On this episode of Marketing Art and Science, I am joined by Infinidat’s CMO, Eric Herzog, for a lively conversation on marketing and business as a team sport, the symbiotic value of a strong sales-marketing relationship, and what Eric believes is the true art of marketing.
Their discussion covers:
- An introduction to charismatic CMO Eric Herzog and how marketing is enabling Infinidat’s mission to become the standard in enterprise storage
- How Eric’s integrated marketing organization fits in to Infinidat’s corporate strategy
- How the Infinidat customer journey progresses through its MarTech stack
- The criticality of having purpose when leveraging AI
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Lisa Martin: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Marketing: Art and Science. I’m Lisa Martin, CMO advisor, show host, and tech correspondent. Today we have a great episode for you. We’re going to be learning about Infinidat from its CMO, what it’s doing to really become the standard in enterprise storage leveraging its MarTech stack. My guest is, there’s no one quite like him. You see his Hawaiian shirt there. He’s been known as “Zoginstor” for over 20 years. He’s as charismatic, he’s as creative and brilliant as is the Hawaiian shirts he’s been wearing for business, like today, for the last 20 years. He has, get this, an MA in Chinese history. Amazing. But really Eric is a product management guy that learned marketing. He’s not only that, he’s a four-time CRO, a multi-time award-winning CMO, he’s our guest on the show today. Eric, it’s great to have you. Thank you so much for joining me.
Eric Herzog: Great, Lisa. Well, thanks again for inviting me and can’t wait.
Lisa Martin: Yeah. Guys, Eric and I are going to be covering four topics in the next half an hour or so. We’re going to be talking about Eric. We’re going to learn more about that background that I mentioned from the MA in Chinese history to being a product guy that learned marketing and chief revenue officer winning awards. We’ll learn about Infinidat. We’ll then dig into its MarTech stack, what it’s doing there, how it’s really leveraging marketing technology, especially we’re going to pivot into the sales and marketing relationship, which Eric is great at given this background. We’ll then talk about emerging tech. What’s going on there at Infinidat? What does Eric see on the horizon? Then we’ll lead with our failure to fab segment where we learn a marketing failure that Eric and team were able to turn into a fabulous marketing success. All right, Eric, with that said tell our audience a little bit about you. You went from product management guy to marketing multi-time CMO. How’d you do that?
Eric Herzog: Well, started as a product management guy in the storage space. I’ve been doing it since the mid-’80s when most of the viewers probably weren’t even born yet, started in the storage industry back then. I’ve done everything in the storage industry, not just the product management side, the marketing side, VP of sales, I’ve even been an acting CFO for a year at a storage startup that raised money. I’ve been a VP of HR three times and I’ve been the VP of manufacturing for storage system companies four times.
My breadth is really more GM-y than it is specific to being a CMO, but I started as a product manager doing pricing, forecasting, feature specifications, the technical expert for a storage system company back in 1986. I was doing that in fact in most of the jobs. I’ve done eight startups. In seven of the eight startups, I not only was doing the marketing function but I was the VP of product management and ran product management, strategy, technical marketing, channel marketing, strategic marketing, digital marketing, product marketing, channel when there was a channel. I’ve done that for a long, long time. The background even at the big companies, I’ve been at four Fortune 500 storage companies, and at all of them I was the VP of product management and the CMO or the VP of product.
For example, I was at EMC, I was senior VP of product management/product marketing and the product lines I ran carried 10.5 billion of EMC’s revenue at the time back in the early 2010s, so 2010 to 2014. That’s my background. Started on the product side and then moved into the marketing side and, quite honestly, really did both jobs originally. Only twice have I been a CMO only. Actually only once, which is now. Even my last job where I was the CMO of the IBM storage division, I was also vice president global channel sales so I had two jobs. This is really the only time I’m just the CMO.
Lisa Martin: Got it. I love that, the breadth of your background. I met you back in the EMC days. I want to say it’s over 10 years that I’ve known you and we’ve had the chance to collaborate on great projects. Let’s talk a little bit about Infinidat. You mentioned you’ve got really a general management kind of background across HR, finance, sales, marketing, and product. What drew you to Infinidat? Talk a little bit about its mission to really become the standard in enterprise storage and how marketing is a facilitator.
