Data’s Hidden Power: Stories, A Journey with Roula Vsric

Speaker A: Foreign. Cmo, um, unplugged. I'm joined by Ruler Vik, a thoroughbred CMO who takes us on a journey from a childhood dream of becoming a vet to running some of the most complex global marketing strategies for some of the world's leading scale up tech companies. One thing that has remained her North Star all this time, and that is the power of structure storytelling. In this interview, she unpacks what it means in B2B marketing to connect the dots between data, leadership and human emotion. Let's get to know Ruler. Welcome.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me today, Chris. It's an honor.

Speaker A: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show and um, I've got a ton of questions for you, but I think actually just to help everyone get to know you just a little bit better and the, and the backstory, I suppose I'm guessing you didn't want to be a CMO when you were a little girl. Um, what was the plan and how did you get here and are you happy about where you are?

Speaker B: Well, I love this question. I think like every little girl, I wanted to be a veterinarian, uh, or a teacher, uh, when I was a little girl. But, um, my path took me in a very different direction. I've had a progressive career within marketing and I think for me there was a pivotal time where as my career was progressing, I was tapped on the shoulder to become a product manager. And I turned the position down three times in one week. It was within the organization I was working in and I was very concerned that I couldn't do the job. And I remember having a conversation with my dad about it, saying, you know, my company's coming really hard at me to pursue product manager position. I don't have the experience in that. I don't have the background. And I said, I don't think I can do it. And my dad said to me, but what if you can? So that sat with me for, for 24 hours I sat on that and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna give it a shot. And it really changed the trajectory of my, of my career because I was able to blend telling the story about the technology and what it was capable of doing. But what I found really resonated was the, uh, what's possible because of the technology. And in all of the interactions I had with customers and partners after that, I made a point to not just highlight, let's say, the speeds and feeds of the product, but to talk about the possibilities and the outcomes that it was able to deliver. So from there, my career continued to progress. I think I've done probably every single job within marketing, which has benefited me, and I think the teams that I've led significantly over the years, because I would never ask you to do something that I haven't done myself. And I think I bring an understanding to the table of, uh, I've been in your shoes before, so I can support you, I can help you, I can walk beside you, in front of you, behind you, wherever you need me to be, be. And, uh, that served me extremely well in my role as a cmo.

Speaker A: So that's really interesting because I would argue from certainly my experience, there's a lot of people who are in the role or expecting to be in the role without this thoroughbred experience, because that grounding, as you say, because I walked in your shoes before. No one, um, carrying on with the metaphors can pull the wool over your eyes when you've done that.

Speaker B: Like, I consider myself a servant leader, so I free and allow my people to bring their own expertise to the table. But that's where I become their partner. And that serves me and them really, really well. I'm learning from them as much as they're learning from me, I think in the world.

Speaker A: Is this the CEO you're talking about, to whom you would typically report?

Speaker B: Uh, typically, yeah. Typically it would be the CEO or the CRO. I'm finding increasingly, uh, roles report to the CEO or the CRO, depending on the organization.

Speaker A: Do you see that relationship, that dynamic has changing in recent years, particularly with the advent of AI?

Speaker B: Yes and no. I think, um, I'm starting to see more CEOs being invested in ensuring that AI is embedded within every area within the organization. I'll give you an example. In my most recent organization, every single employee in the organization had to have a KPI about the adoption of AI to do their jobs, but also being able to demonstrate the impact that a high has had. So whether that's in increasing engagement, increasing share of voice, increasing productivity, or even budgetary gains.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm really pleased to hear that. There was a piece of research that came out, uh, just a few months ago that made the observation that the average tenure of a, uh, CMO, particularly in the world of B2B, which is the world that you and I inhabit pretty much most of the time. But the tenure of the CMO has shortened to its lowest level ever, I think below three years and shorter than any other member of the C suite. I wonder what your thoughts are on that. And why you think it is.

Speaker B: I'm seeing the shift as well. And again, it depends on the organization and generally what the age of their workforce is. But having said that, I think organizations are looking for digital natives, people that are grasping all of the new technology and AI that's out there. So with a, uh, generation of workers that are digital natives, that they sometimes bring something different to the table that an organization may be looking for. On the flip side, however, when you have a tenured, uh, cmo, it shouldn't be dismissed that they are not constantly looking at the latest trends in the technologies. I've run workshops, uh, over the last few months with my own organization, who is obviously younger in tenure than I am, and I'm teaching them how to leverage AI for development of campaigns, development of Personas, competitive intelligence. How do you leverage the information from AI to create really standout campaigns and leverage it for storytelling as well? And we've seen a significant shift and a comeback, uh, which I thought was extremely interesting to watch in storytelling and pr. In organizations. It was very difficult to influence your board and your executive board for that matter, to invest in PR and storytelling. And now with AI, you know, a tenured CMO is watching trends all the times, and we watch the data really, really closely so we can jump on things very quickly. What I noticed was PR was making a big comeback in AI, so we were able to shift significantly. And what I've seen is PR has now become more important in the era of agentic AI and agentic search, for that matter. So storytelling moving away from just telling stories about features, uh, has become increasingly important. And very much so is independent research leveraging your own data in storytelling, again, to make sure that the brand story is working when customers are repeating it in their own boardrooms or when they're saying, wow, I want to be able to have that impact. Right?

