MarTech Interview with Brett Rafuse, Vice President, Demand Marketing, Cisco

Brett, your career spans marketing, operations, and leadership—each demanding a unique set of skills. Could you share a high-level overview of your professional journey and the key inflection points that shaped it?

I think the common thread throughout my career — whether in marketing, operations, or leadership — has always been systems thinking. I started deep in technology right out of college as an application developer, and I’ve been able to apply that process and systems mindset to various roles since.

A key milestone early on was my aspiration to work at Microsoft, which I relentlessly pursued until I found the right program management and operations role that leveraged my technical background. After about seven years, I realized I wanted a broader career beyond just operations and made a conscious choice to step into the marketing side of the organization to get closer to the customer and the business.

I spent almost 20 years at Microsoft loving the work and people until an offer from Cisco. The role offered me an amazing opportunity to rebuild our marketing platforms and the critical processes required to deliver value to our customers and partners. The chance to apply what I had learned and transform marketing for a blue-chip brand like Cisco was an opportunity I simply couldn’t pass up.

How has this experience influenced your approach to fostering cross-functional collaboration, driving innovation at scale, and executing integrated go-to-market strategies?

Working in large enterprise companies teaches you very quickly that you simply can’t get things done alone — you have to be collaborative. When it comes to marketing in particular, success at this scale is truly a team sport because marketing’s role isn’t merely on outputs but on creating great customer experiences that directly impact revenue.

To truly impact the bottom line, marketing has to be able to collaborate, prioritize, and align left to right. This means working closely with other marketing teams as well as functions like IT, sales, and customer success to build consensus, get the right sponsors on board, and make sure that investments and decisions are driving desired business outcomes.

Focusing on the collective benefit is also how we drive innovation at scale and effectively execute those integrated go-to-market strategies that work across all parts of the customer lifecycle, from brand awareness and early engagement to sales, post-sales usage, and renewal.

What prompted the imperative for marketing modernization within your organization? How did the intersection of global market complexities and shifting customer expectations create a ‘perfect storm’ that catalyzed innovation?

There were three main drivers behind our marketing modernization. First, customer expectations have fundamentally changed, especially with the rise of AI even in just the last six months. Customers now expect a very different level of engagement with brands across all channels.

The second driver, like many other companies in today’s macroeconomic environment, is the budgetary pressure that has forced us to become more efficient. While AI certainly helps efficiency, the sheer reduction in available dollars led us to really scrutinize our technology investments for maximum value.

Lastly, the creation of our Revenue Marketing team empowered us to take a fresh look at the systems, tools, processes, and teams needed for the future. Our existing martech stack evolved over 15 years into a mix of different tools and systems that offered no unified view of the customer and was holding us back from creating more integrated experiences. All of this drove us to deconstruct our old stack and look for strategic vendors we could grow with, rather than chasing best-in-class point solutions that created integration chaos.

In a global organization like Cisco, how do you ensure the unification and accuracy of customer data across regions? What impact has this had on delivering more personalized experiences throughout the customer lifecycle?

For us, it all comes down to building a foundational data lake strategy that serves as the single source of truth, holding data from all our systems of engagement – sales, marketing, customer success, you name it. Our data lake is crucial for harnessing the power of our first-party data. Cisco has a massive customer and partner base that engages with us daily, and being able to capture the context of that first-party engagement is incredibly powerful.

The real magic happens when we bring in third-party data and combine the two to unlock a whole different level of context that allows us to truly personalize our engagement — not just marketing but also other functions like sales, such as contextualizing data to improve conversations or accelerating usage scenarios. Having all this data in a standardized platform lets us syndicate it to the exact place it’s needed at the time of engagement and avoid the complexity of data trapped in different silos across the customer lifecycle.

As AI becomes more embedded in modern marketing, what role is it playing today in driving efficiency and insight? Looking ahead, how do you envision balancing automation with authentic human engagement to maintain trust and connection?

First and foremost, great AI is powered by great data – you need complete and pristine data to build effective models. Cisco’s massive data foundation is precisely what unlocks our ability to deliver the best AI use cases, and honestly, I think we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Today, we’re using AI to improve content creation efficiency, enhance lead scoring, identify the next best customer, and drive both our digital and in-person personalization efforts. Looking ahead, we see AI serving more as a guide and partner to our marketers and sellers in how they engage with customers. By improving workflows and automating much of the operational overhead and decision-making process, we’re essentially unlocking more time for them to focus on actually delivering amazing customer experiences.

