A Conversation with 'CMO of the Year Finalist' Timothy S. Gilbert, Campus Management Corp.

Timothy S. Gilbert Chief Marketing Officer Campus Management

On Monday, May 17, the Chief Marketing Officer Institute will reveal the winners of its "CMO of the Year" award for leadership excellence. The following interview, conducted by the CMO Journal and CMO.com, is one of 10 with each of the finalists. Click here for our conversations with the other nine finalists.

>> Category
Small to Midsize Organization 

>> Company Description
More than 1,700 colleges, universities, foundations, and fundraising organizations in 17 countries rely on Campus Management Corp.’s enterprise software products and services. Campus Management’s CampusVue Ecosystem is a fully integrated, centralized administrative and e-learning platform that unifies administrative management and reporting for a full range of public, private, and proprietary postsecondary institutions. Campus Management’s award-winning student information system is used by more than 75 percent of the largest U.S.-based proprietary career and online colleges.

>> Highlights
As CMO, Timothy Gilbert has led marketing’s efforts to expand the company’s product portfolio from two to a dozen software solutions, including acquisitions and OEM relationships. Marketing communications tactics generate more than 60% of the sale’s organization qualified pipeline. Gilbert has organized the company’s annual users conference, growing attendance by more than 25% annually for five consecutive years. He also conceived its online community, myCampusInsight.com, where customers can review and vote on new features. Gilbert regularly oversees the structuring of complex contracts for enterprise software systems for the company’s higher education clients.

>> The Conversation
Q: You’ve enabled marketing to generate nearly two-thirds of total qualified leads for sales. What tips can you share with other B2B CMOs for generating a great number of qualified leads?
A: We are constantly at-play with all the technical tools, like CRM and Google Analytics. We seek professionals who are comfortable with data. Good creative is important—you need to be fresh and crisp with your messaging. But the day job is reading Web metrics, studying response rates, and segmenting and resegmenting your lists to get ready for the next campaign.

We’re religious about integrating campaigns from front to back. Outbound flights tag to Website landing pages, wired into our CRM system, and out to the desktops or mobile devices of our people in call centers or in the field. It is instant. Then we study it and tune the next flight. We are installing a new system that we also sell to universities, which automates a series of interactions within a campaign based upon the prospect’s preferred mode of communication and to whatever action or reaction they had to the previous step in the campaign.

Response rate is vital. People buy from people in this market space. So we have a three-day aging report on our sales inquiries. If three days go by after an inquiry has been qualified and assigned to you, expect a nudge from your executive. The vast majority is getting same-day or next-day personal contact from our people—by which I don’t mean an automated email, I mean a human being on a phone or in-person. In today’s environment, if a university official is contemplating a new half-million dollar software system, and she spends six minutes on your site and views nine pages, you’ve used a lot of her valuable time. So you dial the phone—ASAP.

Q: How have you persuaded your key customers to become such committed and positive evangelists for your products?
A: In higher education, ads and PR don’t win deals. It is your references. Higher education is unique. This is an industry of passionate, well-educated intellectuals who live life immersed in logic and research. . .and then doubt the logic and question the research methodology. Prove it. Show me.

Five years ago, half a dozen clients were acting as our references. Today, more than 130 will talk to a sales prospect on demand. It is not because we became suddenly perfect. Frankly, you don’t want references saying you’re perfect; it sounds hokey. I wish I could claim marketing did it with a logo’d baseball cap.

What happens is that marketing or your CEO lays out a vision for what the ideal customer experience should be. For us, this is iterative, defined by the scenarios that emerge over time to test your ethic. Gradually, you have test cases you can put into operational language, such as what behaviors can be policies because they keep clients optimistic about the trajectory of your technology, your service levels, and your evolution?

Clever marketing or niceties from account managers only go so far. Building references takes the whole village. It requires that each employee has suitable power and an internal compass tuned to the vision so they can do what they already know is the right thing without dragging the client through a lot of bureaucracy. And if all else fails, there’s always a free baseball cap.

Q: You directly influenced the close of many major deals for your sales team. What do you do to be so well-integrated and connected to your sales force?
A: Keep in mind, Campus Management is a company that has grown from small to medium, so its executives wear many hats. We rotated responsibilities at one point, so job titles were approximations. Now that has to change as we grow. But each executive rides along with sales and directly manages customer relationships from time to time. This isn’t a Fortune 50 ivory tower. Maybe that’s not going to be scalable, but for now it is works.

To answer the question, though, it is important for marketing managers and product managers to be the CEOs of their lines of business. I have to assume you’re competent. Now let’s get out there and see if our best-laid plans withstand sitting across the table from other smart, reasonable people representing their billion-dollar organizations. They say both sides will feel a bit stung after they sign a fair deal. So you get out there, listen, and understand the objections firsthand, clarify why we believe in what we presented, and then take the advice from your sales professional on how we can make things work for this client without anyone getting hurt.