product, every feature, every complicated permutation they want to do with the product. I truly do not mind slicing and dicing content because at the end of the day, we're trying to make it as compelling as possible, as quickly as possible for folks that are trying to find a solution.” 
“Customer, customer, customer. Look through their lens. It's very easy to get caught up in what we think is brilliant or what we think the team rallies around and gets excited about. But you always have to take a step back. Ask yourself, ‘What does your customer really want? What do they need and where the heck are they?’ Secondly, demand gen is one piece of demand. There's an entire ecosystem. Make sure you are aligned with the rest of the marketing team, your product team, your sales team, and your developer relations team because it is a unified effort.”

Episode Transcript

Episode Timestamps:

*(2:00) - How Joy got started in Demand Gen 

*(3:30) - What Vonage is and what it means to be CMO 

*(5:30) - The Trust Tree & Joy’s demand gen strategy 

*(8:30) - Who Vonage is selling to

*(9:45) - Org structure for Joy’s marketing team

*(12:25) - The Playbook - Joy’s most uncuttable budget items

*(17:00) - Joys non-digital channels for marketing (day-to-day) 

*(18:30) - How to market to developers 

*(21:40) - What Joy is most likely to cut in the coming years 

*(23:35) - Joy’s favorite campaign 

*(26:40) - How Joy views Vonage’s website

*(30:00) - Joy’s favorite/most convertible aspect of Vonage’s website

*(35:20) - Quick Hits


Sponsor

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Links

Connect with Joy on LinkedIn 

Follow Joy on Twitter

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Connect with Ian on LinkedIn

www.caspianstudios.com