Juggling CMO+: How to Lead Across the Business

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have five flocking awesome founding sponsors: HG Insights, Boomerang, Webless, Firebrick, and Webflow, and an amazing VIP dinner sponsor with Vidoso. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, and same ambition to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. Tickets are now available at CMOHuddles.com. Do yourself a favor—check out some of the speakers and experts we have. It will blow you away. You can also watch a video that I am confident will get you pumped up, and it also shows what Gen AI video can do right now. Grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a Bonus Huddle where experts share their insights into the topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles. Sandy Ono of OpenText opens up about what it really means to juggle the demands of CMO “Plus.” She shares how overseeing both marketing and partnerships at a multi-billion dollar company calls for the right mindset, skill set, and toolset to lead revenue-driving alliances and unite teams around shared growth.

And by the way, if you're a B2B CMO, you can meet Sandy and another 100 incredible marketing leaders at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto, California on November 6th and 7th. Visit cmohuddles.com for details. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to today's Bonus Huddle. We're diving into the concept of the CMO Plus, and this is something we talk a lot about in CMO Huddles, and it's the marketing leader who takes on another significant area of responsibility, and it's a tricky road to navigate because you're creating a lot more demands on your time, but you're also changing perceptions of the CMO from the term I hate the most, which is "just the marketer," to a true business leader. And it seems to happen almost every time when a CMO gets another area of responsibility. So our guest today exemplifies this transformation. Sandy Ono is the EVP and CMO at OpenText. She not only leads global marketing for a $5.5 billion company across 10 business units, she also oversees partnerships and alliances. So this is CMO Plus in action. I also want to point out that Sandy will be joining us at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto this November. If you haven't secured your ticket, get on it. We only have a few left. Okay, Sandy, welcome. How are you and where are you this wonderful day?

Sandy: Hey, Drew. Good to see you. Thanks so much for having me. I am in California today, so I'm usually based out of Menlo Park here in the Bay Area.

Drew: Well, I know we're going to make you go very far from Menlo Park to Palo Alto in November, but excited to continue a conversation we actually started like five months ago. So one of the things we like to do in these is, just in case our audience needs to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay, we want to give them some quick action items. And in this case, three actions CMOs must take to succeed in a CMO Plus role. If you list them, we can then unpack them one by one.

Sandy: Well, great question and way to start. As you mentioned, Drew, I have the pleasure here of overseeing marketing communications and also partners and alliances, and I say three actions in terms of as you lean into CMO Plus is one, what's the mindset you want to take? Whether you call it a Chief Growth Officer or the Chief Market Officer, whatever it is, but that mindset of thinking big is thing one. The skill set is second, which is, you're usually in a CMO Plus role, you're a marketer at heart. I'm a marketer at heart, but I learned something completely new, and I messed up a lot. So what is that skill set you're willing to take on? And then third is toolset. Because, you know, jokingly, we always say we have a bag of doorknobs at the end of the day, but how can you make the bag of doorknobs really work together because you know the function so well, and that's kind of the promise for both yourself and your career and your company as you take on CMO Plus.

Drew: I love it. So we've got mindset, skill set, and toolset. All right. Well, let's go through them one by one. The mindset is an interesting one. It's funny. I have debated at length with Kate Bullis about Chief Market Officer. Regardless of the name, let's get at the mindset and what do you mean, and what do you think has helped you succeed as a CMO Plus?

Sandy: Yeah, I think a lot of us who are in the CMO role, again, love marketing, but we probably love growth even more, and that's really a really relevant topic in any kind of executive team you're in. For us here at OpenText, we've been a serial acquirer, so actually driving profitable, organic growth was a big deal. So taking that on as the charter as the first thing to say, well, what is my job, whether I had the scope of a traditional marketer, or if I have a scope of a CMO Plus, that's the job to be had. And then the notion of, well, if you want to get closer to revenue, which we all do, you know, what is that step you want to be able to take on? And what does that mean? Right? Taking on revenue seems good on paper. I ran commerce for a long time, and that tied really closely to digital marketing. And then I came here, and as you know, it was partner sales, right? Partner sales that I inherited and alliances. So getting one step closer to revenue and how that actually, you know, taking your skills of being able to run programs end to end, and taking that towards how you impact revenue and how you want to do it in your own style, right? I think was a huge part of the mindset of being willing to take it on.

Drew: I agree with you, and I think we talked about this a lot in Huddles that, you know, ideally, everybody wants to get closer to revenue, and yes, driving profitable, organic growth is important. What's interesting is the partnership. Because partnership, in your case, I imagine a lot of revenue goes through partnerships, boom, automatically gives you that credibility.

