In this episode of the Six Five Webcast – Marketing: Art & Science – CMO Advisor and host, Lisa Martin, welcomes the CMO of Pure Storage, Lynn Lucas, who talks about her journey to the C-suite after studying electrical engineering and breaking into technical marketing. She shares how Pure Storage is leveraging data science and generative AI to achieve significant efficiency gains. Lynn also provides insight into the AI Marketing Council she’s built at Pure, along with some of the great use cases they are already implementing.
Their discussion covers how:
- Pure Storage marketing is leveraging data science to be proactive with its customers
- Pure Marketing is leveraging emerging technologies like gen AI to elevate the Pure brand and convert prospects to loyal advocates faster, more efficiently
- This Challenger brand infuses both art and science to elevate the brand
Learn more at Pure Storage.
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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 the latest episode of Marketing: Art & Science. I’m CMO Advisor from The Futurum Group, Lisa Martin. This is a show where we really get to sit down with CMOs weekly and understand how they’re balancing the artistry and the science of marketing to convert those prospects into really vocal, loyal advocates. I’m so pleased to welcome my long-time colleague Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Pure Storage to this episode. Lynn, it’s so great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Lynn Lucas: Lisa, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Lisa Martin: You have such an interesting background. I want the audience to understand, CMO of Pure storage, as I mentioned, but walk the audience through how you got there because even your education is such an interesting topic.
Lynn Lucas: Well, thank you. And I think my story proves that you can start in one place, but then just let your passion take you where it should. So I did start out as a EE degree from UC Berkeley, but after a summer job of coding, which I thought was my lifetime love, I realized I really wanted the interaction with people. I went back to school, heard from a colleague or a student one year ahead of me, and she had done this thing called technical marketing, and it just fascinated me on how I could take my technical background, but helped turn that into what does that mean to a salesperson or a seller? So that’s how I got started. Went into the original Hewlett Packard as a technical marketing engineer, and over the course of my journey have been at multiple all B2B high-tech companies, large and small. I would say the consistent theme is just building and growing businesses.
Lisa Martin: I love that, it’s fun to do. I always love to hear those backgrounds that are kind of zig-zaggy, because most of them are. It’s really rare, I don’t know about you, but it’s really rare for me to meet someone in marketing as long as we’ve been in marketing who actually has a degree in marketing. There’s always different backgrounds, life sciences, EE, computer science, whatnot that just gives, I think marketers so much more, well-roundedness in terms of being able to lead marketing organizations and really impact the business. Talk about the vision. You’ve been CMO at Pure, what, nine months or so?
Lynn Lucas: I have, yes.
Lisa Martin: Walk us through your vision. What does that look like?
Lynn Lucas: Well, for me, vision always first is grounded in the business strategy. And I agree, I think marketing and marketers are more well-rounded when they come from different places. But what we want to do, and what I always ascribe to is take those first 30 to 45 days, do your listening tour and understand the context of the business. So here at Pure, we are doing incredible things disrupting the storage industry. The oldest, I would say legacy part of the IT stack with a platform and an as-a-service approach. And so our marketing vision based on that is to really drive awareness, especially in these times with AI and cyber attacks, that your data storage platform is an advantage to you if you have the right one. And to reach those higher-level buyers that today, let’s just be frank, they don’t think about storage, because they don’t see the connection to the business. So our vision is to be that premier innovative provider of an as-a-service data storage platform. And Pure’s been innovating in this space for many years. So it’s just an honor for me to be here on this next step of the journey.
Lisa Martin: Love that. Let’s talk now about the science and the art of marketing. Something that you and I have spoken about before is that we both love the fact that it’s become so scientific the last 10 years or so. Let’s talk about the science piece first, how are you leveraging data science to become proactive so that you get that message out to the customers that why they should go Pure, why it’s important, especially from a cybersecurity and AI perspective.
Lynn Lucas: I could talk about this forever, so you’re going to have to keep me grounded on this. It’s one of the core reasons I went into marketing is that blend of the art and the science. And it is so great with all the tools that we have. So we have a data scientist team here at Pure that is fabulous, and we use data science in every phase of the customer journey. So from really understanding what are the highest TAM accounts we should be targeting that are ripe for our solution, highest propensity to buy, also when are they ready? We all know that purchases in IT are going to come over some cycle or there may be other priorities. So we’re using that to really develop propensity and information for our sellers and bringing it to them. And then we’re using data science to really understand what content is resonating the most with different personas. We’re selling to seven different personas and we really want to understand what is resonating. So that’s a really brief overview, but we’re very grounded in data and the metrics to inform our marketing strategy and continually adjust.
