Nicole R. Braley is a remarkable leader in marketing, renowned for her forward-looking, strategic, and dynamic approach. With over two decades of expertise in diverse industries such as healthcare, oil and gas, consulting, and technology, Nicole has established expertise in driving growth and digital transformation. Currently, she serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Empower Pharmacy, a leading provider of compounded medications dedicated to producing innovative medications to enhance people’s lives.
A Distinctive Leadership Style
“At the end of the day, my job is to work for my team. My question to them every day is, “What can I do for you?” or “What do you need from me?” quotes Nicole. This doesn’t mean she can’t be a tough manager. She truly believes in adopting a servant-leadership mentality that elevates the people she depends on to deliver on the goals and visions of the business.
Fostering a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation
Nicole has focused on the two key strategies to encourage innovation and collaboration at Empower Pharmacy: practice introspection and lead with service.
This approach, emphasizes forward-thinking and identifying potential challenges before they arise, helping the team align their efforts and move forward together. By staying grounded in core values and embracing a servant-leadership perspective, Nicole ensures that the team navigates both the known and unknown with purpose.
Central to Nicole’s leadership is a commitment to diversity and inclusion, a principle that she believes should be embraced at every level of the organization. Through a bit of introspection, she has identified three key practices to promote an inclusive culture:
First, Nicole emphasizes the importance of staying committed to an inclusive culture. She firmly believes that small, thoughtful actions such as collecting information for virtual meetings in advance, creating opportunities for others to contribute, and elevating voices that might otherwise go unheard can make a big difference.
Secondly, she encourages employees to have the courage to hold themselves accountable. This also involves taking some time to learn how issues like gender bias may manifest in the workplace and show empathy for working parents by checking in with them and offering support.
Finally, Nicole suggests them to be curious. She also encourages them to get involved in the company’s D&I group or participate in its activities. With many great virtual events currently available, she sees this as the perfect opportunity for employees to engage and make a difference.
Evaluating the Impact of AI: At a Glance
In Nicole’s opinion, reinventing customer experience and sales enablement with AI are the two ways AI impacts the company.
“As we move into 2024, our focus on transforming customer experiences revolves around revolutionizing marketing and sales enablement using AI,“ says Nicole.
This strategy is about leveraging AI to not only enhance the sales processes but also to significantly change how they interact with customers and support the sales teams.
She firmly believes that the integration of AI will present an opportunity to make significant changes in 2024. For example, AI can be used to create dynamic content, experiences, and sales playbooks that adapt to different scenarios, ultimately leading to a better customer experience. The real innovation lies not in these elements but in the ease and precision with which AI can help the team scale this tool. By offering real-time suggestions and scripts, AI can assist customer-facing team members navigate customer conversations more effectively, resulting in better engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved retention.
Another key area where AI is revolutionizing sales is lead prioritization. By analyzing historical data and lead stage trends, AI can help sales teams identify which leads are more likely to convert, allowing them to prioritize their efforts more effectively. This prioritization not only enhances efficiency but also increases the likelihood of successful sales outcomes.
Conquering the Hurdles Along the Way
The last few years have seen unprecedented disruption in the CMO’s role, with an increasing emphasis on inclusive marketing. This shift highlights the importance of crafting narratives that genuinely reflect the diversity of the audiences a company serves, ensuring that these stories resonate deeply and authentically.
Internally, this focus on diversity and inclusion translates into a strong employee experience (EX) that aligns with the customer experience (CX) companies strive to provide.
Nicole underscores this connection, stating,-“A diverse and inclusive internal culture not only reflects our values as an organization but also drives creativity and innovation, providing a wellspring of unique perspectives that fuel our marketing strategies.”
Driving Growth with Innovation and Digitization
Being a CMO in 2024 is not just about managing marketing strategies—it’s about being a daring innovator, a creative mastermind, and a key growth driver for the entire organization.
Nicole’s vision extends beyond that of a Chief Marketing Officer as she ventures further into this transformational era. It’s a thrilling journey filled with opportunities to reshape the future of the business, and it all hinges on three fundamental shifts.
Nicole’s Secret to Balancing Her Professional and Personal Life
Nicole’s managing style is based on trust and autonomy; her teams have always known that she believes in their ability to manage their workload and their time. But the irony is that in empowering her team to embrace their downtime, she has ignored her own advice. She steered the ship while forgetting to anchor herself. Nicole has endorsed the pursuit of work-life balance for others, all the while her own scales were tipping dangerously towards all work, no play.
She says, “I recognize that my role extends beyond guiding others; it includes setting an example. It’s time for the shoemaker to pause, to craft his own pair of shoes, and to walk the path of well-being that I’ve so meticulously laid out for others.”
The Significant Role of Technology in Marketing Strategies
Nicole finds the tech stack, which includes Salesforce, Medallia, and Shopify, as well as virtual event platforms and web tools, plays a crucial role in driving marketing efforts and ultimately driving the customer experience. She sees the tech stack not just as a collection of software—it’s a strategically assembled set of tools working together to drive growth and deliver customer value. In her role as a CMO, she leverages these tools to drive digital transformation, integrating data-driven decision-making into the strategies she uses to optimize her marketing efforts and propel growth.
Words of Wisdom
Advising aspiring marketing leaders looking to make a significant impact in their organizations, Nicole emphasizes the importance of constantly learning, exploring new ideas, and challenging conventional wisdom. According to her, as a CMO, staying current with marketing trends and new technologies and being willing to take risks with new, innovative approaches is the key to unlocking growth and driving success across the organization.”
