An Interview with CMOs from Northwestern Mutual and Equinix
Lynn Teo, CMO of Northwestern Mutual, and Adam Berlew, CMO of Equinix, bring unique perspectives and strategies for connecting with customers in today’s rapidly evolving marketing landscape. With wide-ranging careers spanning nearly 25 years each, they offer insights into the challenges and opportunities facing CMOs today.
Teo began her career in user experience for software, web, and e-commerce industries. This foundation shaped her customer-centric approach to marketing. She’s led complex global marketing teams across advertising, publishing, education, retail, finance, travel, and health. At Northwestern Mutual, Teo’s role involves navigating the complexities of a B2B2C model and balancing digital channels with a network of 8,000-plus financial advisors. The opportunity to align her personal values with Northwestern Mutual’s mission to free Americans from financial anxiety was a key inspiration for taking on her current role. She was drawn to the company’s 167-year legacy of trust and the challenge of keeping a long-standing brand relevant in the current market.
Berlew has held leadership roles at top companies, including Google Cloud, Brocade a Broadcom Company, Dell, and Boston Consulting Group. His background encompasses strategy, marketing, product management, sales, channel programs, and M&A in both enterprise and consumer sectors. At Equinix, Berlew focuses on building customer success stories to promote the brand and using modern marketing technology for personalization and world class customer journey. In addition to highlight and create awareness of Equinix’s story of sustainable data centers and AI infrastructure solutions. Berlew was drawn to his role by new developments in AI infrastructure architecture and the opportunity to work with a historic company at the forefront of network connectivity and cloud computing. He sees Equinix as uniquely positioned in the AI era, providing critical infrastructure for advanced computing needs and distributed architectures essential for emerging technologies.
In this Q&A, Teo and Berlew discuss:
- Strategies for brand differentiation and enhancing customer connections
- Navigating key changes in marketing, including AI integration
- The future of marketing, including hyper-personalization and automated insights
- Leadership approaches and managing change
- Prioritization techniques for new marketing leaders
- Advice for aspiring marketers
Their valuable insights below are for marketing professionals at all levels, from those just launching their careers to seasoned executives adapting to the ever-evolving industry shifts. Both CMOs emphasize focusing on personalization to enhance customer connections, leveraging AI, and building a formidable brand presence in an ultra-competitive landscape.
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In terms of forging strong customer connections, how do you successfully differentiate your brand in a market where offerings are often seen as commodities?
Lynn Teo: In financial services it’s hard to distinguish between one brand and another. So, I always go back to what makes you, you. For Northwestern Mutual, our legacy is something that we hold up with tremendous pride. But I also think being attuned to what consumers are facing in the world is crucial. In financial services, there’s a tremendous amount of skepticism about whether consumers can trust a brand. Is a brand bringing something to bear that is truly of value? Is the brand attuned to their very personal needs as a consumer?
As CMO, I’m always challenging my teams to look at the reasons people say ‘no’ and have that front and center. Our role as CMOs is to earn the right for customers to actually listen to what we have to say; and you earn that right by demonstrating that you understand them and that you’re meeting them where they are.
“Branding isn’t just about value; it’s about earning the right to have people listen to you.” – Lynn Teo“
As a brand, I look at where the strength of Northwestern Mutual is. It’s that our 8,000-plus financial advisors are second to none. They are the face of the brand, the human element behind deeply understanding and being very empathetic to customer needs. When you face commodification or commoditization, that’s when you have to look inward and reflect on what makes your brand truly unique and valued.
Adam Berlew: For Equinix, in particular, it’s offering a differentiated solution that solves the business problem. We’re a B2B company, with a focus on providing an amazing customer experience. Part and parcel of that is a lot of customer education and helping the customer design an IT architecture to ensure the achieve improved business outcomes. In our world of data centers, some of the big issues are power and being able to provide responsible power. As the most sustainable data center company in the world, we want to tell that story.
Everybody in the B2B space across industries is trying to harness the power of AI, so it’s partnering with them to help build their AI solution. We need to meet customers where they are and tell our story on big stages in important places because AI is a boardroom conversation. And responsible power is a boardroom conversation. For me, it’s about getting all the people in our company with authority on these topics to speak in places where we can help educate the world.
Every industry is going through so much transformation. As you think about key changes in marketing, what’s top of mind for you right now?
Adam Berlew: We’re not a well-known brand because, in the past, only a few thousand companies worldwide needed us – as we’ve expanded our footprint, IT architecture evolved with Cloud and now AI, both more companies in the additional countries we operate in and additional buying centers in all our customers and prospects need to know us. The first thing is expanding awareness and doing that in a very efficient way. This means using a modern marketing tech stack, automation, AI, and personalization.