Sandy: Correct, yeah, and your ability to actually see tangible programs that drive true revenue is a little bit closer, right? I'd say on the marketing side of the house, you see it because you're the upper funnel of pipeline, and we all drive performance in that, but you have to depend on your sales friends to actually see it through. You know, when you own partnerships along with marketing, you are actually designing things that is one step closer to revenue, and you take on those responsibilities, right? I don't know if—I mean, you guys, I'm not a seller at heart. As much as I love marketing, you can make me do sales if you ask me to, but I had to take it on. This was part of the skill set part, right? I don't wake up every week and do a forecast and run down deals and understand deal construction, and those are some of the newer skills where I was forced into it because I took on the role, but it was also a huge learning opportunity. And again, virtuous cycle, once you're really that close to revenue, then you step back and say, well, what do you want to do with this broader role in order to design programs and partnerships and alliances that you think will actually drive true revenue?

Drew: It's funny, we had a dinner with some CMOs on Monday, and one of the CMOs also has some sales responsibility for one particular unit. So my question for this individual was, what does the CEO now want to talk to you about?

Sandy: That's a great question.

Drew: It's never marketing. It's only sales. So there's the CMO Plus, there's marketing. And I wonder, so my question for you is, so what does your boss want to talk to you about these days, marketing or partnerships?

Sandy: Oh, gosh, partnerships. And it's funny, because, you know, everybody still does the marketing because you're the pizzazz and the sizzle, and my boss trusts me to do, actually, all the marketing job. But as an opportunity, you guys, I reflect back on two years of doing this. Once I took on this role of partnerships and alliances, I was on every board meeting. Yes, my boss wanted to talk to me about partnerships, and he was depending on, funnily enough, you know, my other role is communications, right? My ability to make something kind of complex, which is a lot of your abilities too, right, folks on this call, make something complex and communicate it simply because that's our job as marketers. We take technologies that are pretty complex and we bring it to customers in a simple way. Partnerships and alliances are quite complex because you're talking products and marketing and other big technology companies. So you have to take something quite complex and be able to explain it and say, where are the levers, where are the investments, and how do we move this forward?

Drew: All right, so number two was skill set, and really interested in that. I mean, you've talked a little bit about having to sort of force yourself to be a salesperson and get out there, but talk a little about what was the hardest part of the skill set that you needed to pick up.

Sandy: Oh gosh, you know, I can admit, I think a lot of us would take on new roles for the first year. I didn't know what I was doing. I said I hadn't run partner sales before. Like I knew about partnerships. I was much better at the strategic, programmatic part than I was at the sales kind of execution part. So one, you got to learn your BS meters. Got to get a little bit better, because everybody's trying to ask you for something. Two, you have to manage things at huge scales, right? Most of us work for global companies. And three, it really forced me into the epicenter of across all of our revenue streams in the company, right? We're happy to be kind of organized this new business side of the house with sales, renewal business on the other side of the house, partnerships and partners do both, right? They sell your stuff and they renew your stuff. So the type of things you're trying to triage, the type of issues that come up, I always felt like I was in the epicenter. So for the first year, I didn't even feel like I was driving anything. I was just reacting and making sure nothing fell through the cracks. One day you can be talking about the risk factors of setting up a bad partnership and trying to exit one. The other day, you can be like incubation, okay, business development. So you, you, you know, and at the levels we're at as part of the executive team, your job is that managing risk and driving growth at the same time in large, large scale. You know, these were multi-million dollar things we were talking about, so you didn't want to mess it up. So I didn't want to mess it up, right? So a lot of mistakes in the year one, just getting bearings.

Drew: Well, it says something that your CEO had that, or your boss had the confidence that you could do this, even though you didn't know how to do it. What made him that confident?

Sandy: I don't know. I think you have to prove yourself. You have to prove yourself a couple things, right as a CMO. One, you're not there just as the marketer, but that you're there as a business leader. So that's thing one. Thing two is you don't have to know the answer. You have to ask the right questions. And thing three is that you really start to understand how partnerships or marketing play into the broader picture of growth, or your company's P&L, either on the growth side or the efficiency side. And to entertain that, right? Like my boss gave me really hard things like, "Hey, if you drove like, 1% margin improvement by like, you know, driving renewals direct instead of through channel, what could you do?" So I had to be partner unfriendly in my job, right at kind of the company level, those were the type of things you get in, not just being at the execution level, where you love partners and you're just building relationships. So being able to toggle up and down, I think the other thing is being able to do something that new. A lot of times, your peers around the C table, everybody's got their swim lane, right? Your COO is operating. Your CFO's keeping everything like in check. Your sales guys driving the new of the stuff on the truck, your product, people are building future. So this middle ground that marketing gets to sit in and partnerships gets to sit in is, well, what is the net new you can drive incremental within the year? And that's really fascinating, and that's a challenge to take on, to say, "Oh, I sit in this sweet spot. Okay, how fast do I have to move in order to actually see it and to bring something that new and incremental growth for the company?"

Drew: So I'm imagining if, particularly in the first 3, 6, 9 months, you're drinking from the fire hose trying to learn this thing, and you're spending more time on the partnerships than maybe you are even today. And so I'm wondering what's happening over in Marketing Land, and how did you make that work?

