One Promise, One Motion: How NetApp Built Strategic Demand

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back.

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. Gabie Boko, CMO of NetApp, opens up about navigating what she calls the three-year CMO journey from hope to despair to determination. She shares how she's redefining branded demand, aligning leadership around a unified narrative, and driving what she calls strategic demand, a company-wide effort to connect brand storytelling to measurable growth. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing 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: Hello Huddlers. When I spoke with Gabie Boko, the CMO of NetApp, way back in March, I heard a perspective that was both unique and inspiring, and I'm simply thrilled she's here to share it with you all. Gabie joined NetApp in January of 2022 after long stints in executive leadership at HPE, Sage, and SAP. Given how the CMO role continues to evolve, I think this is a perfect time for you to hear from Gabie Boko. So Gabie, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Gabie: I'm doing great. You have me in my kitchen. So I decided to move out of the office just because sometimes it's easier to have a conversation in an environment that feels a little less office-y.

Drew: I love it. When we first started CMO Huddles, it was right at the very beginning of the pandemic, and one of our Huddlers would take the meetings from her laundry room because that was the only quiet room in the house. So I get it. So that's awesome. So we hope we cook up a good show. Let's start. You described the typical three-year journey for a CMO: hope, despair, and then determination to either overcome or exit. Now you're currently navigating, or at least you were, through the trough of despondency, as you put it. Can you share what that looks like for you personally and how you're managing through it?

Gabie: Yeah, I think it's the cycle of change, right? And when you're a new CMO, you come in, you're super excited. You know, everything is pumping. Everybody's in alignment because they're looking for net new and the options are available to you. I think when you hit year two, which is where I was the last time we spoke, it's really the natural part of that transformation journey. It's like things stop working. The excitement level has dipped. It's a phase where it's like, I can't seem to move the needle, but there's all these big rocks that I promised, and you really are balancing the competing priorities, your initial strategy, and you kind of have this realization. It's like, am I actually getting this done? Is this really where I want to be? You have to find a place that is managing through that because it's like any change management, right? The trough is really where it starts to get super real, where it starts to get tough, where the transformation starts to take hold or it doesn't, and you have to make some adjustments. You know, am I out of the trough? I think I'm emerging from the trough. I'm in the beginning of year three now for me, and that's been a mix of me actually committing back to what the strategy was, but also the recognition of saying, I'm going to go adjust and reconnect with my other C-suite peers and say, I think we need to make some adjustments, but I need your help. And that's, I think, the determination to get through the trough.

Drew: And I'm sort of wondering how this fits in. You know, you've got, obviously, a large, established customer base, but you also have a long sales cycle, like 18 months. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A new CMO comes in. They change what was in place before. All the stuff that might have worked from the former CMO, it takes, sort of 18 months, it's still in effect, and then your stuff starts to take hold. So does that play into any of this because the sales cycle is so long?

Gabie: It does. It does. You've almost got a clash of cultures, marketing cultures, a clash of strategies and a clash of messaging. There's certain things you can do, and I definitely wanted to be more prescriptive on brand because I wanted it to be not a clash. I wanted it to fall and stream more easily. But demand was one of those areas that I did get the clash, right? We had campaigns that were in market, media perspectives and placements that just weren't doing the job, not to mention just you have a former team, right, that are committed and married and gung-ho on a previous strategy, and you have to bring them along, or they decide to exit. So I think all of those things is what happens in that mix of legacy or previous into new. I also like to really say that I think CMOs do each other a disservice, right? CMOs come in and build on the shoulders of the CMOs that were before them, right? Marketing is not a—if it's a jerk and jerk or a lift and shift, then you're always going to be in that catch-up stage. So I believe in something that's working for me right now is, what was it that needed to be changed at the right time? I didn't need to go do a new brand campaign. I did need to redo the narrative. I didn't need to pull out all of the team at one time. I needed to see what worked and what didn't work. So I think it's building an understanding and seeing where you can change and then being able to communicate that. Because leadership around a CMO wants immediate results. Any CMO, they want immediate results. I want more demand. I want you to grow my brand. I want that all tomorrow. Why are you so slow? And I think it's really understanding and being able to communicate, hey, listen, this is where I am. This is where I'm going. And if they can understand that and then you can embrace and bring them along, which everybody says that, but that is the hardest part, right? To me, that's the hardest part, is going in and having a conversation with somebody whose expectations are way over here, and I know the team we've got is, like, right here. So it's that communication that I think is the bridge between last regime, new regime, company expectations changing, and how to really bridge that gap.

