Observe, Inc CEO, Jeremy Burton, joins CMO Advisor and Host Lisa Martin on this episode of “Marketing: Art & Science“. In this conversation, Jeremy shares his CEO-level perspectives and expectations of the marketing function, as he’s held several signifiant CMO and CEO roles. He also discusses just how the marketing function differs at early stage companies compared to larger, public companies, and what his expectations are of marketing as a strategic business partner.
Their discussion covers:
- Burton’s journey from software executive to CEO and his extensive experience in enterprise software and marketing.
- The exploration of marketing strategies in early-stage companies versus large public organizations and the evolving role of CMOs.
- Insights into marketing integrating the “art” and “science” of marketing to drive revenue and business impact.
- Practical uses of data and AI in marketing at Observe, including examples of turning challenges into successes with tech innovations.
Watch the video below, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Listen to the audio here:
Or grab the audio on your streaming platform of choice here:
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 and Science. I’m CMO, advisor and Host, Lisa Martin. This is a really special episode that we’re bringing you today. Now generally this show, we want to talk about the artistry and the science and those levers that marketing leaders pull to deliver those dynamic, personalized, relevant customer experiences. But today with the special guest, we have Jeremy Burton long time person that I’ve admired for many, many years, the CEO of Observe, Inc. He’s going to be giving us some great perspectives from the CEO suite. Jeremy, it’s great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for sharing some time with us today.
Jeremy Burton: Thank you for the invite. Great to be here.
Lisa Martin: Yeah, so I’m going to do a little bit of bragging about Jeremy. I mentioned I’ve known him for well over 10 years now, but he’s been a CEO before. He is been a long time CMO as well, but really an enterprise software executive with well over 20 years of experience running software, business systems, from budgets of 250 million revenue to 20 billion, extensive experience in P&L management, development of enterprise software marketing, strategic M&A, co-founded and built the largest Oracle community on the internet, the Oracle Technology Network that he grew from zero customers to 2 million members in his time and it’s now at over 6 million members today. Jeremy, give the audience, I did a little bit of bragging about you, but give us your overview and what you’re doing and why you’re at Observe now.
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, as you mentioned, I’ve done a lot of things, but one of the things that I’d not done was build something from scratch. So I think in tech, many of us either work or have worked at large companies and certainly if the company’s doing well, I mean, I had a great run of Oracle back in the nineties and certainly with the sort of mindset of youth, you can convince yourself that it’s a genius all because of you. And I think as you get older and you see a few more companies, what you realize is that actually you are sort of a fortunate passenger on the train and the folks who built the train and got the train to leave the station and get it to go a hundred miles an hour, they’re probably the folks who were most responsible for success. So look, in short, I always wanted to do a startup. I wasn’t getting any younger and I kept in touch with a great guy called Mike Speiser from my Veritas days. Mike used to work for me as a product manager for me at Veritas, and he is in the business of creating companies. And so I got with Mike when I left Dell and he was like, “Hey, these are the companies in the portfolio” and Observe was the one that I was most attracted to. Put it that way.
Lisa Martin: I love that. Your career has been so historied over 20 plus years, I mentioned just a tip of the iceberg of some of the specialties and experiences that you have, but having the chance to do a startup and being willing to go, “I’ve done so much.” When I think of when I first started, you were CMO at EMC and then became CMO of Dell after the acquisition. And you’re probably the most talented CMO I’ve ever met. Some of the art and the sizzle and the science that you have deployed has been just fun, inspiring, and different and bold. So I love that. This seems kind of strikes me as you really bold taking the leap into startup land and how long has it been now?
Jeremy Burton: A long time. Six years. I mean, it’s what a lot of people underestimate is that startups there’s sort of, I think, in Silicon Valley, a romanticism around startups and-
Lisa Martin: Yeah, sure.
Jeremy Burton: It’s all about the IPO party. But it’s a grind. Nothing happens quickly. You can get lucky, but I mean certainly in the segment that we’re in in enterprise software, there’s no such thing as luck. It’s not like you can create a fashionable social network and all of a sudden be worth $10 billion. You’ve got to solve a real problem that customers are willing to pay big money for and it takes time. So yeah, six years.
