TOP CMO: Karl Van den Bergh, Gigamon - 'Thriving Amidst Chaos'

Karl van den Bergh  00:00

The CMO role is one of the more challenging roles for sure the role requires it balance that balance is important. Like everything in life balance is important. It leads to good outcomes.

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Ben Kaplan  00:11

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies

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00:17

and most disruptive startups, re ideas packaged a certain way want to spread, they want to be told to someone else is simple, surprising, and significant. Unlocking viral creativity is to make it rapidly scalable.

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Ben Kaplan  00:32

This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan. Today, I'm speaking with Karl Van den Bergh, CMO of Gigamon, a cybersecurity leader with a focus on deep observability. That's the technical term for looking at network security from the outside in. Karl has a wealth of Tech experience having worked for companies like data stacks, and Tibco. So how do you manage a marketing mix in a downturn? Are there lessons from the pandemic, that you can apply to a potential recession? How do you balance short term results? With longer term thinking? Let's find out with Karl Van den Bergh.

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Ben Kaplan  01:21

Karl, how do you balance the short term and the long term as a CMO? And I think in our discussion, we'll see how that has implications all throughout different decisions we make at various inflection points of a company's lifecycle. Yeah, great question,

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Karl van den Bergh  01:35

Ben, great to be here with you and speaking to your audience. So it's a great question. And the marketing has evolved a lot over the years. And one thing I think we can say is true, irrespective of the type of marketer you are, or the company you're in organization are, in essence become more and more measurable. And that's good and bad, I'd say the good is that we can attach more easily to value to the outcomes of marketing, I think that's something that has been more of an art than a science prior. And now with all the data we have, it's become very clear, you know, or it's, it's easier to measure that output. So that's the good, the bad is sometimes those metrics, and that output, particularly, you know, what is the quota return on investment from marketing, can become the overarching or overriding measure, which can, if not done properly, can lead short term thinking. And so as a simple example, you know, it might be that you are looking for the shortest path to return from marketing investment. And that would lead you to investing more in demand, and maybe in the easiest demand motion out there, which would be going after your customer base. Whereas what might be important and strategic to the organization is to make sure that your brand, and nd awareness associated with that is growing. And so that's the sort of dynamic that you can fall into from a short term versus a long term thinking perspective. And it is important as marketers and marketing leaders that we figure out what's the right balance between those two?

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Ben Kaplan  03:26

There's a couple things there. One is that what you set as that final metric can influence how you even approach the problem is that setting the right metric is important, regardless of what it is. And too if you set the metric in a certain way, and in particular, if ROI return on investment, which makes sense why we'd want it because we can see there's a one to one correlation between I put this in I get this out, I can justify it. If you're in business, it's a money making machine, we put an x we get out why we're making money, therefore, we can do it infinitely. The problem with that is it could start to replace strategy and why does that come to dominate strategy? How does that if you're not careful, start to influence all of your strategic thinking,

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Karl van den Bergh  04:06

marketing and I often say that marketing and the role of CMO is one of the more complex I have a ratio which I use, which is complexity to appreciation. I think as as an executive marketing has an A marketing leaders have one of the highest complexity precision ratios in terms of like recognition and in terms of understanding so when you think about marketing and getting back to kind of your question is like this definitely a very data intense centric component. As a technology stack, there is you know, psychographics and understanding your audience there's aesthetics in terms of you know, branded how you appear on the market, there are so many strategic obviously choices that you make an operational so when you think of the breadth of marketing today, it's an incredibly complex function and and CMO has an incredibly complex role, and yet the recognition and understanding of how marketing is works because it has evolved so rapidly and so much over the last few years, it's still, and so one of the biggest roles of a CMO is actually in that communication. And evangelization of the function, the communication and education, I would say, of the executive team, the rest of the organization and the board. So back to your question, you know, can the metrics jeopardize, you know, strategic thinking? And they absolutely can. So you said it? Well, you know, the metric in some ways will determine your focus. So, it's about framing the problem correctly. First of all, you need to understand what is it that you're ultimately trying to achieve as an organization, and really getting clear on those objectives? And so, you know, what, what is most important isn't the most important that, you know, we we get the most out of our customer base, is it important that we grow market share, or grow? share of wallet? What are the what are the ultimate objectives of the organization that will then determine strategically so number one, that will then determine what are the right metrics? And once you have the right metrics, then you can set about, you know, what is the right strategy? And so are the right approach to achieve those those metrics and those objectives.