Eric Herzog: Sure. Our focus is in the enterprise. The bulk of our customers are the global Fortune 2000. We also do very, very well in the service provider space. We provide that solid storage infrastructure for them to do backup as a service, storage as a service, database as a service, and of course they’re competing against Amazon, Microsoft, and Google so we sell to these small and medium cloud providers and then the rest are really the global Fortune 2000. In fact, of the Fortune 50, 25% of them are customers of Infinidat even though we’re a sub-billion dollar company. Our focus is really delivering high-end features that are needed for 24/7 operation, very intense focus on cyber storage resiliency. In fact, we’ve won 17 awards for our cyber storage technology.
Lisa Martin: Then how does marketing fit into the overall corporate strategy, which is obviously to be highly competitive with those big guys?
Eric Herzog: Well, we’ve got a small marketing budget but we absolutely punch above our weight. We focus on having an integrated marketing approach. Several companies, marketing A) is not part of the company. They’re off doing their thing and running advertising, think it’s cool when their ad’s on TV. We’re all about delivering top of funnel, helping deal progression, what does it take to get our partners fired up. For example, next week I am doing a channel partner enablement. I did one this past Monday. In a couple weeks, we’re going to do a global partner recruitment event.
We have a big launch coming in May and so I’m the keynote speaker for our channel partner prebriefing, so it’s making sure that marketing is part of the entire mix of the company. We meet with sales every week, sales leadership, and I meet with the CRO and a bunch of his VPs every week one-on-one independent of that meeting. We meet with product management every week. My approach given my background of being a CRO before running product management before is that it’s a team. The thing that some marketing people don’t get, business is a team sport.
Lisa Martin: Yeah.
Eric Herzog: Business is a team sport. It’s very much like American football. I know there’s probably some viewers who are not from the US, but it’s American football. You have the offense and defense, they have to work together. On the defensive side, there’s multiple subteams. On the offensive side, there’s multiple subteams. If they don’t work together, you don’t win the game, but sometimes marketeers… If they got the fluff ad, that’s great. If they win some sort of thing from one of the big ad magazines, they think that’s cool. That’s not what salespeople care about.
Salespeople care about the right amount of air cover, they care about being able to drive them top of funnel leads and then helping them progress deals down through the funnel to a close. That doesn’t happen all the time, but marketing’s job is to help sales sell and I tell my team that all the time. Because I used to be an athlete… I’m short, fat, old guy now, but I used to be an Olympic class wrestler and an all-star baseball player on the high school side. It is all about getting on the mat or getting on the field every single day, so one of my mottos I’ve used actually multiple times is “raise the bar.” Their number one thing is to beat what they did themselves.
Lisa Martin: Yeah. Raise the bar.
Eric Herzog: Swim faster, run farther, win more matches, go over the higher bar, throw that, when you’re throwing the javelin throw it farther. It doesn’t matter what the coach says, what their family says, what the citizens say, what the fans say. They are there to win and they need to raise the bar every day, and that’s the way world-class athletes behave.
Lisa Martin: Love it.
Eric Herzog: I believe that since business is a team sport, you are out to win the Super Bowl, you’re out to win the World Cup, you’re out to win the World Series, you’re out to win Olympic gold medal every damn day. If you don’t run your company that way, you won’t be successful.
Lisa Martin: I love that. Speaking of raising the bar, last question in this intro section is a favorite customer story of Infinidat’s where you guys, marketing and sales, came together, you raised the bar, you won the Super Bowl, that Stanley Cup, for example. What’s your favorite story that you really think shines a value on just what you said Infinidat is known for?
Eric Herzog: Yeah. We have, well, now a large customer. At the time, they were a large prospect. They came in through one of our webinars on cyber storage resiliency. When the account team… The account team had a first meeting on their own. We have a sales development representative team so they called in, they got a meeting set up, then the sales guy sent me an email after the sales… So the sales development rep phone call, then a physical face-to-face with the sales team. Then they called me up and said, “Hey, the guy’s all over cyber. Can you present for a half an hour on cyber storage resiliency, recovery using Infinidat technology?” I did.
