CMO Chats with Jason Winston, Sr. Director of Marketing for Wow! Business

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO chats. My name is Jason Winston, and I’m the senior director of marketing for business services at WOW! Business.

So, Jason, tell us a little bit more about you and your role at WOW! business.

As you mentioned, I work for WOW! business. We are a leading broadband provider in the United States, primarily in the Southeast and Midwest. We have about 495,000 subscribers or customers, either way you want to say it, in 16 markets across that area. We have a vast portfolio of both residential and business products. On the residential side, we have obviously broadband internet, a home phone, and a mobile phone. On the business side, we also have, obviously, internet, coax, and fibre-hosted VoIP business continuity, which is an LTE failover product, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and lots of others to help enable businesses to do their business. My primary role is on the business side. So as a broadband company, we do have several residential and business products. I’m responsible for the marketing on the business side. That really includes all of our tactical execution mix, demand generation, and brand awareness. I help the salespeople with their needs, content, and other things. We really try to find messages that resonate with our customers and have them consider us as a provider so they can help them in their businesses.

Thank you. What is your main marketing focus? At the moment?

I kind of touched on it, but my marketing focus is really driving consideration. I think people talk about, ‘Oh, you need to drive awareness.’ But consideration, for me, is really where it’s at: are we considered? We’re in a very competitive environment, so are we considered for a viable partner for our customers? That’s a large part of it, as well as demand generation. How do we get people to actively call us or fill out a web form? What tactics do we use to do that? How do we analyse the most cost-efficient way to do that? Really, it’s driving that choice for our customers—that we’re a good partner for them.

How do you define success in marketing? Out of all of these things that you were, which ones were the most successful, and how do you define that success?

I think you have to boil it down as a marketer to the revenue downstream. There’s lots that go into that you can look at in one campaign. This looks like a success, but are we driving the right revenue, and are we helping people make the right decision? And you ask, What’s successful? We have a program that we call our local Advantage Program. So again, we primarily sell to small and medium-sized businesses. They typically don’t have a lot of money for marketing. They’re trying to keep their businesses going. So we have a program where, if they bundle internet and phone with us, or internet and our Wi-Fi product with us, we’ll feature them in 1000 TV spots in their local area. This is really appealing to small business customers because, again, they typically don’t have the ability to do that. We feature them, we give them a part of our commercials, and we talk about them and show pictures—and, suddenly, the awareness for them grows. It’s just that it’s a really great partnership to do with our customers, and they see the benefit right away from it. That’s just one. Again, I talked about the monetary part, but then also just the partnership we have with our customers because we’re able to do things like that.

You also mentioned your sales team. What is the relationship between marketing and sales, and out of all of the marketing initiatives that you’ve carried out, which ones have your sales department been more grateful for or excited about? 

The marketing and sales departments in large organisations typically have a lot of friction in the relationship. It can go both ways, where marketing can say, ‘Well, sales, you should do a better job of selling.’ And sales would tell marketing, ‘Well, you need to do a better job of marketing and have people know about us and call me’. We’re very different at WOW! because I actually report to the sales organisation, but I’m in a marketing role. I report to sales, and it’s created just an incredible partnership that takes away that friction, where it’s more of us being one team striving for the same goal. We can have real conversations knowing it’s not adversarial; it’s just, how do we get better? It’s really a kind of breath of fresh air. Having that opportunity, I get salespeople on the ground that they’ll call me or email me with something they need or an idea, which is great; it keeps that communication going and makes us all better. And for them, anything that helps them deem anything successful that we’re driving people to them. Have we created a program that drives more phone calls? Have we created a program that our prospects in the market can talk about? They already know about us with our field salespeople, so just anything that can give them a little heads up versus our competition has been successful for us. That’s great.

It’s great that you have that relationship with your sales team. It’s incredibly rare. We talk with marketers all the time, and obviously with salespeople as well, and that connection is, unfortunately, very, very rare. There’s often a divide between the two departments, which should never be the case because they work right together.

Exactly. 

What would you say are the biggest challenges that marketers face today?

