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Making It with Jon Davids
166 - "This was a $2B company with no marketing" | Kimberly Storin, CMO at Zayo
00:42:29
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- [00:01]
JD
What's up guys? JD here. And on today's show, I am talking to Kimberly Storen, Chief Marketing Officer at Zayo. This is part of my Corner Office series where I talk to the marketing leaders at the biggest companies in the world. Zayo was a $2.5 billion technology company. Kimberly's been there for about three, four years. When she came in, this marketing team didn't exist. She built it from the ground up and really had to start from the bottom. So you're going to understand what it's like to come into a two plus billion dollar company and have to build a marketing team from scratch. If you want to build a big company or if you're running a big company right now, this podcast is for you. That's coming up in just a sec. If you're a fan of the pod, make sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you like to listen, of course. To get my best stuff to your inbox, head over to JohnDavids.com, get on the newsletter. Now my conversation with Kim Storen. So Kim, you come into Zayo. The company's been around for a while, but the marketing department doesn't exist. So tell me what that was like and what did you do on day one?
- [01:13]
Kimberly Storen
So it was an interesting situation. So we are a two and a half billion dollar company. It's a, this is a large, large organization. And I came in and marketing really was kind of bifurcated into a couple of different areas. There were a handful of communications folks that sat in the financial organization and that was really due to investor relations. The company had been public previously and then there was a handful of marketing people that sat in it. Who knows why? Just a handful. And then there was some product marketing folks that sat in product, which is less, less, less unique. But what we ended up doing was bringing together those disparate groups, creating one marketing function, one global marketing function, and then really had to build up the team and the capabilities from there. So it was, and you know, these were folks who had not had a lot of experience in sophisticated or professional marketing organizations. So we had like that product, the product marketing team, for example, had really never done product marketing. So we had to get them, you know, trained up through the PMA Institute, get them understanding what product marketing does and is and how they can be good at their, their roles. We had to really change communications from being a function focused on communicating with investors to a function that was really looking at communicating at the brand level to customers, prospects, investors, bondholders, you know, General market, which they hadn't really done. So it was.
- [02:54]
JD
Did you know that was the situation before you took the job?
- [02:57]
Kimberly Storen
Yes and no. I knew that like marketing had been a pretty nascent function in the organization. The organization prior to us taking it private had been a company that had grown by acquisition, very much inorganic. So I think there was 46 acquisitions before we took the company private. And then we've done a few acquisitions since then. But mostly, you know, now we're kind of looking more at capability versus back then there was a lot of asset acquisition. And so it just, the growth really stemmed from being acquisitive and the go to market motion sales, product marketing really didn't exist in the same way. And so I knew, I kind of knew. But I think you don't really have a sense of how nascent and how foundational like you have to be. I mean the first thing I walked in on day one and again I kind of knew because like when I was talking to the CEO and our president and COO back then and our board, like I knew that the website was not great, right? But you can only know so much kind of, you know, looking from the outside in. And I remember that first day getting underneath the hood of the car and realizing that the website was a headless CMS that nobody could change. Right? Nobody in marketing could actually update content. And not only that, it was uncrawlable by Google. It was a series of PDFs, essentially what were sales decks loaded into a website.
- [04:45]
JD
Quick break. So I can tell you about Toyota. And no, this is not a car commercial. This is a commercial for Influicity. That's the marketing agency I created in my apartment almost a decade ago. And man, have we outgrown my apartment. You can see how we helped Toyota introduce their vehicles to a brand new generation of drivers. Check out the case study@influicity.com that's inf l u I c I t y influicity.com I know you're two and a half billion today. How, how big was the company when you joined it? Was it still around?
- [05:18]
Kimberly Storen
I mean we've been growing but like generally speaking, I mean, similar. Ish. Yeah, in terms of revenue.
- [05:24]
JD
So it's a, it's a $2 billion plus company and they don't even have a functioning website. They've got PDFs on the Internet. And so they had been growing throughout all those years really just by buying more companies. They didn't have to worry about organic growth.