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Ben Kaplan  06:18

Or put another way, it's not just this tension between strategy and metrics. But there's this other part that you mentioned, which is objectives, metrics measure how fast were climbing the wall strategy, but also influenced by objective determines, is the ladder up against the right wall to begin with, right? And the problem is that if we just focus on essentially, what is the most direct way to measure how fast we're climbing the ladder, and that's ROI? Do we just forget to think about if the ladder is on the right wall at all? And yes, we're climbing, but we're climbing to get to a two storey building, and we could be climbing to get to a 10 storey building, but we're just not going to see that because it's easier to get to the two storey building. Yeah. And

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Karl van den Bergh  07:03

it's also I think that the challenge, and I don't think anyone will get tired of this talk about metrics, because it's so front and center of the CMO conversation, I think the challenge sometimes with the metrics is that there are certain metrics that are easier to measure. In other words, it is easier to know that if you do a demand program, and you get a lead, and it turns into an opportunity to deal, that's clear, it is harder to know, if you are building a brand, what is the impact to the bottom line. And so the tendency can be especially when budgets are tight, is to gravitate to the things that are easier to sort of draw the line between the investment and the return than things that are harder to measure. But doesn't mean that they're less strategic. And that and that's kind of the dilemma, right is that you can unless you've got a back to the education, unless you You've brought your board and your executive team and the company along an understanding and appreciation, appreciating the importance of say building that brand, building the awareness building a relationship or building community. Then when push comes to shove, it's going to be hard to defend that spend, because it's harder to show the direct correlation to the bottom line.

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Ben Kaplan  08:25

Just to play devil's advocate here for a second. Some people listening to this may be saying, Yes, I would love to not be so ROI driven. But we're in a downturn, budgets are being cut. The future is uncertain. I'm seeing layoffs across the sector, inflation's up, we came out of the pandemic. And now we've got an economic crisis that everyone says is about to happen. And I've got to be conservative. What do you say to that, where the natural tendency is, I got to account for every dollar dollars are getting harder to come by. So let's get really, really focused on ROI out of necessity. It's about

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Karl van den Bergh  09:03

it's back to what we said earlier is a balance between the short term long term between the tactical and strategic between what's very easily measurable and what's harder to measure. So how do you strike about first of all, it is back to what are you trying to what strategic even tried to do understand the realities of the market today. So we are headed into some let's say we're already in a recession. So budgets are tighter, there is, you know, concern out there. And so people are being more conservative in their spending. That's, that's a reality. And we've got to deal with that reality. Now. Given that reality, and like anything and one of my favorite books is Ryan holidays, the obstacle is the way so it's looking at an obstacle or challenge and saying, What can we how can we turn this around? How can we turn this into an opportunity? So knowing that most people are going to be cutting back Is this an opportunity for us to figure out a way to make sure that we don't over index on cutting back marketing and keep the budgets right to where we can, so that we are growing our mindshare in the market, because everyone else is pulling back and spent. So this is potentially an opportunity for us to become more present, because there's going to be less noise in the market now doesn't mean that's going to be easy, then there's got to be a plan behind it. So how are you planning to achieve that? What are you going to do with the money doesn't mean that you're going to be reckless. But one of the ways that I would say, and we could talk about this in more detail, I'll give a headline, one of the things I would be looking to do as we head into the downturn is how do I how do I leverage relationships I have in the market, that is obviously customers, that is channel resell partners, that is a community that is influencers that I have a connection to, because that is one of the in my, in my view, one of the most efficient ways to quote spend your money is leveraging the relationships because that's where people are looking, they're looking to the industry luminaries or to their peers, or to a community for information. And so that will be one of the things that I would look to invest in, that may not produce that immediate, obvious ROI, but strategically in long term will absolutely Build Your presence in the market.