In fact, last Friday I was at a $35 billion US customer. They’re actually in Sweden, but they’re 35 billion US dollars in revenue and I was presenting on some products that are going to be announced on May 22nd. The sales team asked me to come out, so that’s sales and marketing working together. They came to our webinar that we put on. That then got transmissioned in the sales team with the sales development rep who then was able to get a meeting, et cetera. That’s what we do, and we do it with the channel all the time. Last week I was the keynote speaker at our EMEA channel partner summit. It’s all about working together in everything you do, whether it be on the digital marketing side, the channel marketing side, the product marketing side.
For example, I’ve got two guys that do nothing but do competitive analysis of the other guys. “Why are we better? Why should we win? What’s red, green, yellow? If we’re yellow, what do we have to make our screen if we’re green? If someone else is yellow, why are they yellow? Because to me yellow means they have it, but they’re not as good as us.” So yes, they are in Chinese history, which I used to teach at the University of California, Davis, they’re in Chinese history, but they’re getting a B and Infinidat is an A student, they’re a B student. Great. Why are they a B? You’re not going to say they’re not taking Chinese history because that would be a lie, so you have your feature list and we say, “They’re in the Chinese history class too, but you know what? They’re only a B student. Infinidat is an A student.”
Lisa Martin: I love that. It’s an A student. Let’s dig into our second topic now, which is the MarTech stack. I want to really probe on… Because you and I have talked before about the importance of the sales marketing relationship. You started to dig into that. I want to unpack that even more.
Eric Herzog: Sure.
Lisa Martin: Talk about the MarTech stack that you’ve deployed at Infinidat and how is it enabling opportunities that marketing is helping sales to win and close?
Eric Herzog: Sure. We use a couple different things. We use Marketo obviously as our main package, we use 6sense, we have a deal with TechTarget who actually OEMs from someone else, some stuff that allows us to look at intent data, what they have installed, what size they are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We make sure that we leverage that stack A) to create top of funnel, whether that be anything from sending an email out before the webinar or before we go to a trade show, then following up, sending a thank you note, making sure all that data gets transferred into Salesforce.com so they can see what the marketing team has done, and then collaborating that way using the MarTech stack to create either A) top of funnel and B) progression so we know who’s seen a webinar, who’s had sales calls, if it’s marked in Salesforce.com with their hot button.
Lisa Martin: I love that. That’s fantastic. Talk a little bit about now leveraging MarTech to create the personas that you’re going after and how influential, I imagine quite, is sales in the development of those personas.
Eric Herzog: Actually we created the personas together independent of the MarTech stack, so what’s the ideal customer profile? What type company? What are the job titles? They sent to me the list, so my team and the sales directors got together, came up with, “Here’s what it is.” Then I expanded it and included not only decision-makers, but decision influencers which they didn’t have. I went up and down the totem pole when you’re in large companies, of course. When you’re a small company… At Herzog’s Bar and Grill, it’s Herzog. He makes the call, all right?
Lisa Martin: Yes, yes.
Eric Herzog: At Lisa’s Cigar Store, Lisa makes the call. But when you’re in a global-
Lisa Martin: How did you know I have one of those?
Eric Herzog: When you’re in a global Fortune 500, all kinds of people are involved. Let’s take something simple. We have an outstanding solution for the container world, Kubernetes, Red Hat. We’ve won awards for that. In fact, a couple of weeks ago at KubeCon in Europe we presented in the Red Hat booth. They had us come in and do a guest session right in the booth. That said, you’ve got to translate that across everything. That’s in the data sheets, that’s in the training we do with the channel partners, that’s in the materials we do for our sales teams, it’s in our competitive analysis materials, we put it on the website and we make sure that we wrap all this together in a common message that can be leveraged by the sales team. Of course, we use the channel for about 80% of our revenue so we want to make sure the channel partners can sound like they work for Infinidat even though they work for one of our partners, but they need to sound like we do and pair up the same message we do and be consistent in message and voice and emphasis. We make sure that we do that not only with our own sales teams, but with our global channel partner community as well.
Lisa Martin: Right, because it sounds like you’ve built a great partner ecosystem there. You mentioned about 80% of Infinidat’s revenue coming from the channel, so the 80/20 rule. Speaking of the 80/20 rule, how are you using data, data science, the MarTech stack, to identify the top 20% of the content that contributes to 80% of the pipeline?
