TOP CMO: Arun Pattabhiraman, Sprinklr - 'From Hustle to Scale: Building a Marketing Team for Growth'

Arun Pattabhiranman  0:00  

You have to be able to build cultural empathy when you are especially in a global role and learn how to respect and work with people across different cultures, different geographies.

Ben Kaplan  0:10  

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Great Ideas package a certain way want to spread they want to be told to someone else is simple, surprising, and significantly. Locking viral creativity is to make it rapidly scalable. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. today I'm chatting with Arun PATA B Rahman, Chief Marketing Officer of sprinkler, that's the company that got its start as a social media monitoring tool and evolved into a Global Customer Experience Management platform for more than 50% of the Fortune 100. Arun was previously chief growth officer at FreshWorks. We lead a global team of 400 plus marketing operations and sales professionals, and help Fresh Books become the first Indian b2b SaaS company to list on NASDAQ in September 2021. So how do you change your marketing tactics at each stage of growth? And how can you evolve your marketing from seed to scale and beyond? Plus recruit the ideal global marketing team for each stage from the US, Europe, Asia and Africa? Let's find out with a rune pot to be Roman. A rune you're in Bangalore right now you're based in India, you've served in these high level CMO or similar functions at global companies that are not Indian based companies. And that's unique about your background. How did you start thinking about that? And how does being based in India in that market make you a different marketer on a global basis?

Arun Pattabhiranman  1:48  

When Ben I think, to be really honest, I think it was not all very well planned, right, there is a little bit of luck and being in the right place, the only time that definitely contributed significantly to my career journey. But I will say this, that, you know, I've always wanted to work in global companies in global roles. The first opportunity that I jumped on that put me on this project tree was when I joined in Moby back into those elements. So in Moby was a mobile advertising focused startup, which originated in India started by the btrda, who happens to be Harvard graduate, and he had a grand vision of taking and taking on the headwinds of the space like Google or Facebook and competing with them with an independent mobile advertising platform. Now that vision truly inspired me and I jumped on that bandwagon. And when I started, I started really small. So in 2011, I joined them as an account manager, primarily focusing on business development and sales. But I always knew that marketing was my forte and my passion. So I thoughtfully crafted a career within InMobi, or the most of my seven years, where I went from account management to, to leading marketing for all app developer solutions, and then taking on product marketing, and then eventually being promoted to the role of the global CMO. Now, I understand that a journey like that doesn't happen very frequently. And for a lot of people, it may not be possible, but I think I was fortunate. And it happened because of the leaders that I've worked with Naveen, happened to be a found out with believed in the potential of people. And he was willing to take a bet on me for having been a global company based out of India, but significant revenues coming from outside of India. He gave me the mantle and the opportunity to be a global cmo from India, and I jumped on that. And that put me on the trajectory of going after companies that wanted to do similar things. So from InMobi, I ran and joined the sleepless Hotstar horsetail happens to be the Netflix of India is India's largest premium streaming platform now owned by Disney. And even there, the role I was hired for it was unique. I was brought on board to run all marketing for markets outside of India. So I was cmo for horsetails, horsetails international operations. So I did that. And then I jumped to FreshWorks, which is, again, India's first SAS unicorn. And the founder and I had connected a couple of years before I formally joined the company. And he always wanted me to join him and he was on a great growth path. And he wanted someone who had deep experience in running global marketing programs and global marketing campaign setting or if India and build a massive growth missionary to support that, so I jumped on that opportunity. And FreshBooks was just had just turned a unicorn they were about $100 million in revenue. And, you know, my journey that as the Global Chief Chief, the chief growth officer entail running all of revenue marketing programs, including managing the SDR and operations teams. So we had to build I had to build a team of almost four 150 people across the globe with a significant portion of them based in India. And that obviously offered, you know, great economic differentiation for the company in terms of running its operations, but also gave me additional expertise in making marketing work in a global company that was that originated in India. So I think one thing led to another, and sprinkler eventually discovered me and for sprinkler, it is the very first time that they have hired at most cmo out of India. And I think, over the course of the last 15 to 20 years, I've been able to build my expertise around building strong marketing machines that can enable the growth ambitions of these global SaaS companies by building a team that is global, but also with significant operations based out of India,