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Ben Kaplan  11:26

The little secret here is that there's power in predictability. If you can make a forecast up the others on your progress, and then report results that match what you predicted. That builds trust. And that trust follows you to your next initiative, your next project, your next program, your next campaign. So seek to find marketing opportunities that you can make predictable, and you will build trust, that can increase your influence, in all the things to come after that. One of the things that is underrated about a downturn, especially if you are not the market leader, currently, it tends to mix things up, it changes the order, there's a lot of rooms to get shift, you can do what take five years in a year, because there's just a lot of disordered disruption. And no one wants to do a stable base kind of tends to favor the status quo. A disruptive base tends to favor the challenger. We did some analysis and some research looking at after the 2008 2009 financial downturn. Who are the companies that want in the next 10 years? What did they do, and usually, it was that they invested in three things and in depending on the industry in different ways. One was actually marketing, they took a longer term view to your point they saw this opportunity to was research and development, they actually invested more in research and development, there is a time for innovation, the market was disrupted anyway, we can actually play out slightly longer game as we look for what's next. And three was infrastructure. There are some interesting companies that were more manufacturing based companies that invested in plants invest in manufacturing, they could get it at a bargain, they did that and that fueled their growth. So what do you think are possible drivers right now is if you look at the marketing mix, or beyond, you mentioned one, which is relationships, either investing in them or harvesting them doesn't need to cost you a lot to set into motion, that partnership you've cultivated for a couple of years, and now say let's come together in these times to do something else. What else should be part of that marketing mix?

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Karl van den Bergh  13:35

I think it starts with whatever the mix I'll get to in a minute. But whatever you're doing, it starts with your message to the market, you know, understanding what is it that your customers or the prospects for the market you're targeting? What are their care bets? And yes, that's true anytime. But I'd say especially true in a downturn, where they're gonna be, they're gonna have some very clear priorities, what are what are the things that they're going to care about? In the case of Gigamon where I am right now, I know that our customers care, as most well about cost efficiencies, for sure. And they will continue to care about hybrid multicloud security, because that's not going away, attackers are going to take a break just because there's any has an economic downturn. So it's like understanding your audience where they are, and making sure that you're offering and the way you position your offering really hits home in their top priorities. And, you know, we're lucky enough that that's clearly the case. The second one is in terms of the message, how you communicate, it's being empathetic to what they're dealing with. So I think the language we use, and how we communicate is also really important. And that was one of the lessons we took away from the pandemic is that you've got to be sensitive to where people are and coming across as to marketing in a challenging time. Actually backfires. Right. And so we actually, we moved away from you know, Talking about our great product to really trying to reach our audience and to say how, you know, ask how we could help empathy. You don't

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Ben Kaplan  15:09

hear that a lot in cybersecurity not necessarily meant to be like most empathetic industry. So what is an example of that? Is it just simply putting yourself in their shoes and trying to serve them first, then serve yourself and making sure that's clear? Or is it something beyond that of how in like, a really technical kind of hardcore field with lots of dangers and fear in the world you can be empathetic?

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Karl van den Bergh  15:31

It's a great question, Ben. I mean, it really is, and this has taken the long term view is a view take the long term view that genuinely The belief is that if you are really going to try and help that you will get, you know, given you shall receive. But if you really are, they're trying to help that, you know, at some point, that will come back to you. And so part of it is I said, and how you communicate. And so we are very empathetic to our Security earnings and say, one of our key messages was recognizing sock Burnett, security operations Burnett, which is real, they're understaffed, they're overworked. And it's a high pressure job. And so really tried to recognize and appreciate the tough job that they have. And and basically say, like, we're here to try and help. And we've different ways that we can do that. But that's our concern right now is there's severe Burnett, and the problems aren't going away. And so I think that's the big one. And I'd say it's, it's, it's building, you can't do that unless you're authentic, because people will know when you're doing it as a ruse to get them, ultimately. And so you've got to figure out how can you do that in an authentic way, I think goes back to the more we said earlier in the conversation, it is establishing the relationship with your, with your community, it's giving back to the community, whatever it is help free software, free training, you know, things that that that you may have charged for in the past, to build that relationship. And again, being true to who you are. And what you represent in the market, I think is the other way that people can appreciate who you are, trust you. And and then you have an opportunity to I said to kind of step in with them and their situation, be empathetic.