Drew: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, and I want to go through a few of them. One, I have seen this happen over and over again when new CMOs come in and say, this is a brand problem. We got to fix it. And they use all their political capital in the first six months to change the color and change the logo and change the tagline, and it often, and it might have been needed. I'm not saying it wasn't in many cases, but it is a rough use of political capital that you have. And so interesting that you describe the difference between brand and narrative. I have to tell you one other thing: a lot of the CMOs in our community have been told by their CEOs and their boards and their investors to never use the word brand at all.

Gabie: Yes, I know. It's hard. I think brand is no longer a linear journey. And I think that CMOs have to be—I've had to learn this. I'll just say it. I'll say I've had to learn this, that I can't do all the same things that I know I have to do. I have to pick the battle. So for me, brand was, I'm not going to make it a dirty word. Well, first of all, I had the good fortune of my entire company saying, you got to do something. I don't know what it is, but you got to do something. So I got to kind of reset that table. But I also wanted to be very, very clear that for me, it was about communicating brand to demand, not just brand. So I said that the most important thing to be able to facilitate demand was to change the narrative. On the side, when nobody noticed, I changed the fonts, I changed the colors, but I didn't make it a big deal, right? I just made it part of the new demand campaigns that I sent out, and that really helped me out. But the narrative was the thing that I felt like I needed to go energize everybody about how to talk about our company and how to position things so that we could get more demand. I don't know if any other time in my history I would have done that. I think that the spend on brand would have been noticed. The spend on demand wasn't noticed. The connectivity and the messaging was what people were aching for and kind of questioning, which is a brand motion, right? But if I didn't call it a brand motion, then they ate it up and they were there. So I was just, I think I'm always in the tune or in the vibe of, clearly, I know how to speak to people like marketers. I know how to do this. Hopefully I wouldn't be in my seat if I didn't know how to do it. But the biggest part for me is how to make people accept it. And I get it. The biggest thing is, what's the ratio of what you're spending on brand to demand? Like, how are you doing it? What's the most important thing? So that's why I doubled down on messaging. Interestingly enough, in the first 18, almost 24 months, it was all about the message, message, message, narrative, narrative, get it into demand, sell the product. Guess what I get to do now? Gabie, why don't we have a tagline? Aren't we doing brand advertising? Don't you want to go do that? Yes, we'd love to do that. Oh, my God, really, that's brilliant. I'll go do that for you, no problem. But now I actually have the basis of my brand message house, and I already know what to go do, but it's been a massive journey, and I'm not going to lie, there might be some axes still in my back from how to go do that, but that was how I approached it. Not the same for everybody. I get that, but that's how I did it.

Drew: So let's talk a little bit specifically. Can you talk about the narrative as you described it, and what it was, and how you changed it, and why that was important?

Gabie: Yeah, and again, I stand on the shoulders of all the CMOs who came before me. You know how CMOs are when you build a brand statement or a brand narrative or a brand promise. Everybody comes in and says, I want this word. No, I want that word. I want this word. And I had a really strong board member on my side who's like, it's not been done right. We need to do this right. Personal opinions aside. Who really guided and sat with me and all of the C-staff, all of the SVPs, all of the VPs, meetings. We went across the board to everybody and basically, kind of, nope, that word doesn't work. Thank you so much for thinking that. Like, he really helped me control that conversation. We had a brand of what I would call commas, right? When everybody is in the boat crafting the promise for us, it turned into a we're an X, comma, Y, comma, Z, comma, 1, 2, 3. I mean, it was just long. It wasn't wrong. It was right from the perspective of we do all those words, but it wasn't a promise that we could actually commit to and live by. Getting that board member on my side, which, by the way, was exciting for me. This is a CMO operating at a board level, which we don't get to go into that perspective, I think, often with the confidence and clarity that a board member will stand beside us. So I really appreciated that, and we came out with something that was one thing. And it's taken us two years now. Once you have the promise, how do you sell the promise? How do you help people accept that their word wasn't included? That's the charge of transformation that we all go through, and that's the education and the training. But yeah, brand of commas to single narrative, but the massive help of a board member and my CEO who were like, we're committing to this. We're done being this. We need to be something that we can live with for five to seven years.

Drew: And can you articulate that narrative now? Is it public? Please.