Lisa Martin: Outstanding. I mentioned that when I first met you, you were a leading CMO. I want to get your perspective on marketing as the CEO. We have CMOs on the program. We talk a lot about where is marketing from a strategic perspective in the business. What are the metrics that matter to the CEO? Give us that CEO’s perspective of marketing as a pivotal function to help startups become successful and share that voice?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, I think it definitely varies depending on the size of the company. I mean, I’ve ran a couple of companies, certainly Observe is the smallest. But I think with a startup, really it’s all about demand creation early on. And in fact, I warn folks who are going to go higher market in folks early on, just be very careful on the kind of CMO that you’re going to get. I think the folks who’ve got a strong branding background tend to not do well because the work here, it’s really twofold. I think you ideally early on once someone who is either a great product marketer with a flair or an understanding of demand creation or probably my favorite profile will be someone who is just a very action-oriented, field-based CMO who’s good at running demand creation programs and field events. The reality is, the two most important people in a startup are the person who runs engineering and the person who runs sales.
And you don’t want to try and be the third of the two most important people. You’ve got to align with one of those two. And so on the product marketing side, you are creating a value proposition from the product, from what the engineering guys have built. They might not be great and they probably won’t be great at articulating maybe what that value proposition is in the terms a salesperson or a customer would understand. So that’s a great skill to have, I think ton of value there. And then I think most importantly, you have to be on the hook to help the head of sales hit their number. And if you are not helping the head of sales hit their number, then my guess is at some point you’re probably going to be looking for a new job. And certainly even at this early stage, we’d look for marketing to really have generated or touched 50% of the opportunities in the pipeline.
Lisa Martin: 50%? Okay.
Jeremy Burton: Yeah. Yeah. I mean salespeople do pipeline generation as well, but I would expect half of it to come from marketing. Yeah.
Lisa Martin: Contrast that with being at a big public company. We talked about some of the real specialties that you’re looking for in the early phases of startups from a demand creation perspective must align with sales and engineering to understand the value prop, to be able to propagate that message. But contrast that with larger organizations. As CEO, what would you be looking for in a stellar marketing leader?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, I think it changes a little bit in bigger companies. I mean, I’ve never ran a big public company. I mean, obviously I’ve worked for a number of CEOs who’ve been running public companies and I never got fired, so maybe I was doing something right, but I was always the product person. My superpower was listening to what the engineering guys were saying. I listened to what the product people were saying and turning that sort of technical mumbo jumbo into a story. And then I guess I was pretty good as well at thinking, “All right, what are the creative things that we can do to make that story come to life? How can we get attention?”
And so I was pretty good at product messaging, the creative side of things, and then the communications, telling the story, talking to the press and talking to the analysts. I was actually never the demand creation person, and I was very fortunate in that early on I bumped into this guy called Rene Bonvanie, who I hired of many places, hired him at Veritas, I hired him at Serena. And Rene is just a wonderful guy, and his skill set was sort of the opposite of mine. He was very good at the demand creation and field stuff. And I always joked that a lot of what I learned in marketing really I learned from Rene. He was sort of the fount of knowledge, but this is why I worked so well. There was a gap there that I knew did the things that I didn’t do.
And so the relationship with the field, which is always important in an enterprise company, Rene was the guy who could drive that and he could show the value to the sales team. And I think I could show the value to the CEO in terms of great messaging, compelling value proposition, like creativity, great press coverage, great user conference events. And those two become very, very important I think as you get bigger. It’s not just about the demand creation in the field, it’s about creating a brand and an aura and a presence for the company. And the CEO obviously is your key spokesperson. And so yeah, if you’re making the CEO look good, that’s not the entire job, but-
Lisa Martin: That’s a win.
Jeremy Burton: That’s part of it. Right?
