Journey to IPO: Driving Revenue for a Fast-Growing Big Data Pioneer with Suku Krishnaraj, CMO of Sumo Logic

Pipeline Visionaries

This episode features an interview with Suku Krishnaraj, CMO of Sumo Logic. Suku is a seasoned senior executive with extensive experience scaling growth at companies like AppFog, HP, CenturyLink, and SolarWinds.

On this episode, Suku explains his strategy for driving revenue for the Machine Data Analytics pioneer that went public earlier this year, why the CMO’s primary job is to solve problems, how to never lose sight of marketing’s role in driving revenue, and the importance of having empathy for your customers.

Key Takeaways

• The CMO’s job is to drive revenue. Never lose sight of that fact. Keep your eyes on the ball and don't get caught up in vanity metrics
• Buyers are all at a different stage. You have to educate and nurture them through their journey by looking at the entire customer life cycle. That means a complete end-to-end mapping that bridges your sales and marketing teams
• Have empathy for your customers. Think of the buyer’s journey, and try and fix their experience with consistent messaging and a consistent experience, and your results will be there in the long run

Quotes

• “The CMO’s job at the end of the day is to solve problems…Demand gen is one of those things, but I really think of my role as growth. I partner with the CRO and our chief customer officer to drive growth in respect to two things: How do we acquire net new logos–net new customers at scale–and how do we continue to market to our existing install base.”
• “Marketing is, if not to drive revenue, I don't know what it is. Ultimately it's about closed-won revenue.”
• “I think one of the things that a lot of marketers miss is that ultimately the folks that are going to win understand how to drive empathy, emotions, and have a lot of care for the folks that you're trying to market to. What is it that they want? You're going to win if you deeply understand what they care about, what they do, and if you show a lot of empathy.”
• “Our job as CMOs is to drive revenue. Never lose sight of that fact. Don't go for vanity metrics. Keep your eyes on the ball with revenue, which is the hardest thing to do for a lot of CMOs, but do that with the help of your counterpart in sales.”
• “For any playbook, you have to adapt it to your situation. And the only way to do that is fail often, fail fast. I have several weekly meetings with different groups in the team and they know they have to give me bad news at the beginning. If they're not failing, it's a red flag for me.”

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