What’s also really important is that as we bring in new tech, we’re making sure we have the talent and capabilities to educate and create amazing content that provides an excellent experience to people learning about us.
“It’s about tech for scale, delivering an amazing experience and supporting multi-persona journeys.” – Adam Berlew
This customer experience is a journey that spans multiple people, multiple parts of the company, departments, and personas. That’s why expanded awareness is so critical to us, and being able to do that with data and insights are key.
Lynn Teo: Before a CMO can decide on what changes to focus on, you have to take stock of what you’re walking into as a leader. My first three to six months were about understanding what flavor of marketing was in place under previous leaders. Sometimes that skew is reasonable because of a certain point in time and the maturity of the function.
Marketing here was very synonymous with brand, perhaps a little over-indexed. The focus was primarily on brand and digital leads. As I consider the changes I’ve implemented, it’s recognizing that while brand is important, it must lead to demand. Brand must lead somewhere.
“Brand only matters if it starts to propel action.” – Lynn Teo
We need to be very quick to have that pull-through of brand. It only matters if it starts to propel action, and that action might differ depending on the customer. For someone who has never heard about the brand, that action could simply be signing up for a newsletter. That’s progress. If someone has already engaged with the brand for a year and hasn’t yet acted, we want them to meet with a financial advisor. The change I’m implementing is that things have to lead to the next step that will move the ball forward more deliberately.
The second area of change is to look at the entire ecosystem of marketing. Digital leads are important because they’re trackable and quantifiable, but we have to look at the reality of the business. If the majority of the leads are being nurtured and developed by our financial advisors, we need to think deliberately about ways we can support them.
A tangible example is when we’re launching a campaign, we need to think five steps ahead of what we need to build for the field so they can amplify our efforts. We provide them with out-of-the-box or turnkey campaigns they can use to exponentially increase impact. We think about how we engage with our financial advisors even for social media.
The change is more holistic, 360-degree thinking, activating all of our channels in an integrated way. That’s a mindset shift.
If you pull out the crystal ball and think about marketing five years from now, how do you see the industry evolving?
Lynn Teo: The elephant in the room is AI. We all know AI is going to accelerate everything we do as marketers.
There’s one area in particular that I would bet on, and that’s how we extract valuable insights. These could be insights that represent a customer cohort, or insights that reveal trends – trends that might differ across different segments of consumers.
All good marketing starts with rich insights. The future of marketing is one where this cycle – insights informing campaigns, which then inform how we reach out, message, or interact with clients – will have a much shorter turnaround time.
We’ll be moving into a world where it’s a segment of one. The insights will allow you to put out hyper-personalized points of interaction, messaging, and product proposals that are so customized to individuals. This will accelerate time to sale.
Adam Berlew: It’s personalization and it’s insight. As a B2B enterprise marketer, I expect that there’s an automated presentation put into the hands of a sales rep with all of the insights about the end-user customer buying group. If you’re buying something today that’s more than you can put on a credit card, there are a lot of people involved.
Sales reps should have everything they need, an automated appointment set up so that they can go in and have a rich discussion with less upfront human contact. The rep shows up in a way where the customer is getting instant value from that interaction, and we’re solving their problem. Because we know their problem. It’s not about giving reps a whole list of qualifying questions; they’ve been qualified, and now we’re solving a problem for them.
“AI will eliminate the need for qualifying questions – so conversations can start with value.” – Adam Berlew
Let’s talk about leadership and leading through organizational change. How do you approach team leadership?
Adam Berlew: We have amazing leaders, and I always try to hire people who are 10 times better than me. As a leader of leaders, it’s about painting the vision, not just where you need to be in six months, but where you need to be 12 and 24 months from now. This allows you to be declarative about where you’re headed. For instance, being able to say, ‘Here are the quick wins that we’re going to make as a team, and here’s how we’re going to operate differently.’ Repeating that over and over allows your amazing leaders to head down those roads without you having to micromanage them.
Lynn Teo: Clarity is critical when expressing the future state and painting a picture of that vision. Give people a lot of latitude in how they use their skills to get to that end state. There’s no one path; there are many paths to get there. Giving people freedom to head towards that North Star is another learning I’ve developed as a leader over time.
“You can only change as fast as your last hire.” – Lynn Teo
When you’re new to an organization or role there are often many priorities and initiatives in progress. After you’ve done your initial assessment, how do you prioritize what to focus on first with your teams?