Gabie: It is public. What we came up with was intelligent data infrastructure. We believe that we needed to change the conversation. It was at the beginning of kind of an AI wave where everybody was AI washing. I call it AI washing because AI was showing up everywhere. We felt that in five to seven years, the market would change on us, and we didn't want to AI us too hard. So we leaned into intelligence. Additionally, we were a data company, right? And not only that, but we're a data infrastructure company, super focused on what's infrastructure in terms of on-premise and in the cloud, so we just called that data infrastructure. The intelligent was our nod to AI, the way we think about it, and the way the storyline went is that we enable organizations to manage data anywhere, for any application, anywhere it's needed, anytime, but it's protected and secured by intelligence. And we really felt like that was a super bold vision, where it's going, what it's allowed us to do in terms of the whole message house. You know, AI didn't just change what's possible. It actually changed what's required. So in terms of our brand house, we felt that we needed to add more promise into our brand promise, and that comes through outcomes, customer outcomes, what you can achieve, what they care most about, what those can track back to, you know, the most business-critical imperatives. So we added that in, and now we're at the point really where that storyline of intelligent data infrastructure and kind of why us, why NetApp, has morphed into being the intelligent data infrastructure company that we enable real-world transformation, not through hype, but removing the friction between data and innovation, which is super simple. I don't know if it was that simple when we started, but it's certainly more simple now, and we're enjoying leaning into it, and we're really excited about the new tagline that we get to unveil in two months.

Drew: It must have taken a lot to keep the word, the letters AI, out of that?

Gabie: Yeah, well, it's actually really interesting. I think everybody wanted to. I think you guys have all probably gone through this, like, I want to make our website .ai. Great, let's go do that. There's nothing wrong with an AI message. I think if you don't have one, then you're going to be probably missing something, but I think you have to make it specific to you. There were a lot of people who wanted AI, but they wanted to take the old of what we were and just tack AI onto it. So it was really interesting to watch people say, "Oh no, Gabie, we're storage. We're AI storage." And I was like, thank you for that. I don't know if that works. So what we did is, as you all, as CMOs, know, right? You go into testing, just test, test, test, right? Ask your customers, ask your partners, ask the prospects, ask the market, does this work? And a lot of people are like, "Mean, yeah, it works." But then when we came up with some, it's like, "Oh, yeah, that works." And so that helped, because it wasn't me saying, it wasn't other people saying, it was like, thank you so much for your idea. But you know, nine out of 10 people hate that idea, so we're going to go with this one, which was also really helpful for us. So again, the tools that CMOs have, the tools that marketers have, they're all the right tools to deploy it, to collaborate, to drive change. But that was really hard, the AI one. It continues to be hard, right?

Drew: And no doubt most of your competitors are AI washing, because that's just what everybody does. I'm curious, did you see data infrastructure as a category that you were developing, or is that language that others might have used? And so are you driving to category ownership?

Gabie: We were really, really specific that we did not want to create a category because we had done it before and it had not gone well.

Drew: Oh, interesting. Talk about that a little bit.

Gabie: Yeah. So it's really interesting, right? When you're in an engineering company, specifically, when you have the smartest people in the world building things and thinking that they are the only ones who build it, like, how do you not have to go build and market a category for every single product that you release? It is quite daunting, especially when they are the smartest people in the room and want to craft that. For me, it was really more about where we've been, and the legacy was fresh in terms of how we failed. And so people were very clear that they didn't want to fail again. So they were willing to not make it a category. I think the other thing that we had to keep harping on was, guys, this is a vision. This is a brand vision. This is not a product. Every time you take your brand vision and try to turn it into a product, then you negate the ability for us to build a brand. Every brand idea doesn't have to be a product. Every product doesn't have to be a brand. And so that's been really—I had an engineer say to me a couple of months ago—that's been really freeing, right? That he didn't have to name every product. He didn't have to rise to the level of every product becoming a category. For me, data infrastructure was just a really good way to start to frame what was two businesses for me, which was data storage on-premises and in the cloud. You can't keep telling two separate stories. So how do you do that? Combining it together was an easy way to do that for us. Is it a category? It is now. I didn't make it, and I didn't want to make it because owning a category is really hard to do. What I did want to own is—and I say this all the time when I get on stage or anything internal—guys, we're not the category, right? We don't own the category. We don't lead the category. We made the category. So we are the intelligent data infrastructure company. Just go lean into that. Doesn't matter if people use it. If they use it, thank you so much. I love it when people copy me. That's fantastic. I don't have to then go market that myself. So it's been a little bit, again, of that change management on message and how you should say things.

Drew: Thank you for going into the specifics of that. It really does help. I think folks see the difference in what you're, where you were, and where you want to go. Really interesting that not every product needs a name. And you know, I feel like you're a branded house, you're not a house of brands. And like, the only NetApp brand I know is NetApp, and that's—how do you stand on that, in terms of, because obviously people are buying different aspects of NetApp?