- [05:37]
Kimberly Storen
And there was no real go to Market Motion. We've always been known as a company that serves and we do a great job of serving the biggest enterprises in the world. So the hyperscale companies, the data centers, you know, the top banks, et cetera. And so they, they, there wasn't an awareness problem, right, because Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon, like they all know who we are. We run their, their data centers for them. And so that's really kind of our, where we started in our, our heritage and our legacy. And it continues to be a really big part of what we do and how we win. But now we have, you know, really gone after this enterprise Go to Market Motion in we hadn't previously. So we've come together, we've verticalized sales and marketing. We are thinking about the pain points that an enterprise, not just the biggest companies in the world, are thinking about. And we're ensuring that we have solutions and products and collateral and messaging that reaches all of those enterprise buyers. And so that's where we're really seeing the opportunity for growth. You know, obviously there's huge AI demand in the hyperscale and data center arena, but there is a ton of opportunity to become more known in the enterprise space with, you know, the organizations that are like, they are doing amazing things that require bandwidth. Like we live in the bandwidth economy right now and what we do is more important than ever. But we had to change our mindset from being a commoditized market to now being a differentiated solution.
- [07:22]
JD
And that's really what I was thinking about. The product is so fundamental, but at the end of the day it's great to have Microsoft and Amazon and Google, but like, how do you get the other thousands and thousands of enterprise players that aren't the biggest companies in the world? So was there, so a couple questions on that. Did you have to identify who the target customer was after you joined or was that already known and then you just had to go after them?
- [07:44]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah, that was, I understood kind of what the business model was and the pivot that we were making and you know, where that, that revenue was coming from at the beginning and where we want it to go. So I think, you know, and I'm a transformation leader by nature, like that's what I do. And so that pivot was what was really exciting and kind of, you know, really enticed me to come and do this work because those big pivots are, you know, the most exciting thing that a marketing leader can be a part of.
- [08:16]
JD
So you mentioned on day one, you Come in. You gotta, you know, get a new website built. Cool. That, that's sort of, you know, one checkbox. What are two or three other things that you really needed to fundamentally change?
- [08:26]
Kimberly Storen
I mean the first six months was really foundational and it was a little bit of building the plane while flying it because I had to show like this was an organization that wasn't, didn't have marketing ingrained in its DNA. So I had to be able to show some value. And so the website was probably the most obvious, like physical man manifestation of that value. And so that was a big win. We did it fast, we did it quick and dirty. We made a commitment that we were going to build a website and content, verticalizing content within it from scratch and get that up and running by the end of the year. So that was like less than six months. To do all of the foundational product marketing work, to do all of the foundational corporate brand work and then go build the thing. So that was like the biggest win that I could have. It was something that I knew immediately, like we couldn't do demand gen if we didn't have a functioning website. So luckily, you know, that kind of bought me some time so I was able to really prioritize and I was able to go hire the right people, build the right martech, stack all of those things at the same time that I was building this website because I knew I couldn't do, you know, meaningful work to generate demand if I didn't have, or even like at the brand level if I didn't have a website that represented our brand. So we, we really started with building our purpose, our mission, vision, values. All of that really did not exist. We refreshed all of that in those that first six months, built the foundational teams and then we were able to hit the ground running in January with a what I would call like lightweight demand gen motion. It was like Demand Gen 1.0, right? Which was we now have a functioning website. We can now start to actually drive people with great content to that website. And so we kind of did bite size. And every year we've done, you know, we've set our goals a little bit higher, we've taken on more, we've continued to like chip away, we've built the capabilities now. But that first six months was really, you know, how do I, you know, how do I demonstrate value and where can I demonstrate value and then how do I start to every year do a little bit more? Because it hadn't existed before and when.
- [10:45]
JD
You talk about Demand gen. Are we talking about Google Ads, events, sponsorships, what are you actually doing?
