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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#67: CMOs are shaping the messaging and the markets with Monica Kumar, Extreme Networks
00:23:51
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- [00:01]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile brand.
- [00:08]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
- [00:34]
Greg Kilstrom
Is the Chief Marketing Officer becoming the Chief market officer? Are CMOs now responsible not just for messaging to the market, but for actively shaping and creating it? Agility requires not just reacting to market changes, but anticipating them and creating the future you want to see. It demands a deep understanding of customer needs, competitive dynamics, and emerging technologies. Today, we're going to talk about the evolving role of the CMO in a world of rapidly advancing technology, increasing customer expectations, and the ever present need for agile marketing strategies. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Monica Kumar, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Extreme Networks. Monica, welcome to the show.
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Monica Kumar
Thank you, Greg. I'm super excited to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Definitely looking forward to talking about this topic. Definitely an interesting one and one we really haven't covered before, so would love to dive in. Before we do though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Extreme Networks?
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Monica Kumar
Absolutely. And this topic, by the way, is near and dear to my heart, so I'm excited to dive in with you. I've been in tech marketing for nearly three decades. I sometimes don't want to remember that timeframe, but a lot has changed in the field of marketing since then. But I like to describe my journey like in three points. First point is from a mechanical engineer to a tech marketer. Point number two, from an intern to a cmo. And point number three is chasing perfection to chasing authenticity. And just to give you a quick maybe one sentence on each. So I started my, my education as a mechanical engineer undergrad and pretty quickly pivoted to marketing. Ended up in the Bay Area in the United States. And tech marketing was it for me for many reasons. And we'll dive into that, right? You know, making. I'm, I'm a very customer focused, storytelling kind of person. I love interacting with people, so it was a natural fit for me in terms of my aptitude and attitude. But then I also started my career as an intern in the Bay Area in one of the Silicon Valley companies and I never looked back. And I've been in tech marketing for three decades and obviously now I'm running marketing for extreme networks. And then the third point, you know, from perfection to authenticity, what I realized was I had these very unreasonable ideas about what perfect anything is, whether it's in my real life or profession. But the industry and the world is moving so fast. Rather than chasing perfection, I think chasing authenticity and time to market is even much more important.
- [03:05]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, love it. So, yeah, let's dive in here and definitely want to cover these topics here. So I want to touch on something that I talked about briefly in the intro. Is this, this shift that you've mentioned before from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market officer. Can you elaborate on what is that distinction and how is AI accelerating this transformation?
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Monica Kumar
Absolutely. And you know, since I've been in marketing for three decades, Greg, I realize marketing has many different definitions and companies have different ideas about what marketing is and what its role is. And companies that are most successful, I've noticed, use marketing as a very strategic lever, not just to promote products, but to shape the market, as you said, to shape behaviors and create entire categories. And I have five points to make here. One is, you know, if you look at a traditional cmo, roles, focus on brand campaigns, demand gen, customer acquisition, all that is still great. But in terms of pivoting to a Chief Market Officer, the same role would really focus on owning the entire market agenda. From market intelligence to ecosystem partnerships to competitive positioning, looking at category creation, customer insights as a company wide asset and then figuring out what brand and campaigns and demand needs to be taken into account. And so essentially owning the voice of the market inside the C suite of the company. So that's one, number two is kind of shifting the mindset from communication to commercial growth of the company and the business. So moving beyond messaging, that just shapes how the company is growing as a brand, but how the company is growing in the market. The pricing, the go to market models, the channel strategies, even the product market fit and partnering very closely with the CRO and the CPO and the CFO to influence growth levers. I have many more points to make, but I'm going to stop there. To me, this is a very important area because this is what's making a CMO role more strategic and more clear inside the organizations and how the CMOs can fit into the C suite and drive value for the company.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean to me it's, it elevates the role of marketing within both the CMO but also marketing within the role of the organization. Because I, and I think that's been happening over, over time as well, and you see more CEOs being promoted from CMO than you did, you know, years and years ago lately. But so, you know, there is this, this, this change in the market, so to speak. But I think it also speaks to this idea of more and more companies. I mean, you know, the, the quote from like, I don't know, a couple decades ago, now software is eating the world. More and more companies that you would never think of being platform companies are now platform companies. And so, you know, to that other point about shaping markets, I think that, yeah, it elevates that, the role of marketing in general. How does this shift, you know, from your perspective, you know, change the priorities of you as a CMO and even how you measure success as a cmo?