Lisa Martin: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. You talked about going back to the Observe story, you talked about, “Hey, I expect in startup phase that marketing is delivering 50% of the pipeline.” In addition to that, what are some of the other expectations that you have on marketing in terms of it being a strategic business partner to you, to engineering, to sales?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, I think early on, I mean Observe this year, for example, let’s say right now we’ve got 30 salespeople. Marketing is actually starting to become quite important. And next year, really important because the number this year, let’s say we’re around 30 million ARR. Well, next year that’s going to be 60 and the following year, 120. And so the number just keeps getting bigger. And so the salespeople that you bring in, you’ve got more hungry mouths to feed. And so you can’t rely on the salespeople to fill the pipe by themselves, they need some assistance. And so then you start to think, “Okay, how do we scale our message?” And this to me is what marketing is all about. If salespeople were cheap, you’d just keep on hiring salespeople. You wouldn’t do any marketing. They would go and knock on everyone’s door, but you can’t do that. It’s just not viable because in the Bay Area, the OT of a salesperson is $300,000.
And so the question is how do you drive productivity out of those salespeople? And productivity is about them bringing in each year more money, more ACV for the same amount in an ideal scenario, less work. And I think that’s where marketing comes in. It’s a great sort of productivity boost for the sales team because you can loosen and warm up prospects so that when the salesperson engages, they already know the value proposition, maybe they’ve even tried the product. And I tell you in the pre-market fit stage of a startup, which a lot of people don’t talk about too much, marketing is actually not that important at all because you don’t have the market fit for the product. You don’t know whether your product can solve a problem for a hundred or a thousand or 10,000 people. You might be only solving a problem for tens of people. Well, if you’re going to solve a problem for tens of people, don’t go and blitz 10,000 people saying you can solve their problem because you’re probably going to fail, right?
You’re just going to generate demand that is going to result in you probably not being able to solve that problem. But once you get to market fit, it starts to become important. And I’d say the demand creation first and foremost. And then I think product marketing becomes very important because you’ve got more salespeople, you have a variety of skills in your sales team. So the messaging has got to be simple. You’ve got to quantify your differentiation, you’ve got to understand how you stack up against the competition. So I’d say those two things, like scaling the demand creation and then getting very good at the value proposition and product marketing and keeping it simple, particularly in enterprise tech, such that as you bring new salespeople on board, you can get them up to speed in that magical six months or less.
Lisa Martin: That simplicity is absolutely key. Let’s switch down to kind of talking about the art and the science piece. We talked a lot about the creativity and the art, and there’s some amazing things that I’ve seen you’ve done artistically before. Guys, just Google, Jeremy Burton, EMC. You’re going to find some amazing things that they did there. But I’d love to understand from the CEO’s perspective, what is the art to you now given where you guys are, demand creation is key, starting to get that product fit, so the value prop being able to create that simply. Where does the art come in at your current phase?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, look, I think every CEO has got the thing that they’re best at. Everyone’s got a major and a minor if you like, and my major is probably marketing, and my minor is probably product or engineering. And so that’s sort what I like to do and probably what I do best. And so I’d say even at this early stage, there’s huge opportunity for creativity. And one of the things I’ve always loved about marketing is you get to dream up weird in wonderful ways to make your message compelling. And at our stage, I mean we have quite a technical product we sell to technical people, it can be quite difficult to understand. And so to try and at least convey the message, we’ve got an illustrated character that we call o11y. I mean Observability, O-11-Y, o11y. And so he is sort of like a friendly disarming character that we use to do everything from articulate our core differentiators to make fun of the competition. And I think you can get away with that if you do it tastefully.
I mean if you’re poking fun at the competition through a friendly robot, then hey, who’s not going to like that? I’d say in every company and certainly that I’ve been at, and certainly every job that I’ve been in, I’ve always been very keen to have the team think about, “All right, how do we stick out from the crowd?” We still do product launches. I think it’s super important that with all the great engineering work we do, that we have a rallying point to get that message out to the market, to get it out to the analysts, to put together new demos, to refresh the website, to come up with new o11y videos. And it’s actually a great motivation for the team. And I think a lot of these things become checklist items. Oh yeah, we update websites, write press release, and they can be sort of like non-events and just a task. But what I’ve found is if you sort of indulge people a little bit more, it doesn’t necessarily cost a whole lot money to do something more fun and different, but it takes a bit more time, right?