- [10:51]
Kimberly Storen
Everything. So we're pretty much a full service, you know, end to end. So events were something that the team had been doing. So that was a muscle memory that existed. It needed to be optimized. But it was like, we had a pretty, pretty strong, like, events capability, but we did not have content marketing. We did not have, like, demand gen in its truest sense. Right. We weren't doing paid or, you know, even organic search, obviously, because it wasn't called crawlable by Google. So there was no SEO. We did not do paid advertising. We didn't drive campaigns in the market. And so all of those pieces, we really had to stand up from scratch. You know, there was no functioning website, so we didn't have a chatbot. We didn't have an ability to communicate with customers digitally. So all of that really had to be stood up from scratch.
- [11:43]
JD
And when you're doing this, the reality is that you're a professional that comes into an existing company. Obviously, you know what work has to be done. But then you also have to be playing politics and making sure that you're showing results and reporting to the board. So how much of your time was also thinking, you mentioned earlier, like, you have to set a goal and show some KPIs, some results. Were you sort of on the clock in your head of, okay, I got to get this done and I got to show some, some success along the.
- [12:08]
Kimberly Storen
Way because so much of the leadership team was new as we were, you know, as we went through that privatization and we're kind of resetting the clock on, you know, what Zayo's strategy is. There was an expectation that I had a lot of work to do, which is, you know, there was alignment in the fact that I needed six months to build something from scratch. And so throughout that first six months, like, we went to market at events bigger and better and more coordinated and professional than we'd ever been. But, like, because that capability existed, like, I could show my impact pretty quickly, you know, taking on some of those pieces that hadn't really been optimized previously were those quick wins. But it was the, it was the purpose, the strategy, the capability, the function and the website that all needed to get done by the end of that first six months so that we could kick off that next January with an actual, like, legitimate marketing strategy, KPIs and goals.
- [13:11]
JD
And so fast forward to today, three years later, what is the marketing stack or the marketing organization look like now?
- [13:18]
Kimberly Storen
So now We're a true end to end marketing and communications team. So we holistically have all of marketing and communications that sits within our organization. We have really built those teams and functionalities from scratch. So I built a great leadership team and you know, we've got, you know, more analytics than we've ever had before. We've got more operational rigor than we ever had before. We've got more capabilities. So you know, our social, our content teams are built from scratch. Our product and vertical marketing team is built and like now optimizing and really running at full speed. And then all of our demand gen digital marketing, creative events. I mean the list goes on and on of what this team is able to accomplish now. And you know, it's still a small and mighty team, really scrappy, but we've built and continue to grow those capabilities that we just didn't have before.
- [14:16]
JD
So how do you know when you're building this out over the last three years? Two questions. How do you know if what you're doing is working? Because you're selling expensive deals to big companies. It's not like you can track, oh, we got this click and therefore we got this dollar of revenue in the door. How do you know if what you're doing is working? And then how do you make decisions on, okay, we've got to be doing more of this or a little bit less of that.
- [14:37]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah. So I think, you know, one thing is, is that you have to look at marketing as an overall business driver. And so yes, like we have been making contribution from a marketing sourced pipeline standpoint. We have a lot of marketing influence that we track. We're able to show that when marketing is involved, the deals are bigger and the deals move faster. So it's this, it's size and velocity that we're able to demonstrate. So those, those KPIs are really critical. But what's more important than that is that my sales leader and my product leader who sit side by side with me are now advocating for marketing. And so that's the biggest. Even though you know, you can show KPIs and dashboards and all of these things all day long. But marketing cannot be green if the business is red. Right. Marketing has to be driving the overall business. And so as the business has continued to grow, marketing has continued to evolve to help support the business in the way that the business is growing. So we're very nimble, we're very agile, we are sitting side by side with sales and product figuring out the go to market strategy that's going to help the business win. And so as a result, we've had a couple of really good years of bookings. And, you know, the sales leader and the product leader now are standing up and saying we should be investing more in marketing. Right. This is helping us. Velocity, size of deal, showing up, being, having air cover to walk in and like, you know, kick butt. We're not a transactional business. So for us, like, marketing will never be able to say, we drove this many people to the website and they bought something today. That's not our job. Our job is to, you know, really create the brand and the reputation in the market that makes sales's job easier and to feed sales opportunities that have high intent and that they can take and spend, you know, the next six to 12 to 18 months, you know, working and closing. So that's kind of how we think about it because it is a more complex. We're not a SaaS business. And, you know, there's. We have elements of recurring revenue that look a little bit like a SaaS business, but we're still a pretty technical sale in the networking space.