Eric Herzog: A) we’re constantly looking at what’s being downloaded, what’s being used by the sales team. We use a technology called Highspot, which is where the content repository is for the sales teams. We can see what’s being downloaded, what PowerPoints, what white papers, what solution briefs. Obviously on our website we can see that from a generic perspective from the end user side, but that also could be a partner, it could be an employee. Then we also have a partner portal, and so the partners register to get in, they get the content. We just won an award last week.
Lisa Martin: Congratulations.
Eric Herzog: On Monday. It was from Computer Reseller News, now called CRN, The Channel Company, and it was a channel award for our channel partner program. So what did we do? One, we did a press release. Two, we added it to our awards deck, and our awards deck gets used in all our channel presentations but also in our customer presentations. We put it on social media, so we’ve been social media. In fact, I social media today. We did the press release on Tuesday, I social media today, and I’ve had 5000 views on Zoginstor’s LinkedIn, just me, but Infinidat also did that. It happens to be we do every other week a sales newsletter, internal.
Guess what? It’s in the sales newsletter that we won this award. Here’s the link to the press release. Next Wednesday will be our monthly channel partner and service provider newsletter, and guess what? It’s in there too with a link to it. So, it’s all about working together as a team. Again, too much marketing I’ve seen is, “Oh, we got great ads.” Okay, great. Does anyone care? “Oh, we won two awards.” Did you tell anybody you won those awards? Did you do a press release? Did you tell your channel? Did you tell your own sales guys, for goodness’ sake? They don’t because it is very functionally siloed.
Lisa Martin: Siloed. Yeah.
Eric Herzog: That’s even worse when it’s a big company. Then on top of that, marketing is often viewed as its own functional silo in certain companies and that’s not the way it should be. I call it the trimese triplets. Sales, marketing, and product management needs to be joined at the hip as if it was the trimese triplets. If you don’t walk together, you don’t work together, you will not win.
Lisa Martin: It sounds to me like what you’re describing is truly like a world-class definition of integrated marketing that a lot of people try to do, but to your point, there ends up being a lot of silos, especially in larger organizations. I love that everything… What you’re delivering is a consistent voice internally, externally through the channel to customers. Talk a little bit about how the MarTech stack drives that typical customer experience that seems to be very highly integrated and very scientific.
Eric Herzog: Well, we make sure that we use the MarTech stack for everything that we do. It’s integrated on the social side, it’s integrated to our seminars, our webinars, our trade shows. We’re constantly notifying the field, we’re constantly notifying the partners, we’re notifying the installed base of course through the end users. We sometimes integrate third-party lists with Six Sense and the TechTarget tool that allows us to look at intent to buy, who’s got what, again mostly in the Fortune 2000, so we target that. We know what the titles are. There’s like 42 between decision-makers, decision. Remember, you have to look at multiple. Let’s take easy one. You have a storage admin. Doesn’t control the budget.
Then you have the storage manager, and talking now like a global enterprise. You have a storage manager. You probably have a director of storage. You then usually have a VP of Infrastructure who has server, storage, and networking. Then you may have a senior VP, maybe you don’t, and if not you have at least the CIO. Because cybersecurity is such a big deal, how does the whole security infrastructure sit? The CSO and the director of security and the security admin. By the way, since storage works across all these applications you’re never going to get a win on an Oracle or SAP workload unless the Oracle and SAP admins agree that it’s the right performance or the right availability for the workloads that they need to deliver to the business.
You have this very complex sales cycle in the large enterprise. We make sure that we target that. If we know that there’s an intent to buy at Lisa Martin 50 billion dollar cigar company, then we make sure we target the CIO where appropriate, the storage admin where appropriate, the VMware admin, the container guy, whoever’s appropriate based on what we’re trying to position. We make sure we leverage the MarTech stack to invite them to our webinar on why we’re great for containers, Kubernetes, and Red Hat, which we did a month ago. We had… We’re a small company, so we don’t have the big budget of many other players that we compete with, and we have 350 people registered globally.
Lisa Martin: Nice.