You’ve got to take the time out to think, “All right, do we have a code name for this launch?” For example. “All right, what is the theme of this? Okay, can we do something for the launch around that theme? Maybe can we host it somewhere that’s in keeping with that?” And then all of a sudden people’s creative juices start to flow and you engage more people in the company in that conversation. And then when you talk about like, “Oh, I have fun at work”, what does that mean exactly? Well, it actually means coming to work and being able to do some free form thinking and come up with stupid stuff that maybe you wouldn’t do every day. But sometimes the stupid stuff is so stupid, it’s actually good. And that’s what gets you to stick out from the crowd, right?
Lisa Martin: Yeah.
Jeremy Burton: So everywhere that I’ve been, certainly in marketing jobs, I’ve always had a person or two in the group that could create the right atmosphere. I think to be creative and to do the art , as you would say, you need the right environment in the company. People have not got to be afraid to speak up and come up with a stupid idea. No idea is too stupid and the way you’re not going to have a lot of pride in your idea because it might be totally stupid and impossible to do. But if you take the right environment, then people get creative with their ideas. And then once you get the ideas out on the table, there’s always something good to go do.
Lisa Martin: I always think the employee experience and the customer experience, they’re like this. They’re inextricably linked. When the employees are productive, creative, have the freedom to do so, the customer experience benefits from that. You mentioned differentiation, and I talk with so many CMOs and I go to so many conferences and AI is everywhere. It’s always in the title, it’s in every keynote, it’s in. I have seen Jensen Huang more times this year on stages with with this cool leather jacket than I ever have before. Nvidia is associated with AI. But how do organizations, from the CEO’s perspective, how do you leverage AI as a differentiator to the business? Because we’re seeing so much visibility on AI in terms of the investments going on, and investors want to know where’s the proof in the pudding? So how do you really leverage that as a true differentiator?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, the standard joke is that AI is the technology that every CEO dreamed of because CEO’s always want like a pet project, and AI is the perfect pet project. I know nothing about it, but it sounds like we’re going to have artificial intelligence. And so how could that not be a CEO thing? Yeah, I mean look, when you’re in tech, you are in the fashion business whether you like it or not. And the thing I’ve loved about this industry over the last whatever 30 years is we had PCs and then we had the web, and then we had social networking, and then we had cloud computing, and then we had crypto, and now we’ve got AI and it constantly reinvents itself. And I think as a CEO, you are paid to make discerning decisions about new technology. If you’re a tech CEO and you don’t know anything about tech, I don’t know where that’s going to lead, probably to the wrong decision or a dead end. And so I think with AI, any new trend that comes along, I think you sort of ignore it at your peril. And I think you have to get engineers with hands-on product and get your hands dirty with the new thing to figure out what it’s all about.
What is the state of it, what is the art of the possible here? And then you’ve got to make a decision regardless of what the hype says, because again, in tech we always over-hype everything and it always takes longer to come to fruition than we ever imagined. Probably AI and GPT has been more hype than any technology has been hyped in history, but there’s something there. It promises to change the interaction model between humans and machines. If I can interact with something using a natural language, that’s a good thing. That means more people can take advantage of technology. It means that more junior people can do more involved tasks. It means that we spend less time getting up to speed with something and more time actually doing work. So to me, there is real value there. I think what is unproven at this point is, is there a business model behind it? Again, as a CEO, we’re not in tech for the sake of tech. We’re in tech to make money. And so we know that there are costs associated with AI.
