What If? So What?

Deena Piquion from Xerox on Data, Disruption, and Digital Natives

• Perficient, Inc. • Episode 63

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In this episode of the "What If? So What?" podcast, Jim Hertzfeld hosts Deena LaMarque Piquion, Chief Growth and Disruption Officer at Xerox. Deena shares insights into her unique role, the intentional disruption at Xerox, and how the company is reinventing itself to stay relevant in a changing market. They discuss the importance of data, the challenges of reaching next-gen decision-makers, and the innovative strategies Xerox is employing to drive growth and productivity. Tune in to learn about the modern workplace, AI integration, and the future at Xerox.

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Deena Piquion:

It's awesome when you think about how you organize this data and then what you can do, the power of what you can do right? We've now created a predictive churn model where we can proactively think about what are the indicators that a client might leave us and how do we proactively go and reach out to them personally, right?

Jim Hertzfeld:

Welcome to what If so what, the podcast where we explore what's possible with digital and discover how to make it real in your business. I'm your host, Jim Hertzfeld, and we get s**t done by asking digital leaders the right questions w hat, if so what and, most importantly now, what? Hey, I'm really, really glad to have a new type of guest, in fact a title I don't think we've had on before, which makes it extra special, but Deena Piquion from Xerox, and her title is Chief Growth and Disruption Officer, and that disruption officer title is pretty exciting. So, Deena, welcome to the podcast and tell us a little bit more about what you do in that role at Xerox.

Deena Piquion:

Sure, thank you, Jim, happy to be here and thanks for having me. So I was recently promoted, about a year ago, to Chief Growth and Disruption Officer and I had the distinct honor of being able to pick my own title and Chief Growth Officer and Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Commercial Officer those are typically the ones that you hear with functions that I have but the disruption was really intentional for my group and for the company and where we are in our history and our trajectory. Xerox is going through a reinvention. We're reinventing our brand. We're reinventing our business model and we have traditionally played in an industry that is in secular decline right, we know that, and so we don't want to be disrupted by the market alone. We want to identify the market trends and disrupt ourselves internally to really be able to take advantage of the market landscape outside of us.

Deena Piquion:

So it was intentional and it was a really great evolution of my role and, I think, one that's possible for many other chief marketing officers. So I had been chief marketing officer for two years before I took on this expanded role and it really became kind of the commercial fulcrum of the organization, working with the go-to-market leaders, the sales leaders working with product engineering, service delivery and consolidating some functions into one group so that we could really weigh in and kind of really lean into that commercial journey at many different points, right, everything from brand to land, to expand, to retain, to acquire, you know, pricing, sales support, sales enablement, e-commerce, virtual sales and kind of foundational to all of that is data really like looking at the data we have in our organization market intelligence as well as internal data and using that more effectively so that we can, you know, guide our reinvention with data and market trends.

Jim Hertzfeld:

That's. That is a lot and I think it says a couple of things to me. One is that sort of a sort of, I would say, a modern business right. Anybody, any company of size, you know, that has to think about it and worry about a lot of things. And the fact that you you sort of purposely tying all that together and looking at the relationships between those functions, I think says a lot, and certainly the recognition that you have to have the right data to fuel it. That alone to me seems like a disruption, because I think a lot of companies don't pull that together, you know, for lots of reasons. They sort of live in their silos. So I think that's disruptive on its own.

Jim Hertzfeld:

And you know you brought up this, you know the idea of sort of reinvention. You know and I think that's relevant to Xerox, because I think of Xerox you know a couple of ways. I think it's one of those brand names of. This is equivalent to the, you know what you do in terms of what you've done in the print industry and what you've done just in terms of being a staple or an icon of office productivity you know for decades. But also I think of Xerox as sort of a key innovation company, right, I think Park and the labs, and there's a lot of lore and legend there. But you know, as part of your reinvention, renaissance brand journey. What is? What is Xerox doing today? Cause I think a lot of people may not know, right, they may think of Xerox in the terms I just shared, but what is Xerox doing to today to sort of keep it going?

Deena Piquion:

Yeah, so this brand, I mean it is an iconic brand, it's a noun and a verb, but that's a blessing and a challenge in its own right right, Because if you want to shift the perception, you want to have the market understand new things that you're doing. It's hard to overcome what you were always synonymous with, which was copy and print in the case of Xerox right.

