How Verint juggled a spinoff and rebranding amid the pandemic

Starting as CMO in the middle of a pandemic is challenging enough. But what about when your new company is spinning off a major chunk of business that will keep the original company name? That’s exactly what Celia Fleischaker confronted when becoming CMO of Verint in September 2020. Her approach provides multiple lessons for b-to-b CMOs. To redefine the brand, Fleischaker and her team began with market research among employees, customers, prospects and industry analysts. Zeroing in on the idea of “boundless customer engagement,” the rollout focused initially on employees, making sure they not just understood the new brand story but could and would evangelize about it. Subscribe to Ad Age now for award-winning news and insight. From there, it was introduced to customers via virtual events and ultimately to the market at large. With many of Verint's more than 4,000 employees and nearly 10,000 customers embracing the new story, it’s not surprising that site traffic and lead flow are on the rise—leaving Fleischaker in her own state of “boundless” optimism. What was your mandate when you first joined Verint? I came in during the pandemic—which is always a different experience—but Verint was in the midst of a pretty big spinoff of a big chunk of the business. Verint was at about $1.3 billion and spinning off $500 million that was cyber security. The remaining portion of the business still under the Verint brand became a pure-play customer engagement company. Building a brand is tough, changing people's perception of a brand that's been around for 20-plus years is not always easy. That was really the focus—getting people to know who we were post-spinoff as a customer engagement company. It was about redefining the brand. How did Verint involve employees? A big team of people worked on this together and a lot of research went into how to define it. It was important that it be credible to our employees and that they really bought in, so the team had identified a handful of influencers in the organization, a mix of people that have been there a while in different functions, some who were newer. They were used as touchpoints along the way, gathering upfront what they saw as our differentiators and how we could go to market, and then, as that messaging got developed and the visualizations that went with it, we tested against them. How did you involve customers? We briefed some customers and then recorded some videos with them asking about these different pieces of customer engagement. They were using our terminology and that's when you feel like you've hit it—right? When your customers and your employees start talking back to you about their experience and the value they're getting and they're actually using “boundless customer engagement” or “the engagement capacity gap” and talking in our language, it's exciting. What messaging did you end up with? Our top-line message was around this idea of boundless customer engagement. We identified a problem that went with it that we were solving and did primary research around it. It’s the engagement capacity gap, related to the struggles that companies are facing as they're looking at—especially with the pandemic—how they effectively engage with customers. Digital went through the roof with all these interactions, but at the same time, they're limited on budget and resources. There's this tug of how they effectively engage with what they have. What did the market research reveal? We went out globally to a large group of people in our target markets, asking them about what they’re seeing, if they’re facing challenges here, what those challenges are, and how prepared they feel. We do see this gap—and by the way, we think it's going to get even bigger and more challenging in the next year, which we didn't necessarily expect. We thought coming out of the pandemic people would think it was going to get a lot easier and that wasn't the feeling. The pandemic pushed in with the acceleration of digital. Initially, it was a necessity during the pandemic, but it really became a preference for a large number of consumers. Getting the tools, the infrastructure and the pieces in place so you can effectively engage through an increasing number of channels is tough. They needed help. How did you roll out the new messaging? We did previews with employees. We made a conscious decision to roll it out internally first. They saw it before the market saw it, before anyone else saw it, and really got a sneak peek at how we were going to roll things out. Then we rolled it out with our different constituencies, with analysts and with investors. With customers, it's still going on, but we did have our customer conference in May and were really able to push the messaging at that event. What worked particularly well with the go-to-market? There was a lot of focus on content and using it as an opportunity to really solidify that content strategy and how we go to market. The primary research that we talked about earlier served as a foundation for a lot of that content, and then we also worked with a number of influencers and analysts to create content as well. Then that really fed the global campaign, which was newer for Verint, across all the regions with a campaign speaking to a lot of the new messaging. What are the key metrics for you? We looked at what we've added to the pipeline as well as quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year from an influence perspective. We saw engagement on our social channels impacted positively. We saw a huge lift in our web traffic and people coming to the site. We're planning to do a brand study at the end of the year. I think getting that baseline on the brand before we were looking at repositioning was really important and, in hindsight, a mistake on my part not to move this forward. I should have pushed for that so that we had that baseline before we did this work. What is marketing’s role in upselling and cross-selling? Especially in a SaaS world, you’re very much partnered up with customer success and different parts of the organization. But retention and expansion are so important, so we are looking at doing more for those areas. We've got 10,000 customers. That's a lot of opportunities. You want to take care of those customers and then you want to continue to grow that relationship.

How Verint juggled a spinoff and rebranding amid the pandemic

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