Ben Kaplan  5:53  

India is well known for great engineering talent, and people naturally think of that, particularly in the SAS space. Right. So they might be familiar with having operations there because of it, marketing less. So is there an untapped marketing talent in India, if people just look closer? Or how should people think about a different one? No, I absolutely

Arun Pattabhiranman  6:11  

think so. Right? I think historically, and traditionally, companies have looked to India for engineering and product talent primary, because you get a lot of people specializing in engineering, and they, they tend to be technically savvy and analytical. And all of that works really well, for r&d centers that are being built in India. But it is equally true for marketing as well. What is exciting about Indian talent is the fact that you find a lot of good English speaking talent, because English is the primary language that folks get educated on. Secondly, I think, even from a marketing perspective, I think there is a shift that's happening in industry where companies are moving, wanting someone, a CMO or marketing team, to not just be responsible for branding and telling a story, but actually delivering growth and revenue. And to do that, you need to be able to flex your muscle between the left and the right brain, and you need to strike the right balance between creativity and analytics. And you can find a lot of talent in India that are able to do that really, really well. And I think because of that, and the fact that over the last decade or so there are a ton of technology based startups that have originated in India, but have gone global and even listed publicly in NASDAQ or NYSE, that is now a significant pool of talent that a lot of global companies can show and are beginning to tap into right to run worker markets. So Indian talent is now not just about technology and engineering, but you're increasingly finding go to market talent across sales, marketing, and even Customer Success operations, that a lot of companies are looking to India to build a team sport.

Ben Kaplan  7:53  

And as you're building teams, and you're working with teams that might be located around the world, for instance, right now for sprinkler I mean, your primary markets are the Americas, you're focused on us, you are focused on Europe, in working globally, and building strong teams and teams that are high performing and that have a high degree of trust. Have you noticed cultural differences that you just have to get through or get behind that you just noticed that that become obstacles or blockers and no one even realizes it? And? And yes, we're all working in English, but we're speaking different languages based on that cultural context.

Arun Pattabhiranman  8:24  

Absolutely. I think building trust is absolutely critical in a function like marketing, especially when if you look at the b2b marketing discipline, it's not just one team that drives b2b marketing, there is an entire discipline that has exploded around b2b SaaS marketing, ranging from branding PR and communications, to performance marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, partner marketing, field marketing, customer marketing, and so on and so forth. And oftentimes, when I bid themes, I'm always looking to strike the right balance between which geography offers the best talent for what kind of skill. So it is true that historically, and even today, you will find a lot of great brand marketers and storytellers and communication specialists in the US, right. And in India, you'll find a lot of people who are technically savvy and who are analytical, who are revenue driven, growth driven, and whoever performance marketing mindset with huge understanding of technology and how that enables growth. So I think the role for me as a CMO is always to constantly preach these two words, in order to be able to sell the right machinery to support growth. And yes, part of that is identifying the right subject matter experts to fill those roles. But a lot of my time actually goes into ensuring that these teams learn to work with each other, build that trust and can create some of the best marketing campaigns that can support that growth, ambition for the company. And that happens with a combination of, you know, getting to know each other as human beings and crossing those cultural barriers and that requires a ton of FaceTime, a ton of collaboration and creating the right platforms for people to know each other as not just colleagues but as friends and human beings and understanding the psyche that craves actions from each of these teams. So I do end up spending a lot of time, my time in making sure the team gels well and has enough of an emotional glue for us to be able to achieve what we need to as a marketing function.

Ben Kaplan  10:23  

You were alluding to just in terms of teams and geography sort of right brain and left brain, right brain creative, left brain analytical, there wasn't as much of a performance marketing field, or growth marketing field that kind of combined those a little bit more, say 10 years ago, how are you balancing all of that and thinking about teams overall, given that your background is one, I think your prior role, it was like chief growth officer, so I hear that I'm immediately thinking about, okay, you're gonna be focused on certain growth metrics, and more oriented towards performance marketing, if you're in that role. You also talked about running SDR teams, for those people who are not in sales, that's sales development representatives, meaning those are probably people that are doing a lot of outbound outreach from things to bring in leads. So you're doing all of that yet, in a global cmo role. Sometimes for CMOS don't focus on those things, or they have more of like the overall brand at sprinkler, you also have a legacy of being thought of for one thing, where as originally a social media management platform, you've broaden that into more of a customer experience overall, but people still might think of you in the other way. So how do you balance all of that? And all the things that you have to manage? And is it just like, you know, 1/3 1/3 1/3, in terms of your focus, or how do you think about what you need to accomplish?