Gabie: Yeah, the only brand, it's true. We definitely try to not have other brands. There's one brand that I will continue to support, and that's our operating system, which is called ONTAP, which has a really rich legacy, and just how we were founded, and why we were founded. And 33 years ago, it was, how do you use your data storage to make your data on tap? Now, granted, we were a bunch of beer drinkers, evidently, at that time, and we were probably sitting around a tap and wanted it to flow as seamlessly as that tap. And we're just now coming back to that story and saying, you know, it's the same principles. We should be telling that story and that legacy, but that's the only brand we defend in addition to NetApp. It has the most customer EQ. It has the most customer satisfaction, and it's most well-known in the industry in terms of a NetApp brand. So outside of that, I don't see the need to add more brands unless it rises to the level that ONTAP did, where we're completely disrupting a space and making that a connection back into really what is our core, which is we're a data company.

Drew: So are you doing all of your ONTAP events at craft breweries? It just feels like you should.

Gabie: It's so funny. No, I mean, we are bringing that back. We have offices where we have beer bashes. We in RTP, which is Raleigh, we brought honey—like bees on-site—and we now harvest that honey and turn it into a local brewery to have our own brew. So when I say beer is definitely connected, we are a beer company.

Drew: There you go. It's wonderful to have things like that and be able to bring them back, because they sort of make this technical, difficult, you know, thing that is very hard to engage with, completely identifiable.

Gabie: Well, and I also think that that's part of what marketing is there to do, right? Is to create cultural moments. And sometimes I think brand marketing forgets and is focused on the brand message, and they forget why you got here. I think when you're a small company and you're close to your founding, you're there, it's resonant, right? Or you're close. But when you're a 30-year-old brand, you have to remember who you were to basically bring that back. And we've been really harvesting—I call it harvesting because we've been really going back. Because as you grow up, right? You lose the people. They're not staying. They're moving on to other companies, right? Technology is changing, the culture, the ideas that you founded this for are changing. So I think that if you really want to build that kind of brand promise and connect to it, then you have to go back and connect your history to it, too. And that's what we've been doing.

Drew: I want to go to something that is really tricky for a lot of CMOs, which is this balance of brand and demand. And I want to understand your perspective on it. You talked earlier about brand to demand. Maybe you could go deeper into that idea to help, because I know that in our conversations, when we're about to have some conversations on budgeting, it's like, can't have a line item for brand. Got to call it something else. You know, it gets really challenging. And I'm just curious what language you use and how you get your executive committee to understand this brand to demand notion?

Gabie: Yeah, I'll just step you through what I've done again. I'm not right, it's just what I've done. In the moment I created something, I stopped calling things campaigns and I started calling it strategic demand. I didn't call it rev ops, I didn't call it, you know, central marketing, central campaigns, I didn't call it integrated campaigns. I didn't even use all the language that we know we're going to use. I called it strategic demand. And when asked what it was, I said this is brand to demand. This is where our key ideas were going to go generate demand in the market, but it's not something that I can do alone. Strategic demand is absolutely 100% connected to the entire company, and what that caused was this requirement now by the C-staff to track demand across all vectors. So marketing now just becomes a contributor to demand, not the owner of demand. Partners are a contributor to demand, sales are a contributor to demand. So it's not just pipe, it's not just revenue, it's a contributor to demand. So demand just got raised up as an imperative, which is super exciting to me, because strategic demand is the combination of brand to demand. The other thing that happened is inside of that strategic demand conversation is this whole conversation around propensity and targeting and personas, and I think again marketers do a really good job of creating personas. When you build brands, we have targets, we're aligned on propensity models, we all work the same propensity models. But what I was able to do in that side of the house was to say, "Guys, I'm not able to get to enough eyeballs. So when you're looking at my component of strategic demand, my component of demand, I should be getting to more eyeballs." And they said, "Well, what would help you get to more eyeballs?" And I was like, "I need to amp up the brand part of this because I just need to feed it." That led to, "Well, what would you do to do that? You can't get more dollars for advertising." Great, thanks so much for that. Okay, no problem. In truth, maybe advertising only goes to the targets that we all know, and you'd have to know us to be able to respond to it. I'm good with that. I was like, "How about sponsorships?" And they're like, "Yeah, but you're doing sponsorships already. What would you do differently?" And that really led to us saying, "Well, what if it was a big sponsorship, like one that was huge?" And that allowed me to go and pitch being the sponsor of the NFL, which is something that we're really proud of that we did. It's opened up tons of eyeballs for us. It's opened up a way to manage, and by the way, they are a customer, so it was an easy sell. And I think what that did on two vectors was said this is not just a marketing requirement to deliver demand. We have to deliver strategic demand, and it has to be something that the whole company is part of. But we also know that we have to feed that demand funnel with net new eyeballs, and sometimes you have to break the bounds of what you need to do, and we need to invest in brand initiatives, things that feel like brand initiatives but in fact are adding value to that funnel. So those are the two things that I did. I will tell you that is probably why I was in the trough of despair too. Both of those things together don't even go down the path that we couldn't measure half of what we were saying we needed to be responsible for. We didn't have the money to do the sponsorship. I mean, all of those things I was fighting both of those battles on both fronts. But coming out of it, we have an amazing sponsorship, we have more visibility than we've ever had, and we have the entire go-to-market team in the boat with us now. We're all singing the same language, we all are looking at it. I just did what we call an executive review yesterday on demand across all of us, and literally everybody was like, "Holy crap, well, what else do we need? What do we need to change? We can see this. I can see what I'm doing, I can see how if I do this, does it change that?" So everybody's asking the right questions. It's now not just on the pipeline or on revenue. People are going all the way back the trail to demand because we can see everything from demand to pipe to revenue, and that's really exciting, I think.