Eric Herzog: We did one on cybersecurity in February and we had 550 people register for that, and that doesn’t count our employees.
Lisa Martin: Nice. That’s a hot topic. Yeah.
Eric Herzog: I always pull out Infinidatians, as I love to call us. We’re all Infinidatians. They always get pulled out of any numbers that we talk about, so these are mostly end users and we divide that into existing customers, prospects, and then of course the channel divided into channel partners and then the distributors who usually sell to the channel partners. We have a very sophisticated way of dividing all this stuff up and we leverage the MarTech stack to help do all of that and target the right people with the right message at the right time.
Lisa Martin: It’s all about the right message with the right people at the right time. Relevancy, personalization. I love that, and your vision is so crystal clear and so integrated. Last question in the MarTech kind of in action section is, walk me through a typical experience and how the MarTech stack is really facilitating me going from a prospect to an advocate.
Eric Herzog: Sure. We make sure we leverage the MarTech stack. It starts, they come in through the webinar or they come to a seminar, so A) We make sure that the sales developer upsell. We also make sure we send them a nice thank you note after, so couple days after. They saw it. First of all, they sign up. Then they get a note, “Don’t forget.” Again, leveraging the MarTech stack. Then they come see it. Then we send them a thank you note. That passes to the sales development reps. We also may do other digital campaigns around cybersecurity, so we would make sure we target them and send them the white paper, whatever we’re doing, or the content syndication. We make sure that we follow that up. Then when we’re moving into the funnel cycle, again if we’re going to go to a trade show…
For, say, give you an example, last year I did a trade show in Germany and I did a presentation on cyber storage resilience for the service provider community. That was the presentation I did at a trade show. Guess what? It happened to be in Germany. Anybody who was in the cyberspace, even if they weren’t at a cloud provider, they got a note, “Come see Eric Herzog present at the XYZ cloud service provider program, wherever it was, in Germany at 2:00… Well, 14:00 on March 22nd or whatever date it was and see.” Now there are people who signed up, there are people who showed up, there are people who were already going to the show.
We made sure we leveraged that from the MarTech stack. If someone was already in the funnel and they were near that trade show, we would’ve sent them a note about, “Come see me present.” Even though they were already in the funnel because we would’ve known through the MarTech stack they already had originally come in because they saw a cybersecurity webinar three months ago or four months ago so that we’re talking about that topic made sense or if we’re doing content syndication on a cybersecurity centric white paper, so we’d integrate that as well. That’s how we make sure that everything works together, everything is cross-functional, everything designed to either drive top of funnel or try to help with deal progression.
Lisa Martin: Deal progression. It’s all about that. We’ve talked a lot about the science part of marketing with you, the strategic elements. Talk a little bit about now the artistry. What does artistry in marketing mean to you and what are some of the things that you’ve seen that you think, “Wow, that was beautiful?”
Eric Herzog: When people think artistry, they think the graphic design and the cool looking logo or the cool looking ad. I don’t think of that at all. Marketing is a science and an art, and I don’t mean an art like graphic design and great video production. Sure, that’s part of it, but the art is understanding how can you take a technical message and turn it into business advantage.
Lisa Martin: Yes.
Eric Herzog: That is an art. It’s a little bit of science, but it’s an art. I’ve been doing this so long I’m almost 70 years old. I’ve at least presented to a thousand CIOs, at least a thousand, over the years, so I kind of know what matters. Because I’ve been a CRO, I’ve also been in the field. I’ve been a multi-time Computer Reseller News channel chief, so I’m out in the field, and I was the VP of global channels for the IBM storage division as well as the CMO, so I’m out with the channel. If you just sit in your ivory tower, you’re going to be a horrible marketing person. That’s my rule of thumb. In fact, when I was at EMC and at IBM, big companies, we actually tracked how much contact my team had.
My marketing ops guy just ran it in a spreadsheet, so that was our marketing tool, Excel, and so I had it down by title. Anyone who was a manager, senior manager, director, had to be in the field with customers or partners for five days a quarter, not counting trade shows. Trade shows didn’t count. If we went to VMworld or we had Cisco Live or some big trade show, that did not count. They needed to be in the field with the sales team, with customers or customers and partners or partners only five days every quarter, plus they still had to rotate and everyone had to work the shows where appropriate. I tracked that maniacally. They teach you about gathering all that data and that is all great, but if you don’t get out there and talk to people, you’re missing the art of marketing. You’re just looking at pure numbers.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely.