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Ben Kaplan  17:26

Maybe in the situation, your objective. I mean, if it's purely ROI, you're like, How can I extract as much us or foreign currency from my client base at this time, so that I don't miss my number, the return on objective, your objective might be in this difficult time, we are in the business of making our customers successful. And we do whatever it takes to do that, because that's just how we're oriented. And we'll do great business when our customers are successful. And we're sharing it with you. And if that is your objective, then maybe you measure that a little bit differently. Maybe that takes a slightly longer term view, maybe you're more empathetic. And maybe that is a balancing factor with of course, the ROI that you also have to meet as well.

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Karl van den Bergh  18:06

Yeah, absolutely. A great the sort of the getting clear on the, you know, what are the objectives that you care about? And making sure again, the organization's servant executives and the board are lined around those objectives doesn't need to can't be measured. Right. So I think that's the thing that sort of no return objective is just that is there is a way to measure how you're progressing against the objective. It just doesn't immediately tie to the bottom line, like an ROI does. And I think that's where people can get caught up is because back to what I said earlier, is there are certain things that are easier to correlate with the bottom line. And people tend to gravitate towards those when budgets are tight. And that can lead to short term thinking. And so it is part of our job as CMOS as marketing leaders to make sure that we're helping the organization think through the long term strategic, so that, as you said, in the case of this companies that you interviewed or research, they come out stronger from challenging times. Because you can only do that if you take the long term view. If you take the short term tactical view, you will make short term tactical decisions and you will not come out stronger from this economic crisis.

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Ben Kaplan  19:21

If in doubt, seek to understand and even empathize with your customers needs. If you can do that, you can fine tune your tactics, your strategies to better serve them. And in a challenging climates in a downturn in a potential recession, by focusing on your customer. By delivering value to your customer, you can often navigate those difficult challenges and find a Northstar to stay the course and head where you need to go

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Ben Kaplan  20:03

Part of what makes a CMO different from just the head of marketing as VP of Marketing global hot marketing person is that there's some appreciation for your part of the executive team of the company at its highest level. So you're bringing your discipline expertise, but you're also helping navigate the overall direction of the company too, as part of the C suite, one of the skills may be underrated is rallying other members of the C suite, to your point of view, or long term thinking and the CFO may have different things he or she is measuring than you. And that may want him or her to push you towards ROI. The CEO may have a different point of view and so forth down the line. So how do you rally people to that way of thinking when certainly it's more convenient? Sometimes it's easier to measure if we all just like agree on ROI?

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Karl van den Bergh  20:55

Yeah, it's a great question. I said it is one in my view, one of the CMOS primary responsibilities is to bring the executive team and the board along this journey that marketing has been on for a number of years on transformation and marketing. And some ways accelerated by by the pandemic and now being tested again, in the economic downturn. And so a part of it is, first of all, where appropriate, certainly explaining the measurement system, and educating on the measurement system and showing predictable results. Because that builds trust, right, at Gigamon, we went on this journey, where I started operating marketing more like sales. And I did it because it was an easier metaphor, or approach or model for most of the executive team and the board to understand that is that we have a target, I present or we present a forecast, and we built a pretty innovative forecasting model, you know, monthly check ins on where we are against our forecasts and our results. And these results are top to bottom and everything in between. and So building that kind of just like sales, you got to target you got to quota, you've got your forecast. And then you got your your results, building that and educating on how we were measuring and getting everybody aligned around the validity in somebody's taking take that ice. So that was a third party that was measuring and wasn't marketing, reporting on itself. All of that build credibility. So having that credibility, then in how we're operating our business, and we're operating as efficiently then allowed us to have the conversation about the strategic longer term where it is less measurable, at least from an ROI perspective. But presenting again, what are the right metrics to measure this, the objectives and progress against the objectives? And so I think it is, again, putting yourselves in the shoes of the other executives and what they care about, and what's important to them and how they think. And at least from, you know, my experience of Gigamon operating more like the sales model, in terms of how we report on our business has been helpful in building that trust and understanding that has done allowed me to have these more strategic conversations.