Arun Pattabhiranman  11:42  

I think it all starts with understanding what is the company really needing from the CMO. And that's where a lot of companies struggle, and a lot of CMOS struggle, because oftentimes, if you speak to founders and startup CEOs, and ask them, hey, what kind of a CMO do you need, and you will get very, very different answers, even from the same individual at different points in time, right. And more recently, you get to hear, oh, we need a full stack CMO. And by that they mean, they need someone who can do great and brand marketing, and also do great both marketing. And you can also drive pipeline and run STRS a dual stack, the reality is, as a human be out of probably 10 to 15 skills that you need to be successful as a CMO, it's almost impossible to find someone who's absolutely good with all these. Right. So when I come into a role, my first assessment is what does the company need at this stage of growth? And how do I calibrate my own skill set and build teams that have complementary strengths to meet that objective? And you know, when I think of the journey that a marketing function goes to, or what kind of marketing does a company need as they go from seed to scale to public listing and beyond, I think of like four or five stages. The first one, when you're just starting the company, I call that the growth hustle stage, you have a really small marketing team, maybe three or four people, we're working extremely closely with a product team, who are broadly generalists looking to dabble with everything in marketing, across content, to brand to digital, etc, with the primary focus of driving customer acquisition, right, and with the primary goal of a certain product market fit. So that is a very, very small, nimble team of generalists who are doing that. But as the company grows, and you start seeing some kind of product market fit, and you start seeing early signs of growth, you get into the zone, okay, defining who you are, what your product is about what your value proposition is, and what your distinction is. So you move from, like, customer acquisition focused marketing, to more of a product marketing mindset, where you're trying to figure out what's the right go to market strategy? And what's the optimal positioning for you to pursue to be successful to get you to the next stage of growth? But once you go beyond the stage to do less, did you do that? You want to accelerate growth, right? And that's when you start scaling and specializing. And that's the, that's the third phase that I think so if you've got your product market fit, right, if you've got your positioning, and messaging, right, that can drive success for you in that market segment. The next thing you do is okay, how do I create a repeatable, scalable playbook that can accelerate growth for the company, and that's when you start specializing your teams. So you move from hiring generalists to actually building a team of super specialists across all of these functions I just spoke about, especially in a b2b context, be it growth marketing, digital field partner, and so on and so forth. And once you establish that team, you orchestrated, well aligned cohesive, go to market strategies, and learn what is it that works for the company to be able to drive repeatable, scalable growth, and that's typically the time when companies go from say $100 million to a $500 million and beyond. Now beyond That stage typically companies want and they exert, they typically go through a public listing or they get acquired by a larger company, whatever. Let's say they continue to continue their journey as a public company. Then once you have a repeatable playbook, you start start realizing the value of branding and brand marketing at that point in time, because when you get into a market that's highly commoditized, with very few differentiated offerings, the strength of the brand is what begins to drive additional incremental growth for the company. So at that point in time, you're beginning to focus on Okay, who are we as a brand? What is the differentiation between us and our competitors? And what is that intangible value that our customers and prospects get by signing up for us versus someone else. So as you can see, the nature of marketing, the goal of marketing, and the type of people that you need in your team to deliver that goal vastly differs, depending on which stage of growth era, and once say you, you've established a great brand, and you have cracked the code on customer acquisition, that's when you move into, you know, the next phase, which to me is a utopian stage, because no company should get complacent about hitting that stage, which is customer lifestyle, lifetime value maximization. So you move your muscles from predominantly focusing on customer acquisition, to actually building communities driving, cross sell, and upsell programs, and maximizing lifetime value from existing customers. And that requires a different set of skills, a different set of programs, etc, etc.