Eric Herzog: If we look at pure numbers, that’s when you screw up. There’s people who thought they’re going to win elections by looking at the numbers and they lost the last three weeks. Why? Because they stop going and talking to the people. You need to talk to your audience. You can’t just talk at them. If all you do is marketing stuff, the data sheets, the white papers, the this, the that, that’s talking at them. Talking with them, which includes at a trade show. I was a Senior VP at EMC, the CMO at IBM. I’ve been a VP of marketing since 1988 I think was my first VP marketing job.
I’m at a show, I’m not sitting there in the room. I’m working a pedestal because when you work a pedestal, who comes up? Customers and partners. Work the pedestal. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t have customer meetings as well. You’ve got the sealed room and you bring customers in there, but you also work the pedestal, you work the front desk, you work, and you… I believe in leading by example, so I don’t believe in ivory tower anything. That means if you’re going to have the art part of marketing in addition to the cool graphics, “I’ve got great stuff because I got this great person, cool videos,” that is all great, but that is just sizzle.
Lisa Martin: Yes. Yes. That’s probably one of the best definitions I’ve heard of marketing art ever. I love how you think about it and the distinction between the science, the art, and the sizzle. You need all of them in different mixtures. But, to your point, that artistry and what you were describing is the relationship-based selling. The relationship’s so incredibly important because most people gravitate towards that. What are you are looking at kind of next in your MarTech stack in terms of emerging technologies? Obviously GenAI, a hot topic.
Eric Herzog: Yeah. The issue is how to use AI effectively.
Lisa Martin: Yeah.
Eric Herzog: Even though I’m a big believer in Terminator and I, Robot and I have legitimate concerns about it, no one thought there was going to be the iPhone. This iPhone is more powerful than probably the first 10 generations of the mainframe in your hand.
Lisa Martin: Yeah. It’s crazy.
Eric Herzog: If you saw someone in 1920 or even 1930, maybe in 1940, and said, “By the way, in 1968 we’re going to have a man on the moon.” They’d say no. I believe that the AI stuff can be very positive, but if it’s not regulated and managed, you need to be very careful using it. If you just let it do its own thing, and there’s a very large public company that just laid off a whole bunch of people in marketing, said they’re going to use GenAI for almost everything, I’m thinking, “Are you guys on drugs?”
Lisa Martin: Yeah, yeah….
Eric Herzog: Illegal drugs, not good drugs that people need, but illegal drugs? You’re freaking nuts if you don’t have someone who knows the technology. It’s a technology company, by the way, so I was just shocked.
Lisa Martin: I saw it too.
Eric Herzog: Who understands the… You can use the gen AI to gather the data. What about patent violations? What about IP violations? Because AI doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t notice that it’s a service mark or a trademark. It doesn’t notice that it’s a registered mark. It doesn’t notice that there’s a patent filed against that thing. It doesn’t know any of that stuff. Use of AI is a very positive thing and is definitely needs to be used, but if it is not managed properly it will give you false data. so you need to protect yourself.
You can use the AI, but if you’re not monitoring it carefully, next thing you’re going to be slammed with 12 lawsuits, and guess what? You’re going to lose because the AI really did steal someone’s IP or violate something and it’s your responsibility as someone doing marketing or selling or any other function in a company. AI’s a valuable tool for market, but it needs to be carefully monitored to make sure that we’re not doing the wrong thing for the company and exposing it to lawsuits or other activities that could be-
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. Right. Potentially catastrophic for business. Yeah. Yeah. Great vision on the kind of responsible use for AI. There’s so much obviously work going on in that, a lot to still flesh out and understand, but your opinions and your passion for responsibility and purposeful use of AI is really clear. Last question for you, in any of your past jobs, and you have the breadth of many people with your own background, but what was a marketing failure, like an initiative, a campaign or something, a deal that went awry that you came in as the marketing chief and with the team were able to turn it into something that was just fantastic for the organization, a big win?
