Ricoh North America, Exton, Pennsylvania, United States: Lauren Sallata, Chief Marketing Officer

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Meet Lauren Sallata, Chief Marketing Officer for Ricoh North America.

She began this role in June of 2021 and brought more than 20 years of marketing and executive leadership experience to it. Having successfully led large, global technology organizations through brand and digital marketing transformations all with a focus on the customer experience, increased engagement and significant, sustainable growth.

She joined Ricoh from Panasonic Corporation where, as Chief Marketing Officer, she was the head of North American marketing and held a role in global strategy with Corporate Officers in Japan. She led the marketing transformation in North America resulting in the first expression of the organization’s new business positioning - from B2C to a holistic provider of B2B integrated solutions.

Prior to Panasonic, Lauren held leadership positions at Xerox Corporation, including Vice President of Business Development & Marketing where she led strategy and execution for the corporation’s rebrand and enterprise portfolio project.

Lauren’s expertise in adapting and thriving during massive change is a consistent thread and key driver for her. She is not afraid of firsts and shares her knowledge widely through thought leadership, which has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Advertising Age.

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Beyond Transformation to Enablement

In 2022, Ricoh was in the middle of its business and brand transformation, repositioning as an information management and digital services company. CMO Sallata knew the key to long-term success of the business, digital and brand transformation was getting sales and dealers to transform with them. She rallied her marketing team around the mission critical job of getting sales enablement right with an innovative approach to increase knowledge, upskill faster, and motivate sales.

The strategy - full-funnel and data-driven - focused on four key areas:

1. Creating site content to engage the right person at the right time. Persona-based, full funnel content strategy that allows visitors to journey from awareness to proof points quickly. In September 2022, Ricoh launched a campaign to build awareness and shift perceptions.

2. Arming Direct sales with new content in a self-service and competitive way. Achieved with the launch of 1Huddle in May 2022 with games on digital solutions pushed out through a mobile app and a live leaderboard tracked knowledge.

3. Bringing the Indirect closer. Development of new Dealer Sales Kits that included all the tools and resources needed to address specific buyer challenges including buyer persona, challenge/market/industry fact sheet, emails, social media posts, a customer-facing discovery model, one-pager and brochure.

 4. Fueling sales with data-driven insights. Combining people – Pioneer Team – and technology – Demandbase – to form a powerful engine for delivering actionable data insights on accounts and a stream of influenced and directly sourced leads.

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“Firsts” are always challenging and this effort had plenty. New brand content, new dealer kits, new platforms, new team and new dashboards. It took a highly orchestrated effort to get all stakeholders engaged, aligned and operational. Not an easy task for any Marketing team but exponentially more so for a CMO fairly new to the organization with new team members in new roles.

Since the launch of the rebranded and optimized site content, impact on engagement has been significant - as of March 2023:

·      40% Increase in on-page content engagement

·      63% Increase in overall landing page content download

·      4.9% to 11% Increase in users scrolling to at least 75% of the page

·      And, site content delivered a lead that led to the largest services deal Marketing has ever sourced for Sales. Comerica was signed in February of 2023 with a deal value of $7,000,000.

Since the launch of the first Dealer Kit:

·      Overachievement of sales plan for indirect in the targeted kit areas:

-      128% Growth in Production Software: Net Software Sales

-      137% Growth in Wide Format

-      257% Growth in Office Software

Since the launch of 1Huddle:

·      43 different games rolled out to Direct Sales during FY22

·      Total games played 6,749

·      Total time of gameplay 260+ hours

Since the onboarding Demandbase:

Early campaigns delivered over 8.1MM impressions, reached 95% of targeted accounts, 88% visiting new site and a lift of 74%.

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