- [16:55]
JD
The business marketing can't be green if the business is red. Love that line. And the other word you mentioned, which I thought was so interesting is air cover. And this is how I often describe marketing to our clients at Influicity. It's that you can look at a Google Ad or a Facebook ad or any kind of direct response easily attributable marketing, and you can say, okay, I spent a dollar and I make $2. And what I say to that is okay, but you could also go to a slot machine and just play that like, this doesn't make you a good marketer. But the air cover piece of it, which is the billboard, the sign at the event, the thing that is kind of intangible but is exactly what drives a faster deal cycle, a larger deal, a repeat deal, recurring revenue, all those things. That's what real marketing does. And the tricky part is, as you said, it's hard to attribute, but you kind of know it when you see it. And it's especially when the product leader and the revenue leader are saying, hey, you know, we vouch for this also.
- [17:49]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah, for the first time in my entire career, I had sales give up headcount to marketing in order for marketing to build, like, more capabilities. I've had great relationships with sales, like my whole career, but like, I've never had, you know, a situation where sales has said, we absolutely need this support, like fewer salespeople.
- [18:11]
JD
More better marketing. And you'll, and you'll have those dollars go further. That's a real testament.
- [18:16]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah, so it's. But I will also say, you know, in a turnaround or transformation, right, we made a pretty big pivot. And so one of the things that I know from doing so many of these, these transformations and turnarounds in my career is that marketing has to make marketing leader, right. Me and my role have to make myself indispensable. And that does not always have to do with marketing. Like you said, right. Everybody can sit there and like be the better marketer than you, right? Everybody's always can come up with this. Let's do a Super bowl ad. Like, I don't know how many times you have to hear that one. Let's go to this event, let's go to these golf games. Like, this is marketing. I'm a good marketer. What's really critical when you're in a situation where there is a turnaround where you know that you're not going to be able to show this dollar spent equates to this dollar made, right? It's going to take time. It's going to take me years to get there because I, my demand gen, I didn't even have a website. So the things that I kind of stepped back and said, well, how, how am I going to make myself and my team indispensable as we're building these capabilities and functions? And so I took on things that are surprising sometimes to folks. Like I took on a role running strategy with our chief product officer. Obviously, purpose is so critical to brand, but really kind of laddering that up to mission, vision, values. Working with our chief people officer to ensure that we had this core identity that could then translate into an employee brand and also a brand for our customers. You know, I took on elements of internal communications and again, not the, not the sexiest of jobs, but I run our, I run our town halls for all of our, our employees every quarter.
- [20:08]
JD
And do you do this because you think it helps on the marketing side or you just enjoy doing it?
- [20:13]
Kimberly Storen
No, I think a, it helps on the marketing side because I think sometimes marketing, like being a brand means that you are thinking about all stakeholders. That's corporate positioning in the market. It is employee value proposition like retain. Like you can't have a good brand if you don't have people that are working at your company that like working at your company and you have a good culture and that are representing your brand to your customers every single day. And then thirdly, you have your go to market. Right. So there's kind of three pieces of what is a brand. And in the time, because I knew the go to market side was going to be taking me some time to get that engine up and running and being able to show that dollar in, dollar out, that in the meantime I had an opportunity to demonstrate like my capabilities, my team's capabilities around corporate positioning and around employee brand. And so those things were ways that I could continue to play a key role, be closer to the strategy of the organization, which made my go to market motion stronger, but also to be seen as indispensable across the organization. In a time where marketing was just really like we were starting from scratch.
- [21:32]
JD
You had to do internal branding as much as you had to do branding for the outside.