Eric Herzog: This would be more about one of the companies. I went to one of the companies, it’s one of the Fortune 500, and the marketing was all messed up. Nothing was working right. Everything was siloed just within marketing, let alone they weren’t working with sales. One of the people just retired, and on this phone I have eight texts from directors and VPs of Sales because this was the other company and they invited me anyway because the guy used to work for me who was retiring. “When are you coming back? We can’t do anything like we used to do. You sure you don’t want to come back? Hey, there’s a senior level opening. You need to come back.”
That was not because I’m some sort of gold medal winner 27 times. It’s because I get people to work together, make sure that marketing is supporting sales and product management and is not off doing their own thing so that they have a cool ad that doesn’t help anyone sell anything or do anything for them. This was more about not a specific deal, but this was more about an entire organization that was sideways and was not helping anybody. I was brought in essentially as Mr. Fix It and my job was to fix it. The fact that I was on this webinar for the guy’s retirement just two days ago and there’s at least eight texts from VP level sales guys saying, “When are you coming back? We miss you. We wish you were still here.” That’s not a bad thing, but that was because I put together a team.
It’s all about the team. It doesn’t matter what I do. It’s about the team. As you pointed out, I’ve won several CMO of the year awards. When you read my LinkedIn post, I don’t say I did anything. I say, “This is a testament to my team at IBM, my team at EMC, my team at this company, my team at that company because it’s a team sport.” I only… If you’re the manager of a baseball team or if you’re a coach of a football team or coach of a soccer team, which of course the Europeans who are listening, they’ll say that’s the real football, so whichever football it is you have the coaches and the managers. You know what? They can do so much, but if they don’t get them to work as a team… In American football, which I know best, there’s all kinds of people in what we call the Hall of Fame, right? The best ever.
Lisa Martin: Yeah. Right.
Eric Herzog: Guess what? They never won the Super Bowl, they never won a championship. They themselves were incredible, but the overall team was mediocre to crappy. That’s because it’s a team sport, and marketing is the ultimate part of the team sport and it needs to be integrated to the rest of the team, the whole company. I would say that that success was getting them to be A) working together as a team, B) working with the sales team and the product management team and not doing a bunch of fluffy stuff that didn’t help anyone do anything but they thought, “Oh, look how cool this looks.” I said one time, “Do I really give a flying F?” Except I didn’t say F, I did the full word.
Lisa Martin: You used it.
Eric Herzog: “Why? How does this help anybody?” “Well, it looks so cool and blah, blah, blah.” I said, “Well, you know what? I’m from California. We used to call that cool and bitching in the old days.” Then I said, “By the way, this is not gray hair or white hair. This is Southern California bleach blonde from all the surfing I do. I’m just telling you who cares? Yes, it needs to look good and professional, but this whole thing you put together, this is not going to help the sales guy sell anything. This is not putting anything together other than it’s a great looking graphic.” Okay, cool. What are you trying to get across? What’s the message? How’s that message help sales and drive revenue?
Lisa Martin: What a great fail to fab story. That is probably one of the most transformational stories I’ve heard. Eric, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for sharing your background with the audience, your charisma, like I mentioned, your creativity, your brilliance, talking about the MarTech stack, that marketing sales alignment that you’re able to do going from silos to integrated team, brilliant. We thank you so much. We’re going to have to have you back on the show.
Eric Herzog: Well, great. Thanks very much as always, and love working with you. Thanks again for all the stuff you’ve done for Infinidat, and of course obviously you’ve interviewed me when I was at other companies as well so-
Lisa Martin: Many times.
Eric Herzog: … we want to thank you very much for everything you’ve done.
Lisa Martin: Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Eric Herzog: Your company has been helping Infinidat a lot, so thank you very much.
Lisa Martin: Yeah, The Futurum Group. We want to thank you, the audience, for watching and let you know that you can find this on demand anytime and we’re going to be back shortly with our next episode. Thanks for watching, everyone. Take care.
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Author Information
Lisa Martin is a Silicon Valley-based technology correspondent that has been covering technologies like enterprise iPaaS, integration, automation, infrastructure, cloud, storage, and more for nearly 20 years. She has interviewed nearly 1,000 tech executives, like Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, on camera over many years as a correspondent.