Drew: I want to go back to that in a second, but before we do that, it would be great to hear sort of the activation. I mean, the NFL is a big organization, a big partner, and certainly one that reaches a large audience. How are you activating that sponsorship?

Gabie: Again, not because I'm not typical evidently, and I try to use my dollars wisely, we're activating through franchises, and we picked two big moments. It wasn't just about the participation in all the television and everything else. For us, it was about moments. So we wanted to be the only presenting sponsor for the international games, which for us was making it a global experience, which is interesting because those get eyeballs, broadcast eyeballs, without having to buy broadcast ads. So we bought that. And then the second piece was that we were really fans of being a part of the Super Bowl. There's no better place to be than at the Super Bowl without having to buy like a crazy ad. I'm not saying we won't buy an ad, I'm just saying we wanted to own pieces of that, and we chose to own the tailgate, and that's a way for us to interact with people before they get into the game. Again, this is about eyeballs. So for us, the people who we are assessing as being most relevant potential customers are going to games internationally or watching international games. They're also experiencing the Super Bowl with a company profile at the tailgate because that's for most of the VIP or the suite holders. And so we just upped our ante on who we target and showing up in that way. I think the last thing that we're doing is we're showing up in franchises. So one of the franchises that we locked in with immediately, because they're in our backyard, are the 49ers at Levi's Stadium, which helps us out quite a bit. They're a great team. They've been a customer for a really long time. So this was really just about changing the profile of that storyline, and there are other franchises to come. But again, this is nothing that nobody else hasn't done. For us, it's about making it connected to who we want to talk to, and this was the biggest vehicle we felt that we could speak to without, you know, showing up and just doing our own suite with six people.

Drew: And it certainly, I mean, the fact that they're customers obviously helps because you have permission to be there right away, and it's an implied endorsement. They're a customer, so that's a great thing. And the international games, you're an international brand, and that is a little slice that not everybody would have necessarily thought of. So, intriguing fun. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. This show was brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you're a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on cmoHuddles.com? Hope to see you in a huddle soon. So let's go back. You talked about measurement, getting rid of campaigns and doing strategic demand programs. What are you tracking? And, you know, I've seen CMOs with hundreds of things they're tracking, and you can't present 100 numbers to a board. So what are the sort of key KPIs that you really at least showcase and know things are progressing?

Gabie: Yeah, well, for brand we track share of voice and sentiment. We don't actually track—I mean, let's be clear, I track things all the time, but what I'm going to share as success are getting highly, highly limited. For me, it's about sharing share of voice and sentiment because that really starts to underpin that the message is getting out, which goes back to my focus on the narrative, not my focus on kind of brand. So that's been a big boon for us because it activates everybody to say, "What can I do to help share of voice? Does product need to be blogging more? Does the customer success team need to be on Reddit?" Whatever that looks like, I think really kind of helps that. The second set of metrics are all about demand. We track what our percentage of land and expand—there's nothing new about land and expand and protect, but we track how much demand we generate for land and expand accounts, and we're looking for that to be 60% of the pipeline. So we don't just track how much we deliver. We equate it to being 60% of the pipeline. That's marketing's contribution to the pipeline. So however much demand you create, we want that to show up in pipe. And then the very last measure that we do is how much of that that we transfer, that we created as demand, that we dropped, that were connected into pipeline, how much of that was won? We track, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15%. Now, I think a lot of people, a lot of CMOs, a lot of marketing people, always remember the age-long fight, right, like how much revenue did you drive? I am not going directly to that path, but I am going to that path via demand. So I'm saying if I generate this volume of demand, I am a component of three sets of teams inside the company who are delivering it. We all have a percentage that we want to see show up in pipe, and we all have a target by which we want to see it convert into revenue. That is as close as I'm getting to saying I own a revenue number.