- [21:36]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah.
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JD
I'm curious how you got into it. So if I look on your LinkedIn here, all the way back, you're an investor relations and crisis media relations. And then you go to Deloitte and you're doing mergers acquisitions and then all of a sudden you jump, oh, you have one more Adele. Then you jump to this role of worldwide brand and consumer and commercial marketing at amd, of course, it's been marketing ever since then. IBM and, and et cetera. How did you go from those roles to marketing?
- [22:03]
Kimberly Storen
So I'd always been communications. Right. That's where I started my career. I started in public relations and crisis communications and had kind of kept. And that's like my passion at the end of the day. Right. I mean everybody. I love marketing. I do everything in marketing. But, you know, if somebody says roll up your sleeves, you got to get stuff done. Like, I love the messaging, I love the corporate positioning. I love, you know, the, the writing and the content and all of that kind of going back to my communications.
- [22:30]
JD
Background and crisis management. Just for, for the listener, that's when things go terribly wrong. You're the one that steps in to clean it up.
- [22:36]
Kimberly Storen
Right. Like, I've got some funny stories, please.
- [22:40]
JD
I'm curious to hear, were there any early because. And that was at the beginning of your career. So what were sort of the first big crises you had to deal with?
- [22:47]
Kimberly Storen
Well, I won't use names, but there was a large insurer healthcare company that had a very large executive compensation package. So I helped mitigate kind of the, the repercussions of that. You know, that, that package. I worked for a gym brand who shall remain nameless, that had crisis after crisis of people dying in gyms and, you know, corporate issues and all of that. I did some restructurings and bankruptcies for, you know, very large manufacturing companies that had seen better days. And so it was, you know, I really picked up early on in my career on this aspect of, like, I like the hard stuff and I like to eat the frog. And while I had peers kind of in the agency world that wanted to go get, you know, their clients on the Today show, I was more interested in going and figuring out these really hard, complex prices.
- [23:47]
JD
You were trying to keep them off the Today show.
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Kimberly Storen
Exactly right.
- [23:52]
JD
That's a great training ground, and it's an adversarial training ground, but it teaches you, it gives you a muscle that I'm sure has come in handy a lot along the way.
- [24:00]
Kimberly Storen
Absolutely, absolutely. And so it really was reputation and brand, but on the crisis side. And so after I went back to business school, I made the jump to management consulting at Deloitte, focused on M and A because I had gotten a taste of acquisitions and bankruptcies and all these things as a kind of a crisis communications. And so that was a big, big change. And I realized how much I love, you know, the, I love the transaction, I love the turnaround. And that was just a big passion point of mine. But to answer your question of how, you know, I made the jump. So during my, my management consulting days, I did a lot of culture, communications and brand work as part of M and A. I ran those work streams. I ran anything related to like, sales, marketing, communications work streams. So I was within the realm of, you know, communications, marketing, sales, but I was coming from a consulting background. So when I went over to Dell after I had kind of had enough of the, the five days on the road lifestyle, I started in, you know, mergers and acquisitions, but was doing a lot of work. I stood up the first marketing competency and communications competency around M and A for the company and then had a chance to really, you know, dig in on more of the, the mergers and acquisitions of like, you know, I really ran kind of the transformation offices, the integration offices, for a variety of acquisitions, and in that process became very close to an executive who was the VP of marketing for Dell Services. And so she's actually the one that pulled me over to amd. And I started as her chief of staff for six months. And as part of that chief of staff role, I had my finger in everything related to marketing, was trying to figure out where I could make the biggest impact. And due to, you know, a situation, I can't really talk about it. It makes me very emotional. But there was a situation where there was an opening to run brand unexpectedly and there was a leadership gap unexpectedly. And I had the opportunity to step in and, and run the brand team and lead the transformation of the entire brand. And I co led that with corporate strategy. Had a real, real opportunity to kind of learn the ins and outs of, you know, leading, leading a brand team and being able to make a very big impact in a very short amount of time. And that ended up being my foray into kind of what I would call operational marketing. So I did have a like non traditional path in terms of coming up through kind of the communications and consulting ranks. But what I think it gave me was an understanding of how to solve problems, of how to understand that a marketing and brand problem is not a marketing and brand problem, it is a business problem. And so understanding where the business is heading and where the challenges are and being part of, you know, the bigger pieces of strategy enabled me to be a really successful marketing leader. And I've just kind of learned by doing, you know, just getting my fingers into everything, being a product marketer, being know, the communications person, you know. The only thing I really haven't like touched is you wouldn't. Even though I did have an MIS degree from ut, so at one point I was coding but like you would not want me to like touch the HTML code. If you want Pascal or cobol, I can like dig it out of the vault maybe, but you wouldn't want me like you know, fingers on a keyboard in terms of kind of like building digital, digital tools. But I've, I've really gotten into all of the foundational elements around product marketing, messaging, corporate positioning that lead to great sales enablement and great demand gen and great marketing.