Sandy: Great question. I had the pleasure of having been here for maybe about a year and a half before we took this on. So our history is, you know, I came to OpenText about three and a half years ago. I inherited a lean marketing, and I come from a place where marketing, we debated at the borders a lot. So my prior company were like, always debating the scope of marketing, you know, and everybody's fighting over the scope here. I got here, and things just kept on being added. You know, product marketing was all here. I didn't have to fight it. Pricing came. Demand was already here. So it was kind of this interesting horizontal function that took on more now. I also spent a good year and a half building out a leadership team, and I couldn't take on this partner role until I probably had a very solid leadership team. So Drew, to answer your question, I depended on my people more. So yeah, because my mindshare was half over in partner land, trying to figure it out, and then my head of partners left. So then I had to do the job myself, which is a blessing, a curse and a lesson on its own.

Drew: Well, by the way, if it's really an interesting point, I want to and it took us about 12 minutes to get here, but clearly you've got to have really strong number twos over in marketing, who can do the job. But what's interesting? And so that's yes, absolutely. But now I want to get to this other thing. It's so interesting when the partner person left, that was a moment when you could really, one, get your hand, get your hands in there, and two, probably recreate it into something that made sense to you.

Sandy: Well put, that's exactly what happened, right? Because we have an incumbent leader who just starts to report into you. You want to respect their knowledge, you want to respect their domain. You let them run the show, and then when they choose to leave, all on good terms, just takes a while to do a search right at this type of level. So I was in the role hands on, hands on deck for six months. So I ran all the forecasts. I got in there. I picked the partnerships that matter, where you spent your time. You feel really thin because you are spread really across. And there's days I wake up guys and I'm like, I wish I was just a marketer. Like, can I just go do that thing? I really like, like, I just want to work on a campaign. That's the simple thing, but then you end up hiring people to fill the role. I have a true appreciation after running it for six months of the depth, then in the weeds and the skill set now that team needs, and now we're going through the next six months of I have a leader in place and how we need to upskill our talent, because it has to go down further than the leader.

Drew: Well, it's so interesting because, and I'm not saying that this was the case, but when you're a leader and there's an existing person in that thing, and you're adding it on, there's a potential to be a dabbler, because you don't know it inside out, but suddenly, when you have to run it, you now know how hard or what leading that department actually looks like, and what this person could do, because you just did the job. How fortunate for you. In some ways. I'm sorry that you're from a time standpoint, it was probably horrible, but...

Sandy: No time for anything, but all good, right? Like now you can look back on it and know and know what shaping an organization looks like, and be able to coach and counsel the new leader to say, "Hey, I think you need a skill up here. No, they're going to need that." And also for your peer sets. It's funny because, you know, we then brought on a new CPO, and our, you know, CRO, is quite into partnership. So everybody hears it too. It's one of those things where, like, again, you are the epicenter. It's your ability to triage your peers, your ability to drive progress forward, really does take this keen understanding of the details and being able to toggle up and down depending on the audience.

Drew: Okay, so at the very beginning, we start you gave mindset, skill set, which we've now covered, and how you got there. The last one was tool set. Talk a little bit about what we're really what you mean there.

Sandy: Yeah. So it's funny, you were asking me what my boss asked me about. So maybe, like, you know, three or four months ago we were going through annual planning, I finally said to him, like, I get it now. I actually really like partnerships. I'm like, I'm not fighting it anymore. Like, I get it and I get how to make partnerships and marketing work together. And as you're just telling my team this week, I'm like, I'm sorry, this is not normal, but you get it in one person. So I understand the structure of the partnerships as much as I understand how to turn the marketing engine on. But that's the sweet spot. That's the opportunity. So whenever you take on a CMO plus role, whatever it is, I happen to be talking about partnerships today, I think you get to this point, you're like, "Oh, I can finally unlock it. Now one plus one equals three." So I have to get these three marketers do these three things, these partner people, organize this thing, go talk to the product guys, and now I know how to unlock something, right? And before it was kind of like, you delegate, and you tell the marketers, "Well, go work with the partner guys," and then that might turn into some solution that you can market. You tell the partner people, "Well, you know, just go set up some relationships," and maybe you get to some areas. And then, now I'm much more precise. I know how to unlock it and which people to pull together out of my own organization. They all work for me. So they'll, you know, happily come to a meeting with me, and I can drive everything from a brainstorm to execution to accountability. And that's the promise. And I it was interesting lesson. I'll just mention, for the first two years, I tried to put everybody under one umbrella, one mission and purpose, one kind of set of priorities. And kick off the year and you want, you know, it's like, it's all about being inclusive, right? And then this year, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have to run them differently." So, you know, very distinct mission and purpose for the marketing side versus the partner side. Very distinct priorities one side of the other, still leverage points where people work together. But it was actually when I started out thinking was like, "Oh, I just have to be inclusive and remember to, you know, call out the partner guys and it'll be a..." No, no. Stop being trying to be everything for everyone. That actually doesn't mean anything. You actually have to speak to each group and their true function and help elevate that, and then lean in on the areas where you want them to collaborate and teach them how. So that's kind of where I've come, you know, on this journey.