Ben Kaplan  16:30  

At top, my global marketing agency, our entire reason for existence is to combine left brain analytical thinking with right brain storytelling. We're primary market researchers, we also find creative ways to communicate and express the insights from that research. Can you search for these traits based on geographic regions in the world? Can you combine teams from multiple geographies? To have the total team package? A room says yes. You listen to where the company is at Are you able to adapt and change? And to my earlier question, I said, you know, is your focus 1/3 To the left 1/3 To the center? 1/3 To the right, or is what you're saying? Is that like, I just need to listen to the company and I need to figure out, do I need to look like up to the left? Or do I need to focus down to the right, and that's what you laser on until you get to the next phase,

Arun Pattabhiranman  17:23  

I tell you what my background equips me with skills. And I'll tell you where I like to operate, I have a bit of a unique background, I grew up in India, my mom is a musician, my dad is an artist, and a poet. And, you know, I kind of inherited a lot of those. And, you know, I, I was extremely interested in art I, I sketch, I paint, I write a bunch of things. So that fuels the creative side of my personality. But I'm also an engineer, I'm also someone who is extremely analytical. So I always try to strike the right balance between which side of my brain, I need to flex for the role. But if you ask me my personal preference, I think to be truly successful as a CMO in today's environment, you need to be not just a brand enabler, but a strategic driver of growth. And for that, it's not about being the performance marketer, the growth marketer, you need to understand the mechanics of poker market strategy. And you need to be able to operate as a strategic global market orchestrator across all customer facing functions. So oftentimes, all of the CMO is not just to say I bring in leads to drive growth, but also to really figure out, you know, which market to go after, Who's your ideal customer profile? How do you set up the right missionary between sales SDRs marketing and customer success in order to deliver the go to market objective for the company. So for me, my preference and my passion is about transforming marketing functions from being a brand enabler to a strategic driver of growth. And that's what I prefer to operate, but not to happen on equips me to be to to operate on the creative side, or on the growth side, depending on what situation demand speed, if that makes sense.

Ben Kaplan  19:05  

You outlined different stages and from more generalists to more customer acquisition that you end up in a more like higher level branding, other things, do you think? Is that something very specific to a b2b SaaS company? Or do you think it has broader applications? I know there's gonna be listeners listening here who would say, probably at an early stage, they probably do the opposite, which is their brand very focused, because that brand, that differentiation, and having a unique positioning is everything to them, and they cannot acquire customers without it. And they have to do that first. And then other things flow from that as they try to scale or do you think more people ought to think about it in this way and say, Hey, even if you are a consumer, SAS, a software company, or just a consumer company, you got to get these things like product market fit and customer acquisition, right and wait on brand. What do you think is true? I know some people would push back on that you raise

Arun Pattabhiranman  19:59  

a variable valid point and I have worked across both b2b and b2c brands. And, you know, if you look at my background in anterolateral was a b2c brand. Disney Plus is a b2c brand. My experience tells me that the framework would apply equally to both b2b and b2c one. Because even in b2c, if you don't have initial validation of your product market fit, there is no point in enlisting on brand. And sometimes an understanding of where your product market fit is, is what guides your thinking on who you are as a brand. Right. So to jumping the gun on building a great brand with pretty logos and pretty websites, and cool campaigns or graders often goes against the grain of what are you building and for whom, and whether what you've built really works for that end consumer that you're targeting. So for me, I personally feel that you can equally apply this framework for both b2b and b2c. I also think that irrespective of whether you're in b2b or b2c, you're ultimately marketing tools, human beings, right. Some of them happen to be decision makers for purchasing tools and inside companies, and some of them happen to be, you know, just buying your products and consuming them directly off the shelf. But unless you're able to appeal to the end audience, and treat them as students and July's the experience, either through your campaigns or your interactions, I think any other strategy was is going to fall flat. So I have successfully applied the same framework in both b2b and b2c contexts. And I also think I can make the lines between b2b and b2c uploading, especially with the consumerization of internet and the consumerization of SAS. Because if you really look at it, people are getting on SAS platforms, which are $10 per month, which is akin to a Netflix subscription, it is high velocity, high volume, easy access to product. So I think these philosophies and approaches can equally apply to both b2b and b2c. But one of

Ben Kaplan  21:55  

the things about scaling up and thinking about that is that you have to have measurement. And accountability is different from responsibility. And this notion that and marketing teams, if you and me are both accountable for something no one's accountable, because no one knows that the buck stops with them. So how do you think about those stages? And actually building the teams, not just the focus of specialization, but how do you think about organizing teams to excel and get you to the next stage by having the right accountability on the team and in structuring it the right way?