- [28:09]
JD
Marketing executives, business owners. If you are running a company and looking for a fresh perspective on how to grow that company, take a look at influicity. That's my marketing agency where we work with brands across influencer marketing, podcasts, social media, AI content, paid ads and so much more. But don't take my word for it, go to influicity. Check out our case studies from all the amazing clients we've worked with over the last decade. That's influi c I-t y influicity.com and I'll see you there. It sounds also like you have a pretty strong entrepreneurial thread running through you for two reasons. Number one, you basically said when you came in to Zayo you were, you had your own startup. I mean you had to build this from the ground up and you had A very entrepreneurial attitude about it. But also you just said a moment ago that, like, there's marketing, there's also, you know, there's revenue, there's sales, there's finance, there's other aspects of a business. And marketing is one of the tools. Promotion, branding, et cetera. That's not always what a business needs to lean on because as you said earlier, Zayo had over a decade where they didn't really have marketing and they were doing just fine because they were, you know, M and A was the strategy. So being able to take a 30,000 foot look down at a business and say, okay, what does this business need? Can I help it and how do I do it? It sounds like you have that mindset.
- [29:32]
Kimberly Storen
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's just the nature of coming up through a client service background, right? You, you were an entrepreneur, right? You had to sell work, you had to deliver work, you had to learn industries. I mean, I was at my brother's wedding in the middle of nowhere, Idaho and get a call that I needed to be in coal mining country in like the middle of nowhere, Virginia on Monday and I better be ready to pitch a client for a $4 billion acquisition. And I need to be ready like, and understand coal mining in a weekend, right, while I'm at a wedding, in a wedding. And so you just get used to like, having to dig in and like, learn quickly and learn the nuances and to be able to build an executive summary of what the challenges are. So that mindset of hypothesis building, I think is very much, you know, the, the nature of consulting. And, and it's why, like, I have a lot of frameworks, but I never believe in a one size fits all. I've seen too many companies across too many industries that I know that there's no one size fits all. So when people come in and they're like, here's my 30, 60, 90, I'm like, nope. Like, I will tell you at 30 days what my 60 and 90 is going to be because there's no way that I can know on day one. I haven't talked to the customers in the detail that I would want to. I haven't talked to sales, I haven't talked to product, haven't talked to the executive team in the depth that I would want to be able to form that hypothesis of what's our ch, is our challenge awareness, is it preference, is it consideration, is it, you know, product market fit, is it execution? Like, do we have everything but we can't execute on it like I can't tell you that on day one, but I can tell you that by day 30 and give you a hypothesis and then go pressure test that. And I do think that that comes a lot from coming up through a different path versus coming up through a functional path.
- [31:33]
JD
When I talk to marketers who are on the ground, the people that are actually running the digital ads or you know, hosting the events and putting them together, and I ask them what they're thinking about, they're usually very tactical, very day to day. I got to get this job done by next week. I'm curious, as the CMO of a two and a half billion dollar company, what are you thinking about what kind of spends the most time in your head?
