MarTech Interview with Dawn Crew, Chief Marketing Officer of Trulioo

Discover how Trulioo is revolutionizing the global identity verification landscape with its cutting-edge technology – an interview with CMO, Dawn Crew.

Trulioo, a global identity verification company, has been revolutionizing the way businesses verify identities and prevent fraud in the digital age. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Trulioo, Dawn Crew has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth and establishing it as a leader in the industry.

With over 20 years of experience in marketing and business development, Dawn has a proven track record of driving growth and innovation. In this interview, we will delve into her insights on the latest trends and challenges in the identity verification industry, the role of technology in driving innovation, and Trulioo’s
vision for the future.

Below are the interview highlights:

Dawn, please introduce yourself to our audience. Give us a brief description of your professional voyage till now.
I’m a business marketing marketer. I understand what it means to the business when marketing is effective. That stems from the first part of my career when I was in consulting and helped more than 500 companies set up systems and processes to scale their global businesses. Then I sold my company and worked for a global business as a general manager driving growth.

I made the switch to marketing in 2007 when I joined SAP and ultimately led marketing operations for the company’s 3BN global innovation portfolio. Since then, I’ve held leadership positions in every subfunction of marketing. Because of that, I know how all the cylinders need to work together to make the marketing engine run.

In 2015, I took a CMO role with BOLD and had a chance to lead all those subfunctions. In 2018, I became CMO of iovation, which is a TransUnion company. My role at Trulioo is my third as a CMO. I think I’m a unique marketer because I had those first 15 years of my career in general management and business growth. I wake up every day thinking about how to help the business grow by enabling other functions to meet their objectives.

Tell us about Trulioo and its distinct services that make it stand apart from the competition.
In launching our industry-defining global identity platform, Trulioo has combined a full suite of person and business verification services with workflow capabilities. With one contract and one integration, customers can meet their verification needs around the world. There is nothing like it in the industry.

Our process focuses on helping customers build and adjust identity verification workflows in an integrated, agile way. Businesses turn to our team as the trusted experts in this field because we’re responsive, knowledgeable, service-oriented, and there for our customers every step of the way.

It’s the people, process, and technology working together to make magic happen.

What are the vision, mission, and values of your organization?
As part of our rebrand, we updated our mission to: Trulioo is the identity platform global businesses turn to for growth, innovation, and compliance. Our values have been established for years, and they’re the foundation for our company culture.

Great brands are built from the inside out, and that led us to develop a purpose statement. We wanted to arm our team members with a statement that defined our “why,” our reason for being, and how we positively affect the people we serve in the market.

Our purpose is: In a world where all businesses will be digital, Trulioo empowers everyone to take part in the global economy. That purpose connects directly to our company roots, which are financial inclusion and ensuring people throughout the world have opportunities. Still, today, even though we’ve developed a strong professional B2B brand, we get excited about helping every person in the world participate in the global economy.

How does your extensive experience in the industry facilitate the growth of Trulioo? How do you strategize scaling its growth?
I’ve been in the fraud and identity world since 2018, and all my professional endeavors have touched some aspect of identity. My experience in the industry is deep enough to recognize these are hard problems.

That knowledge, combined with my marketing experience, allows me to translate the problem and solution into everyday language people understand. When there’s understanding and communication, there’s connection and, eventually, collaboration. Growth follows naturally from those connections.

Strategizing scaling follows the same pattern. It’s really understanding the problems companies are trying to solve and making those connections between Trulioo experts and our customers.

Please tell us about the recent rebranding of Trulioo. How will the new global identity verification platform transform the ID verification industry?
It was a business-driven rebrand. Once we really understood the power of the platform and what it represented for our customers, it was apparent that our company brand had to align with that. It allowed us to simplify things. Our company, brand, platform, and product are Trulioo.

We started with research. We learned the pains our buyer personas were managing in their landscape, how they viewed Trulioo, and where they saw Trulioo as better and different from the competition. That research fueled our brand and creative strategies. This rebrand was a 360-degree overhaul of Trulioo from the inside out.

We’re going to transform the industry because we are now showing customers what’s possible. No one else has done that. They now know they have one platform where they can deploy multiple verification methods and access hundreds of data sources. And they can knit that all together using our workflow tools.

Is this new platform compatible with both SMEs and large enterprises alike? If so, how?
Our focus is on both mid-market and large enterprise customers. Our platform will allow them to improve their identity verification in different ways.

The mid-market customers, for example, may choose to use the workflow tool extensively and then publish directly to their website. Our large enterprise customers may build their identity verification workflows and then go directly to an API. And there will be no end of variations between those two.

We offer those capabilities regardless of the size or maturity of the organization.

How would you describe your leadership style? According to you, what drives people to achieve to the best of their ability?
I think I’m an authentic leader, and that comes with the good and bad. Ultimately, my style is through a lens of wanting to improve all the time. It’s very rooted in feedback.

What I’ve found helps people achieve their best is a combination of open communication, setting expectations, and direct support and feedback. I’m truly committed to each individual’s success, and I think people know that I’m here for them.

Being a seasoned leader, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to venture into the industry?
Go for it. Be yourself. Don’t try to be anyone else because it’s exhausting. Being a successful entrepreneur is hard, and you have to use your energy wisely. When I was starting out as a consultant, I learned right away that you just have to hustle. You’ve got to be smarter and work harder than anyone else.

Become a master in your field and always help others understand the problem you’re trying to solve, rather than providing only the solution. When people have a shared understanding, there’s power in that. I think entrepreneurs miss that a lot. They just talk about the solution.
If you’re an aspiring marketing entrepreneur, look at the trends and look at how people are consuming information through so many different channels before they even talk to a salesperson. Work with that, not against it.

What are your go-to sources to get all the latest updates in the market?
I closely follow industry news to stay up to date on key developments and happenings in the space. Understanding marketing technology and how it all works together is key.

Most often though I turn to other leaders in the space. I also have a small network of other CMOs I talk to regularly. We each go to vendor-sponsored, small-group networking events, which are very useful. You get to know the vendor and offers but also each other. When we get together, we talk about the things we’ve done, who we met, and what we learned. That’s really valuable.

Networking and access to information help you make sure you’re on top of things.

What tech trends do you think will shape the future of the industry? How do you envision the changing landscape of ID verification?
The tech trends in the next couple of years are about simplification. As marketing leaders, we’ve all experienced large, disjointed tech stacks in the past few years. We were growing so fast, and when someone had a point solution for a problem we were having, we bought it.
Now we’re realizing enablement, data streamlining, and organizational efficiency are where we’re focusing on the tech side. I think there’s going to be a simplification of the tech landscape. It’s similar to identity verification. It will be about streamlining and efficiency. The drivers will still be compliant, with onboarding and customer experience. But the trends for our customers will be simplifying their tech landscape and moving to solutions such as the Trulioo platform.

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