Arun Pattabhiranman  22:29  

You know, the first thing is understanding what is the Northstar metric that you're chasing? Are? What is that Northstar metric that as a marketing function, you're taking accountability for and that varies, like I said, based on the stage of the company, early stage companies really just building the product, maybe you're just helping the product teams, or certain product market fit, getting to a minimum viable product, I didn't find those bigger customers, blah, blah, blah. But as you get to a real scale, right, you depending on the type of company, and whether you're a large enterprise focused company, or SMB and mid market focused company with a pretty large inbound motion, you have to understand what is that one metric that you can definitely influence and impact? And how does that align to the growth process for the company. And I think for a lot of b2b marketers, they live and die by pipeline. And often times when they think of pipeline, they think of marketing source pipeline. And I think that's a big problem. Because when you're looking at everything that you do as a marketing function, you're creating demand, you're caption demand, you're driving sales enablement, and you're focused on customer engagement, which also drives loyalty. So I think understanding that you're accountable for key metrics that impact every stage of the customer lifecycle was just spinning the top of the funnel with a bunch of leads for sales to act on. I think that's the first mindset change that is required for teams in the scale of stage. And when you start thinking about doing that, which is influencing every stage of the customer lifecycle, you begin to think about how to organize your teams around those customer status, right, from awareness to acquisition to retention, and loyalty and advocacy, right. So every team can hold themselves accountable for a KPI on each of these different stages of the customer lifecycle, and that drives more accountability and meaningful impact to the business.

Ben Kaplan  24:30  

Here's the thing about scaling a company that a lot of people miss. What makes you great at one stage of the company can be the very thing that limits your growth at another stage. For instance, having a marketing team that is very flexible and can do it all is very helpful when a company is in its formative years. But as a company grows, you need more specialists and specialized marketing expertise, which specifically means people who don't do it all and managers who can bring out the best In those specialists

would you rather hire for your team, a superstar? Who does things their own way? They're very high performing, but it's hard to replicate. It's because it's really individual talent that's driving things, or would you rather have hire someone that is not the superstar, but fills a very specific role that is repeatable, that is scalable, that can be part of a process that is more predictable, like the stages, you said, what should companies aspire for on their marketing teams?

Arun Pattabhiranman  25:35  

That's a great question. For me, I mean, if I were to distill my own leadership style, I often say that my style of leadership is to think of my team, not as my army of soldiers, but my council of ministers, right. By that I mean that you need to have subject matter expertise, each of these domains of marketing that we spoke about, but having the ability to work, cross functionally, and have the right cultural assortment, in order for that repeatable process that we established as a team to scale beyond that says, so I definitely feel especially if you have to be accountable for broad, and given that each of these different disciplines within marketing is a vast area. And it says you need to be at least in the scale of stage, you need to be able to find people who have the depth of expertise and knowledge. But more importantly, are able to work well with each other. So for me, it's about having the depth of expertise, and having the ability to collaborate and understanding that no individual is bigger than that diademed Or the entire organization. So for me cultural fitment and subject matter expertise. And the combination of that is a book. Right? And to your question, specific question, if there is a rock star who can do things uniquely, but is not scalable and replicable beyond themselves, that is not something that is that you would look for when you're looking to drive hyper growth, because you need repeatability. And you need predictability in what you can drive. And tomorrow, if you're over indexed on one individual who's driving that, because they bring in some unique talent, it's not repeatable, and it will, it will fall apart. But knowing how to tap into something unique talent like that, and leverage them meaningfully, in the right context can actually help add an additional layer of roads for company because that can become a differentiator, right? For as long as you're able to retain that data, right. But the more important thing for me is to establish a foundation that is based on having the right skill set with the requisite level of expertise in that area, and being able to create a team culture that is making that missionary work well. Together.