We have to train models, we’ve got to pay to make an API call to OpenAI. And so then the question’s going to be is with that additional cost, if I add my profit margin, can I charge an additional amount in order to pay for it? Is it a new revenue stream or is it just something which is going to make my existing product better? So I think that’s sort of the phase that we’re in right now. I think we’re all believers that there’s some value there. I joke with folks that I don’t know whether it’s the next blockchain or the next cloud. Not to people who say it’s bigger than cloud. I think the reality is maybe it’s somewhere in between those two. And so we’re in the mode of deciding or trying to figure out, all right, how does AI make observability better? Can we charge additional money for AI-driven features within the product? Dive in, but don’t bet your company on it until you’ve got good data. And I will always get the data from the engineering team as to what they’re saying. And then once we believe in the technology, then it’s about the business model. Can we make money? So lot to consider.
Lisa Martin: A lot to consider. You’re right, but it’s phased. But to your point, it has to be able to deliver value and differentiation I think for businesses. Give us some kind of practical applications and AI automation data in marketing at Observe. And what do you look for in terms of data science impacting value, impacting pipeline?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, we don’t use a lot of… I mean AI is the label attached to everything. Right now anything that has an algorithm is AI. I mean, we certainly use generative AI in our product and it makes our product better. And we’ve got a few hundred monthly active users that derive value. We haven’t actually been able to charge more value for that yet, sorry, more money for that value yet. In terms of using it in our business, we certainly do sort of pipeline it like statistical analysis of data to try and understand not just what the number’s going to be next quarter, but the probability of deals closing. To me, I think that is sort of a well-trodden path in the realm of sales. From a marketing standpoint, it is kind of interesting right now that there are many who believe that all content will be done by a generative AI ChatGPT-type interface. And oh, my website will be written by one.
I think my view of it is yes, but. If you looked at any of the content that GPT generates, it’s actually very well-generated and it makes sense. There’s not a lot of depth to it. Yes, you can prompt more to get more depth for sure. But I think as marketers, you’ve got to ask the question, what makes content compelling? And for me, compelling content, clearly something that’s well-written, that’s got a bit of soul to it, that’s maybe even got a sense of humor to it, but that has got some depth to it. And I do find a lot of the generated content doesn’t have that much depth to it. And so I still think that to reach people, probably more so in future, to reach people online, you’re going to have to work harder to get that sort of depth of content that people want to read. Because the cynics’ viewpoint here would be that the world just gets full of 10X more insipid content, and we completely lose people online.
What happens on LinkedIn and web and social channels is what’s happened on email. You can’t get a response to save your life. So a lot of sort of insipid generic content is just going to have that effect. People are going to switch off, they’re not going to see it anymore. And so one of two things will happen is people will realize that, “Okay, I’ve got to be a bit smarter. Maybe I can have someone assist me with my content generation. Maybe AI can assist me, but without the main knowledge and a bit of smarts up here, I’m not going to produce something compelling or we’ve got to move to another form of delivering the message”, which could be interesting.
Lisa Martin: Also, the emotional piece.
Jeremy Burton: Sorry, say again?
Lisa Martin: Also, the emotional piece. You talked about some of the things generated by ChatGPT don’t have a ton of depth. There’s also no emotion there. So I still think it’s humans plus AI. I like the word that you used, assistance. I think that’s a great positioning for that.
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, I think that’s the sweet spot for AI. I think it helps humans do a better job, but if you let it do the entire job, I think you end up in a very sort of mediocre generic… What was that movie, Pleasantville, kind of world. It’s this sort of realistic but boring place. Know.
Lisa Martin: Generic doesn’t work.
Jeremy Burton: Everything’s perfect, but nothing’s interesting.