Deena Piquion:

But today, I mean, we've really expanded everything that we do to focus on enabling the modern workforce and workplace to be productive. Right, we are a B2B brand through and through, and it's all about enabling businesses, but the world has changed and the workplace has changed and people's needs have changed, and so we have a lot of different offerings that people don't know about yet, and it's our job now to educate them and make sure that they do understand that we have AI powered platforms that deliver productivity or insights, workflow automation all kinds of things to really help the modern business overcome the challenges that they're seeing every day. And in addition to that, we've also expanded into adjacent markets. So last fall, we acquired IT Savvy, which is an IT solutions and services company.

Deena Piquion:

So we've now effectively become a very large IT solutions kind of VAR right, a value-added resource. We sell other people's technology as well as our own right. We wrap that and bundle that with our own services for businesses and you couple kind of the power of IT solutions with our print technology, print services and our digital services that help digital transformation, productivity, workflow automation. You've really got a very new Xerox in terms of the modern day challenges they can solve.

Jim Hertzfeld:

It's interesting. You bring up sort of the modern workplace. I'm in our Chicago office today, so behind me are offices and chairs and cubicles and I was looking earlier for today for actually a piece of paper, like I've got to take some notes here. And you know, it's great, we've got a bunch of people here today and I'm here to meet some people and there's no substitute for that. But the, you know, the 90 percent of our time is spent, you know, disconnected, physically detached and and all over the place. So you know, yeah, just the acknowledgement of how we work as teams and as individual interface with individuals. There's no substitute for face-to-face I mean, there's just-.

Deena Piquion:

There is no substitute. It will never go away.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Exactly we were just about jinxed there, Deena, Like yeah, never going away.

Deena Piquion:

Never. I mean. There's something very powerful about being able to look somebody in the eye and get a feel for the person right.

Jim Hertzfeld:

So what else do you think is sort of changing? What sort of changes are you seeing out there? I mean, we've all we've talked about hybrid work now for way too long. I'm so sick of talking about it, but I mean, I think some of these changes were underway, just sort of the the connected worker, the connected devices. I think there's more and more connected devices out there. I mean, what are some other things that you know you're seeing out there? Actually, I was going to bring up a book I saw here in the office the World is Flat. That's another one. I don't know if anybody's familiar with that book that feels like it's such an old book, but it was written by Thomas Friedman. It's a great book about. The idea is we sort of flatten the world out and become more connected. So it might be timely. But what else are you kind of seeing out there from your customers? And would you mind sharing a couple of things that maybe we haven't heard about that are sort of driving?

Deena Piquion:

Yeah absolutely, I mean hybrid, of course is something everybody needs to solve for security as well. Right, you've got to be able to enable people to work securely wherever they're working. Sustainability is growing for us. It has been in Europe for a long time actually, and becoming a lot more front and center in terms of people's procurement and technology needs. You know the footprint on the world right.

Deena Piquion:

And so we've changed even our own service delivery approach, for example, and incorporated augmented reality, not only to make things more efficient, but really to kind of reduce our carbon footprint in the world as well in terms of you know, the need to send out technicians physically all the time.

Deena Piquion:

So you know, those are kind of, I think, the trends people are familiar with. But there's also this need to help people kind of solve for this productivity challenge. There's so much data internally. There's disparate systems depending on the size of your company and business, right, but a lot of our larger enterprise companies have disparate systems. They have, you know, they do work in silos. Not everybody has really integrated the way that they work, and so there's a real opportunity to go in and listen to a client's issues and pain points and develop for them.

Deena Piquion:

And we do that. I mean we do that for companies as large as you know Fortune 500. And we do that for small law offices or, you know, doctor's offices or churches and local schools, as well as large universities. So we can go in, we can assess kind of where data sits, whether it's structured or unstructured, document-based or device-based, gather that data automate a workflow, whether it's something as simple as accounts payable or something really complex in a warehouse or in a product and engineering workflow. That's kind of our, the beauty of Xerox is that we've had this trust of clients for so long. It's a brand that's trusted. We've been in offices for over a hundred years. We've been behind the firewall, we've been around the office cooler and I think there's a trust in allowing us in to solve problems for our audience.