Lisa Martin: I love that what you just described as data science is foundational to marketing at Pure Storage. You talked about seven different personas and as consumers and this blends into our business lives, we just expect the content that we’re served up is going to be relevant, contextual, personalized in a non-creepy way. And we have as marketers these tools now that allow us to do just that, to really stay ahead of the competition, to differentiate. Talk a little bit about some of the key top line metrics that you are delivering to your stakeholders.
Lynn Lucas: And if I can just go back one thing before we get into the metrics, I think, and this is the fun and exciting and super challenging part of marketing is the tools are often there, the understanding of how to employ them and the change management within your own marketing organization and change management in the C-suite. I mean, let’s be candid, marketing today I believe is we are media houses. And if you are not a media house, it’s going to be very difficult to win in your industry because to your point, it’s not B2B or B2C, We’re all human and we’re expecting that personalized content. So to the metrics and speaking of C-suite, what do they care about? Top line growth, top line revenue, and cost of sale. So I think let’s ground ourselves in what the CEO, the board, the CFO are looking for, and that’s what we support.
I am a partner to the CRO and this is what we are driving together. What gets very interesting is the metrics down a level or a couple of clicks, and we’re looking at what’s really, when you start to talk about a business where you have multiple personas, there’s a lot of different metrics that you can start to look at. Are we reaching all of them? Do we have enough in our database? Are they engaging? What’s the effectiveness of the content? What is the ROI overall for my campaign? These are the things that I am tasking my leaders with really at their level, looking at that one click down from the business metrics and then their managers with how are we doing at the tactic or the channel level and continually driving efficiency and improvement. So it’s a broad range of metrics. We could probably spend a whole podcast looking at that, but for your listeners, really you have to ground it first in what the business cares about.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. At the end of the day, that’s what’s most important is how is marketing moving those levers there, pulling on data science, pulling on the artistry to really inform the brand so that ultimately those personas are given exactly what they’re looking for in as close to real time as possible. That’s really kind of where the sweet spot is.
Lynn Lucas: Yeah-
Lisa Martin: How would you say-
Lynn Lucas: Sorry.
Lisa Martin: Go ahead. Go ahead.
Lynn Lucas: Well, I was going to say, so we try to combine the two topics in terms of the metrics and the data science. As an example, in an existing customer, how am I demonstrating to the business that I can provide timing on when that customer’s ready to buy or expand in a solution, and then the efficiency of us delivering that to the seller to shorten the sales cycle. So those are some of the ways that we’re really looking at how do we combine the metrics the business cares about with the data science that we have.
Lisa Martin: How would you say the data science piece is helping to inform or evolve the Pure brand? I’ve known Pure for a very long time. It’s always been very bold in its marketing, which I’ve always admired, but how does the science piece come to help from a brand perspective, because we think often a brand is art.
Lynn Lucas: Yeah, I’m so glad you love the Pure brand. I mean, again, just an iconic challenger brand and see we’re wearing the orange love, we stand out in a sea of blue in tech. Well, the data for the brand is critical. With a platform approach and as a service, we’re really reaching the VP and the C-suite who are really interested in a new approach. Why do I not think about this part of the IT stack in the same simple way I would a collaboration software or my CRM or my virtualization or my cloud?
So that’s where we’re going. To get those VPs and C-levels interested, we’re using data science, again, to really understand for our target profile of who we believe is right for our solution, their readiness, and then we’re measuring lift with our brand approach. We’re also doing really classic things. We’ve been talking about in marketing for a long time, we’ve got multiple versions of brand campaign messages running at the same time. How is the science saying folks are reacting to that? And we’re really drilling into the detail. Is that by geo? Is it by industry? Are there differences? Is it by VP versus C-suite? So we’re really baking all of that into our brand approach and being quite agile and tuning our approach based on that.
Lisa Martin: Sounds like you could, I mean, this is going to sound silly, but very scientific, very prescriptive down to the personal level. What messages, what colors, what content is resonating with them to ultimately help them on this self journey that they’re probably on before they even get to a Pure rep to understand, yeah, we need to be talking to Pure Storage. This is absolutely critical for us.