With marketing both an art and a science, this allows AI to handle the science while empowering our marketers to apply the art of human connection and engagement, thinking about how best to action or improve upon AI’s suggestions.

We’d love to hear about your approach to designing a marketing tech stack that balances scalability with flexibility—how have you brought this to life in your organization?

Our approach really emphasizes the importance of strategic vendor relationships. Because of the sheer size and complexity of Cisco’s enterprise and business model, we gravitate heavily towards enterprise-scale partners. In building our stack from scratch, we’ve focused on selecting a core set of strategic partners that we can invest in and influence their roadmap. This gives us far more stability and flexibility for long-term investment compared to trying to cobble together a stack of disparate tools that might not integrate well enough to create the seamless customer experience we’re after.

A key consideration for us is also knowing that future business acquisitions are inevitable. This is precisely why our data lake strategy is so foundational to our approach; aligning the data layer first allows us to syndicate the right data to the right place at the right time, regardless of the underlying system. Ultimately, our stack is designed for scale and flexibility across multiple platforms so it can grow and adapt with us into the future.

The phrase “culture eats process for breakfast” has become a guiding principle in times of transformation. How has this belief shaped your approach to marketing modernization, especially in navigating global complexities and opportunities?

I see culture as the linchpin for what we’re trying to achieve through our marketing modernization — it’s critical both for the change management we’re driving and the innovation itself.

From my perspective, our culture has three distinct pillars. First, data has to be central to everything we do. Having this data-driven mentality pushes our marketers to consider the performance data of their tactics and the customer data influencing their actions. Equally important is fostering an innovative mindset to rethink the experiences, technologies, and processes needed for our future goals. And the third pillar is encouraging a process-challenger mentality: that belief that no matter how great we are today, we can always be better tomorrow.

While getting the team to embrace this — especially those who built the existing systems and are being asked to let go of them to make space to build new things — can be a difficult change management journey, fostering this mindset is critical for our transformation.

In an increasingly dynamic and nuanced business landscape, what strategies do you rely on to craft narratives that resonate and drive meaningful engagement across diverse stakeholders?

It all comes down to simplicity, especially in complex organizations. As marketers, we have to take the inherent complexity of our daily work – the technology, the processes, the customer journey – and simplify it as much as possible for our diverse stakeholders. You’d be surprised how effective it is to walk into a meeting with a sales leader and simply ask, “Wouldn’t it be great if our marketing team and your sales team were looking at the exact same customer engagement data to identify the highest priority revenue opportunities?” When you put things in simple terms like that, it almost doesn’t matter what systems, data platforms, or AI models are involved; it becomes far easier to build consensus and align on a shared purpose and outcome.

I constantly challenge my team to simplify and bring every discussion back to two core questions: What value are we creating for the customer, and what revenue-oriented business outcome are we trying to deliver? By focusing on these questions and putting on that “shareholder hat” as I like to call it, we can all speak the same language and ensure decisions are based on what’s right for the customer and the business, not internal politics or personal goals. My experience has shown that even if you make the wrong bets sometimes, if they’re always oriented towards the customer’s best interest, you’ll ultimately be on the right side.

Tell us about a strategic partnership that unlocked innovation. What structural and cultural elements made it successful and sustainable for long-term, customer-centric collaboration?

Our strategic partnership with Adobe is a great example of one that has unlocked a lot of innovation. When we approached them about building our future martech stack, we made it clear we were building for the entire company, not just one line of business. Aligning on this strategic, company-to-company intent set a completely different foundation for our engagement.

What’s also unique is that given Adobe’s strong B2C background, we were willing to be early adopters, and in some cases “customer zero” on the amazing innovations they were bringing to the B2B space. This led to many conversations about adding features we needed, which allowed us to influence their roadmap for other large enterprises. Our shared goals and willingness to innovate together are what makes this partnership so successful and sustainable.

What key insight or piece of advice would you offer to organizations embarking on the journey toward a global, personalized, and omnichannel marketing strategy?

Don’t be afraid to start over. If you can convince your stakeholders that what’s working today won’t suffice for tomorrow, you create the necessary permission and space to innovate at a dramatically different speed.

We saw this firsthand when we began bringing our first campaigns online with the initial components of our new martech stack. Our aspiration was to go from licensing the technology to execution in just five months — a goal our vendors told us was crazy aggressive. Because we weren’t held back by the past—trying to fix or support systems built under entirely different assumptions, we beat our goal by three weeks. Our team also found it incredibly freeing to not be constrained by old methodologies while driving innovation.

Give yourself the room to innovate and don’t hesitate to challenge preconceived notions. Sometimes you just need to start fresh.