Drew: Yeah, interesting. Really, really interesting. There's certain times in certain types of people, like marketing naturally attracts certain folks, and they're gonna they need certain stories to sort of get excited. But partnerships are different animals, and I don't know if anybody ever grew up and said, "Gee, I want to be in partnership." So it sort of comes upon them. But nonetheless, it's a thing, and it's a practice. And if you want them to feel as important as the marketers, that makes sense. Are there in terms of so that's one of the skill sets that you're the tools. So what we are, have we covered tool set effectively, you think? Or do we? Because I'm ready to move on, but I want to make sure that we've covered what you meant by tool set.

Sandy: I think so. And then I think once you know how to crack it, then how do you scale it? Right? That's the other thing. So tools, less so kind of like automated tools. But remember, partnerships mostly—it's also what's hard about it, or cool about it—is it's not just your company. So, you know, you can build it, and they will come that way for direct sales and all that. You will build it. Do they want to partner? Do they see you the same way? Do you market in the same way? Do you sell in the same way? No. Co-selling, co-marketing is a whole other beast, right? So it's a—and, you know, we work in an ecosystem. So often there's three players, you know, from the ISVs of the world, the application players, down to the infra players and the cloud players, right? So there's often multiple partners and system integrators that you have to kind of think about, and each of those are behemoth companies that are 10-20 times bigger than your company, right? And what do you mean to them? So I think that toolset of saying, how do you organize your house to unlock it? How do you then work with the ecosystem to unlock it, and what is sustainable, right? And what is not just a one-time fun exercise, but what is actually going to drive a system and process and accountability is part of why building it is kind of fun.

Drew: Yeah, and I'm imagining that part of this is, how are you a great partner for them, for your partners, right? How are you really partnering, and what does that look like? And great partnerships are gives and takes, and that they want to do it. And ironically, it's not just, hey, you have the best product at the best price. There's relationships here, right?

Sandy: Yeah, and it's often multidimensional, right? Like, you know, we have our beloved CSP hyperscale players. They have a certain way to work, and it's often these delicate balance of trade discussions, right? So I am in constant communications with our CFO and our CPO and myself around these partnerships, because we actually have to be quite in sync as an executive team to feel in sync to the partner. That was something I wasn't expecting, right? Just be transparent and say, oh, I'm working on this thing. They're probably going to ask you about that thing. So, you know, at the end of the day, are you a customer or are you a partner within an ecosystem? So you start to dance in some areas that are way out of the normal kind of marketing realm, but super interesting and super important when you can unlock multimillion-dollar type of deals for the company.

Drew: And so we have a question from the audience. One question is, is there a new partnership that you were able to incubate in this role that you're really proud of? And if so, why?

Sandy: Yeah, and there's a couple that I personally worked on in the last nine months, just kind of January to now. One is, we have a very mature partnership between OpenDex and SAP. It's pretty public, but it's funny, once you get in there, you're like, oh, wow, this is part of the unlocking the marketing engine. You go in there, I was like, we haven't co-marketed. Holy crap, right? So I saw the opportunity to then mature an already great partnership to the next level. And another one we just started from scratch—we're actually announcing it next week—is with a financial services partner, and we're embedding our technologies into theirs. So soup to nuts. How do we build it with engineering? How do we introduce it to the market? How do we then bring it to market for their audiences, not my traditional audiences, their audiences. A third one is with the hyperscaler. So balance of trade, who does what? What does it mean to be in the marketplace? You're one of 2,000 people in the marketplace. And the fourth domain is, you know, in AI. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways technologies embed into each other, but now AI and AI—everybody's spinning up their AI, all the agents want to talk to each other. Do you play in each other's marketplaces? Do you not? If you don't, are you relevant? So those are the fun things that we need to—right, you need to spend time and energy on all types of domains and keep very clear with your teams: what makes money, what builds relationships, what drives relevance. And if you're not clear, it gets really muddy pretty quickly.

Drew: Amazing. How often do you have to actually get involved in, say, a specific account call to either sell initially or to, you know, nurse it along?

Sandy: On the major partnerships, I lean in pretty heavily, you know. I'm kind of in the monthly and quarterly reviews, because, like you said earlier, Drew is a really good point. Partners expect you to show up too, right? And that actually is half the equation. Do you have good technology? Do you show up as a good partner? Are you demonstrating that in true revenue, jointly together? So a part of, you know, being an executive as part of this ecosystem is showing up and having the dialogs and saying, yeah, I'm working my side of the house too. You work your side of the house. People need to hear that, feel that, and trust is a huge part of this. And again, translating marketing and partnerships—in marketing, you're building trust, but sometimes at an arm's length level, right? Because it's through digital, it's through events, it's through whatnot. In partnerships, you're right there on the ground, but the skill set's quite the same. Be simple, be clear, be direct. And I actually have to untrain all my marketing jargon out. You can't use any marketing words, which is actually a good thing for my marketing team, because I come back and be like, no, guys, can we just explain what it really is, right? So there's a lot of unwiring to rewire, which I think is a good thing for a marketing organization.

