Marketing Made Easy: Use Customer Profiles

Marketing has evolved far beyond creative guesswork. As Teradata CMO Jacqueline Woods reveals, success now demands scientific precision in understanding and reaching customers.

Woods points to a fundamental shift in the marketing landscape. "The world has become noisier," she explains. With countless channels competing for attention, businesses must navigate customers to relevant information quickly and clearly.

Through practical examples, Woods demonstrates how Teradata breaks down their complex AI offerings into digestible segments based on roles, industries, and solutions. This approach transforms overwhelming technology into clear pathways for specific users.

Beyond segmentation, Woods emphasizes the critical role of data science in marketing decisions. Her team uses propensity modeling to identify which prospects mirror their most successful customers, allowing for precise resource allocation.

She challenges common assumptions about marketing activities. While in-person events remain popular, data often reveals they're not the highest-performing initiatives. Yet some low-return activities serve strategic purposes essential for market presence.

The core insight: marketing excellence comes from truly understanding customer needs and articulating solutions in their language.

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Being intentional with your marketing isn't about posting a few things on social media and hoping it works out. You need to understand your business landscape, your goals, and who you're talking to. Get those things right, and you have a shot at being successful. -- Jacqueline Woods

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

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Cut Through Market Noise: Learn how to stand out in crowded markets by speaking directly to customer needs, leading to higher response rates and qualified leads.

Scale Your Marketing Team: Discover how businesses of any size can access data science expertise and analytical tools without hiring full-time specialists.

Enter New Markets Successfully: Gain insights on identifying and entering adjacent

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Follow Jacqueline Woods on Social

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- Jacquelinne Wood's Website

- LinkedIn

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More About Today's Guest, Jacqueline Woods

Chief Marketing Officer, Board Director, Trustee, Strategic Advisor

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Jacqueline Woods is Teradata’s Chief Marketing Officer and a vital member of the executive leadership team. She excels in showcasing customer outcomes, simplifying complexities, and highlighting the critical role of AI in creating and delivering value. Jacqueline's career spans across leading companies like IBM, GE, Oracle, and NielsenIQ, where she has driven corporate transformations using modern marketing methods grounded in data insights. Recognized as a Marketing Visionary by Marketers that Matter and one of the Most Influential CMOs by Insights Success, Jacqueline continues to inspire and lead with her results-oriented leadership.

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Key Takeaways

• Science of Marketing - Success requires data analysis and intentional strategy rather than intuition alone. Even small companies can access data science expertise through creative staffing approaches.

• Smart Resource Allocation - Marketing decisions should balance measurable returns with strategic necessity. Not every activity needs high ROI if it serves a crucial market positioning purpose.

• Customer Understanding - Beyond demographics, effective segmentation considers roles, industries, and specific solutions to create clear pathways for different users.

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A Transcription of The Talk

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Mark Drager: So Jacqueline, you have an absolutely stunning career, in marketing, in Insight, in customer experience, in what we call segmentation. Being able to understand a company's prospects audiences and clients, breaking it down to different people in different use cases and different ways that they may choose to shop with us. You've worked at global companies like IBM and General Electric. And today you're at a company, Teradata.

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What I noticed right away, when I was looking at your company's website, at your marketing is Teradata is in the world of AI, which, if I can be blunt, is kind of confusing as hell, right? Like, what does that really mean? And yet, when I come to your organization's website, and I see how we can help, and I click on the button, how we can help, I see that you break it down by role, you break it down by industry, you break it down by solution or use case.

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Suddenly now, it's clear to me that out of every different type of company, every different situation, and every different user, I can very easily self-select where I would fit into that. And it may seem like a very simple thing to do. And yet so few organizations are able to connect those dots. They assume that the target audience, or the user would just kind of figure out where they fit in all of this. And yet you have done this so well. Can you share with us a little bit about why this is so important? And perhaps based on your experience as a global lead and segmentation, perhaps this is something that comes very naturally to you.