Jim Hertzfeld:

So, Deena, that's a line I'm going to use. By the way, I've been behind the firewall. That is a great line. So I don't know, I've never heard that. So that's a great one. There's something I'm using later today for sure. I mean that's a variety of use cases and audiences and people you're trying to meet. What do you? You know you, you've been in here for a hundred years but you've been in this business and you've learned a lot over a hundred years. But there's a whole, you mentioned to me before, a whole next gen decision maker. You know this is still a B2B business at hard right. You're behind the firewall and and you built trust. But you know how do you, as a growth, sort of put on your growth officer lens, you know what are some of the challenges you have in kind of reaching those types of buyers.

Deena Piquion:

Yeah. So that I mean we did a lot of research or at least I did when I came into this seat as the CMO kind of figuring out what do we have to build on and what do we need to change from a brand perspective and we do have an extremely strong and favorable opinion. With 45 and over, I fall in that category right, we know Xerox and we have a very favorable and strong opinion about Xerox. But there's this whole next gen kind of digitally native decision makers that are coming into positions today. They're making the decisions in businesses.

Deena Piquion:

But 25 to 44 audience is kind of our sweet spot for that next gen decision maker and they might know of Xerox but it's not top of mind, it's not relevant for them, they're not very familiar with what we do. So it is really an opportunity for us to introduce ourselves right, reintroduce ourselves to some segments but introduce ourselves to others. So what we've done is we've really focused on kind of like bolder copy and visuals a little bit punchier, a little bit funnier, making it intriguing for people to kind of think about hey, I didn't know Xero a little bit funnier, making it intriguing for people to kind of think about hey, I didn't know Xerox did that or I want to know more and really focusing around kind of we make work work wherever work happens. Right, like expanding what we do for people but staying very clearly in our B2B space, about enabling workplace productivity.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Oh my gosh, Deena, you're like throwing lines at me. I'm going to use so much. We make work, work, like that is great.

Deena Piquion:

That's our tagline for our campaign that we launched in the second half of 2023. And we're doubling down. Like we tried a lot of different things. We tested. You know, we did a lot of out of home that Xerox wasn't usually, you know, we you didn't usually see ads in LaGuardia or JFK or on buses or in bus stops about Xerox, but we did, we tried it. We tried some TikTok ads. We obviously used a lot of LinkedIn and, and you know, relevant social platforms for us. But we're evolving all of the time and we just launched a new partnership with the Aston Martin, the Aramco Aston Martin Formula One team, really to kind of advance that narrative of you know it's a sport of technology, we're a technology company. You might not think of us in that way, but we're integrating our technology into the sport of technology to make a team faster and more productive.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Yeah, that is great. So I just love the empathy and the listening that you're putting into it. I think that's so important. What are some things you're doing, then, sort of internally so reinventing the brand and how you engage, but you've been reinventing yourselves. You mentioned, you know, some of the services you're expanding into, but and you mentioned data you mentioned data being. I hear this a lot. You know from other customers that you know when they start to kind of break down what they really want to do and how they really want to work differently, how they want to make their own work work, they start to fall back on the data that they don't have or that they need or it's got to be cleaner, and you know. So how is that manifesting inside the organization?

Deena Piquion:

Yeah, I'm a data geek. By the way, I love data, so I'm not your typical, you know, creative marketing person and I love to surround myself with those people, but I love the data like what the data tells us and how does that guide what we do?

Deena Piquion:

And you said earlier kind of even just putting the groups together that I have together under one umbrella, is disruptive in and of itself and it surfaced so many opportunities for us.

Deena Piquion:

So what started as a campaign to clean our data, for marketing, segmentation and email marketing, and all of this turned into this much broader project for the organization where I now own client data, created a client data governance council, implemented a master data management system a golden record for clients so that we can unify data from different sources, different systems Remember, xerox has acquired companies over decades, right, and we have different transactional systems as well as many different systems we use for service delivery, for client sentiment, different things.

Deena Piquion:

So we've unified all of our data into a data cloud, into a client data platform, and now the use cases we're able to see, of course, to give more relevant marketing to buyers at the time they want it or need it, but also just to give better insights internally into how we're designing things and what we're doing with our offerings, with our service delivery plans, with many different things internally. It's been great and going through that exercise and we're now in the process of layering on one of our own offerings on top of it as kind of client zero, so that when we go to the market and say we can do this for you.