Drew: Yeah, I think for just about everybody. I mean, if you want to be perceived as a business person, you can't use marketing language, right? And if you want to be perceived as a partnership person, that same thing would apply. So that's interesting. You know, months ago, on our prep call, you talked about the idea of ecosystem collaboration creates true differentiation. I thought it was interesting at the time, and I still wonder if you can explain that idea.

Sandy: Yeah, working in tech is a lot of fun. And as I was talking about earlier, if you think about it from a customer lens, most of them have hundreds, if not thousands, of applications where you're kind of working enterprise. Most of them have different infrastructure, so I'm still on-prem, multiple clouds. So in that, this notion of collaborating with everybody else is really important, because the customer expects it, right? I put in this application. I wanted to talk to that application sitting on this infrastructure. I may have it look different—a multi-cloud mode, you know, multi-application world. And now with AI on top of it, multi-model, right? World is what we live in. So part of a lot of the partnerships, you have to get down to solutions that matter, differentiation that matters. And like I was saying, we're not at a spot, and some others are quite more advanced at this, right, of just being very pointed around: is this a place where I'm just lightly integrated as software, right? Is this a place that I'm truly embedded? Is this a place where it's just AI talking to AI? And being able to do that is really important, because the go-to-market is different, right? Our sweet spot and our skill set as a CMO is a go-to-market strategy. So it's very different to be like, oh, it's just like technologies that talk to each other, so my direct sales does that, versus embedded—oh, their sellers are selling it—versus AI to AI, just relevance for the customer, but not true, you know. So being able to delineate this amorphous word called ecosystem and really understand what matters to the customer, right? The system integrator basically tells them what the reference architecture is. So who are you to the system integrator? So it's the fun and the joy of doing this, but it forces us to have more robust conversations with our partners and make sure our teams are focused on the right things, right? If you build it, they don't always come. So that's a big lesson on the marketing part to say: be pointed, be specific, be meaningful to the customer.

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Drew: We have another question from the audience about channel conflict and how, if you have those issues, and how do you deal with them?

Sandy: Yes. I'll answer it on two sides. On the alliances side, we get into a lot of conversations around fly, no-fly zones with our best partners, because we're competitive in some parts of our businesses and partners in other parts of our businesses. So there's a lot of adult conversations around: no fly over here, fly over here. Can we double-check on this one? Or you fly or no fly? And again, partner people are the partner people. It's really the BUs that control, you know, the products at the end of the day, right? So when you work a partnership, you actually have to think beyond the immediate partner contact that you have in order to get the fly, no-fly zone, right? The other part of channel conflict is, I think we have to acknowledge that the channel is hugely shifting, and our ability to play into different business models, right? So on the channel side of the house, you know, the historical distributor-resell kind of model—that's now because of, you know, demands and margins—when that, those businesses, those organizations, those partners have shifted to more managed services, so their dial between resale and services is somewhat evolving. Now, who are you as a piece of software in that ecosystem while you have professional services? So you want to talk about channel conflict? Yeah, quite often. And it's kind of like, well, what's your services doing versus what my services are doing? And do we have rules of engagement, you know, for on-the-ground selling? And these are big players. You can have your opinion, but how do you do that globally with account teams that, you know, particularly want to behave in different ways? So yeah, I think channel conflict comes with the job. It's always the: what do you want to programmatically set as the logic? And how do you deal with the corner cases, right? How do I kind of manage my day?

Drew: So I want to sort of get us back into marketing land somehow, just a little bit. And it feels like partner marketing is maybe the bridge here before we talk about that. And I'm... How do you think about partner marketing as its own thing, relative to, say, overall marketing? You know, where you're doing it. I don't know if you do direct or whatever, but you know, help us understand the difference between those two, how you think about it, and the kinds of things that you're doing in partner marketing.