Lynn Lucas: Yeah, that’s the goal. We are trying to really drive that awareness so that it becomes easier for our sellers to get that response, to get that engagement. I mean, as a C-suite myself, I can tell you there’s very few emails or phone calls that I pick up for MarTech stack items in our part of the world. So we’re really focused on that. Are we there on that journey? No. We have so much more that we can be doing to make this really efficient and get that reaction. And again, I think that is applying a lot of what maybe has traditionally been thought of as more of a B2C kind of emotion, but we can use all these techniques here in B2B to really stand out with the customer, which is our goal.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. How has the MarTech stack that you’ve implemented, that Pure has been working on for a while, I suppose as well influenced and facilitated the sales alignment with marketing? Because that’s something that we talk about a lot as well. It’s challenging, but I think nowadays there’s so much more from an observability perspective that sales can get because of the marketing science that’s behind it.
Lynn Lucas: Yeah, you’re so right on this. So have a fantastic marketing ops team. And you hit the nail on the head, I think we often continue to forget both internal to companies and with our external customers is the tech is one piece of it, but there’s the change management, the education. So we have progressed quite far down the path of moving to buying groups, which is not focused on a single lead that we would pass to sales. But as you might imagine for most high-tech B2B sales of any consequence, there’s multiple people in that sale from maybe the VP of IT to procurement to maybe finance, folks in the IT team. That’s been a pretty natural conversation with sellers.
But then the action of how are we delivering that information? What do they do differently? What does our SDR organization do differently? That’s the area that is really critical for marketers to be hand in hand with their sales organization. And so what it has done, and it’s fantastic, is we have joint meetings regularly on how we are transitioning to this and it’s really brought tighter alignment. And I will say that Pure sales and marketing already had a very strong relationship, but now we’re in this joint go-to-market conversation and it’s really facilitated it. So in a way, the tech stack has facilitated us getting even tighter on how we’re going to market.
Lisa Martin: And that’s so critical, because at the end of the day, you both want to bring those customers in, convert them to loyal advocates. Everyone’s on the same page with respect to that, I love how you really leaned into the science part of marketing, I think. I love you taking complex, esoteric information and distilling it into digestible components is something that fascinates me about marketing, something that I love and know you do as well. But let’s talk about the art piece because the sizzle, the art, we talked about Pure’s bold brand. I’ve seen it for so many years now. What is the art piece to you and how do you fuse or blend it or balance it with the science?
Lynn Lucas: Yeah. And you have to have both because also we buy as humans, we want a good story, we want to feel good, we want to feel like we are doing right for our, whether it be our team, our company, our customers. So it is an absolute and of the two and certainly with brand, we are leaning in to the art and the emotion. One of the things that I learned back in the day is really how impactful a brand can be when it taps into that emotion. And let’s just be honest, with all the tools that marketers have and thinking about IT and how much they are bombarded with all the messages from vendors, if you have a really functional brand, very product spec feature out, are you really going to break through the noise? Versus if you can tell a story, pull on a heart string, can you rise above and grab their attention?
And so Pure, I think, has done that well over the course of its history. Today we’re doing that. And in particular, touching on a theme that is really emerging around the globe, which is that of sustainability and how can we solve a business problem and also help with the sustainability aspect. Which may be part of the business’s need, but may also just work with the emotion of I’m helping do good passing it forward. So watch for our newer ads that are coming out on sustainability. And that’s where we’re really trying to tap into that emotion to bring the awareness of Pure’s entire platform and the reach in what we can do.
Lisa Martin: I’m so glad you brought up the emotion piece because it’s critical from a differentiation perspective. I think you hit that nail on the head with tell a story that evokes a response from me, a prospect. When you talk about sustainability, a lot of customers I interview have sustainability requirements and initiatives within their organization such that they’re only going to be working even at the RFP level with companies like Pure who aren’t just talking the talk about sustainability, but actually have the data to demonstrate how the technologies that they’re delivering are helping organizations to meet their sustainability objectives. So I think that emotion piece that you hit on is unique to Pure, but incredibly important.
Lynn Lucas: Yeah. And here’s where if we come back to blending a little bit of the data science, sustainability overall as a topic is maybe a little stronger in Europe for some obvious reasons. In the US, it’s there, but it is more around power and space right now. And so understanding the slight differentiation in message can make a massive difference in your campaign and tying it, we’re tying it into the hot topic of the moment. And I will say, you and I talked about this, it’s not just the moment, AI. We’re at-
Lisa Martin: Absolutely.