Ben Kaplan  27:47  

How do you think about hiring for marketing teams based on the team culture and working? Well? What do you look for? Is it just someone who seems to speak well and communicate well? Or how do you find the introvert who's going to be a great team player, even though they're not necessarily like the person in the interview at the whiz bang? How do you build and hire for team culture,

Arun Pattabhiranman  28:06  

the kind of people that I try to definitely read out in an interview process, or later on when they actually come on board is the group of folks that I would call green jerks. They are super smart, they are high performers, but they're extremely toxic, and people can't work with them, right. And offer banks, it's very hard to ascertain that right at the interview stage, you do get references some of those references, I always think that the interview process can only give you 50% certainty around whom you are bringing into the tea. And to be fair to the other individual, that they might actually tie you really well in a different kind of an environment. But in an environment where there is so much cross cultural collaboration and so much coordination that is required, they might actually fail. So you need to be able to strike the right balance between having subject matter expertise, and also know how to work with others meaningfully. And I do not necessarily think that someone who is an extrovert is more suited in marketing, I think for especially for a lot of the roles that I I spoke about, be it analytics, marketing, technology, operations, performance marketing, you actually need people who work like engineers who can actually go deep and find some mindspace and deliver on their goals and go deep into the space need not necessarily have to always be talking in large for it. So and we have to be able to create a safe space for different kinds of people to be able to come together and create a diverse team diversity matters a lot in creating the right environment. But I think what is important to have as a leader is clarity around the non negotiables for me that non negotiable is two things like do you bring the requisite level of expertise for that function, an area that you operate in? And secondly, do people enjoy working with you? Right, and that you only know sometimes after you've made the hire so I think those two things are my guiding beacons by Look, the high talent, the mighty.

Ben Kaplan  30:04  

A totally underrated quality in marketing and in business more generally, is enthusiasm. Do you have high engagement? Do you get excited? Is that excitement contagious? Because if you do, people tend to like working with you. And like the basketball player who may not score a lot on his own, but makes everyone else around him better. Your enthusiasm, especially a CMO can level up the entire team. So do people enjoy working with you? And how can you surround yourself with more people you'd really enjoy working with? Because a rune is in the customer happiness business. Now, he treats this question quite seriously. You've been at companies that have used AI or artificial intelligence in various ways that might be something relatively simple, like when's the best time to post the social media content? That could be something more complex than that? How do you think that things are changing now with the rise of Chad GPT? And other people talking about it, people kind of being like, I knew I was cool. But I didn't realize it could do that. How do you think that role plays? And just looking to the future of marketing from someone who's been involved in AI? Where's this all going for us? And where do you think we'll be in five years as marketers,