Sandy: It's a great question. It's actually where we're not stuck, but it's one of our challenges this year, right? So, you know, I had the pleasure working with four other big technology companies, and many of you guys probably have too. So where you have size and scale, you usually have a separate partner marketing team. They wake up every day, they're aligned to the segments, and they care about the partner angle. They bridge. They are awesome marketers. I don't have that, right? And so many of you who might work for mid-sized companies, I don't have a... I didn't have a partner marketing team. So like, year one was kind of like, ah, can we cobble it together? Do I... Do I have three people over in demand, start to focus on the channel? So we don't do, you, right? Do I have it as part of the product marketing job to care about alliances? And we were just literally having these conversations this year as we came into our fiscal years, like, where can we squeeze the headcount model to actually formulate the team? We kind of know what we want them to do, but, you know, we live in a world of constraints. We don't always have the resources that we need. So we have to figure it out. I think I'm at a place where, as more of these partnerships start to form, and those are just true levers of growth, our biggest challenge, which I'm sure is many of your guys's challenges, we serve multiple business units. We happen to have 10, so even serving those 10 business units with the capacity we have is a thing. So then you add on partnerships. So my intuition went to, oh, let's just be embedded in everybody's jobs. It's okay. Not so great in execution. Everybody runs out of bandwidth, so then you don't get the kind of the focus you need for the marketing. And as you work with other partners who have pretty mature marketing teams, again, they need their counterparts. So we're still figuring it out, Drew, but it's a great question, which is, I think the skill sets in marketing can either be taught or, you know, you can bring other people in. The capacity is one you as a CMO need to work through. And it's amongst the third thing, prioritization of all the gamut of things that are on your plate, just like anything else.

Drew: So one of the things that I, you know, OpenText is a brand. It is, you know, lots of different products underneath this brand. Have you been able to create a through line from the big brand and the logo and the idea of this company through partner marketing? And I know that's hard if you don't have a partner marketing team, but I'm just curious how, and because it feels like that's part of the opportunity, because I have seen it break down. You get to partner marketing and it seems like it's a different company, yeah, you know, suddenly it's an ingredient brand, it's different, or suddenly it's just, you know, it's feeds and speeds that fit and connect with this widget, and you lose any essence of what the company or the overall idea of the company stands for. So how do you, how do you think about this, this through line?

Sandy: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, all of us as marketers aspire to, I think, you know, I'd say we're on the journey of a through line that really lands. So, you know, we have lots of business units. We are also quite acquisitive over the years, but what we do is secure information management for AI that actually has more work to be done, right? So on the direct side of the house and your normal job, you know, that's still work to be done. So everybody understands that, and then lands in all your BU. Now, when it comes to partnerships, one of the things I've been trying is you have to ladder up and get the permission to do joint messaging, right? Sounds so basic, right? But when getting a room to actually do joint messaging, you don't get lost as a widget, but you have to win the permission to do that and with their marketing teams and then believing in it. So, you know, with one of our 30-year partnerships, we're just doing that now. Like I said, opportunity, right? Marketing enters the house. You're like, oh, opportunity, let's do some joint messaging. But that joint messaging then lands into the sales teams, their sales teams, our sales teams, as you show up in the market better. So it sounds so basic, but it is a bit of a brilliant basics. It's also toggling between how you normally talk to your customers and how you need to be relevant to their sales teams. And I think that's been harder for my marketing team to remember to do that, right? Like we know how to sell our technologies and to our customers all day long, but you now have to sell it within their stack, right? So again, it pushes on points of differentiation quite a bit more and saying, okay, well, what's the point of differentiation? Not just your standalone technology, but within their stack. It's a lot more solution marketing than it is just straight up kind of product marketing.

Drew: I want to get back to one thing that you said, and it just sparked so, you know, big issue for CMOs always is justifying budget, right? Because, you know, CFOs see it as an expense and not as an investment. Often, then you have this hard part of short-term, long-term, it's often hard long-term sales cycle. And you know, how do you actually measure the impact of marketing with partnerships? On the other hand, you initiate a partnership, it generates revenue. There is dollar value directly connected with that activity. And therefore, in theory, if partnerships grows by 20%, then budget for helping you in your partnership, at least your partnership budget, whether that's marketing or not, you should, in theory, be able to get more revenue to do that. I mean, right, more operating budget, if you will.

Sandy: I wish it worked out that simply, right? Yes, the logic is there. I think all of us understand that. You know, at our levels, those are the trade-offs. And I'd say that with marketing and partnerships, what's the similar thing on both sides is many times people don't understand the complexity of what we do and why we unlock things. So very tangible, right? It's very tangible to go spend five bucks and go hire more salespeople. I don't know if this is true in any of your guys's companies, but true in the couple I've worked at. They could see it. They put a quota on it. You hire five people. It's super direct. Marketing, not as direct. Partnership, not as direct. And partnerships, good ones take multiple years. People aren't so patient with me or us in general, right? So being able to say no, this is how I drive value, this is how my team drives value, and consistently say no, when you invest in this side of the house, you are unlocking something. And yes, you have a little patience to see that come through and doing few things, right? I've kind of gone down to the place where demonstrate it versus, you know, just say it. So pick a few where you can show everybody. Here's how the pieces come together. And when we did that, we saw this, so that's more tangible. I've also gone to the place of, of course, you know, self-regulating what you deprioritize, right? Trying to return... the lines are don't matter so much. So you can put your eggs where it does matter. The business case for return is true on both sides of the house. You know, we get as much pressure on the partner side as we do on the marketing side.