Drew: And let's talk about that a little bit because we've had folks share where they ended up owning pipeline because it was the only way to sort of get whatever marketing was nurturing and developing to the point it was actually a sales-qualified opportunity. They felt there was this gap that happened because the handoff was missed, and so they just took over pipeline to sort of get control of that. I know that's not what you do. Talk about how this works for you, and do you have sort of service-level agreements in place, even on the—there is some handoff at some point in time—and how that works.

Gabie: Yeah, it was—again, it's because it's a company-wide initiative on demand. We've been very explicit, right? In that target set of propensity models, everything goes in as a $0, right? That's just guaranteed. So everybody can work it. Whoever puts the first set of dollars in, that's the account, and it gets tracked all the way through. So there is agreement that if marketing has their hands on it and has added how many dollars that opportunity will generate, then that's a marketing-influenced lead. And no matter if you go through the sales motions of, "Oh, I closed that. I had to reopen it because I was already working it." No, you weren't. You weren't. I can subtract that. I can track that all the way through now because we dropped a little cookie in there. Thanks so much for playing. That doesn't count. But I couldn't do that without agreement, right? I couldn't do it. And but I also said if demand is shared, pipeline is shared. That means that revenue is shared. So all of us came together as go-to-market leaders and said, "We got to do this differently, eliminate the lines and the friction of ownership. This is how we're going to drive it together." I'm not saying that it works that way in every company. I've certainly been at companies where it's super combative, where I literally had salespeople, you know, writing down, "I see your conversion rate is this. That means I need this many leads from you, and I expect you to spend this dollar per lead, which means that this is how much money you get to go make it." There are those, right? Fortunately, I am not in that space. I do, however, believe very, very much that I am still committing to the same principles, just maybe slightly differently. I'm still committing to making marketing a part of revenue. I'm just doing it via a demand vehicle. I am still committing that my whole focus should be on what that conversion rate should be at the highest possible dollar. I'm just doing it through the lens of demand, and I am committing that if I am able to do that, then you should reward me with more budget to go do that. It's the same, but it's just more partner-based. It's more like we're in it together. It's not just marketing—you own this kind of thing, kind of principle. And honestly, this is the first company I've ever been in that has advocated for that.

Drew: Help me understand one thing because I always have sort of laughed about this notion of marketing influence. There really isn't such a thing as a sale that marketing didn't influence because everybody goes to the website at some point in time. In 130 touches across a six-to-18-month journey, marketing influenced it. They may not have closed it, they may not have opened it, but they influenced it. So I just struggle with this. And then I also sort of have this bigger sort of thing—win-loss rate is determined often by brand perception. Do I trust this brand more than others? That's marketing in like the grand scale. So where are you in that sort of that discussion? And maybe it doesn't matter, and I could sort of move on.

Gabie: We're still—I think all of—again, this is—I think marketing needs to learn that it's how you present your story in the context of how other people can interpret it. My boss is Spanish. I mean, when I had to present a tagline to him, that was me having a conversation half in Spanish and half in English. And that's an understanding kind of language—what works, what doesn't work. And I think sometimes marketing people get stuck on what, how we know how to communicate, and then people don't interpret it right. Influence is one of those things that I think is really hard to do. If we're doing our jobs right, yes, our job is to influence. Everything we do would be influence. If you track it as a percentage of revenue, technically, then I should be in every deal, right? And that's exactly—that's not something that I guarantee you any salesperson that I work for will allow. So I needed to find a way to have a conversation where I was like, "Listen, I'm partnering. We know that I have to influence. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, fine, but let's make this relevant as to how I'm actually helping you. What's going to drive that influence?" We are tracking—we track it, though, not through influence. We track influence in time to close, so we track the number of days. Did influence help us with the number of days to close? Did influence help us progress through the sales stages? We're still working that math. The first couple ones we looked at, we were like, "Okay, this is bad. We shouldn't present this." So we're still kind of working it out. But right now, we're leaning towards the number of days where influence is a metric there that we'd want to watch as a conversion size. That's something that we work on a lot.

Drew: Interesting. You know, I would say in our community, there aren't that many brands that probably have the very high level of basic awareness. NetApp is a known entity. It's been around 33 years. If you said in detail, "What do you know about NetApp?" I might have had some storage something, right, at some point in time. So awareness is less of an issue for you overall—unaided awareness—but salience and relevance and news, and, you know, "What have you done for me lately?" That feels like—I mean, changing perception is hard. You're having to make people be curious about your brand. Now, is that a fair assessment?