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Monica Kumar
Yeah, I mean, look, the first thing is. And again, this ties back to your first question about what's the. How do you pivot from a chief marketing to a market officer? My priority as a CMO is not just to tell our story to customers, because I feel like that's old school. Of course, we all have to tell stories. You know, there's a saying that you have to tell a story before you can sell the story. So I get that. But really, my priority is winning in the market. It's not just telling a story. I want to win. I want to win business. I want to grow the company revenue. I want to partner with my CRO and CPO and grow the company bigger. Right. So that's the number one shift in my mind is how do we create more revenue and value for our business? Obviously that can be done by focusing on solving customer problems. So that's my, I would say a big shift for me as a CMO many years ago to now is I'm focusing on understanding and shaping and winning in the market as opposed to just telling our story to the customers. And platformization, I think, is what you're asking, that has played a big role, like, you know, especially at extreme. Let me give you the example. The platformization is this notion of a portfolio solution. So rather than point products, we are integrating our products together into a platform that's integrated, that's easy to deploy and manage, and that can be reliable and bring more value to customers. The reason why that becomes important in winning is because now we are going to solve a customer problem, not just pitching point products. And that's an exciting, I would say, pivot in the industry. You know, it's happened in applications, it's happened on cloud and databases. It's happening in networking now. You know, that's what Extreme has been doing for the last, I would say, eight to nine months. It's driving the notion of platformization in the networking industry.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, let's talk about that specifically then. So Extreme Platform 1, you know, it's a significant launch for Extreme Networks. What were, tell us a little bit about, you know, what it is as well as, you know, what were some of the key branding and marketing strategies that you use to ensure success.
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Monica Kumar
Yeah, the first thing we did was, you know, really looking at what is it that customers need from networking solutions. And clearly we, we heard three things and again this was, we did a lot of research with customers, again going back to having a pulse of the market and understanding customer sentiment. Number one was there is an immense amount of, amount of complexity in our space. So they're looking for simplicity and it becomes even more important as AI is getting introduced and everybody's experimenting and the complexity is now exponentially increasing. So simplicity was one, I would say attribute that customers wanted reliability, you know, still having the security, the performance, the high availability, the disaster recovery, all the things that you need in an enterprise environment was important. And number three, value. So keeping all that in mind and we looked at our portfolio and realized we already had products in network deployment and management, we had security products. We were embedding AI into this. So the work that our team did in the last many years was to bring all of the capabilities together in a single solution. And we call IT Extreme Platform 1. For us this was a very important, not just a launch, Greg, it was really about creating a new category in our market, a category of network platforms which hasn't been done before, network platforms that are AI powered. And the way we did this was a very deliberate launch process, but also very consistent in our messaging and aligning with sales and product teams before we announced anything in the market. And as I said earlier, everything was, I would say outside in, it wasn't like, oh, we are going to build something amazing and people are just going to come to it. It was very much what is it that customers are looking for, what challenges are they facing? And that's what we are addressing with Extreme Platform One.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And then so from a, from a launch perspective, what role did agility play in this as well? Because, you know, I would imagine, you know, you, you bring something to market, you plan, you know, as, as much as you can plan, there's going to be unexpected market feedback, competitive pressures, like all, all kinds of other things that, you know, some of it, you can anticipate just based on experience and insights. But some of it is you have to kind of roll with it. So you know, how did you, how did you build in agility into the process?
