Brand Makeovers: Cindy Knezevich Of Salesloft On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Give yourself a year. You’re going to tell yourself, “It won’t take that long! I can pull this off in six months, tops.” I don’t care how quickly you work as an individual. This is impossible. There are so many moving parts involved in an overhaul of your brand that you’ll need the full year to make sure every tiny detail is in place across your whole organization before you launch your rebrand.

As part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” I had the pleasure to interview Cindy Knezevich.

Cindy Knezevich is the Vice President of Brand and Communications at Salesloft. She is a SaaS marketing rockstar, having led marketing for both Jacada and The Network prior to her role at Salesloft.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’m a people person. I’ve always found communication to be kind of second nature for me. Early in my career I gravitated to marketing and comms quite naturally. About ten years or so into my marketing career, I had an interview with an industrial psychologist. He told me something that I found fascinating: I’m considered “split-brain dominant,” which is rare. My left brain and right brain scores were only two points apart, and the psychologist said “no wonder you are flourishing in technology marketing. The right side of your brain is satisfied by marketing and the left side by technology. This interaction helped underpin and inform my decision to stay on my path in marketing within the technology space.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing or branding mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Oh, I have many! One of them is pretty simple. Very early in my career I was in a corporate communications role. During a presentation, I put a slide up and introduced a colleague named Brian, but his name was spelled “Brain” on the slides. That was an easy lesson to learn: proofread, proofread, proofread!

Later in my career I was leading Customer Marketing for a software company and sending out a March Madness promotion to our existing customers. My first big email of the promotion had the subject line “Are you ready for March Madness?” And…. it bombed. Very few opens, no responses. I redid it with the subject line “Extra licenses 30% off until March 31” and it was hugely successful. I learned it’s good to be clever and creative but at the end of the day, you need to be direct in your comms or they won’t land.

And while I wouldn’t call this one funny, I learned valuable lessons around branding from it. A few years after that March Madness promotion, I was leading marketing for another software company and launching a rebranding project. I didn’t do as much internal enablement or hype around the rebrand as I did with our external constituents, and that was a mistake. People liked the new look just fine, but they weren’t willing to go out and shout it from the mountain tops. I learned that your internal ambassadors should be the biggest champions of your brand, and you have to help them become as passionate about any marketing efforts as you are. Once you have them on board, your internal teams will help your customers, influencers, and prospects get excited about what you’re doing too.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?

The tipping point for me was when I stopped believing in impostor syndrome.

I was the Director of Global Product Marketing and Communications at a software company for three years, and in that time span I got engaged, got married, and had a baby. I was always a confident person but so much change in a short time — and there were very frequent professional changes happening in that company — had me wondering. I don’t know how it happened, but once I did all of that my belief in impostor syndrome flew out the window. I know it exists for other people, but not for me anymore.

When I stopped putting energy into “can I do this?,” and instead started saying “yes I can and if I can’t at first, I’ll figure it out”, it changed the way I approach my career. I’m not going to focus on how certain areas are lacking; I’m going to focus on building those areas up. Sometimes you just have to be your own biggest cheerleader.

This is now the standard I hold myself to. I have empathy for folks who feel like they’re not up to the position they’re in, but it’s my job to help them do their best work or coach them into a place where they feel confident — whether I’m doing so as a peer, direct report, or manager. I still have bad days and projects that go awry, but I know I can handle problems like that now. Once you realize that you have the power to choose where to direct your energy and what to give credence to, impostor syndrome disappears.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Right now I’m working on completely overhauling Salesloft’s online content strategy. I’m encouraging the team to start with a blank sheet of paper and think outside the box. How can we better meet the needs of people who come to our site looking for education and inspiration?

I want to really understand who our audience is and how we can best serve them. Let’s focus on who is coming to the site, what content would best meet their needs, and then on creating engaging and inspiring content.

This all boils down to making sure everyone who interacts with our brand has the best experience possible. Whether they’re visiting our website, running into us at a conference or attending one of our events, our customers and community should have a consistently amazing Salesloft experience.

What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?

The most important piece of advice I can offer is this: you must be protective of yourself and your time. This is something that I struggle with to this day. Sometimes it’s hard to protect your work/life balance, but if the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that you don’t get any time back. It’s important to do the work that you’re invigorated by and give it 110% while you’re doing it, but you can’t lose sight of what really matters: your family, your health, and your life outside of work.

Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

At their very base elements, here’s how I see the two: Brand marketing is who you are. Product marketing is what you do.

With brand marketing, the goal is to generate awareness and make sure everybody understands who your company is and what you stand for. Prospects and existing customers need to know what your promise is as a brand and how you show up to solve problems. We want them to think “I have a sales problem; I need to call Salesloft.”

The goal of product marketing is to ensure your audience understands what you do and how you can help them. We have to constantly ask questions like “How do we position ourselves? How do we package this solution in such a way that it meets the needs of different customer personas? How do we put together an enterprise packaging plan?”

Let’s use Nike as a brief example to illustrate this difference. Nike’s brand marketing centers around their slogan “Just Do It.” Nike’s brand marketing tells the world, “We’re here for athletes. We make the world more active.” Nike’s product marketing, on the other hand (or foot!), tells the world, “Here are all of the shoes we offer. Here’s why they’re better than Adidas.”