Lisa Martin: Exactly, exactly. You’ve done such a great job kind of explaining the CEOs perspective of marketing, sales, engineering, and the dynamics, the relationship, the uses of emerging technologies, the need for strong business cases over your history and career, which we touched on a little bit. What is a failed to fab story that comes to mind where there was an initiative or a program that wasn’t going according to plan, you guys came in, whether it was marketing or others within the organization, and really course-corrected quickly to deliver really impact to the business. What story comes to mind there?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, I’ve got a few of them, but the one that sticks in my mind, because I think it was all marketing was probably 10 years ago, it was very popular to try and educate customers on reference architectures for solving certain problems. And reference architectures are really boring. It’s basically a specification or a white paper or a document that describes what you would implement. It’s mind-numbing stuff, unless you’re implementing something, in which case it’s the how-to instructions of solving the problem. So it’s sort of interesting but dull. And we were trying to market these reference architectures and there were really specifications and we came up with the idea of maybe we could make it look like a product. People like products. Why? Because you can see them and touch them and use them, and we can produce great photographic imagery of them and people can emotionally connect with them.
And so we thought, “Well, okay, specifications, specs, what if we created something called VSPECS? So I was at VMC at the time and everything began with a V. We had vMax and vNX and everything was V. So what about VSPECS? And so we were like, okay, we could create a VSPECS array cabinet. Only we didn’t have to really create it. We could just create a picture of it. And then we actually thought, that’s such a good idea. Why don’t we let… Because it was many our partners that would love these specifications because they would go to the customer, the customer would be convinced that they could solve the problem. The partner would go away, put a whole bunch of Cisco gear and VMware and EMC in this cabinet, and then ship it to the customer. And so the partners loved it because it made them not look like integrators, but product people.
We can deliver you this. You see this beautiful array branded EMC can deliver you everything that you want to solve this problem in this box. And so it was pure marketing, but it took off like wildfire because the folks that we would market to and the folks our channel partners would market to, were used to buying products and they would get quite skeptical. Oh, it’s like a bill of materials and what you’re going to put it together and well, how much is that going to cost? But in their mind though, if they could buy a product and that was going to turn up on their doorstep and boom, I plug it in and up I go, that’s a lot more compelling. But yeah, I think that’s probably one of the better examples where just a bit of creative marketing allowed people’s perception of something to change dramatically.
Lisa Martin: And also really not just changing perception, but meeting customers where they want to be, which is always critical. Last question for you, Jeremy. I know you guys at Observe a big round of funding recently. Congratulations on that. What’s next for Observe? You talked about marketing now is becoming more of a strategic piece, but what are some of the things that we can expect to see in the next six months or so?
Jeremy Burton: Yeah, we have a big launch coming up in end of September. We call it Voyager, so I won’t spill the beans on that. We’re really up our sales team. We’re ramping up our field events team. We have a wonderful lady, Kristen Lyles, running that group. We very much have a direct sales motion, enterprise selling motion. So clearly high touch customer events. We’ve found actually the smaller, more intimate events are becoming more and more popular again. We’ve actually found a drop-off on a lot of the digital, LinkedIn. I don’t know whether it’s a post COVID burnout or what, but a lot of the small, more intimate field-based events tend to go really well.
And these are, I mean, things like wine tasting and making margaritas, and not all to do with alcohol, but many of those go down really well. And then we’re ramping the product marketing team as well. As I mentioned earlier, product marketing I think just becomes more and more important because then now we have a PR agency and the communications team. Well, they need messaging because they’ve got to pitch it to whoever. So yeah, there’s a lot going on in the marketing area, and as I said I’ll ramp up this launch at the end of the year.
Lisa Martin: Excellent. Well, we’ll keep our eyes out for Voyager in September, and I thank you so much for taking the time again to be on the program. I love the perspective that you’ve given our audience of the CEO, expectations on marketing and how it changes depending on where an organization is in its maturing. That’s invaluable content. So Jeremy, thank you again for giving us the time and for imparting wisdom on our audience.
Jeremy Burton: All right, thank you.
Lisa Martin: We want to thank you for watching this episode of Marketing: Art and Science and remind you the next episode comes out in two weeks. For Jeremy Burton, I’m Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
How Modern Marketing is Enabling Delta Air Lines to Revolutionize Travel
Ash Parikh on the Evolution of the CMO role and the Influence of Tech on Marketing Management Style
How Modern Marketing is Enabling Domino Data Lab to Unleash the Power of AI
The Intersection of MarTech and PLG (Product-Led Growth)
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.