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Jacqueline Woods: Yeah, Mark, I guess I would say, first of all, it didn't come naturally when I first started doing it, it didn't come naturally at all. It wasn't something that I kind of woke up and was like, yes, we should have segments, and we should be specific. Because I think when you think about marketing, people tend to think about mass marketing and kind of getting as many messages out to people as you can.

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But you know, the world has become a much noisier place than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It is a much noisier place because you have so many channels that you can get information from. So I think if you're getting information from many channels, you have to be really precise in terms of trying to target who you're trying to talk to. And you want to meet people where they are, and you want to help them in an easy way navigate to your information.

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And I think that's what's really critical. So when you think about it, we didn't have as many social media sites as we have now. When you kind of think about even ad tech and the way people talk to each other, think about LinkedIn even 10 years ago. Think about that. Think about it five years ago. It wasn't the marketplace that it is now in terms of the way companies actually talk to customers and try to get them to pay attention.

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Because I think the barriers to entry are so much lower than they used to be for people trying to compete with one another. You have to be very specific about who you're talking to, and why you're talking to them. And make it easy for them to find you and find information about you.

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Mark Drager: And so, when we consider these different types of roles, and if I go to your website, I can see that for our listeners, it's broken down to business leaders versus data leaders versus the scientists or the engineers who may be using Teradata's platform and software. So it's broken down into decision makers or more C-suite people, it's broken down into the actual users who may be leveraging the system.

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And then when we go to a different type of segmentation, we think about industry, you know, there's financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, there's all the different industries. And then finally, the solutions might be broken down based on the different types of customers or the different use cases where you might use them.

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These three buckets: the different roles for the person who might be exploring your system or your service or your offer, the different industries where you work in whether it's super high level or it gets very, very niche. And then the ways that one might use your service, your system, your solution. If you're listening to this, it's this kind of strange matrix that breaks down the different types of people, how they might identify, the different places or industries they might work and how they identify, and then the different ways they might implement your software.

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And as you mentioned, Jacqueline, this is not simple, this is not easy. I have found that many of the people in the organizations we work with can get lost in the weeds of knowing, okay, when we start to go down this rabbit hole of all the different industries and all the different use cases and all the different things, it can become too much. Do you have a natural way you approach this or a process you approach where you find that Goldilocks "just right" kind of approach?

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Jacqueline Woods: Yeah, when you think about it, what you just said even at its simplest form was kind of this three-dimensional matrix, right? Which were roles, industries, and kind of type of solution. And when you think about it, what someone is looking for as someone in the C-suite or a senior business leader, they care about really one thing. Now, everyone will say we care about more things, but honestly, we care about one thing. And that one thing is really growing your top-line revenue.

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And so when you think about talking to someone, that is what they're thinking about, you have to frame the conversation that way. So they're not necessarily interested in the solution at that point. They're interested in ways companies may be like them or in adjacent industries, how have they grown their top-line revenue? And have you helped them do that? And kind of how do you frame that? Now, if someone's listening to this, they're going to say, well, people want to manage margin, and they want to manage costs, and they and all of that is absolutely true. But what people get rewarded most for is acquiring new customers and kind of growing their business.

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Now you obviously want to do that profitably. And so you have to think about that as the first thing that type of individual is looking for. So that role is a very different role than what the CIO is looking for. That role is a very different role than what a digital officer or an analytics person is looking for. Because they're looking actually, how does this solution fit into the context of the other software that I already have? How do I marry these two things together? How, you know, is it easily integrated? So each of those people is looking for something different.

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And the reason that you generally do an industry lens is because there are some industries that are very much alike. I mean, the one great thing about working at GE, when I worked at GE, was that it practically covered every industry. I mean, at that time, it's a much smaller company than it is today because it's broken, you know, they've broken up healthcare, etc. But back in the day, it was like, we sold everything to everyone, including light bulbs, appliances, turbines, and financial services. So you really had to kind of think about what was it that you could use in similar use cases that you knew people were looking for, that may be adjacent to another business that you're actually talking to.

