Being the first chief marketing officer for a company presents a unique set of challenges, from setting expectations to establishing the marketing function to driving business strategy. As the first CMO of business and technology consulting firm Slalom, Sangeeta Prasad’s experience as CMO of Russell Reynolds helped her face the challenges head-on.

Her journey offers lessons for B2B marketers on shaping the brand identity of a successful company largely unknown outside its client base. By aligning the $2 billion firm's internal culture with its external identity, Prasad helped transform and simplify its brand story—encapsulated by the phrase “Fiercely Human”— demonstrating the delicate balance of defining a new vision while honoring existing corporate culture.

What was your mandate at Slalom?

As a first CMO, you have to be very comfortable with uncertainty and lack of clarity. I came into Slalom because I felt there was a transformational opportunity—the culture was amazing and Slalom deserved to have a brand that's bigger than its business. I did not have a clear mandate on how to go about doing it.

Slalom is a very successful company. It was at nearly $2 billion when I joined but, if you haven't worked with Slalom, you've never heard of Slalom. It never had global marketing to build awareness of the brand. So, while it was so successful already, there was a real question: What can branding and marketing do that will change things?

What did the process look like?

Slalom has a very strong culture, and people take the core values and purpose very seriously. I didn’t try to change why we exist but instead tried to put words to it and unite people. We're very people-centric … and bring our whole selves to work. Every customer and partner I spoke to said, “Interacting with all of you feels different, better, more fun. We like working with you.” 

So, I tried to capture that—to explain externally and to unite internally all the great things that we do. We captured it in two words: Fiercely Human. You don't usually use those words together. Separately, they can mean almost opposite things, fierce versus human. But together, they have stopping power. You could say innately human, very human, seriously human. Fiercely human means we come with passion.

What did employees think of the new brand?

Launching a brand or rebranding is all about the internal first. It's about getting our people to be our brand ambassadors. I wasn't trying to change our people; I was simply trying to express it in a way that inspired people and created pride and passion. It didn't require a lot of selling. When people heard it, they were like, “That's what I can tell my clients!”

Why should you work with us? Because we're fiercely human, and we deliver everything else that everyone else does, but we do it in a way that makes you feel different. That really captured the imagination of our people in our clients and customers.

What do you do internally to bring the rebrand to life?

Having supporters and stakeholders with you along the journey is just as important as the launch process. We created an advisory council of leaders and influencers within Slalom who added their voices to ours. 

Then we had an internal launch in a town hall with small training sessions—a series of 10-15 webinars you could join to learn more. We weren't just launching two words, we were launching a new look and feel, how to describe Slalom and a whole bunch of new things.

We trained people extensively on the new brand. We created so many tools and templates for people to use the brand. That was a very important part of the success of the launch. Everyone's busy, so the easier you make it to use it, the more successful you'll be.

How about externally?

The biggest thing after our internal launch was Dreamforce. We have a big presence in Dreamforce because we're one of the biggest Salesforce partners. We really went all out introducing the new colors, look and positioning. Our colors are very different than other consulting companies—they’re brighter, more optimistic, more fun. Bringing that to life in the booth was really impactful.

All our people felt so proud of what we did. More than 300 of them attended, and everyone wore the same Slalom shirt, Slalom shoes—many of the Slalomers shared pictures on social media of the booth, of us all looking similar in our clothes, which expanded the impact. No one group can amplify more than 100 people with all of their connections. The fact that people did it organically is more impactful than global marketing sending out a few social media posts.

It created a movement where people were coming up saying, “Who are you guys? There are so many of you out here, what's happening?” I actually had strangers say, “Slalom, you have arrived.” That made a really big difference in how our partner Salesforce perceived us as well.