Lynn Lucas: The beginning of this very long journey for all of us on AI and that has an incredible impact on power consumption in the data center.
Lisa Martin: It does, it does. It almost comes full circle from that perspective. Let’s now switch to talking about emerging technologies like AI. You’ve seen a number of big waves in technology in your time in the industry. Where does the AI wave-
Lynn Lucas: Getting to that point.
Lisa Martin: But where does the AI wave fit from your perspective? Because we talk about this all the time with customers, with clients, with the mainstream media, and people have this laser focus on AI and all the investments going on and want to see where’s the ROI. We’re not there yet. We’re early inning. So what do you see the AI wave compared to some of the other waves like mobility, Wi-Fi, and the internet for example?
Lynn Lucas: So I think you just nailed it. This wave is as significant as mobility and the internet, if not more. Honestly, you’re reading many of the same things that I am that is saying that it is much more impactful, but it certainly is as impactful. And like these other waves, we are at early innings of this journey, both for how our customers use it as well as how we use it in marketing, but it is not going away. And I think there’s been a little bit of is it over hyped? And certainly that happens with these tech cycles, but it is here to stay and it’s fundamentally changing everything we do. So it’s a big focus both external in terms of how we help our customers be AI ready and also internal in marketing.
Lisa Martin: You just said AI ready. I want to pivot on that for a second. How does Pure see what is AI ready? Because customers, we go to so many technology conferences, you and I, Lynn, and AI is part of pretty much every theme, every keynote, every presentation. It’s there, so kind of the fear of AI washing and a lot of the messages to the prospects and the customers are, if you’re not in AI right now, you’re too late. You’re already behind. Do you think that is a sense that customers have in terms of how can I become AI ready when everyone’s telling me if I’m not in it already, I’m too late?
Lynn Lucas: Yeah. Well, I would say it’s never too late to get started. And again, we’re in early innings and if we take a page from the past with mobility and we think about when the first Apple phone came out, and can we imagine what we can do today with our phone, the apps and all of the things that were invented with that, that would be the vision I would paint for, we can’t even imagine where this is going. And I would refer folks to other materials on purestorage.com. When we talk about AI ready, we’re really starting to talk to organizations about their data storage strategy, their security around it because of the intense use of data, what kinds of use cases they might be starting to think of, and how is there infrastructure an enabler for that versus something that’s holding them back.
So without double clicking into it, I think that what we see right now with customer feedback is they’re super interested in it. They’re just starting to really think through what are the bigger use cases. We haven’t hit that wave yet. We’re really working still, I think in very early days on efficiency use cases and not the fundamental transformative use cases that I know are coming to all of our industries.
Lisa Martin: I agree. I believe they’re on their way as well. Every time I’m on Schwab Network, they always ask me where are we with AI? Is it hype? Is it a bubble? And I say a lot of organizations are in pilot phases to understand what are some of the quickest wins we can get right now? And a lot of that to your point, is around the efficiency gains. I think every CMO I talk to, I just talked to an hour ago, same thing. They’re bringing in AI in their technologies and in their marketing and delivering significant efficiency gains, which eventually will make its way to cost savings.
So when those investors in the street are looking for where’s the ROI and the AI investments, we’re going to get there. But as you said, we’re in the kind of the first lap, and that’s okay, but we can only imagine or we can’t really imagine what some of the great things are to come where AI can be hugely impactful. But to me, from a storage perspective, we go AI runs on data. Pure helps organizations securely store that data for as long as it needs to be there. So in a way, Pure is kind of foundational to organizations being AI ready.
Lynn Lucas: Well, and if I were to add, not just securely store that data, but put it in a platform approach so that you can easily transition from training to inference and also do it with the incredible efficiency of flash, which is 10X more efficient from a power and a space than hard disk. And given everything we talked a little bit about with sustainability, that is more critical than ever, because many organizations do not have the room in the data center or the electricity and the water to cool it does not exist. And so we want to do our part in helping organizations be able to take advantage of this incredible technology, but do it in a more efficient and sustainable way. What I want to also maybe come back to is in marketing, because I think we have to look at how we are using this technology as well.