Gabie: Yeah, but I think it goes hand in hand with awareness, right? I think the normal track of awareness, familiarity, consideration—we find that our consideration numbers are very high. When we're invited, we're considered. That's not our problem. If we want to grow this company, which our goal is to grow this company, then we need to make not just people familiar with us to go to that consideration level. We have to up the ante on the awareness, and that means we have to step outside of a few comfort zones, right? We can't just talk product all the time. We have to talk our brand. That's why the tagline and the brand narrative are so important. So we know that we have to grow that, but we do it under the conversation of the only reason that we want to grow those things via those vehicles is because that helps us get considered more often, and that's what our goal is. That's that brand-to-demand again, right? People go off of how much revenue you're making, and how is marketing helping that? Well, if I've helped it by moving consideration from a high 69 to a high 85, that's fantastic. But if that's a high 85% out of 50% of awareness, I'd rather have it be a high 85% out of 80% awareness. So that's kind of the battle, right? We have to reach more eyeballs, more consideration.

Drew: Interesting. You talked about working with your CEO, whose native language is Spanish.

Gabie: President. My CEO is George Kurian, and he's the twin brother of Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud. So we've got the family business going.

Drew: Amazing. It's just—this is a small question, but most US companies and a lot of international companies sort of align on a tagline in English and don't translate it. Is that your plan? And it's—I'm not judging it at all. In fact, sometimes I think it works.

Gabie: Literally the conversation. And again, he's incredibly intelligent, very, very smart. And he's like, "I don't have any problem with it. When I watched my US colleagues react to it, I was like, 'Oh, wow, this is cool.'" So he's like, "It didn't hit for me." He's like, "But, you know, then I went back and I looked at taglines, you know, 'Just do it.' I didn't react to that one either, but I want to buy Nike." And I was like, "Okay, so he's got enough intelligence to be able to kind of assess," which I am considerably blessed by having somebody who wants to have those conversations, same with my CEO, very willing to have the conversations. They are the least of my problems when it comes to taglines, right? Again, it's less about the bosses. The bosses will support you either way, in my mind, but it's down to the geniuses who work at your company. And everybody's very creative, right? Everybody has a great idea. Everybody wants to promote that idea. So it will be how well of a hustler I can be to convince them that this is the one tagline that we need, and to leave off all the ones that they've been building all by themselves. So we'll see.

Drew: Yeah, well, it does speak to the need to, when you're doing something like this at a well-established company, to really give enough time to sell this internally and build momentum and get people excited and show how it relates to them. And, you know, there's sort of levels. You educate a bunch of people, and then they go educate a bunch of people. It's a whole thing, and it's often skipped, but it can make or break.

Gabie: The hardest one, it's going to be Japan, right? Character languages in Japan is going to be the hardest one. I'm looking forward to that conversation. Luckily, we have a brand-new leader, and she's amazing.

Drew: That's great. Talk a little bit about the CEO-CMO relationship. I mean, it really is make or break, both from a longevity standpoint. Talk about building the partnership in your mind, even when it's a little more challenging.

Gabie: Well, I actually report to the president. I'm one of those CMOs who—I think there's been a shift recently, like, the last 10 years, where CMOs report into CROs. My CRO is actually my president, so he owns all of go-to-market. So there's a lot of that. As you get bigger, I think bigger companies, as you're growing, you tend to kind of put marketing in with like, but I have always been a part of and included by the CEO at the board level and at the C-staff level. So it's almost like I'm kind of everywhere with multiple inputs and multiple bosses. I spend a lot of time with our chief product officer because of his input. So I think the best thing that can happen to a CMO is to have a very advanced-thinking CEO who connects that CMO into every executive and every board member for the feedback. If they compartmentalize the CMO into a space that is just "do demand" or just "do this," then it becomes very, very hard to be successful. And so the relationship has to be there. But it's not even just a relationship. I think I've been with CEOs who I liked a lot, who I didn't get—still didn't get, maybe, board access that I wish I had. I think it's advanced thinking on the part of a CEO to say, "I want this to be successful, and I see it more on the lines of a strategic function for me. And I see this person as somebody that I want to endorse"—not that you're the smartest person. Marketing is there to be a contributor. So I endorse this partnership and this way of communicating, and I want this person in as many places as possible so that this person is effective. That's how my CEO approaches it. That's how my president approaches it. And even with that, you go through the trough of despair, right? Because you've got all this pressure of people who expect all these amazing things from you, and it's like, "How am I ever going to live up to that?" So yeah, you need that, but you also, like, equally—it's like your father at some point. It's like, "Oh, God, I disappointed Dad," or "I let my uncle down. Dang, I should have done that better." So you've got to have it. I don't know how else to do it. If you don't have it, then I don't know if I'd stay. I don't know if I could stay here if I didn't have that, quite frankly.

