The changing of seasons this time of year is always a bright spot in the calendar. For summer, it’s a time of renewal, of growth and promise. Watching the explosion of seemingly sleeping plants shows the hope of new buds, new visitors and new activities to explore. For the best marketers, every day is summer. It’s about the transformation of their business, their teams and their approaches. Marketers tackle underlying challenges with energy and vigour, always planning for growth ahead.
Bringing a diverse set of skills to solve any challenge, Nilpa Srivastava is the VP Marketing at Pethealth Inc. Pethealth, a Fairfax company, is one of North America’s leading providers of medical insurance for dogs and cats. Nilpa’s role is to deliver executive leadership across functions leveraging her strong organizational vision and strategic capacity. With strong relationship management, Nilpa is able to drive innovation and transformation across the organization to produce incredible results.
Transformation to the Core
As with many executives, Nilpa senses opportunity quickly. When the role at Pethealth came up, she jumped at it. Why? It offered an opportunity to be part of an organizational transformation within a company known for its positive culture. There were just a handful of people in Marketing when Nilpa joined and the team lacked structure and organization. There were several brands, many products without value propositions, limited reporting and no marketing plan. The opportunity was ripe for growth and was in an organization that had extremely aggressive targets and objectives.
When opportunity appears, jump at it. It’s your chance to put your mark on something and really help.
Nilpa has now been there for over two and a half years. During that time, her team has now quintupled to 25. Pethealth is now performing at over double the capacity than they were in the past. Under Nilpa’s leadership, Pethealth’s sales and marketing efforts have transformed and she leads the company’s digital evolution. Specifically, Nilpa’s focus is on bringing in the people, the tools and technologies to accelerate results further.
Organizational Transformation
When Nilpa joined, only one of her few marketing team members was focused on digital. That needed to change. So, Nilpa gained the required resources to invest in a business transformation. This started by growing her team at an incredible pace. Today, Nilpa has 10 people on her digital team supporting the various tools and technologies her team has launched. From analytics, to multiple branded websites, to paid media to email to social, it’s a broad mix. A lot of it focuses around how her team refines their market strategy while diversifying the marketing mix.
The other part of Nilpa’s mission is based on the insight that Pethealth has a huge opportunity with the marketplace and the pipeline already in existence. The question is how does Pethealth fully connect with prospects and customers to become actively engaged with the brand via ambassadors and influencers on their behalf? The answer became clearer in time:
Pethealth saw the opportunity to leverage a marketing team to be the jump-off point for a transformation in the overall brand to ensure the business has the best approach in the marketplace.
Many organizations talk a good game about marketing having a seat at the table. But very few businesses have marketing driving the conversation at that table.
Marketing Leadership Transformation
When Nilpa joined Pethealth, marketing was considered in many ways to be glorified order takers. The business had things they wanted to do and they needed marketing to make it look pretty, or to deploy it. There wasn’t often a lot of strategy or thought leadership around how to really approach the amazing opportunity available with its hundreds of thousands of leads.
Fortunately, Nilpa has received strong support and the resources required to transform the team that is changing the way the organization thinks.
It started with reporting results on what’s happening in the business, not just for marketing, but overall. Specifically, how are the lines of business performing? Often, large firms have a technology strategy that the leadership team drives and marketing is an element of that. Nilpa’s vision, on the other hand, was to have marketing drive a lot of this.
Nilpa often starts new projects by asking a lot of questions. From a technology hub perspective, what are the tools that Pethealth can be leveraging that will enabled by, supported by and and work collaboratively or integrated with other key tools? How will CRM, for example, ensure that the organization has the information needed to think more strategically?
A New Organizational Culture
From a culture standpoint, Nilpa is proud that Pethealth has really shaken things up. They’ve brought in a lot more young people, which has its pros (energy, digital dynamism, demographic representation, among others) and cons (attrition, lack of experience, new expectations of working life). Those were risks that Nilpa was willing to take and it has resulted in things like “no meetings Wednesdays” for Marketing. This approach is slowly taking hold in other parts of the organization. Similarly, daily marketing huddles start with a two minute exercise stretch or workout, just to get the blood flowing. This is incredibly important as Nilpa reflects that we’ve all been sitting around at home too much over the last year and we’ve had to evolve the way we work and interact with one another.
Culture really matters and Nilpa is proud that her team has assisted the entire organization in transforming and creating a very different style of culture.
It’s amazing to see when new ideas start to expand beyond one team. Is it osmosis? Nilpa’s not quite sure but when new ideas spread, it can start to get very interesting in such a positive way.
In the End, Marketing Matters
Nilpa is reflective when it comes to the broader community and her profession. She thinks it’s really important to emphasize that marketing isn’t just about advertising. It’s not just about getting sales.
Marketing really has the power to influence and change organizations in the way they think and in the way they operate.
In that sense, marketing is unique because the profession brings together individuals with unique skill sets who may have a different style of thinking and who will push the envelope to drive transformation.
Marketing certainly will innovate more than Nilpa has seen in many other types of of departments (and she can say that fairly, having run many of them) so it’s clear that marketing is a pretty amazing place to be. The proof is that it’s a pretty positive place where individuals who are looking for something new and exciting can really grow into. Sounds a lot like signs of summer, right?
In Partnership With
Nilpa Srivastava is the VP Marketing at Pethealth Inc, a Fairfax company, which is one of North America’s leading providers of medical insurance for dogs and cats. Pethealth offers a unique range of products and services for veterinarians, shelters and pet owners. Nilpa’s role is to deliver executive leadership across functions leveraging her strong organizational vision and strategic capacity. With strong relationship management, Nilpa is able to drive innovation across the organization to produce transformative results.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.