Deena Piquion:

you know, Mr and Mrs CMO, I will be able to personally speak to how it's helped me right.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Yeah, that's great. I've seen that come together with. You know you mentioned the golden record. I mean it's such I don't to people who don't understand that a little bit but you know, an MDM, master data management like if you, especially when acquisition, you know there'll be like I have my first name here, my last name there, my phone number somewhere else, and how do you tell that those three records are me? That's a challenge. I mean you don't have to. And again, people I think have been down this road or they want to be driven this way. They have to tackle those fundamental problems. But when you get it done and you actually see data supporting decisions, I mean there's. I've been in so many rooms I think we all have in so many meetings where you know the squeaky wheel gets the grease, or the extrovert, you know, beats out the introverts, or you know there's just inertia in companies. There's just like, well, we've always done it this way and we haven't stopped to look at the data. So I just think it's something that we need to be reminded of constantly about you know what it really means to be data driven, because it sounds cool, but you know it's a lot of change that comes with it, too, like people have to give up their assumptions.

Deena Piquion:

Yeah, and it's I mean imagine, for 118 year old company that's been successful for so long and people have done things that worked for a long time. But over time, we've acquired other companies, you've moved into different businesses. The world has changed, right? So it is making sure that, fundamentally, people need to challenge the status quo and allow our next steps to be data driven. And it's awesome when you think about how you organize this data and then what you can do the power of what you can do right.

Deena Piquion:

We've now created a predictive churn model where we can kind of proactively think about what are the indicators that a client might leave us and how do we proactively go and reach out to them personally, right? Or pricing we've now layered on an AI pricing model that helps us to maximize win rate but also enable us to maximize profit, right. So it's that kind of sweet spot. And there are so many other areas. We're now hosting AI workshops with salespeople and Salesforce. That is our system of record and our CRM, and that's where we've invested in our client data platform. So we're doubling down and we are working with them for them to see the day in the life of a sales rep at Xerox and start thinking with us strategically about how do we augment that day in the life of a sales rep with agentic AI to make their life easier, right. To make their work, better for them and make them more productive.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Well, that's a great application of agentic and AI and we're seeing that as well, because and it's great that you sort of start small, I think, having those wins I love this sort of these workshops that you talked about, or you know, well, let's try it this way. And then you got to sort of crawl, walk, run with people, right, so they understand what it is. In fact, I was just having this conversation with somebody the other day who had not tried a generative, a chat, GPT or a co-pilot. I said, well, you know, hey, yeah, so you haven't tried this yet. And so you just start showing them and then their minds start to go because they know their work right, they know the shift, the disruption right is, you know, takes a little confidence building and it's just small steps. And you know, I think a lot of organizations look at that and you know they're not trying to downsize, they're not trying to do more with less, they're trying to do way more with what they have, you know.

Deena Piquion:

And so and modernize right. I mean, you know, like the foundation of a modern sales or marketing organization is data today. It's just right, and so I always tell my team we'll crawl, walk, run right. So like start small. So we often start with councils, like we have people nominated from sales to be on these AI workshops on a council. We had a marketing AI council that started with some proof points and use cases.

Deena Piquion:

So I think it is important to find people that can be those change agents for you internally and can spread the word once they have those great stories to tell.

Jim Hertzfeld:

That's great. I like those sort of functional applications. You know of AI. So, Deena, you know what comes before a crawl, walk, run. Does anybody know what that is cry? If you've had children, you know that it's cry. And they, finally they crawl, walk, run. So you know we have sometimes we have to point out you know, like how bad it is, like you should be crying, you know, and we got to motivate them. But anyways, this is great. I love like the disruption and growth you're fusing together. I really appreciate you sharing it. If there's one thing you could tell listeners people who were in your shoes maybe a few months ago, who were trying to grow and disrupt at the same time, what's sort of one piece of advice or one thing that you think they could do tomorrow?

Deena Piquion:

I would say, develop some really key partnerships internally. I think that's been really helpful for me. Kind of CTO, CFO partnerships are really important, right. They need to be on the journey with you. You know, however your company is structured whoever leads up IT and whoever pays the bills need to be on the journey with you.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Definitely who pays the bills. So well, Deena, thanks, so much. Thanks for sharing again, and I look forward to seeing what you guys are going to disrupt next.

Deena Piquion:

Thanks, Jim, thanks for having me.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Take care.

Joe Wentzel:

You've been listening to What if, So What? A digital strategy podcast from Perficient with Jim Hertzfeld. We want to thank our Perficient colleagues JD Norman and Rick Bauer for our music. Subscribe to the podcast and don't miss a single episode. You can find this season, along with show notes at perficient. com. Thanks for listening.

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