MarTech Interview with David Rabin, CMO @ Lenovo SSG

David Rabin, CMO at Lenovo SSG chats about his journey as a B2B SaaS marketer while taking us through some of the most common B2B marketing and martech practices that modern day marketers should avoid in this catch-up with MarTechSeries:

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Hi David, tell us about yourself and what about the modern state of technology marketing excites you most? Tell us about your role at Lenovo…

Mention the brand “Lenovo” to anyone and the likelihood is they will describe us as “the ThinkPad provider!” Lenovo is historically known for its strong hardware business, and we’re very proud of that legacy. Over the past decade, we’ve embarked on a landmark transformation from hardware only provider to full-fledged solutions and services company and this is an ongoing journey. I am the Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group (SSG), and SSG stands at the epicenter of this transformation, established to address the growing market demand for end-to-end technology solutions.

As the marketing lead for this business group, my primary responsibility is to shape the vision for how Lenovo appears in the market as a global technology powerhouse and drive awareness and preference for our services portfolio.

During my 18-year tenure at Lenovo, I’ve led both B2B and B2C marketing efforts for different departments and geographies including the hardware business. With a PC or server, we have something visual to work with but when it comes to services and solutions because they’re intangible, we must tap into the recesses of our creativity and eschew traditional marketing tactics, to bring to life the benefits for our target audiences. This is a challenge I relish and exactly why I enjoy my current role – I love working with my team to find unorthodox ways to reach out to technology decision makers, whether through marketing programs, thought leadership, social media, sales and partner enablement, and more.

For new entrants to the tech marketing realm: what key marketing learnings and fundamentals would you share?

The old adage holds true—you’ve got to be obsessed with knowing all about your customer and don’t assume that the archetype and audience profile will remain the same in a year’s time. Their behaviors, their psyche, their ethos, what drives their decision-making, are changing constantly, as are their responsibilities and the world around them.

Let’s take CIOs for example, our main target audience at SSG. Every year, Lenovo surveys hundreds of global CIOs about their areas of focus and core responsibilities within their organizations. Year after year, we see those responsibilities changing due to internal and external forces such as organizational shifts, macro-economic forces, emerging technologies, and even the global pandemic.

To maintain a strong and up-to-date understanding of your customer, a great relationship with your sales organization is key—they’re the ones who are closest with customers and hearing about those shifts first-hand. If you don’t know how to support customers, or how to add value to sellers, you will not succeed. You have to understand what motivates them so sit and listen to real, live interactions with them as much as you can.

Finally, the advancements in marketing technology like AI-powered tools at our disposal today provide us with the wherewithal to better understand and target customers, convey messages that resonate better, and then track the behavior of customers.

There is an abundance of technology out there and it’s our job to weed through that. There are going to be new technologies coming out today that will add value to your organization, so invest in learning what is out there. You will improve not only as a marketer, but also elevate the marketing function in your organization.  And if you don’t keep up with the times, I can assure you someone else will happily take your place.

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What are some of the most common marketing mistakes you see B2B executives make today?

Firstly, stick to your strategy and give it enough time to make it work. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t turn around if you know you’re heading down the wrong road. If you pick a direction, a target customer, an area that you are going to invest in to build new offerings, new capabilities, or a new go-to market model, give it enough time to properly evaluate success. It can take months or longer to see progress with a new strategy, so it’s important to have the patience to wait it out.

Secondly, find the truth in data. You need to find data sources that you can trust—listen to that data. You can get a strong pulse on what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s on the minds of people. As important as these data sources can be, don’t trust every data point blindly. Our job as leaders is to stress-test and triangulate different sources of data.

Lastly, you have to trust the experts in your organization. Put those people who have institutional knowledge in positions to make decisions, and do your part to remove roadblocks for them, rather than make the decisions for them.

When it comes to the confluence of AI, Martech and Marketing: take us through some of the strategies and martech that have fueled your goals. How have you optimized and picked your martech stack over the years?

With sales enablement, we’ve embraced a less is more approach. We’ve migrated dozens of sales enablement tools onto a single platform. This consolidation has made it easier to locate resources and assess data, determining what strategies are effective and which are not. Discovering assets and information is now much easier, thanks to this consolidated platform which is user-friendly and navigable.

Another key strategy is focusing on evaluating the effectiveness of the existing assets, and be merciless in discontinuing those that aren’t working to avoid unnecessary expenditure. This data-driven approach ensures efficient resource allocation and genuinely supports sales. Remind your people that we get paid for impact and results, not outputs, so making a lot of ‘stuff’ isn’t a measure of success.

We were also early to embrace AI to support content development and delivery to drive efficiency and optimization. We have developed a platform that leverages GenAI to create marketing and sales enablement content, and the results so far have been great: we’ve seen a 70% cost-reduction with content creation and 4x faster speed to market! This has the potential to be one of the biggest game changers in marketing I’ve seen in my entire career.

Five of the biggest misconceptions around AI, martech and marketing that you’d like to dispel in this conversation?

I don’t believe that AI is going to put marketers out of jobs. The reality is that it’s more likely to reframe the work we do. What we are seeing is its potential to drive better outcomes and accelerate speed to market. Marketers who know how to leverage AI-powered tools will have an edge over those who don’t.

Another misconception is that because of this abundance of new tools and data, marketing spends are completely optimized. Unfortunately, there are still many areas where we need to work very hard to mitigate unproductive spending. There are many ways that we are still inefficient—bad data, poor relationships with the sales organization, changing priorities, slow reactions to changing landscapes, and more.

More data does not replace the need to gut-check and triangulate those findings. One data source is not always going to give you the right answer. And of course, you can’t let perfection be the enemy of progress, so there’s no use being paralyzed by good or bad data.  Sometimes you just have to trust your instinct, make a decision, and start moving forward.

A few thoughts on what the future of B2B SaaS Marketing is set to shape into before we wrap up?

We’ve spent the last few years simplifying our processes – focusing on fewer things and doing them better and bolder. On the other hand, with AI, there’s an urge to create a 100 times more initiatives because of the efficiency achievable with micromarketing and personalization. AI now allows us to create materials efficiently for a targeted audience. I believe there will be a transition from a period of simplification to one of hyper-targeted, long tail tactics, and AI is going to allow us to do that with lightning speed and exceptionally limited costs.

In a similar vein, we are seeing a trend of deeper fragmentation with AI applications. There are dozens of different tools for video development, image development, content development, web creation and so on. As we remain in this emerging stage of AI technology, I expect to see similar levels of fragmentation in the tech marketing tools we use.

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