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And that became really important. And that's really something that I really learned at GE because they were in so many industries, but the industries did a great job, the businesses, whether you were transportation, oil, and gas, appliances, commercial aviation, they did a good job of understanding what are our similarities? And then how do we take those similarities and talk to the types of customers we have that have similar needs? They did a great job of doing that. And so I've always been a person that really leaned into industries and really told stories about how you solve complex problems. And how are those problems very much, not just your only problem, but similar problems that everyone is trying to solve?

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And I do find that people learn from other industries, and they like understanding what other industries are doing, and then adopting some of those behaviors for their own selves. So that's been something that I really lean into.

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Mark Drager: You're giving away one of our greatest secrets now. Over the years, I founded my agency in 2006. And at a certain point, I wondered how many industries we've worked in, and we've worked in 29. And I can't tell you how smart you look when you take something that's fairly standard practice, you know, it's just everyday business in one industry and you bring it to another, and suddenly you're blowing everyone's minds.

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Jacqueline Woods: Well, and there are some industries that have a lot of similarities, like retail, consumer packaging, and finance and banking, actually. And I mean, on the, what I would call the consumer banking side, they have an awful lot of similarities. When you kind of get down to it just in terms of, and then when you think about those similarities to even telecommunications, because everyone's looking at the churn and customer acquisition, and how do you, and then you can move that over to media and entertainment, because who's better now at thinking about how to have subscription services? Twelve years ago, that wasn't really a thing, streaming wasn't a thing. You didn't have people having subscriptions for streaming, that is just a new advent of the way that people sell telecommunication services.

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And so all of these types of industries, I think, do learn from each other. And then you can even translate that to software as well. Because think about it, we didn't have a quote, Software as a Service, which by the way, is just a subscription, which by the way, is just cable TV, or anything that's like that, or buying your gas and electric services, and other things that kind of have similar kind of pay by the click, or pay by a certain type of usage and a certain type of metric. And all those things are very, very transferable to one another.

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Mark Drager: And we're starting to see this. I mean, we don't talk a lot about consumer packaged goods or things like that. But gosh, the shift of the automakers in the last few years to try and move people to subscription services for features that are already built into their cars. I know, like, you get some, and if you stop paying subscriptions, suddenly your heated seats turn off. Like, look at farming and agriculture, with John Deere and all these companies embedding tons of technology that farmers can't even service themselves. It's the moats that these organizations are building around themselves to turn everything into something we don't actually get to own. It's pissing me off a bit.

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Jacqueline Woods: I thought I was annoyed with the heated seats. Because I really like the heat. It's a feature in your car, just like anti-lock braking or not, you know, if you live in a cold area, you know what I mean?

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Mark Drager: Oh, I know what you mean. I live in Toronto.

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Jacqueline Woods: But I do believe that people are definitely decrementing services and products in a way that kind of forces the buyer to really sit back and say, "What do you really want? And what value are you getting out of the item that you're purchasing?" I have always been a person who said that people do not value all you can eat. That is why buffets have gone out of style. If you think about the brunches that people had, you go back 15-20 years, those brunches on Sunday were, you know, you'd had your mimosa, and it was all you could eat. Everyone figured out that you could never eat as much as what they paid for. So, this really thoughtful way to sell and have people purchase what they really want, I do think works well in some industries. And for some things, it doesn't work well for everything.

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I do think when people buy a car, and you get a vehicle to your point, I think most people are expecting that the things that are coming in my car, or the things that I purchase for my car, I get this XM, you know, Sirius XM, that absolutely should be a subscription. That is not something that you have to have, that is an option that you can purchase. But it's like picking out a letter in the alphabet and saying, "Mark, if you really want that letter E, I think you're gonna have to pay extra for it," and people are like, "You know, I need all the vowels, not just one."