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Ben Kaplan  23:19

How would you think about the lessons from the pandemic, you executed a pivot in the pandemic? But how does that inform you now as we get to this new phase, which is not primarily pandemic sort of lead, but more downturn or recession lead as well? What do you take from sort of the struggles of the past two years that you apply to the next two years,

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Karl van den Bergh  23:39

looking at your your marketing mix, and understanding the right mix to reach your audience and how that continues to evolve, we obviously moved into a completely virtual world and we're moving back to natural hybrid world and we're still learning. And, you know, there's been some good innovation. But there's still more efficiencies, I think, to be gotten out of that. So how, what's the right marketing mix, for your target audience, for your industry for your offering back to what we talked about earlier, it really is learning to be empathetic to your audience where they are, and so and in the message and how you communicate, I think that's key, and building trust, and building that trust through the relationships that you have with your customers, partners community ecosystem, because at the end of the day, that is and the world is moving that direction, more and more of marketing. In my view going forward will be word of mouth. It will be through a trusted because we know that the buyer today more and more of the b2b managers and employees are millennials candidly prefer not to talk to a vendor. We've seen that in our data. They're okay to do the chat jackpot but they're reluctant to to talk to the salesperson unless you know until it comes to absolute mouth. Last time, so they prefer to do their research online. Let's be there, you know, pre pandemic, I think it accelerated in the pandemic, more and more of the buyer journeys online. And where do they go? They go to their trusted sources, that is peer site reviews, community, folks who will quotes talk independently objectively about the offering and the company. And so I think investing in that that word of VAs is going to be incredibly important going forward, because as I said, that's the way modern marketing is gone.

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Ben Kaplan  25:27

If you're facing reduced marketing budgets, one of the first things you can do is ask yourself, what are the relationships that I can leverage? Do I have relationships with industry partners? Do I have relationships with adjacent industries? Are there other entities, individuals, organizations, that I can help amplify, and they can help amplify us? Relationships rarely have huge price tags. If you can leverage relationships, you could actually advance marketing objectives, even during a marketing shortfall, or a downturn.

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Ben Kaplan  26:10

In the relationships between tactics and strategies, and typically we have a strategy, it leads to a tactic to implement the strategy. But in times of turmoil or downturn, sometimes we can go the other direction from a tactic that we abstract into a greater strategy. And I'll give an example a lot of b2b companies have in pursuing marketing components that are built on tradeshows, conferences, relationships, meeting people in person may be that channels disrupted if it was in the pandemic, there's less face to face interaction. So we need a strategy to continue to cultivate those relationships, because that's a driver of our business, just the tactic may change, it might not be quite the same effort and spend to your marketing mix point on trade show channel. But that doesn't replace the need for the relationships because relationships drive our business, we just got to do it a different way. Tactically,

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Karl van den Bergh  26:56

yeah, I would say that the relationship became even more important during the pandemic. And so it was the way that though you nurtured and grew that relationship, or in our case, it's a complex b2b technology, infrastructure. And we want it to take the buying experience, as much as we could online. So we thought about, you know, the way that buyers used to buy cars, go into your showroom and look at the cars and now more and more of that you can do online, and you can kind of customize your car, and you can kind of take it for a drive nearly online. And so we did that with that was one of the innovations for us anyway, that we did was we're not, you know, an online application. We're physical piece of hardware, with cloud, you know, cloud software now. But we brought that experience online. So it was one way to get closer to our buyer, without having to meet them in person. So that's an example of kind of building on that relationship.

