Nikhil has over 25 years of technology, software and e-commerce experience. He’s currently the Chief Marketing Officer at FICO (NYSE: FICO), a Silicon Valley pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions and transform organizations. Currently, Nikhil is leading the marketing efforts around FICO’s innovative, new cloud-based decisioning platform designed to help customers accelerate their digital transformation. Prior to FICO, he helped to lead two start-ups in the ecommerce space; Supplizer, a cloud-based order management & supply chain management SAAS platform for retailers, and Zoostores.com, a retailer that offered over 2M products in the home & fitness markets. Nikhil was also the COO of Mercantila and spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where he held a number of executive-level positions, including vice president of sales and operations for HPShopping.com.

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Nikhil Behl, CMO of FICO, a leading analytics software company helping businesses in over 85 countries. Nikhil has over 25 years of technology, software and e-commerce experience. Prior to FICO, he was COO of Mercantila and spent 12 years in a number of executive-level positions at Hewlett-Packard. Nikhil is best known for being a part of the founding team that built H-P-Shopping.com and turned it into one of the top-five I-R 500 retailers in just seven years.

On this episode, Nikhil uncovers the main ingredient for crafting the perfect customer testimonial, why the people you work with are the main driver for creativity, and his strategic tips for creating curated events that perform.

Key Takeaways

There’s nothing that can beat having great people on your team. Great people is the foundation for everything else.
Customer testimonials are still one of the most important aspects to every valuable marketing campaign.
The more you do for sales, the more they do for you. When both departments work for one another, the company is taken to new heights.

Quotes

“You have to be able to tell these stories just in time with the right medium and not taking up too much of that, person’s either time or ability to digest something. And so taking a story and starting to break it up into either multiple components or segments, putting it into multiple mediums, whether it’s a video or audio or through social or long form and helping these things actually build on each other is really important.”

“When we break the mold and we do something that’s radically different and this might not be necessarily a campaign that might be more of a tactic than anything else. And it really is a by-product. Probably one of the things that I, that is very near and dear to my heart and what I believe in more so than just about anything else. And that is to have great people, almost everything we do starts with great people. How do you get the absolute best people in the world, excited to come and work with you, partner with you and share as enthusiastically the mission. That you believe that you’re on.”

“Our job is to make sure that when our sales teams go out. That we have created tailwind for them. And then we can increase the wind velocity to help them drive those opportunities through the funnel faster. And then we can help them drive more cross sells and upsells through that. As long as we have clarity on that, we are able to express that to our sales partners and we have then clarity of who we’re going after, why we’re going after them. What are we trying to solve? What are we trying to sell and a joint sales or marketing plan on how we’re going to accomplish that. We tend to come out significantly better than when we don’t have those things in place.”

Episode Transcript

Episode Timestamps:

*(2:15) - Nikhil’s first role in marketing

*(3:31) - Nikhil’s current role as CMO at FICO

*(4:10) - Segment: The Trust Tree

*(5:52) - What the buying committee looks like for FICO

*(9:19) - Nikhil’s marketing strategy

*(10:37) - The way Nikhil organizes his marketing team

*(12:26) - Segment: The Playbook

*(17:38) - How Nikhil craft’s his customer testimonials

*(21:38) - How Nikhil thinks about FICO’s website

*(26:48) - Tips on creating curated events

*(29:07) - What it’s like being a serial entrepreneur and CMO

*(31:50) - Segment: The Dust Up

*(34:00) - Segment: Quick Hits

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