I think especially for us—I’ll use Wow as an example—just the incredible competition that’s out there now. And I think you can probably take any category; there’s just tremendous competition. There are lots of companies that are well-funded. For example, right now, we’re seeing hundreds of millions of dollars poured into our markets by other companies to overbuild and build fibre. A few years ago, maybe we had one or two companies that were our competition. Now, we have many more than that. How do we differentiate with that extra competition and try to have people choose us? It’s also not just technology that has changed. For traditional overbuilders, the lay fibre has been around, but now the mobile phone companies have got technology where they can bounce broadband off of their towers and to a residence or to a business. Even though it’s an inferior product, it’s not as reliable, and it’s not as fast as your traditional broadband, but they are gaining customers. They are putting a lot of money behind it. They’re gaining customers as much as we want to say it’s an inferior product; it’s the new thing, and people are buying it. So I think the challenge for us in that situation, or any marketer that has lots of competition, is, how do you break out to be different from the competition? So that’s something we do; it’s a challenge for us every day.

How do you set yourself apart from the competition?

For us, we rely on the reliability of our products, but other companies can do that too. We really try, and we talk about the WOW! difference and why we’re different from the bigger guys. We have a couple of really big competitors that can outspend us and have more resources, but they’re big companies and can be cold. We want the relationships in the markets with our customers. We don’t want them to feel like, ‘Hey, great. Sign here, sign here, someone will contact you, and I’ll never talk to you again’. We continue to have relationships with our customers, and I even recently was in one of our markets. We were in a sales meeting, and one of the sales managers took a call and jumped out, and he came back and said, ‘Sorry, I had a customer call that had some questions’. Typically, customers don’t call the salesperson, but we maintain those relationships, and we think that really drives a difference for us.

I agree, and I always say people buy from people and that relationship with your counterpart is always fundamental. So, you mentioned smaller businesses. What is your ideal client profile at WOW?

Yeah, typically small to medium-sized businesses. But for us, it could be a sole proprietor that needs internet and a phone line. Great. It could be a larger company that has 20 employees, and every company needs broadband and a phone. Fortunately, we talked about, ‘Oh, we want to, we want to sell to medical companies, or we want to sell to bars and restaurants’. But for us, any customer, anyone that needs broadband, we want to talk to them because we’ll be able to provide that to them and help them with their business.

Do you host smaller events, or do you participate in conferences? What are you doing in that area? 

Yeah, actually, you know, I just talked about primarily small and medium-sized businesses, but we also have a wholesale group that we will sell to other carriers that may not have the network where they need it. Actually, twice a year, we go to a couple of shows. This year coming up, actually, in October, we’re preparing for in Denver, where we are able to sit down with those larger providers and have those conversations and talk about how we’re changing our network, updating our network, and expanding the network. We do it very specifically based on the need, and then the wholesale group for us is really where we do a lot of that.

What would you believe is the biggest opportunity for CMOS or marketers today that might not have been available in the past?

We hear a lot about it now: about generative AI and chat GPT, but I think that is going to change how we market, and it’s an opportunity now. I’ll give you an example of how I use chat GPT. If I needed a piece of sales content, typically, I’d have to hire a writer; I’d have to send background information. We have to have conversations. Well, now I’ve learnt that with chat GPT, with the right prompts, I can get 90% of what I need. So I think, as a marketer, things like that will allow us to do things much more quickly, much more efficiently. I think it’s just the start. I think we’re in the marketing world just kind of learning from it, even though there’s been AI for years, and we just don’t realise it. But I think what’s going to happen is the interface for a marketer, so in the past, if I needed some data, I would have to talk to one of our analysts, and they’d have to do some code and some software no one else knows to get it. I think the interface is going to be much like chat GPT, where I’ll just be able to ask a question and get what I need instantly. We’ll get much more data much quicker, which will allow us to make better decisions. 

All right, thank you. I have one last question, and it’s my favourite question: how would you define the role of a CMO in one word? And why?

It’s funny because I was talking about AI, and I went into chat GPT and asked that question. I’m just curious what it would come up with, and the one word that came back was growth. I think that’s perfect because I think you can have other adjectives—you might say visionary, strategist, or brand builder—but all those other adjectives lead up to growth. If, as the CMO, any lead, or any marketing leader, you’re not driving revenue for the company, then you need to rethink what you’re doing. My philosophy has always been if I’m looking at a program or spending money, will this program or this tax help my salespeople sell more? If the answer is yes, great, let’s do it. If it’s no, okay, let me rethink it. So I think now, more than ever, it’s less about brand building. No one cares if you have a great brand and no one’s buying from you. It’s more; the more of us driving growth and driving revenue on the back end.