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Monica Kumar
Right. I'd say number one, we were a well oiled integrated machine across product sales and marketing. Like I cannot, I cannot say enough about that, you know, to. I know it sounds simple enough but I think a lot of projects and executions go sideways because marketing maybe doing something on the side while sales is going and selling something else and products working on something else. We were completely lockstep. Number two, we had at every step of extreme platform one journey and we had an eight month launch process. This was very thought through. We did a vision announcement back in December to set the stage for the market in the context of why we are doing it. And even before we announced the vision, Greg, we did a survey of 200 IT leaders and this was a survey we did over a few weeks. We produced the results and we published them and we knew what IT leaders wanted. They wanted an integrated network platform with security and AI and there's many other pieces in there. So we took all of that into account. So lots of customer input in how we came up with the launch process. We started with our early vision announcement. Then at every step of the way we were agile in terms of getting customer input. So when we had an early access availability of our software, we ran five focus groups with multiple customers in each and we got their feedback. We incorporated that input back into our limited availability announcement which happened in May and then we just went generally available in July. So the agility is making sure there's customer input at every single step and making the appropriate updates and changes as needed based on the input. Also on the AI messaging, I mean, you know, this AI keeps disrupting itself every week, every day, every hour, even sometimes. So we had to really stay on top of it in terms of talking about not just conversational AI with chatbots and stuff, but really agentic AI. The whole notion of introducing agents in networking software, that was something we quickly got on board with it as our product teams are building the technology, marketing had to get on board with building the messaging and the routes to market and so on. So those are a couple examples that at every step having the customer input, our partner ecosystem is very important. That input and then the messaging of the AI and keeping up to speed with how the market was changing with that.
- [13:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean to go to the AI point a little bit more too, I mean lot as you mentioned, Changes in a matter of weeks, if not days, it feels like in that world. And so what was sounding like a brand new thing, you know, nine months ago is, is now almost, you know, expected or something. And I think so there's that. Plus I think there's a lot of companies that, you know, they, they mention AI and yes, technically they use AI in their products, but it's sort of, you know, maybe window dressing or something like that. You know, how did you maintain that the authenticity in the, in the messaging around, you know, something, you know, something that is truly innovative, but to make sure that it stands out.
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Monica Kumar
Look, that's where credibility comes in, right? I mean, I am not a marketer that just is going to make an announcement and put a message out there just because we're going to sound big. We have to prove it. And this is something, this was our design criteria of our launch. I would say the entire launch process. At every step we will have a proof of, of an execution detail. So that's why I explained the four part process early. Like the first part was just the vision part. And we showed some demos, you know, that bookend early access was very specific. With a few customers, we took them through hours and hours of showing our capabilities, getting them hands on experience, working with them. And when we announced limited availability, customers actually saw the demos, live demo, live environments, and every step we, and then we had four customers on stage that talked about their experience with Extreme Platform 1 even before it was generally available and using some of our AI capabilities. So the proof is always in the pudding. Like you said, any company would lose credibility if all we are doing is talking. But don't just tell me, show me right and let me get my hands on it. And so the next step is the trials and the interactive demos. And that's what we offer now to our customers. They can get their hands on the product and try it for themselves.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I want to go back to the platformization topic as well. And you know, I know we talked about that as a trend in B2B tech, but I also want to talk about maybe some of the challenges and opportunities that come with marketing a platform offering versus a point solution. And how did you go about addressing those?
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Monica Kumar
Look, I only see opportunities in terms of marketing platformization or messaging and positioning platformization. And it's not just messaging positioning, it's actually having our product team create a platform. And the reason I say that is I know of no customer who is looking for a product to solve a problem. Every customer we talk to needs a solution of some sort or the other. And so if you just look at the word solution by itself, to me that's what we need to do. We need to solve customer problems, we need to provide them a solution. And platformization is the way to go. If you want to talk about challenges. Yeah, it's a mindset change. It's a mindset change, you know, within our own sales and marketing organizations to move away from marketing and selling and positioning point products to positioning solutions. So that's number one. But that's easy when we know our customers want things to be simple. They don't want to use 10 products. When they can use one platform or one portfolio product to make things simple so that their management can be easier, we give them operational productivity in the organizations. So I'd say I see huge amounts of opportunities in terms of positioning the platform. As a marketer, it's a dream come true. Imagine not having to dilute your message across 10 different products, but you have this one amazing platform to position and create demand around, create customer engagement around, create adoption around and create a renewal stream around and a lifetime value for customers. So I think it's a big opportunity for companies to be able to message solutions versus point products.
- [17:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So, last topic I want to talk about, I want to get back to the role of the cmo and you had touched on some of the collaborative aspects of it. I want to get back into that a little bit more and just ask a little more how. With the goal of the CMO being to know, grow the business and, and some of those things that, that you had mentioned before, how are you working with others in the organization, you know, chief Revenue officer, sales officer, others, to really align those marketing efforts with revenue generation as, as the goal.