If marketing is a hub and spoke model, product marketing is the hub. Product marketers are constantly feeding market information back to their product team. If you notice your customers are struggling with something, as a product marketer you can relay that back to your product team, and they’ll work on prioritizing a solution. Product marketing is responsible for taking that info to the rest of the organization, too — comms, demand gen, promotions, community marketing, and so on. Strategy is embedded in everything product marketers do.

Combined, brand and product marketing are very powerful. They help you package and price your solution, generate awareness, and educate your market on why you’re the best to solve their problems. And, ultimately, drive more revenue.

Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

A former colleague of mine who worked in sales used to say “It’s one thing to generate business. It’s another thing to generate business when everyone knows who you are.” You’re going to have a much easier building and closing pipeline if your market is already familiar with and has affinity for your brand. My job is to make sure everyone knows who we are when we show up. People should know that you’re the best choice to solve their problems before you even knock on the door. That’s why branding is so crucial.

Spending time and effort into generating a brand also differentiates you from your competition; it’s not always enough to know who you are — people need to know why you’re different and why you’re better.

Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?

You may consider rebranding when your current brand doesn’t reflect who you are anymore. That was one of the driving factors in our own rebrand here at Salesloft. Right now, Salesloft is a rapidly scaling, hyper-growth company with unicorn status. We’re certainly not the same company we were 10 years ago, and we’re not even the same company we were before the pandemic. Salesloft is an enterprise SaaS company now serving some of the biggest and most well known brands in the world. We needed to evolve our brand so it reflects who we are now, not who we were when we started a decade ago.

If your brand identity has served you well for a long time, that doesn’t mean you have to stay with it until the very end. Your brand needs to evolve as your company evolves. You need to stand out and make sure you’re keeping up with ever-changing markets and customer expectations.

What’s more, you may want to consider rebranding to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Salesloft’s people, product and service have always stood out, but for a long time our brand blended in. On G2 grids for example, our logo was indistinguishable from all the other sans serif blue-purple sales tech logos. So, we took the leap and completely reinvented ourselves to guarantee the brand identity the world sees matches the way our customers and employees see us.

Are there downsides of rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?

A brand makeover may not be a great idea if you already have a lot of positive equity. By rebranding you risk inadvertently destroying positive sentiment around your brand.

Remember New Coke? A lot of Coke drinkers in 1985 reacted poorly to it, including myself! “What are you thinking?” we asked. “Nothing was wrong with Old Coke!” This example is more about product than brand, but the message is the same: you shouldn’t do it just to do it. You should do it for strategic reasons or to solve big problems. What’s in it for people who already love your brand? Why would you risk all of that just for some new typography and colors?

You always, always, always need to weigh the risks before rebranding. We all have limited funds, time and attention. You need to be aware of the amount of energy you spend on anything. If you’ve got bigger fires to put out, don’t waste your time on a rebrand; if you’ve got a product that doesn’t work or your customers aren’t happy, rebranding isn’t going to fix anything.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image”? Please tell us a story or an example for each.

  1. Stop using stock photography. Your audience needs to see themselves reflected in your brand. Nobody sees themselves in photos of ladies sitting at their desks and laughing at salads.
  2. You can be bold with color, font or typography, but not all three. For a successful rebrand, you need to be willing to stand out. But you don’t want to give anybody a headache, so don’t go overboard.
  3. Give yourself a year. You’re going to tell yourself, “It won’t take that long! I can pull this off in six months, tops.” I don’t care how quickly you work as an individual. This is impossible. There are so many moving parts involved in an overhaul of your brand that you’ll need the full year to make sure every tiny detail is in place across your whole organization before you launch your rebrand.
  4. Think as hard about the rebrand process as you do about your actual, final brand. How are you going to excite, engage, and enroll your internal employees? How are you going to activate your influencers and customers? What happens when someone inevitably finds materials with your old branding? Are you going to rebrand your products at the same time? These are questions you need to ask and answer during that year-long rebrand process. You can’t just show up one day and say “Look, we have a green logo now!” A rebrand is so much more than that and committing to a brand makeover means committing all the way.
  5. Finally, rebranding is about your whole company, not just marketing. When you’re developing your new brand, your marketing department can’t do it by themselves. You need buy-in from your sales teams, product team, people ops, etc. When we were developing our new brand at Salesloft, we worked with an agency and a cross functional team of Lofters. You need reactions from people with eyes and ears and experiences outside of marketing. This will help inform your rebrand process and ensure your entire organization is engaged and involved in your new brand identity.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I want to inspire a movement that eliminates impostor syndrome for good. There has to be a way to convince everyone who tells themselves they’re not good enough to stop believing that nonsense. I want to encourage people to trust that they’re awesome the way they are — you may have flaws, but who doesn’t? If you want to do better work, stop wasting your energy questioning yourself and channel that into generating results.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There’s a Babe Ruth quote hanging on my son’s wall that I always come back to: “Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” For me, this message aligns with how I feel about impostor syndrome. If you let fear stop you from doing what you know you can do, you’ll never get anything done. Sure, you may strike out a few times, but at least you played. And that’s how we learn to win!

How can our readers follow you online?

Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter!

Thank you so much for these excellent insights! We wish you continued success in your work.


Brand Makeovers: Cindy Knezevich Of Salesloft On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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