Drew: I have to ask about how AI is impacting the way your marketing is happening, how it's impacting your teams. You know, there's a lot of folks who have actually reduced their staff as a result of that. Others are looking at more productivity as a result. Where are you in terms of, sort of, if there's a maturity model for AI adoption, where are you?

Gabie: I'm probably right in the middle, maybe a little bit above middle. I have a big digital background, so I like to be first in on most tech, so I wanted to move really quickly on things that were going to be meaningful. And so we did on the tech side. I think I was a little bit slower on the people side, not because it was the wrong move, but because I really wanted to know what was happening and how AI would affect that. It's always hard to affect someone's job, so I'm just going to be honest. But I think it's getting to the realization, for me, we need people who are going to be next stage for us, who are going to be AI-driven and can be supported by and make and influence where we go in that AI journey. And so that's definitely done some reductions, with more dollars being put into how we think about AI media, which is more GEO versus SEO-based, hiring agencies that allow us to do that, thinking about our website not just as a website but as an AI agent itself, how to think about people not just using ChatGPT and writing great content, but how we partner to actually use that as storytelling. That's required a different type of employee; that's required a lot of training for the employees who wanted to make the jump. So I think on the people side, I was a little bit later than I wanted to be. On the tech side, I was more forward. So against both of those, I'd probably say I'm just a little bit up from the middle, I'd say, in the curve.

Drew: Any lessons learned so far in the AEO GEO area?

Gabie: No, I think the more I try, the more it's just like, try it. Just keep going. Just, I don't like that—do that. Okay, try that. Do two or three things at the same time. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day; it was like, "Well, you know, I'm really into Google because it's definitely doing the job for me," and I'm like, "No, it's not. Let's go fix that." So I think for me on the GEO, it's to experiment, to experiment fast, and to experiment often. There are so many good, small, and even large agencies who have their models out there. I think just go try one or two of them, see what it gets you.

Drew: Yeah, it's so funny because I've had—we've had a lot of conversations in Huddles, and we're having several groups have come in and presented, and it's too early to know that if you do this set of inputs, you'll actually get this set of results. I mean, it's just—and because you have to run tests, and it's so, it's crazy, because in order to actually measure, you have to run like 1,000 queries with the same keywords because they don't ever provide the same answer twice.

Gabie: I also think, though, to that point, is what I've really respected about the vendors that I have used and the agencies that I have used and am currently using. So I went to them and said, "Listen, I'm going to blow it up. I'm going to blow your world up. If you want to be on board with me, then let's go figure out how to do it together." So I have a lot of the tech that we're buying where the CEOs come in and say, "Okay, what's your vision? We'll go do this with you for free because we don't know how to do it either," which has been really helpful. Agencies basically saying, "Hey, we tried this with somebody. Let's go try it with you." So I've just been really open and honest, saying, "I've got to blow this up. You know, I have to blow it up. Please be a partner with me. Let's go figure it out together," which I do love. There are so many great AI companies out there. I just got to one, like, little bit before this call, and I was like, "Oh, I should use that one too." So I know it's like going shopping. It's like, "I think I'll take that and that." That's like, "Yeah, I want all of it."

Drew: Yeah, it's a little overwhelming. All right, well, unfortunately, we're running out of time. I want to just make sure that if you could offer maybe two do's and one don't for CMOs as they think about their job moving forward, maybe in the area of just holding it together, holding herself together.

Gabie: I think the first one is, don't—you know how to do this. You don't have to follow the same steps in order. Be willing to break your own rules. I did, like, I did brand out of order from what I would normally do. It's okay. You'll get to the end result in the long run. And then the last one for me is just, you got to have people you can go vent to. I have some really great CMO friends that I am able to just absolutely word vomit on, and you absolutely need it. It's not easy to be who we are and to do what we do. I think your bent, and my bent is usually to risk and to go hard and to fix, but I think, you know, sometimes a good friend will say, "Hey, you're already doing the right thing, you know, maybe pause on that one and go for this one." So you just need—and that's not always in your company. It's outside. So find a group of CMO friends that you respect.

Drew: I love that. That's kind of what we do here at CMO Huddles. All right, well, Gabie, thank you so much for joining us.

 

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!