Lynn Teo: One of the first things I did when I came to Northwestern Mutual was to figure if my marketing team was structured correctly. For any leader, you need the scaffolding in place because the scaffolding reflects the strategy that then reflects how you’re going to get to your goal. Structure has always been the first place I go. But be open to tweaking your structure as you go. You may not get it right the first time so give yourself grace to tweak it again when you’re 10- or 12-months in.
Adam Berlew: There are a couple key considerations. First, you’ve always got to make sure you’re doing the basics well. Do a quick assessment to ensure you’ve got your key competencies and capabilities in place, and where you might not be performing as well as you could be, and shore that up. Beyond that, it comes down to what the product strategy and market strategy are at the moment. For us, we’re evolving quickly in this world where hundreds of billions of dollars are being put into data centers. As the largest global data center-focused company, we focus on how we capture this increasing demand in an AI world. This means getting really clear with product teams, the CEO, and the board about overall company strategy. Brand can be a powerful entry point to those conversations. That’s why this is a moment for us to prioritize brand via customer success stories, ensure we’re being heard on these really important topics, and invest the money and effort to do that at scale.
Where should marketers start in order to get more comfortable with AI?
Lynn Teo: My team is investing in the content creation side of the house. Content is a very safe place for most marketers – social media, copywriters, demand gen marketers – to dip their toe in the water. My encouragement would be to test and learn. Work with email subject lines or the copy for a campaign and have people see the quality of what’s generated.
Adam Berlew: The ability to get scale and test quickly with AI is really valuable. You can adjust your campaigns rapidly. But I’ll also highlight one more area, which is the bane of every CMO’s existence: attribution to the sales cycle. Many of us have relied on a big army of data scientists for this. Today, there are a number of solutions that leverage AI to do attribution for your campaigns and ROI. This is a massive opportunity.
As marketing leaders who hire significant numbers of people across various roles, what advice would you give to aspiring marketers?
Adam Berlew: Everything’s changing fast, so be super-curious and willing to learn. For aspiring marketing professionals, working across functions is critical. It helps you understand how different areas contribute to each other and makes you an excellent team player. We all want team members who focus on helping others succeed.
Lynn Teo: Be a consummate learner. Be curious and think about how your unique skill set and interests might lead you down the path of marketing. Marketing as a discipline is changing fast. I’ve had the benefit of growing my career across multiple industry verticals, whether it was software, healthcare, e-commerce, and now financial services. Test yourself by bringing your skills across different industries. And don’t forget that your role as a marketer is about contributing to the business and helping solve problems.
About the Visionaries
Adam Berlew CMO at Equinix
Adam Berlew is Chief Marketing Officer for Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company®. With a focus on innovation, customer-centricity, and rapid expansion, he is responsible for bringing to life the vision for Platform Equinix® by aligning customer acquisition, revenue growth, and effective marketing strategies. Adam has more than 25 years of experience in product and go-to-market roles at various technology organizations, including several years as a VP in Global Marketing at Equinix. He also held roles at Atlassian, Google Cloud, Broadcom, and Dell. His marketing expertise spans the tech industry, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, software, hardware, telecommunications, and consulting services.
Adam holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from Brown University. He is an Independent Director Board Member at Stifel Financial and a Member of Glynn100. Additionally, Adam contributes to the community as an Independent Board Member of the U.S. Olympic Luge Committee and holds a Life Membership at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Lynn Teo CMO at Northwestern Mutual
Lynn Teo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Northwestern Mutual. Her responsibilities encompass brand strategy, product marketing, field and customer experience marketing, digital marketing, marketing technology, operations, and consumer insights/market research. She is a data-driven and revenue-centric tech sector marketing executive specializing in driving growth for the enterprise through the buildout of modern marketing capabilities. Ms. Teo joined Northwestern Mutual in September 2022. In her 24 years in industry, she has led digital transformation initiatives in a broad range of industries: advertising, publishing, education, retail, finance, travel, and health. She is a seasoned international executive who has lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Asia during her career. From 2014 – 2018, Lynn assumed roles as VP Digital Marketing and Head of Marketing (Asia Pacific & Japan) at CA Technologies. From 2018 – 2021, Lynn expanded her scope of responsibilities as VP (CMO) of Global Marketing and Customer Experience at Wolters Kluwer Health. Before joining Northwestern Mutual, Lynn served as the CMO of three lines of business at Thomson Reuters.
Ms. Teo received her Honors BA degree from the National University of Singapore and an MA in Professional Writing (Information and Online/Interaction Design) from Carnegie Mellon University. Lynn enjoys international travel, experiencing new cultures and cuisines, and hiking in the National Parks across the US.
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