Arun Pattabhiranman  31:22  

there are major transition points in the ecosystem that disrupt the journey of a marketer? Right? I think the first juncture of disruption was when there was a massive explosion of channels across because consumers were engaging. And that happened with the social media revolution, when Facebook, great Tiktok, WhatsApp, and all these native social media platforms as profit. And that time, marketers were adjusting and calibrating their skills to understand how to engage with consumers across these important channels. Now, once that happened, when consumers actually started engaging on these numerous model channels, then what happened was, there was a proliferation of data that was getting created and shared by these consumers on these platforms. So marketers had to recalibrate and understand how to leverage the wealth of data that was available on these numerous channels and use that intelligence using AI to self engage with those consumers better, right? You get a simple example of understanding, leveraging AI to figure out what's the right time to post a social media post. But there are companies that are and there are marketers using AI in foreign more powerful ways. For instance, I can tell you that there was a European insurance company that we work with that sometime during last year during the Ukrainian war, picked up a huge negative sentiment on social media using AI. And suddenly the natural colony for us, there was huge negative chatter happening about that ran, and they got an early alert about that using the sprinkler platform. And what they went, what they discovered in that process was that the chatter was largely about their brand logo resembling the Russian army, right. And that was possible because the AI platform was able to use image recognition to kind of figure out that this was what was causing the negative chatter, and quickly the the brand turned around, and within 24 hours, they executed a complete rebranding strategy and changed the law. And then they had to bring things back on track. So from learning how to engage with consumers on modern channels, to being able to leverage AI and data that is getting created on all of these platforms, we are now moving into a new era where AI is helping marketers do their job. Right. And that means that AI is helping can potentially which rgpd help marketers become far more productive, in find Constantine to market and come up with campaigns be content for social media or content for website pages and whatnot. Now, what is also forces this one, obviously, there is a huge opportunity for productivity and marketing to go up by leveraging these new tools and AI. But also marketers need to step back and think about what's that unique skill that they need to burn out, they embrace this disruption that is shaping the market, right? So there is a lot of chatter happening about can AI really be as creative as human beings? Are we losing the human touch, etc. So I think the next generation of marketers are going to be marketers who are who build this fence around learning how to leverage AI to do the work and to market and engage with consumers. I think that's the phase that we are moving in. And I feel that's a welcome change because you do want to ensure that you leverage technology to be able to use it to a brand's advantage to get to market faster and to do things more profitably and more creatively. At the same time. It also allows the marketer to take a step back and print real skills and leveraging these tools of platforms to become better marketers.

Ben Kaplan  35:03  

And like any big shift in technology or other resources, it allows you to amplify to a great extent, whether that's through productivity or the things, what you can do what you can accomplish, it makes, instead of the ladder climbing up the wall, it's stairs. It's an escalator. It's a speed elevator, but you still got to make sure that everything's up against the right wall. And that becomes the skill that all these things to amplify. But it still only amplifies that core insight as well. So the final question I just say is, for those who aspire to your kind of courage directory in your role, and maybe could be a CMO, maybe in this global world now, from an unexpected place somewhere else in the world, what would be your recommendation for the future CMOS who want to be sitting in your chair in the next five years, and what would be your recommendation wherever in the world they may be?

Arun Pattabhiranman  35:52  

I think the first thing of the first piece of advice that I would give you is reflect upon who you truly are, and know what your strengths three, I think it's important to know what kind of a marketer you are right and there is the left brain marketer, that is the right brain marketer, the discipline of marketing is exploding, knowing where you have spent and intentionally spending time in building your strengths at that area for whatever period of time results in disproportionate benefits in your career downstream. So be self aware, knowing what your strengths are great your strengths, and invest in yourself to be able to build and strengthen those skills over a period of time. That is number one, I would say the second thing I would say is stay on top of what's changing in the market, right. Today. It's Chad's DVD tomorrow with something else as a marketer, if you're not able to understand what shows are shaping marketing, and how that would have an impact on the way you would run your marketing and engage with your audience, you're not going to be in a good position. So always stay in top on top of trends. And the third I would say is more from a personal standpoint, stay longer and stay humble. And I think in marketing, oftentimes, because you have to collaborate across different geographies, different kinds of people, you have to be able to build cultural empathy when you are especially in a global role and learn how to respect and work with people across different cultures, different geographies. And I think that's an invaluable skill that is required as you're actually growing UK. And personally, for me, that's something that I have a lot of learnings over the last 510 years or 15 years of my career. So those are three things I would say that could potentially and the last one is probably just hope that you're lucky because I had a ton of that based.

Ben Kaplan  37:40  

According to a rune pot to be ramen, he's got to have a different go to market strategy depending on where you are in your company's lifecycle. Plus, you need to build your marketing team differently for each stage of growth. Early on, you're in the hustle phase, driving customer acquisition and finding product market fit with a team of marketing generalists, then move to product marketing mindset, think positioning, and messaging to accelerate growth. You've then got to scale and specialize the goal. Create a repeatable and scalable marketing playbook that leverages super specialists, then start to unlock the value of your brand to drive incremental growth. Are you done yet? A rule says you can unlock the value of your existing customers with marketing that helps you grow even further. Sure, it's easier said than done. But you can start by viewing your team not as an army of soldiers, but rather as a council of ministers. For top cmo on Ben Kaplan

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