- [31:56]
Kimberly Storen
Absolutely. Market and customer. Right. My belief is that my job is to be the voice of and the voice to the market. And so there's a lot of ways that that manifests itself. It manifests itself in what I deliver to the market, but it also manifests itself of what am I listening from the market. And so I spend a lot of my time really trying to understand where our customers are heading, what are the things that keep them up at night, where is the market going? Like, what does that game board look like? How do we win in the market? And then I spend a lot of time asking my teams why they want to do this. Why do you want to do that? Like what are you solving? Like, how does that fit? Like where have you, where have you gotten that information? So we spend a lot of time kind of really thinking through, through the why behind the what. Because there is a, like a nature, especially if you're an individual contributor, you know, more junior marketing, you know, associate maybe that like, or strategist who's coming in. They have a very narrow view of tactical execution. And so I spend a lot of time kind of coaching the why behind the what so that they understand how their tactics fit into the bigger picture and how we make sure that we're spending money and resources on the right things that actually move the needle.
- [33:11]
JD
Yeah, it's to hammer. Everything is a nail. And that's often what the world is like to somebody at the very junior level. I remember early on in my career I was dealing with an ad agency and this is for a major CPG brand. And I was pitching them on something that was basically going to make them look better in the store, on the shelf. And after this big pitch and I gave them all this explanation and they turned to me and I remember this one woman turned to Me and said one thing that really changed my mindset, kind of what you're describing. She said, we already have 92% penetration on the shelf. Like, we don't need help on the shelf. There are plenty of places we need help, but somebody goes into Kroger or goes into Walmart, they're picking us up regardless. How do we get them to know that they have a need for this product? How do we get them thinking about the use cases? And so really trying to understand marketing from a 360 level. The thing that you need is not always just the thing that you do best. It might be something totally different.
- [34:06]
Kimberly Storen
I mean, I think about amd, right? I mean, which is just the darling of the tech world, right? Right now. I mean, Lisa sue is the CEO of the year, I think Time magazine, last week, or Fortune, whoever it was, you know, working with Rory Reed and Lisa Su at amd. Originally, I came in and the hypothesis was we have an awareness problem. Intel's the behemoth. Nobody knows who AMD is. And I led a pretty substantial research project where we discovered that's not actually the truth, right? The. The market truth is that we had pretty good awareness. We had very little consideration. Like, so everyone knew who AMD was. And they said for whatever reason, whether, like, I assume that your performance sucks because intel is so good, or I assume that you're irrelevant because I go into Best Buy and there's nine laptops with an intel sticker and there's one with an amd, you know, or my perception is you're, you know, too cheap or you're too expensive or you're too. But, like, the issue was not actually awareness. The issue was consideration, which meant that our entire brand and marketing strategy had to change because it didn't matter. Like, everyone knew who we were. So it's perception change. It's taking those blockers out that come in that consideration moment and. And helping the customer realize why they should be buying an AMD laptop or building an AMD server or putting an AMD chip into a game console versus we just need to go, you know, spray and pray and, you know, go hit the awareness. Like, that wasn't the problem. But if marketing, if you assume that, you know, the challenge without actually validating and substantiating that, you know, the challenge, you can end up spending. I mean, and the team was right. I mean, the team was spending money on, like, movies and branding, like, embedding into movies and, you know, doing, you know, big brand sponsorships on a very, like, tight Budget that just didn't like the ROI was not there because it was solving the wrong problem. Sure. Now like because of where the company is. Sure. Like AMD can go be the sponsor, sponsor of, you know, F1 teams and what have you. Like, the finances look a lot different now with where the share price is than back then. But it was, you know, it was spending money on solving the wrong problem. I think that's the biggest thing as the voice of and the voice to the market. Like that's what we can bring to the table.
- [36:43]
JD
A solution in search of a problem is a problem in itself. You can't be chasing it. So as we sit here at the start of 2025, what's on your mind and what do you think generically marketers and business builders should be thinking of? Is it geopolitical, is it AI, is it the, you know, what's going to happen with TikTok? What, what sort of some big things that you're thinking about for this year.