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Ben Kaplan  27:50

I think this notion of innovation. And that being one of your innovations that you've done is that it's also underrated, that scarcity, whether that's money, whether that's customers, whether that's leads is a driver of innovation, you have to figure out another way, and that there's not too many companies that have rich fat, happy market leaders that are super innovative, they don't have to be they just have to reap their harvest. So looking for ways to do that. And to the point about our obstacles, opportunities could be really powerful. How much of your ability to see that is based on your background? If I was going to summarize it, it's not a traditional CMO background, you've had experience and product as a general manager in m&a. How does that give you a different viewpoint or perspective that might make you see more of those opportunities instead of obstacles?

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Karl van den Bergh  28:40

That's a good question. I hadn't really thought about, yeah, how my background might play into I think back to one of our earlier point to compensate. And I think my background certainly helps in my putting myself in the shoes of the other executives and what they care about that for sure. It's helped there in terms of innovation, I really do love this idea of like turning obstacles into opportunities. I think it's, it's fascinating, because, you know, it's all about the growth mindset. If you're familiar with growth, first, the fixed mindset and sort of back to what we said earlier, how do you reframe a problem? And think think it through? I think that that's kind of the beginning of it, like how do you think about the problem differently, that can lead to these innovations. And so certainly, certainly having a technical background, and and then a general manager or thinking about p&l does lead me to look at the problem, maybe in a multi dimensional way. Maybe that's part of it. But also, you know, I've got a credit, great team of great marketers, in my case, a Gigamon that helped drive some of this innovation for the company.

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Ben Kaplan  29:43

And looking back at your background. I mean, you have this multifaceted background. You've also worked with some companies, generally technology companies, software companies, but they've had some unique challenges and opportunities based on where they were in the ecosystem by love to ask you about some of those and what you take with you to your work with Gigamon today. So first, we can start out with some of the open source based companies that were commercializing products based on that I'm talking about a jaspersoft or a data stacks that are based on that. What do you take now, even though you're not at a company like that at the moment? How does that sense of knowledge and community influence you now,

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Karl van den Bergh  30:24

one of the things that we took directly to get them on from those companies was community. And so we were an enterprise b2b, there was no open source component to what we did. And there isn't today either, however, the importance of building community around our offering was something that, that we started here at Gigamon a few years ago. And that community is growing quite substantially, since we put it in place. And they said, it's become kind of the trusted source for both our customers as well as prospects go and ask questions and get answers and kind of get a sense of, of the offering the company its values and how responsive it is. So that was one for sure they took away from it. I think the other is, ultimately what is going to win you a customer base and market share is providing a great solution to customers problems. And so you know, in the open source world, it is very much the way these projects start. It's it's a piece of technology that does something, and it's kind of thrown out there. And sometimes it grows, sometimes it doesn't. But ultimately, successful companies that come at that sugar, I had to build a, you know, solution to a critical customer problem. And that involves just more than technology, but everything that you wrapped around it from the documentation to the services to the support to the customer success. And and so really taking his solution focus to helping our customers in our case now, getting their arms around security and compliance in the hybrid and multi cloud, which is a journey they're all on and they're all trying to figure right. Is is kind of where we're really focused as is helping them in that really challenging journey. So solution focus and community based approach.

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Ben Kaplan  32:25

And what do you take from the other side of the coin in your background, which is the companies that were based on enterprise sales, whether that's certainly back further in your career, the saps of the world Tibco, you're at another company oriented towards that now, how are you more efficient or effective in your role now than you were when you were newer in that type of role?

