Lori Cohen is a go-to-market executive with an impressive track record in launching and growing enterprises. The founder and CEO of BlueSky Branding, Lori is a data-driven CMO with deep experience in demand generation including search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), account based marketing (ABM), field and partner marketing, content-marketing, digital and much more. 

She’s also a former journalist. Lori began her career as a business reporter for PBS - and won multiple awards including a National Emmy, Peabody Award and a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard Business School.

In this episode of the Look Left @ Marketing podcast, Bryan Scanlon talks with Lori about the importance of branding in enterprise tech.

01:15 - Discovering your “why”

02:23 - Lori’s definition of branding

05:36 - Marketers measuring vanity metrics

08:56 - Gazelle, an example of how proper branding boosts a business

16:42 - Symptoms of a lackluster brand

25:12 - Branding around customer insights

30:09 - Best metrics for measuring branding success

For more information on everything she’s up to, be sure to visit https://www.blueskybranding.com/.

Notable quotes

• The term “brand” can mean a lot of things — here’s how Lori defines it: “I think at the highest level a brand is what people are saying about you when you're not in the room. So the brand is the experience, it's every touch point, your logo and your tagline and your colors and your website. But it's (also) your reps, your emails, your social tiles and what you're talking about. It's all of those things wrapped together that create kind of this emotional bond between you and your customer.”
• The volume of vanity metrics like managed qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL) doesn’t necessarily help build your brand: “I think it's a little bit backwards. I think if you can figure out what your brand stands for, then you can target the right people. Then you can bring less MQL in. So maybe when you make this transition, they go down and to the left, but the quality is better and it feeds your pipeline. And the end result is the end result you want, which is to drive revenue. Because whether you're in sales or marketing, isn't your job to drive revenue and be part of the go to market team?”
• Lori identifies the symptoms of a lackluster brand: “Your campaigns are no longer performing the way they used to. Your cost of customer acquisition is really going up. You know, your churns are high, your competitors are kind of nipping at your heels. And there's a lot of downward pressure on price, not just from your customers, but even your sales team is saying, “We have to lower the price.” We have to lower our price. And traditionally you've had a great product. I mean, you really do have good technology, but you've, you've always focused on things like the features and the functionality. And now you have competitors in the market that are really blowing you out of the water because they're positioning themselves against you and you're not responding.”