- [37:07]
Kimberly Storen
So I mean I think there's a lot of tactical things that we should be thinking about. You know, I think the tech stack has gotten completely unwieldy. We're spending way too much money on it. I think we've, you know, my hot take is the whole ABM category is kind of created by vendors to sell more crap to marketers that they can't actually get value out of. So I do think that like there's going to be an opportunity next year to simplify, simplify, simplify. You know, as always, I think especially if you're a PE backed company like we are, you're going to have continued cost constraints. Whether those are geopolitical related or just PE related, that will continue. But I think, you know, ultimately the marketing function itself right now is in a little bit of like it's, we're in a pivotal moment of a function. And so I think for cmos next year we have to be thinking about how do we continue to manage, in addition to managing the brand of our companies, manage the brand of the marketing function and how do we start to collectively change the trajectory that we're seeing? Right. We still see pretty high turnover out of the CMO role. We're still seeing a lot of tactics versus strategy out of that function. We're still, we're seeing a lot of, in technology at least where the separation of brand and the separation of demand is really happening. And so people are, are shoving marketing under chief revenue officers, which I think is a terrible move, not just personally, but I think Also, when you think about being the voice of and the voice to the market, if you're just being seen as pipeline this quarter, you're missing out on the opportunity to build everything that you need to build pipeline next quarter and the quarter after and the year after and the five years after that. And so I think, you know, the thing that I think most about in 2025 is like, how am I a good steward for the function that I'm passionate about and that I believe is truly the driver of growth. Big, like capital G growth, not little G growth, not marketing source pipeline growth, but corporate growth. And so that's the thing that really kind of keeps me up at night is how do I like, what's my contribution to the collective function in terms of how I'm going to bring this function along and how am I going to help educate the CEOs and the chief product officers, the chief sales officers that I engage with to ensure that.
- [39:46]
JD
Marketing doesn't become irrelevant and marketing is not sales. I think you kind of danced around that a little bit. Like the idea that you'd have marketing reporting into the CRO, in my mind, totally messes up the incentives because the CRO is not incentivized to do what the CMO is incentivized to do.
- [40:04]
Kimberly Storen
Right? Absolutely.
- [40:05]
JD
How do you think about. Just one last note on that. How do you think about the difference between sales and marketing? Because it sounds like you've had good, good relationships. They vouched for you in the past. What is sales job versus marketing's job?
- [40:18]
Kimberly Storen
So I try to be really simple about it. Right. Like sales job is this quarter revenue, next quarter pipeline. Right. That's their, their mandate that their coin operated. That's how they think. That's how they win. For me as a marketer, my goal is next quarter pipeline, and even more importantly, the quarter after the quarter after the year, the next five years after that. So it becomes this like, again, kind of going back to that statement of how am I giving the company the air cover it needs, Whether it's channel partners, depending on your route to market, or direct sellers or alliance partners. Like I'm giving everyone the air cover that they need to win in the market and how am I insuring? We know that in B2B, what, there's 15, 18 touches before, and they want to do 80% of their research before they talk to you, even in a complex sale. They want to talk to you in a complex sale, but not until they're pretty far along. So my job is to make sure that I'm moving them faster to that 80% and that I'm seeding those conversations for our sellers, our partners, our alliance partners to go move those deals faster and that I'm ensuring that I'm bringing in opportunities that, you know, we can nurture and, and, and feed into the sales engine. But sales is focused on in quarter revenue, next quarter pipe. That's their goal. And marketing's job is to ensure that that's easier, faster and, and that there's more people coming to that point where they're ready to talk to sales and it takes marketing to make them ready.
- [41:57]
JD
Kim, so insightful. I really appreciate you sharing with us today and just giving your insights to all these, to all these little things that we don't think about when it comes to doing marketing at a very big organization. So really appreciate it.
- [42:10]
Kimberly Storen
Oh, thank you. I enjoyed it.
- [42:11]
JD
Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, it helps other people find the show and it lets us know that we're doing something right. We'll talk to you guys next time.