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Karl van den Bergh  32:47

I think it is at the I would say the collaboration at the executive level, if any organization today operates as siloed functions, they're not going to be successful. And so we have a very strong culture of Gigamon, we've hold a one Gigamon culture, or a franchise approach where it is very much a it's a team, especially on the go to market sales marketing channel, that are operating together with a common objective. And so having that very tight alignment, common shared goals, very clear and open and authentic communication. I think that is, is probably one of the things that certainly I have put a lot more emphasis on, I believe, you know, matured towards is that cross functional peer to peer collaboration at the executive level, that would be certainly one of them. I think the other is to being efficient, being efficient from a marketing perspective. So this conversation we started around ROI is being as efficient and as accountable as possible, with the money that we were given. And so the way that I talk back to the franchises, the way I talk to our my, my sales counterparts around marketing is we are the stewards of the investment on your behalf. So we are the experts, we kind of know you know, what works and what doesn't. And we're willing to take a perspective on it. But we're kind of the stewards of that investment on your behalf. And, and so we tried to be as efficient as possible, and they understand that we get measured on outcomes. And so we get once you get them in part of that process, then they're engaged and they are they have skin in the game because they know that you're doing this on their behalf. And so getting very efficient and accountable with your investment is no thing that I believe is something that I've picked up or I've evolved since my time at SAP and took up.

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Ben Kaplan  34:53

And so you've got to stay focused on the long term, but you can't ignore the short term you've got to be empathetic to your customer, but you can't forget other colleagues and your executives and your board, you've got to be strategic yet, you've got to be tactical, is this just an impossible job? How do you do all of those things? Who are the CMOS that you admire? And how does one do this job? When there's so many conflicting priorities and considerations?

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Karl van den Bergh  35:25

Yeah, the CMO role is, as I've had the benefit of bringing other functions, so I can have a outsider perspective as well and more challenging roles. For sure. I think it's got a, I have a ratio, we talked about earlier sort of complexity to appreciation ratio, which is, you know, it's a very complex role that not well, necessarily recognized or understood. And so to your point, I think the role requires it balance. And that balance is important, like everything in life balances is important. It leads to good outcomes. And so the balance between the long term, the short term strategic tactical, are things that the CMO needs to manage every day. And at the same time, I think it is a very interesting role, I think it's a role that can be very, very rewarding, because it's the tip of the spear of many companies, creating new markets, as we're doing right now. Gigamon, with deep observability, could be a very interesting and challenging journey to go on. And so, you know, HBr wrote an article that there's no one tied to CMO, there's like maybe three, three flavors of CMOS. And that may be true, depending on the lifecycle, the company and you got to know kind of what type the CMO you want. But whatever, you know, whatever type of CMO, you are, I think that balance that we talked about is Core terms of who I admire, I think I can talk about the sort of the marketing, I think there's all the great companies that we know, and we love, from a marketing perspective, what I love about them. And I'll say the obvious Apple is the sort of the clarity of what they represent. And this is one company has continued to do well, even in challenging times, because they are obsessed about their customer and delivering an incredible product and doing it in a way that is very distinctive. If you think back to their think different campaign, they are very clear, and they have a great message to the market. And so look, Ben, I think these are going to be challenging times for CMOS for marketers. And as you said, I think it'll be important to find that balance for your organization in and helping them navigate and not lose sight of and think of yourself as a representative of the long term because I think that is in many ways marketing is to counterbalance the short term tactical is to maintain that long term focus.

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Ben Kaplan  37:54

According to Karl Van den Bergh, it's easy to get caught up in the metrics of the moment. So don't lose sight of the bigger picture. Find that delicate balance between meeting the immediate needs of the business and planning for the long term. Stay laser focused on your objectives. Maybe the objective is developing strong relationships. If in person marketing tactics no longer feasible, continue to build those relationships by developing other tactics. downturns can also present opportunities, mix things up. Try new approaches. Sometimes, as a CMO, the downturn is what you need to galvanize support to try something outside of the box. build strong relationships with customers, partners, and other stakeholders. It's valuable in times of uncertainty and incredibly useful as you come out the other side. find that sweet spot where you can survive the presence, but continue to lay the foundation for the future. For TOP CMO I’m Ben Kaplan

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