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Mark Drager: Can you imagine not only paying a subscription one day just to use the air conditioner? Suddenly it's a heat wave, and now they're surge charging and charging me even more to use the AC because it happens to be a hot day. I mean, exactly, who knows where it'll end?

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But I am curious. So if we consider these different segments that you have again, by role, by industry, by solution, are these simply for you in your role as the leader of marketing and presumably sales in general? Are these operational personas as well? Do you track whether some industries are outperforming others in terms of cost of acquisition or close rate? Do you look at whether certain roles lead to better decision-making or higher closes than others? Are these not necessarily specific attribution models? But are you using these personas or roles as well from an operational point of view?

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Jacqueline Woods: Well, specifically, we have some propensity modeling that we do. We actually look at companies and places where we've done well, whether that's by industry, whether it's by the size of the company, or the type of solution that has been deployed, and we will actually put that against our prospects and opportunity set to really see where we should spend more time. We absolutely do that.

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In fact, it is something that, I have data scientists who work for me, which you should not be surprised about. I have a whole data science team, and I call it marketing. It's called revenue optimization, where I'm actually looking at the dollars that I'm spending myself, and where I should most likely place them in order to get the best return for the dollars that I'm spending.

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There are things that people really like, but it doesn't mean that generate the highest return. People love doing in-person events. We definitely all miss each other. It's like we had three years of kind of not being around people. And so now, people have always loved doing events. But events aren't necessarily your highest-performing marketing activity, quite frankly.

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And so you always have to have a combination of what is it that I should do to figure out what my highest attribution activities and tactics are, and then have that balance in my marketing mix to figure out where I'm going to be placing my bets. And I'm always going to place them in the place where I feel like I'm having the most optimization.

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Mark Drager: Is that by nature, skew decision-making to the activities, tactics, or decisions that can be backed by data, and eliminate, I guess, maybe some of the potentially positive but other ideas, the other campaigns, the other investments you might make, but may simply just be one or two steps removed from being able to attribute, you know, this sale to that activity? Well, we trust a bit of a bias.

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Jacqueline Woods: Well, no, because we track every single thing that we do. And some things, even if they don't have as high of a return, some things you do because they're strategic to do. You need to show up at the XYZ conference because it's strategic for your company to be there. It doesn't mean that you're going to get 1000 marketing-qualified leads by attending that conference. But it means that you are part of the ethos of your industry and community and peers. So if you don't show up, it's obvious that you're not there. And that may be giving off a signal that's not positive. So some of those things can't necessarily be 100% accounted for, like, "I'm going to show up at something because it's the right thing to do for the company." It doesn't mean that I'm going to have the highest return on that particular investment. So you will do things like that. But by and large, the majority of the marketing spend that we have is 100%. I'm looking at those levers all the time because it has to do with what my media buys are, it has to do with what we're doing on LinkedIn and other places or other channels, and which channels are going to be the best channels for us.

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Mark Drager: I'm glad you mentioned levers because often when I'm working with business owners, I explain that really, we're a brand strategy agency, and we help with segmentation. And we help with branding. And we help really create and craft unique messaging and differentiation. But I have a whole bunch of different levers I can pull. And so a big part of my responsibility is trying to determine out of all of the stuff I could do, what are the things that will make the most immediate impact with the lowest risk with the highest possible rate of return? That's the way I look at it. And so you mentioned these levers you could pull. If someone listening to this does not have a CMO in their organization, they have a marketing team, they have a sales team, they have a head of marketing, VP marketing, whatever it might be, but they don't have someone with your level of expertise or experience. They don't have the data scientists, they don't have any of those people. When you boil it down and really simplify it, what levers are you pulling? Is it simply, "This is the budget I have to apply? These are the channels or strategies I choose to apply. And these are the people I need." Is it that simple or are there other ways you're looking at these levers you can pull?