So we’re really today in these early innings as well, we formed a marketing AI council or AI for Marketers, AIM, because we have to have an acronym and getting some of the users in our organization sharing use cases, sharing how they are applying it to the different parts of marketing, which is so exciting because it’s really every department from creative, to the web, to the data science team, to product marketing, can all use it. And I think we’re seeing today a couple of classes of just efficiency, framing of problems, summarization of data or great bodies of information. And that is helping us right now make our marketers more productive and get to results faster. And that’s what we’re working on now. So I’m super excited about what the team is doing.
Lisa Martin: I imagine there’s a lot of hand raisers across marketing functions, and we want to be next. We’ve got a great idea for a use case where we think AI, gen AI can be a huge efficiency booster for us. How do you stack rank? Because I imagine everybody in marketing wants to be part of this.
Lynn Lucas: Well, super fortunate here at Pure, very advanced, and we have a CTO that focuses on AI for the company, enterprise ChatGPT licenses. So we are very advanced company-wide in terms of using AI in the different functions. So we haven’t had to stack rank so much so far using and ChatGPT, enterprise ChatGPT is been made available for us to use. And you can do so many things with that already. And of course, that’s what, as I would caution all is that’s what keeps your data safe. So not using anything that would be proprietary or would go out into the public models.
And so right now I don’t have that constraint and we are learning as fast as we can. I have a fascinating use case from our ABM Center of Excellence where they are using it to also start to personalize content for our one-to-one ABM approach and make that process faster. And that gets back to what we talked about, which is marketing today really needs to deliver that personalized content. We’re a media house in many ways. And so it’s one of our great use cases that we’re exploring right now is how we can do that more efficiently.
Lisa Martin: I think that’s fantastic. It sounds like your approach is really methodical, it’s very strategic, it’s very much aligned to the business strategy, and it sounds like customers are really finding value in that. Last question before we wrap up, because I know we can keep talking, give advice to those future CMOs who are following in your footsteps. You talked about the breadth and the depth that you bring from a perspective, you’re leaning into emerging technologies, you’re driving marketing with the art and the science. How would you advise the next generation of CMOs to continue learning to get to your level?
Lynn Lucas: Oh, well, I appreciate that. I feel that first of all, my biggest tip to anyone at any stage of their career is be curious, keep learning. That I think is probably the secret to career success and keeping yourself energized, keeping yourself engaged with the business. And that’s been the hallmark. I didn’t start out thinking I would be a CMO or want to be a CMO. It was really an extension of my curiosity about what more could I do in marketing? And over the course of my career in marketing, I’ve had the opportunity to do many different marketing jobs, and that’s informed my role today. And that would be maybe my second piece of advice. I think it’s really critical to have whether that be a more well-rounded business experience to bring to marketing or a well-rounded marketing experience.
Because leaders in marketing have to have a lot of perspective to bring to the table around how to align to the business strategy. CEOs, CFOs are looking for what are the insights from the market? How are you addressing them to best create that growth at an efficient pace? And also increasingly advising the organization on the communication of key corporate messages, whether that be sustainability or diversity. And so all of this requires that more well-rounded approach. And I just encourage folks to take those steps in their career to have new experiences and to keep learning, follow your career path that way versus set out just for a title.
Lisa Martin: I couldn’t agree more, Lynn, thank you so much for sharing that great advice. I love the whole stay curious theme. I think that gets you so far and there’s so much untapped potential there. We thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your insights, your journey with our audience. I know they learned a ton from this, Lynn. Thank you.
Lynn Lucas: Oh, Lisa, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It’s been great to talk about marketing, art, and science with you.
Lisa Martin: I love it. Thank you. We want to thank you for tuning into this latest episode of the podcast. For Lynn Lucas, I’m Lisa Martin. I’ll see you next time.
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Author Information
Lisa Martin is a technology correspondent and former NASA scientist who has made a significant impact in the tech industry. After earning a masters in cell and molecular biology, she worked on high-profile NASA projects that flew in space before further exploring her artistic side as a tech storyteller. As a respected marketer and broadcaster, she's interviewed industry giants and thought leaders like Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Suze Orman and Deepak Chopra, as she has a talent for making complex technical concepts accessible to both insiders and laypeople. With her unique blend of science, marketing, and broadcasting experience, Lisa provides insightful analysis on the latest tech trends and innovations. Today, she's a prominent figure in the tech media landscape, appearing on platforms like "The Watch List" and iHeartRadio, sharing her expertise and passion for science and technology with a wide audience.