Drew: You know, in an ideal world, a CMO could share what their CAC is, what the lifetime value is, and then it's CAC over lifetime value. And in some ways, partnerships are... you could, I guess you could say, because there's a lifetime value potential of a partnership, and there's a cost of acquiring a partnership, but what metrics are similar and which ones are different, so that you know at least you can report progress?

Sandy: Yeah. So I think the short-term ones is, you know, as expected, right? Your pipeline generation, your revenue generation, your conversion ratios, all the normal things, you know. We manage pipeline with Salesforce, partner-sourced and marketing-sourced. So, you know, that's pretty straightforward. What's funny is, I have to make sure my marketing and my partner teams aren't trying to, like, steal from each other. So like, you know, I gotta just, you know, put that to bed. Long-term KPIs, I think, you know, if I had to say it is actually about stickiness of your solutions, customer retention rates, and probably what's a softer KPI, but the feedback you can get to drive innovation, right. So like, the stickiness of the solutions is a key thing, and partners can really help with that. And so does marketing, right, outside of any other function, you know, in the organization. That's what we can do. We can also unlock retention rates if we do our jobs right. And lastly, we're not great at this at OpenText yet, but I hope we can build it is the model to say the feedback from the customers and the partners. How do I get that back into our innovation cycle? Because you sit at... you sit at the foreground of a lot of people wanting to tell you how they feel about your products. Partners are even more opinionated than the customers, right? So how do you bottle that up in some way that your product guys even want to listen to you? And what are the hard facts, and what are the win-loss, and what are the, you know, the anecdotal stories? Because I think we're actually more even-keeled, because we see it at greater scale than the sales guys, because the sales guys, got to love them, but they have a lot of anecdotes. You know, and anecdotes isn't how you want to drive your roadmap. You want to drive trends and white spaces and be able to collate that feedback in some way that's super digestible for the organization. So that's a... that's an aspiration of mine that's not built yet, but I do think that's kind of the promise of what we do.

Drew: Well, it sounds like with a partnership, at least. I mean, we all want to get better feedback from our customers to make our product better. But it's interesting when you have a partner in there, and they're often integrating you, they'll go, well, you know, this would be a lot better if we could do this with you. And if you're listening, that could really be meaningful. Because also, I'm imagining that if you gave that partner what they wanted, and it worked, they're going to want to partner with you more.

Sandy: Yeah, exactly. And they often see beyond our BU lines much better than ourselves, right? So, because, you know, we're just technologies to them. We're not, you know, business units with accountable goals, which we often are internally. You know, partners see across marketing, see across, right? So...

Drew: Yeah, I have so many more questions for you, and we're going to run out of time, but I have to ask, because it is the topic on everyone's mind, which is sort of where generative AI fits into your sort of overall plan, whether it's to create efficiencies in your group or actually deliver a better marketing product. Talk a little bit about how you've approached it. And you know, if you have any sort of success stories that you feel really good about.

Sandy: You know, we've been trying to adopt as much as we can. I think two years ago, I said to my team, if we don't, we'll just be the marketing department of the 1980s, right? And who wants to be there? So what's kind of been fun and more recent is, on the creative front, we went full hog at kind of adopting tools, graphics, advertising, turning creative cycles from months into weeks, right? Super fun. You know, we're doing our big trade show in the fall. Now, I'm into like audio. So we're turning messaging into songs. That's been really fun, animating our characters. So you're continually surprised at what the tech can do to really speed up that creative process.

I'm prospecting. I happen to own our BDRs, kind of SDRs team. We've been doing the triangulation of how to be relevant to buyer centers for a while now. And now we're kind of going into, can we use generative to do deeper kinds of points of view, and how do you marry together intent to how you show up and how you kind of present yourself? What's been super interesting is, you know, in product marketing, which arguably some would say transforms the most because, you know, content creation itself is being kind of moved in a new direction. We've definitely been experimenting with, definitely scaling. What I've been observing is now we need to figure out our guardrails, right. We happen to have an org where you have product marketing who may originate what you need to create. You have a creative production team that, you know, creates some stuff, and you have a web team that controls digital. We now need to actually standardize a little bit of our guardrails, or even tool sets we use, because our approval processes or the way we actually get work done won't actually improve until we actually streamline that across the org. So at the beginning of our year, I said to my team, like, this is about process engineering. You guys know that, right? And like, this is not about just using tools. Like, we actually have to change what we do. So it's a process. It's going to take us here, right, defining roles that are handled by AI, defining what tool sets, what guardrails. How do we actually get the efficiencies is going to take some rewiring of how we do marketing. The last domain I'll mention is, I happen to own sales enablement, and that's really fascinating, too. So, you know, we are trying to actually shift sales enablement into, how do you teach our sellers to prompt versus, how do you just give them more stuff, right? Because we probably suffer from, you know, many of us probably suffer from content dysfunction. Oh, we create a lot of stuff, but nothing lands with the sales team. So we're like, Okay, well, what if we deployed our sales place in like a series of prompts. And how could they prompt something, use something they got, and then go show up with the customers. You know, how do they ingest something and listen to a podcast on the way to their customers? So we're experimenting and scaling some of those things, because we actually think we want to do that part quite differently as well.