Speaker A: What do you mean by storytelling? Right, Because a lot of people will say, right, let me tell you my story, and then they'll list, give you a list of facts and features, but that's not really storytelling, or how do you see that? Uh, and in the context, particularly of presentations and PR and as well as direct and indirect comms.

Speaker B: So I think, as in technology organizations, we're sitting on a treasure trove of data and analytics. And increasingly we're leveraging that data and analytics to make our technology smarter, to be more predictive. Having said that, when we talk about storytelling, and I'll give you a really good example from an organization I worked in, we were at uh, one of the largest technology conferences in the world in Barcelona, you may have heard of it, Mobile World Congress. And we had back to back briefings with journalists, with analysts. And I remember sitting in the room with our CEO and a couple of our other executives and we were a founder led organization. You can imagine founder led organizations are all about the product, right? You know, the founder is the one who developed it in his basement or in his garage. And he's very passionate about his baby. So we were sitting in the room and I had been trying for a while to convince him in briefings, lead with a story, right? Because people remember stories, they remember real world examples. So we were launching something new. It was extremely innovative. And he did start to focus, he was focusing heavily on the features and, and this is how we're different from the competitors, technology wise. And you could see, you know, back to back briefings, I could see that the journalists and the analysts were kind of head down, you know, just making their notes. And I could see that they were not as engaged as we could have had them engaged. And I remember we had a tremendous story within healthcare at that time. And it was the very early days of virtual healthcare. We had a mobile device management platform that we were selling at that time. And I remember one day we were in a meeting and somebody said, guys, we're not saving lives here. And I had said, but hold on a second, we are saving lives. And I had shared the one story that we had heard about how, uh, nurse at home organization was leveraging our technology to get into rural Midwestern, uh, usa. So in that particular briefing, I brought up the story of this particular example and I was showing how it created the opportunity for early urgent medical intervention that had not been possible in the past. And all of a sudden I saw the head come up, the analyst head came up and I told the story. And you could just see him from this leaning forward. He sat up and leaned forward and our CEO picked up that signal and his body language changed. And then every briefing after that, he started to tell the story. What I found was the coverage that we got after we started doing the storytelling spiked significantly. And I started to have journalists and analysts reaching out. You know, it was inbound, as opposed to outbound outreach, saying, I remember the story you told us about this. We're doing a piece on, let's say, retail. Do you have any, you know, any examples that you might be able to share with us? And it really changed the game for us. We shifted our strategy significantly and our CEO and our Other executives. Storytelling changed as well, and it had a huge impact, not just with the press, with analysts. And then we started to use those examples in sales pitches as well, because everyone wants to know, what are my peers doing? So when they go back to their executive teams and they're telling a story of, hey, I met with this one vendor. They were able to enable X, Y and Z impact. It's how. Yeah, Then it becomes the how. Right, it's what? And then the how.

Speaker A: I came across something recently, and we've done it as an agency quite a few times as a tactic. But I think the latest one I saw was just, uh, it was a company talking about its latest MedTech AI innovation. And the landscape very, very quickly changed when the journalist got his head around it and started talking about, so how this means the nurse can treat more patients than normal. Now all of a sudden you're talking about the patients and the nurse and they become characters. But equally you've got this notion of conflict, which is such. Or struggle, which is such an important part of any story is what you can't do, but that you now can, and then the impact on, um, people, or as you say, saving people's lives.

