A conversation with David Rich and Scott Morris
Marketing leaders are being asked to build the next version of their businesses while delivering results for the one they have today. That balancing act anchored a recent Marketers That Matter® Visionaries conversation with David Rich, Chief Marketing Officer of DTN, and Scott Morris, Chief Marketing Officer of Sprout Social.
With Marketers That Matter® Chief Community Officer Kathy Hollenhorst leading the discussion, the two leaders explored how they’re growing and repositioning established brands, adapting their go-to-market strategies, and applying AI to business challenges.
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Building the Future While Delivering Today
For both CMOs, transformation means keeping the current business healthy enough to support what comes next.
At DTN, a data and technology company serving agriculture, energy, and weather-sensitive industries, Rich said that requires careful sequencing. The company needed to sharpen its positioning, introduce product innovation, and change how its teams sold to customers. Attempting everything simultaneously would have made the work harder to execute and more difficult for employees to absorb. Instead, DTN established its positioning first, then redesigned its go-to-market approach around it.
At Sprout Social, a platform that helps brands manage social media and turn social data into business insights, Morris emphasized that focus requires deciding which opportunities to pursue and which to leave alone.
“Strategy is, in large part, mostly the things you decide not to do,” he said.
Spreading resources across too many channels and messages, he cautioned, leaves a brand average everywhere. He also identified internal alignment as a major potential barrier to growth: sales, marketing, product, and customer success each have priorities, and connecting them requires sustained leadership attention.
Make Repositioning a Companywide Strategy
DTN’s challenge was finding a cohesive story across three distinct sectors: agriculture, energy, and weather. After decades of growth through acquisitions, the businesses lacked a shared narrative.
The common thread was that customers in all three sectors relied on DTN’s data and expertise to make decisions and manage risk. Rich’s team built the company’s positioning around that shared value: helping organizations make better operational decisions across their businesses, even as market and weather conditions change.
“Positioning is strategy. It is your corporate strategy,” Rich said.
The work involved the executive team, with the CEO serving as sponsor. Before launching externally, DTN trained its go-to-market teams and required salespeople to become certified in the new positioning.
At Sprout Social, Morris is working to expand the company’s identity beyond social media management into social intelligence: turning social data into insights that inform business decisions. That means building relevance with executives while continuing to serve the practitioners who helped establish the brand.
“Repositioning really is an inside-out job first,” Morris said.
Both leaders stressed that employees need to understand and carry the story. A new narrative only becomes useful when the people bringing it to customers can explain it in a compelling and consistent way.
Let the Buyer Shape the Go-to-Market Strategy
New positioning also changes how a company reaches and serves its buyers.
At DTN, the move from individual products toward broader solutions required more consultative selling and conversations with senior decision makers. Existing customers were especially important as teams needed to explain how DTN’s expanded capabilities could address additional needs.
Sprout Social is pursuing larger enterprise opportunities while rebuilding its product-led growth approach. Morris described buyers who want to explore the offering, start a trial, purchase, and add products without speaking to a salesperson.
Those buyers aren’t necessarily small companies. They may simply have less complex needs. Serving them well requires a different experience from the one designed for a large, consultative sale.
Even as those approaches vary, the brand story needs to hold together.
“If the story changes too much by persona, you don’t have positioning; you just have a set of pitches that don’t hang together,” Morris said.
Start With the Bottlenecks
Both leaders described an evolution in their AI use, from helping individual marketers produce work faster to improving larger processes across the customer journey.
At DTN, Rich’s team identified a specific problem which was that deals were getting stuck in discovery, and account teams could spend weeks gathering the information needed to understand a customer.
The company built a live account playbook that pulls together information from sources including Gong calls, Salesforce, and account plans. Rich said the playbook helps teams get up to speed in days instead of weeks. AI agents update it as new conversations occur, giving teams fresh information and guidance throughout the sales process.
The goal is to help opportunities move more efficiently toward a successful close.
“Don’t start with the tools; start with the problems, the bottlenecks you want to solve,” Rich said.
He also recommended looking first at capabilities already available within the business before adding outside tools.
Morris encouraged leaders to look across sales, marketing, and customer success for opportunities to work together, using the customer journey to guide where AI can help.
Faster Execution Raises the Bar for Judgment
Morris said AI is changing the economics of go-to-market execution. Teams can analyze more customer conversations, personalize outreach, and test ideas more quickly. As execution becomes faster and less expensive, strategy and judgment become more valuable.
A distinctive perspective still matters.
“If everyone uses the same tools to produce the same average content, sameness is the only thing that increases,” Morris said.
That reality is also shaping what both leaders look for in talent. Rich values curiosity, a willingness to experiment with AI, and the ability to identify where it can solve a business problem. Marketers also need to have the critical thinking skills to effectively evaluate what AI produces for accuracy, brand fit, and quality.
Morris looks for marketers who can act without having perfect information and who are curious about working alongside AI agents.
“I’d rather hire for that curiosity and the confidence to make a decision and move quickly,” he said.
Keep Customers Close (and Keep Moving)
As the conversation closed, Rich returned to the customer as a grounding point amid rapid change.
“Keep the customer at the core of your marketing and your approach,” he said.
He also urged marketers to keep experimenting and building with AI, describing that growth mindset as essential to developing their careers.
Morris encouraged leaders to make decisions faster and revisit them often.
“Most decisions are reversible. They are two-way doors, so treat them that way,” he said.
He also recommended establishing routines that keep leaders hearing directly from customers. As responsibilities expand, those connections can become easier to lose, but they remain essential to making smart choices about how and where to grow the business.
About the Visionaries
David Rich, Chief Marketing Officer, DTN
As Chief Marketing Officer, David Rich leads DTN’s global marketing strategy and organization, connecting the company’s solutions with customers across agriculture, energy, and other weather-sensitive industries. Partnering closely with product, sales, and customer success, he shapes go-to-market strategies rooted in DTN’s innovation and its customers’ real-world challenges.
A marketing veteran with more than 30 years of experience, David has driven growth across multiple business stages, sales models, and categories. His career includes marketing leadership roles at Adobe, Yahoo!, Disney and Pepsi, as well as high-growth startups in the U.S. and Europe—where he built strategies that accelerated impact and forged enduring customer relationships.
David holds dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and art, and an MBA from Duke University. He is also committed to developing the next generation of leaders as an MBA Student Mentor for Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, where he previously served on the Alumni Board.
Scott Morris, Chief Marketing Officer, Sprout Social
Scott Morris is a senior marketing executive with extensive B2B and B2C experience leading strategic marketing and communication initiatives globally to help businesses scale. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Sprout Social, where he leads the entire global marketing and communications team.
Prior to Sprout, Scott spent more than five years at Zendesk, most recently as Acting Chief Marketing Officer, where he led the company’s 400-person global marketing and communications team. Prior to Zendesk, Scott spent 12 years at Adobe, where he led product marketing for Creative Cloud. Before Adobe, Scott held various marketing leadership roles at Macromedia and Fortune Brands.
Scott holds a B.A. from Lafayette College and studied at the University of Paris – Sorbonne. He splits his time between San Francisco and Sonoma County, CA.
MTM Visionaries airs live on Zoom and is moderated by Kathy Hollenhorst, Chief Community Officer for Marketers That Matter. In each episode, two new Visionaries share their game plan and how that impacts today’s teams, talent, and you.
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