Drew: Interesting. It's funny, because a lot of, we spent this month in three of our huddles, talking about how people are using it in a lot or creating sort of sales GPTs, which are like answering, put in whatever question challenge you have, and has all the sales enablement materials in there. What you just said, I think is so interesting. It was so easy to create a Notebook LM podcast version of an imagined sales conversation, right? And that would actually be brilliant. So thank you for that little bit of inspiration. You know, again, this thing about workflow. So, I mean, one of the things I do wonder is, we've talked about it, but some are approaching it. Do you see where you're going to need an AI ops person on your team that can actually do the operation and the workflow and put the guardrails in and connect some of these APIs, because it's not just about building a GPT. If you really want to do workflow, you got to have steps in the middle where humans are going to come in, and those are going to involve different technologies.

Sandy: Yeah, I think so. I don't know if it'll be a role, but there certainly is a body of work we have to go through, right? Which is, you know, so I've done a couple things with my team. Is just food for thought. One is, you know, bring up your org chart. You know, where are the humans? Where are the agents? Just draw it on an org chart. So you start to imagine roles that can be automated. Next thing we need to do is lay out the process, the classic marketing process, bringing a campaign to life. Who touches what, where decisions make. How do we take steps out? So that's kind of where we're at. So it's not unlike how you've always deployed software, but now you have multiple pieces of software, or newer kind of technologies, with AI to be able to do different steps and really force people to reimagine. I mean, just like any other organization, we're quite in our comfort zones most days, right? People don't wake up wanting to do their jobs differently. They're finally experimenting with stuff, but fundamentally changing roles. Like, that's what we're talking about. Like, fundamentally changing roles, right? And with the promise. Like, the other thing is, how I kind of catch it with my teams, is use this as you've always thought you needed 10% capacity, but you only got five. Well, how do you bridge it, right? So, like globalization, translation is a big thing, right? Most global companies are. So we don't have enough horsepower, manpower to be able to bring it to Japanese, bring it to German, bring it to, you know, French, and, you know, whatever other language we're supposed to do. So from sales enablement all the way to marketing. How do we do that differently? The tool sets are there now, but how do we do it? How do we activate and, you know, who's still checking? Are we checking? I don't know. So there's this notion of how we were able to use tool sets just to get the website translated, but now we're at the place where, well, how do we want to do this localization process differently with the tools that we have?

Drew: Okay, a couple of sort of lightning round questions. Is there something that you've changed your mind about in the last year?

Sandy: Oh, have I changed my mind about AI marketing? Can't be at the generic level. Is that fair enough to say all of us are doing some level of AI marketing? Customers are much more sophisticated. Now the rate at which people want to see ROI is really true. So I've changed my mind about what AI marketing really is and what it needs to be.

Drew: Okay, one big bet that you're making, a program, an investment strategy, that you believe will pay off in the next 12 to 18 months.

Sandy: Staying on this AI thread, I think it's kind of this move to conversations and move to what would fuel the generative like, kind of GEO space, right? We forever, for 20 years, talked about SEO, right? But I'm sure you guys are getting into, I have now, like whatever, salespeople telling me, hey, why don't you show up in the AI overview? So I'm like, Okay, thanks. Right? So you're like, do I explain SEO to you or do I just say thanks and move on? So I just say thanks and I move on. But it's a thing. Of course, it is, right. Certain things are going to evolve. The way we create content is going to fundamentally evolve. You know, I kicked off my team this year saying, no, stop talking about the assets you're going to create. Start really embracing the conversations you're supposed to have as a two-way, and now have that fuel both generative AI, GEO, search engines and how you do content. So I do think it's quite fundamental. It's the change. It's going to embark on our function in order to actually show up correctly and how we want to.

Drew: Yeah, I was, I gave a talk the other day. It's like, why this is the most exciting and perilous time to be a marketer. It's both. So one, to close out, maybe you can give us two dos and one don't for CMOs who want to thrive in the CMO-plus role.

Sandy: Oh, great question. I say, do take risks. It may feel uncomfortable, but just take it if it lands on your lap, like it did on mine, like I didn't choose to, but somebody left the company and landed on my lap, take the risk. Just do it. Go for it. Second is, force the cross-pollination. You were asked to take this on because it's a bag of doorknobs, but you are entrusted with actually forcing cross-pollination in your organization that can unlock something. And then lastly, the don't is just don't be afraid to fail and run out of time. You'll run out of time. I run out of time. We all do, right? But it's part of the risk and the rewards.

Drew: I love it. Well, Sandy, thank you so much. I can't wait to continue this conversation in person in Palo Alto this November.

If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!