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Monica Kumar
Yeah, I'll start with the product first because I, and, and because I'm a tech CMO and I think this applies to any company that's selling products or services. You have to have an understanding of what your portfolio is and what's the benefit of it to your target audience. Who is it relevant for? What benefits does it bring? How is it differentiated? Where do you exceed expectations? Where you don't? How do you differentiate from the competition? So I'll start with our Chief Product and Technology officer relationship first. It is very important to establish a credible relationship with your CPO and CTO and to make sure they know that you understand the technology in enough terms to be able to put a business value around it. So to me, that's a very important, very important Important relationship. And you know, I've done, like I said, three decades of that. I was at Oracle for 22 years, worked, I ran the database, product marketing for many, many years as part of that. And of course my EVP of database development was my BFF there. We had to be, we, we had to be very tight. So that's one. And I have the same relationship at extreme. So I'm really fortunate to have that because we, before the product even is ready to be ga'd, we are engaging with the product team a year or two before that as it's even being designed because I want to be part of that process right from the beginning, not at the end when it's ready to be launched. So, so that's one. And number two, I think the sales, Sales relationship, the way I described that to my team is it's an arranged marriage. So sales and marketing, arranged marriage, now it's up to you. We are in it together now. Whether you want to make this a fruitful, you know, really nurturing relationship, that's up to both of us. And it's so important for us to nurture that relationship because we are together going to win business. It's not one or the other. I know ultimately sales is out at the front line closing the deals, but there's a huge amount of lift marketing can do for them if used in the right way to warm up the prospects all the way to closing the deal. We can condense that timeline, we can improve deal sizes, we can improve win rates. I mean, there's so many things marketing can do and we are doing already. So to me that's. You can call it an arranged marriage, you can call it two sides of the same coin, but it's another very, very important relationship to grow the business.
- [19:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so moving, looking ahead, what, what would you say, given some of the shifts that we've talked about, some, maybe some others that we haven't talked about yet, what are some of the critical skills and capabilities that you see CMOS will need to have to cultivate to succeed and how the, you know, marketing and the landscape's evolving?
- [20:22]
Monica Kumar
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm going to mention that word that is now mentioned in every sentence that we speak of. It's the Chief Market Officer role is inherently data and AI driven. I mean, there is no two ways around it. The use of AI for market scenario modeling, competitive intelligence, personalized engagement, running campaigns, creating content, efficacy of getting insights from your data, all of that I think is extremely important for the cmo. Role going forward and as a growth driver. So I would say AI experiment if you're not already. I'm sure most CMOs are today experimenting with it and some are even using it in real use cases. And I'll give you one example for our company, we've created a sales AI tool where we've put all of our customer reference information, our collateral, sales plays, competitive differentiation. So now our sellers have access to literally an AI tool where they can go in and type information and say, give, give me the top 10 customer references in the Midwest that are healthcare customers. Boom. They get it at their fingertips. Imagine before that they would have to go to a portal, maybe ask five people, maybe do a search, and now literally within seconds they can get that information. To me that's, I mean, there's no way about it, right? AI literacy is a really big deal and that's the most critical Skill and Capability CMOs will need to cultivate going forward.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Love it. Well, Monica, thanks so much for joining today. Really appreciate your insights. One last question for you before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Monica Kumar
Man, I mean, do we have any other choice? Our world is changing around us so rapidly and technology especially. Right. And even more so with AI. So for me, agility and change is what we live. A change is what we are going through every single day. We are not merely observers of what's happening in the tech industry. And because of AI, we are the strategic architects and shaping how AI becomes a creative enabler for the teams and an ethical safeguard for our organizations and the growth engine within the organizations. Yeah, I mean, I'm constantly looking at the team structures, how agile our organization is, what kind of investments are we making? Do we need to rebalance investments? Do we need to upskill our team? Do we need to train them? What kind of cross collaboration activities do we need to do? Yeah, so all of that and I would say agility is the name of the game here.
- [22:52]
Greg Kilstrom
Love it. Love it. It's also the name of the show, so even better. Well, again, I'd like to thank Monica Kumar, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Extreme Networks for joining the show. You can learn more about Monica and Extreme Networks by following the links in the show notes.
- [23:07]
Monica Kumar
Thank you so much.
- [23:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Thank you.
- [23:11]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2bagility.com. That's B2B agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering the all a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [23:47]
Greg Kilstrom
Brand.