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Jacqueline Woods: I don't know if it's that simple. There are so many ways to get the kind of talent that you need, even if you're a small company. And I would encourage people to do that. There are data scientists that are sitting out there that only want to work two hours a day, and would be more than willing to do some analytics for you to help you understand how you're spending money, and whether that money is working effectively for you or not.

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I 100%, I am a data-driven marketer. I started my career in finance. My best relationship in, like, the entire time that I've worked probably has been with the CFO, because I know how to talk to the CFO. Like, I can go in. And not—I think people really wrongly, and this is now when I will make the pitch for, you know, marketing is more of a science than it ever has been. People aren't sitting around going, "You know, let's just do this, and let's see if it works out." You need to be intentional, because as soon as you're not intentional, what happens is you've spent or wasted money on something that actually wasn't effective for you. And if you have a small budget, and if you don't have the right kind of levers in place, sometimes that's hard to recover from.

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And this is not to throw Red Lobster under the bus. But you know, coming out with this now conversation that, "Hey, we shouldn't have done all-you-can-eat shrimp." And that's the thing that took us under, I think, yeah, maybe that was a promotion that had its time and had its day. But clearly, someone wasn't doing the analytics to see that it was costing them more to have that type of promotion than it was bringing people in the door. So I am always going to err on the side of getting the information, getting the data, and having someone do the analytics on it. That is the best way you can spend your money.

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Now, let's say we have that, making sure that you kind of cobbled together the right people that have the expertise is important. And I know that you know this. One of my jobs that I had when I was at Oracle was I run pricing and licensing for the company. For everything that the company sold, I don't care whether it was services, I don't care if it was software, I don't care if it was education, I don't care if it was financing—anything in the bill of material, I was responsible for my team and I. People bought toothpaste and thought they could price software. So people, because you have an experience with something, sometimes you think it's easier than what it is. And because you have familiarity, sometimes you just bring those opinions with you.

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And I think roles that people have familiarity with, like marketing or even like sales, people just think that they can just, "Let me just tell you how to do it." And there really is a bunch of expertise and data that goes into that. So I would always encourage people, no, it's not just kind of some resources and a few channels, and let's post a few things on social media and hope it works out. I think you have to be pretty intentional about how you have a composite of what your business landscape looks like. What are the goals that you're trying to achieve in that landscape? And who should you be talking to? And how do you talk to them? And if you get those things right, you have a shot at being very successful.

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Mark Drager: Oh my goodness, this is such a great masterclass. I'm speaking with Jacqueline Woods, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Teradata. I do have one final question for you. So if you had to boil it down to one single tip or strategy to help us sell more, what would be your advice?

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Jacqueline Woods: You can tell that he didn't ask me that question before because then I would have obviously had an automatic answer. But if I had to boil it down to one thing, I think it really does boil down to, do you truly understand the needs of the people or constituency that you are serving? Do you have the right product or service to meet those needs? And can you articulate that in a way that they understand that you do, and you alone are the best company to meet that need or help them solve that problem?

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Mark Drager: That is a fantastic answer because you just basically wrote down, I said one thing, but you actually just said, "Go figure it all out. And if you crack that code, you will succeed."

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Jacqueline Woods: Yeah, I don't ever think there's a silver bullet. And I think that most people somehow think that there's a silver bullet for things. And every time that I investigate where someone thought that someone had a silver bullet, or they had the one trick pony, or that somehow they were, they just came out of nowhere, and they were the dark horse that no one knew about, and like, all of a sudden man was the darling of Wall Street. When you really go investigate and really dig in, what you find is that generally it's someone who works really hard, who laid the groundwork and foundation, who kind of figured out how to meet, you know, kind of people where they were, and then just executed extraordinarily well. And if you find a situation where that's not true, Mark, let me know. Let me know because I have not seen that yet.

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