Speaker B: You got it. You got it. And that's, that's, to me, the power of storytelling. You know, what I'm seeing increasingly as well in storytelling. We talked a little bit about data and analytics and how, how that is also, we're all sitting on a treasure trove of that, and using that in a compelling way is crucial. So in a, uh, fleet management organization I worked in, we had almost 5 million subscribers. And if you think about all of the intelligence that you can get from 5 million vehicles that are on the road, it can be overwhelming. But when you're able to find a problem that exists in a market or in a community and then leverage the data to tell the story. We, uh, told a story. I live in the gta and there's a major expressway that has been crumbling in our community. So finally, our local government has made an investment in repairing and rebuilding that major expressway. But they said it's going to take three to five years to finish the project. So we thought, let's understand how this is impacting business by commercial vehicles that are on the road. So we leveraged our own data. It was anonymized aggregate data. We leveraged that data to tell a story about the commute for these commercial vehicles has increased by, let's say, 3X. They're spending one and a half hours in traffic. There's an impact on sustainability. There's an impact on the number of customers they can service in a day. That got picked up not just by businesses, but it also got picked up by policymakers and, and local and provincial government. And as a result, the project is now there's more investment being made to expedite it and shorten the cycle. So not only did we get a, uh, brand lift as part of that, you know, we got TV coverage, we got radio coverage. Our customers realized they can use their data to reroute the vehicles so that they're avoiding that, you know, that slowdown and able to service more customers. It had a huge impact on the community. So that was just based on telling a story and leveraging our data.

Speaker A: This is absolutely right. It's the impact of the. Sometimes it's just data for data's sake, but if we can build a story around the impact on people's lives, that's when the narrative really starts to resonate. And talk to me a little bit about the concerns or worries that you may have. Um, so when we talk about the, um, headwinds that are facing, um, CMOs right now, when they're leading teams. There was a former client, commented on LinkedIn this morning. She just basically made the point, what is going wrong with LinkedIn? She was talking about in the sense that all of this is now appearing to be generated by AI. The need for humanity, if you will, or relationships or authenticity, is that now being eroded because of AI? It must be a big challenge, surely, for, for, for people in your position.

Speaker B: It really is. And I think AI, if it's not used properly, it has the potential to kill creativity. And that is a big concern of mine. It might kill originality if, if we're not careful. So AI really excites me. Um, I look at it as a creative multiplier and an insight engine where what scares me is AI driven sameness. So that's a big concern for me. When everyone trains on the same data, differentiation becomes a leadership act, not an algorithmic one. So I see that AI can create content, but CMOs create meaning. So AI is democratizing production, but elevating the importance of taste, editorial judgment and brand strategy. The CMO becomes the curator, not the controller. And I think where B2B brands have the opportunity to win hearts and minds in the era of AI is trust, simplicity and transparency. Buyers are drowning in complexity today. Uh, the brand that helps them think more clearly will own the relationship.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. Complexity is a massive problem now. Particularly for CMOs. And partly explains why it's so difficult to keep the job, doesn't it? Because getting their head around all of the different channels available to them and also recognizing there is this massive sea of mediocrity out there to contend with, actually standing out and having an impact on the business, uh, is a challenge, a big challenge. So what are the metrics that really matter, do you think, from a CMOS perspective?

Speaker B: Oh, there's so many metrics that matter depending on, you know, your organization and the various functions. But I think, um, what's overrated is marketing. Qualified leads, they're a vanity metric unless they're deeply qualified. What's underrated is sales velocity. It tells you everything about product fit, buyer readiness, message clarity, and whether your go to market engine is aligned.

Speaker A: Good. Excellent. Fantastic. Okay, so just one final question because I, uh, know we're coming towards the end of our time for any cmo. What advice would you give now when it comes to. I guess because I had one client recently who said he looked at his. He looked, literally looked at his clock and he thought, well, I've been here three years now. Is my job on the line? What's your advice to any CMO wanting to sort of buck that trend?

Speaker B: I think what I would say is, is always be ready for change. And the metrics that may have mattered in the past are shifting now. Embrace AI. I think generative AI really excites me. Not to replace talent, but to expand imagination, be concerned about homogenization. Too many brands are starting to sound the same because they're, they're training on the same models. And I think we really need to be thinking about our advantage isn't just what we build, it's how deeply we understand the people we build it for. So don't lose sight of the customer and the problems that they have and how you connect. At the end of the day, we're still humans, marketing to humans. So never forget that we are still in the era of marketing to humans. We're just using AI agents as a way to reach that audience.

Speaker A: Amen. And I think this is, um, absolutely right. B2B. It's not about. You're not talking to businesses. You're still talking to people, Relationships and humanity matter, and more so now than ever. So Ruler, that's really good, good advice and absolutely bang on. And I thank you for giving up your time today. Lots of useful insights in there and let's stay in touch. But great to hear from you, Chris.

Speaker B: It's always a pleasure. Keep doing the great work you all do.

Speaker A: Bless you. Thank you so much, Rula.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Well, that wraps up another episode of CMO Unplugged. Um, huge thank you to Ruler, and thank you for listening to the show. Please do me a favor. Uh, not to mention the algorithms. If you could just press the subscribe button if you found this entertaining. And, of course, if there's anyone else who you. You think some wizard or guru in the world of B2B marketing should be on the show, please let me know.