Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Wed, 14 May 2025
What happens when a marketing leader decides to halt 90% of content output? For Ben Taylor, Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys at Cisco, it wasn’t a gamble—it was a strategy. In this refreshingly candid episode, Ben makes the case that content marketing is (and should be) dead and explains how empathy mapping, design thinking, and intentional "awkward silence" amongst his marketing & CX teams have become his new north star. We dive into how Ben transformed Cisco’s approach to customer experience by prioritizing deep understanding over high-volume output — and saw 5x pipeline growth as a result. From redefining how marketing supports sales to slowing down in order to speed up, this episode challenges everything you thought you knew about B2B engagement. If you’re tired of creating content for content’s sake, this one’s your permission slip to stop, rethink, and rebuild. Key Moments: 00:00 How Cisco's Ben Taylor Is Redefining Customer Experience03:17 Why Marketing Is Core to the Entire Customer Journey07:23 Content Marketing Is Dead: Here’s What Works Instead13:25 How Design Thinking Transformed Cisco’s Marketing29:36 Can AI Be Empathetic? The Real Challenge in CX Automation36:23 Using Empathy Mapping to Build Better B2B Campaigns38:19 Agile Marketing: Faster Cycles, Smarter Strategy45:34 Hiring for Fit: Why Empathy Matters More Than Pedigree52:15 The Emotional Core of Customer Experience Strategy01:01:56 Breaking Silos: Aligning Marketing, Sales & Success –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What happens when you stop producing 90% of your content?
Marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now.
You have a pretty strong opinion about content marketing.
Content marketing is dead. Wow. It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident.
How did you bring that philosophy into Cisco?
80 to 90% of our production stopped when I took over the team. We were spending a bulk of our time in production before we're now spending it in trying to understand what our customers are thinking.
How do you get leadership buy-in on something like this? I don't know that all of them would be able to accept that less is more.
More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline.
If you're ready to talk a little bit about AI.
Is it a big topic these days or?
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Chapter 2: Why does empathy matter in customer experience?
Chapter 3: What is the new philosophy behind content marketing?
If you're ready to talk a little bit about AI.
Is it a big topic these days or?
Do you use GPT or CLAW?
I don't tend to use any of them.
What?
What I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience, that's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, Put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? Humans make decisions emotionally.
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Chapter 4: How can design thinking transform marketing strategies?
We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. People build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. Force people to sit in a room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We have seen 5X, 6X growth and what our impact is from there.
It's not just like, theoretically, this would work. But you've seen the results. You've reported it to leadership. You've got buy-in from your team. What are you betting on now, then? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease. And with me as always is Rose Shocker. Happy to be here.
We just got off the mic with Ben Taylor, Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys at Cisco.
He had so many hot takes. And I feel like this episode is going to be so great for the boots on the ground marketers. I feel like they're going to be rejoicing when they listen to it. Because having just this expectation of volume over your head and no clear through line is no clear data, just produce, produce, produce is a recipe for burnout and high turnover.
Ben is in marketing, but his title, which I didn't read all of it, is also customer experience marketing, which is sort of a unique title. I don't know that I've actually seen it written that way before.
I feel like everything he was saying is just things people need to hear right now. Not only is customer experience embedded into every stage of the customer journey, but marketing's a huge part of customer experience. And as someone who's worked in marketing, I've never thought of it that way.
Well, and what he really brought to the discussion that I think a lot of people will need to hear is the power of empathy throughout the entire customer journey. From first time I see your logo to I bought your product to I'm thinking about renewing to, okay, I have loved this for years and now I'm recommending it to a friend.
And he is really beautifully weaved empathy into every touch point for the customer. And the other thing that he talks about a lot isn't just how you can bring empathy to the customer, but how you can bring empathy back to your organization. He's building marketing teams that are going to sales and actually asking them from an empathetic perspective.
We need to be talking about how does this actually relate back to the human being that is our customer or is our employee or is our manager. We need to bring back play and imagination and totally putting on the cap of pretending to be your customer. What do they actually care about? What's actually interesting to them?
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Chapter 5: Can AI truly empathize with customers?
So I have a hard question for you.
Oh, no.
Maybe not too hard for you. Okay. Sheets or Wawa? Wawa.
Wawa.
Wawa.
There's stories of me coming out of Wawa at three o'clock in the morning. I mean, that is a, I have to go to Wawa, get a hoagie at two o'clock in the morning. It's equivalent to Whataburger, right? Like having that option.
I haven't even been to Whataburger.
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Chapter 6: What is empathy mapping and how is it used?
Are you not from? Okay.
I'm not from here.
That's concerning to me.
You haven't been to a Whataburger? No, I have not been to a Whataburger. All right.
Where are you from? You're from the Northeast?
All over the place. Okay. My dad was in the military. So it was all over the place. Yeah.
You have to. It's the same sort of sense of like, I can get something completely unnecessary at three o'clock in the morning. And that's the joy of it.
Well, I mean, I lived in Pittsburgh, so we had sheets. Yeah. So that's what we did.
I mean, I'm a hundred percent Wawa.
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Chapter 7: Why is hiring for empathy important in marketing?
Oh my gosh. I have a Wawa I've been into. I've been disappointed with. So maybe I need to go to like a better one. They all just seem kind of like me and kind of crummy.
Uh, central Philly ones are different. They're, um, I don't know. I guess my campus was right in the middle of Philly. So I, I, I don't know. I was also probably not the most sober every time I went in too.
So that's, yeah. But yeah. Uh, so where else have you lived besides Philly and Dallas?
I grew up in Dallas, uh, school in Philadelphia. I lived in New York for a bit, uh, New York city and Manhattan. And then I was in Houston and I've got family out. So kind of all over, but mostly, uh, Mostly Dallas, Austin, and the Northeast. So Philly and New York.
Okay. So which city has the best people watching?
People watching?
Yeah.
New York. Just because there's more of them there.
Okay. And best drivers?
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Chapter 8: How do you break down silos between marketing and sales?
Yeah. And we talked a lot about marketing on our prep call. And how do you think marketing, like what role does marketing play in customer experience?
Well, one of the downsides of CX getting more defined is that it has kind of become over-defined on this post-purchase sort of like loyalty. I mean, you look at CX different things and it's loyalty programs and it's how you have adoption kind of motions and retention sort of motions. When At the heart of it, it is about truly the customer experience.
Like stop thinking about what it's defined as and think about what the term means. And that's engaging with the customer. So some of the challenges that I've had is don't just think post-purchase. Don't just think pre-purchase. I'm engaging with the customer. Yes, they're at a different point in their journey, but I'm engaging in marketing with the customer in the same way.
I need to care about their experience in the same way. And I need it to connect through to the customer. back half of that engagement in the same way. So I think for me, marketing is integral.
I think sales enablement and engagement and down funnel kind of like actual sales conversations, your adoption, your success motion, your renewal motion, all of those are part and parcel to what customer experience should be.
And I think teams tend to, and companies tend to narrowly define that as just, you know, post-purchase a lot of times, and they don't think about the rest of that customer engagement.
So Ben, you started working at Cisco how long ago?
About six and a half years ago.
Okay. What brought you to Cisco?
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