In this episode of Marketing: Art & Science CMO advisor and host Lisa Martin welcomes business leader and CMO of NetApp, Gabie Boko. In their engaging conversation, Gabie shares with us her background, double clicks on what stakeholders want from B2B marketing leaders, how she’s using data to pull the levers of art and science in marketing, and how NetApp marketing is leaning into generative AI.
Their discussion covers:
- Gabie Boko shares her career journey, her role at NetApp, and how marketing is fully integrated into the company’s strategy.
- An exploration of how NetApp uses data science in marketing, the key metrics shared with stakeholders, and how this informs the brand strategy.
- A discussion of the balance between scientific and creative elements in marketing and how they have been used to rejuvenate NetApp’s brand.
- The powerful impact of emerging technologies like generative AI on marketing.
Learn more at NetApp.
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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 your host, CMO Advisor, Lisa Martin. This is a show where we really get into it with CMOs and leaders and professional business leaders to really understand how they’re pulling the ladders of art and science within marketing to create compelling customer experiences, impact pipeline, and revenue. And I’m pleased to welcome our next guest, Gabie Boko, a great business leader from that at the CMO there. Gabie, it’s great to have you on the program. I can’t wait for the audience to learn from you today.
Gabie Boko: Oh, I’m glad to be here, Lisa. It’s going to be a great convo.
Lisa Martin: It is. We’re going to hear… Gabie is going to unpack her career for us and she’s going to be really honest with us and really, what do stakeholders want from B2B marketing leaders these days? We’re going to get into the science and the art of marketing at NetApp, and we’re really going to lean into the science here that Gabie has at her disposal on what she’s doing. It’s fascinating. We’re going to be then talking about emerging tech and marketing. Heard of AI washing? We’re going to cover that today, what is it and how to avoid it. And then Gabie is going to leave us with, as usual, our failed to fab story, what happens when you’re outpacing the market. Great stories here. Gabie, go ahead and kick us off. Give us some background. Let’s unpack your background, your journey. I know that you’re a really strong, bold, provocative business leader. How’d you get where you are?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. I think that I’ve taken the path that most CMOs have taken. I think you do have one of two paths. You’re going to come in through product or you’re going to come in through go-to-market or field sales. I came in through the ladder and before I even got there, it was like, “What do I want to do with my career?” I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t really think that that was going to go the route that I wanted to, but I think by coming in through sales, it allowed me to be effective and think about my career in a way that maybe other CMOs aren’t given the privilege of. I didn’t think I wanted to be a CMO. I wanted to be a lawyer, so I came at it with a fresh sense of, “How can I influence? How can I be a part of something? How can I change the trajectory of myself and a company at the same time?”
I think marketers in general have had a really storied pass with how to be in B2B where I feel like I’ve taken that same evolutionary path that most of the industry have taken on how they think about B2B. I can see that reflected in the choices that I’ve made and the career or the jobs that I’ve been given. I can see an innate focus out of the gate on demand generation. I think most companies, higher demand generation, they want marketing to contribute to that. That’s probably 50% of my career. I can see that really embedded in my career, and then I can see how the market, maybe not just the market has evolved, but I can see how I evolved by embracing digital and really leaning into digital at a time when we were looking for a way to influence pipeline and influence market, and so my career shifted to being far more digitally focused.
I can also see the undertones of me trying to break out of that and really decide what I wanted to contribute with tons of brand and really getting into product and what that meant for strategic messaging, and that’s really where I land right now. I believe that where I am is I’m happy to be a contributor to vision and strategy. I have all of the skillset that comes from growing up in pipeline and demand generation from being involved in digital and what that can do to transform a company, but it’s got that personal lens, which is where I really think I can contribute to the company. So that’s the trajectory. I don’t know if it’s super different, but I do know that it’s personal, and I love where I am right now.
Lisa Martin: Awesome. And it should be personal. You talked about the evolution of you and your career, the evolution of organizations. How have you seen what business leaders want from BDB marketers? How has that evolved over the course of your career?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. And I just talked about that a little bit, but I think that’s the focus on pipeline. I don’t know if companies really understand marketing. I don’t know if that’s a marketing’s failure. I don’t know if that’s a shift in how we view marketing as just an overall collective, but I do think that businesses see the tangibility of demand generation as the first avenue for what they want or see in marketing. They’re looking for those metrics. They’re looking for that contribution to their business. They’re looking for a way to measure that growth and that spend. I think that marketing has very silently maybe evolved from the original Ps into where we are now.
I think that marketing could probably get a lot of that mojo back quite personally. If I have anything to do with it in my career, that’s what I’d like to see, but I think that that pipeline demand generation is a good place to start. I also think that it helps us get out of maybe a swim lane that is just that, you can’t be a good demand generation person if you don’t understand how your business is running. You can’t be a good generation person if you aren’t at the table understanding vision or setting that strategy. So I think that marketers and the business of marketing as a whole really has the opportunity to say, “Don’t just get stuck in your swim lane. It’s influenced by so many other things. Demand generation is best executed when it has air cover from the brand. It’s best executed when there’s a strong company vision. It’s best executed when it’s aligned to a product roadmap that you’re not guessing about.”
So I think that that’s the evolution of marketing, and I think that’s the evolution that we as an industry in tech, but also as an industry of marketers continue to be on is how to really validate that and make it come to life.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. Making it come to life and manifesting that is incredibly important for every organization across every industry. Walk us through before we dig into the science and the art of marketing game, we talk a little bit about the executive leadership team structure, the ELT NetApp. Where do you roll up and who are some of the key stakeholders that you influence?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. I am in what we call the traditional marketing for this era. I roll into the president, which is essentially the chief revenue officer and the go-to-market team, but it’s all go-to-market. I have a very nice dotted line relationship with the CEO and because that’s how we think about establishing vision and context, I think that that’s a shift for marketing in the past, I don’t know, maybe 10 years, 10, 15 years, where they’re feeling that need to connect it more tightly to sales, to not have it sit in an ivory tower or a silo where it’s a service. I think that’s okay. I think marketing will continue to evolve just like everything in marketing is a pendulum string. Are you centralized? Are you decentralized? Is product marketing? Is product marketing now? Do you report into CRO? Do you report to the CEO? I think all of that is evolutionary, and I think marketers need to be able to float the hover state, if you will, and that’s really what I do here. I am the CMO, which means I’m marketing for the company, but I am also highly, highly connected into running the business, which is why I report into the president.
Lisa Martin: Share a little bit about something that you and I have chatted about before is that how scientific marketing has become in the last 10 plus years, which is something that fascinates me as a former life science person. But walk us through, there’s so much data in marketing. How do you use that science, that data science, to really inform the direction that marketing goes, the direction that ran goes, the direction that demand gen goes and really impact checkpoint?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. Who knew that marketing would be the holder of such immense opportunity and visibility? I think everybody always knew it, but I think the micro focus on what are your results really takes away from what’s the data, and I think that there’s so much data, especially coming off of our customers, our campaigns, our products, and I think marketing sits at the nexus of all of those things. I believe that it is incumbent upon marketing not to hoard, so I really look at a lot of what we do with data, and especially me here at NetApp. I definitely like to think about the data in context of all of the other teams who are using it to ask questions, to survey customers. Is this working? Is this not working? To survey our own employees. Is this working? Is this not working? That’s how we really got to our brand, really deciding to say, “Are we doing what the brand is compelling or saying it’s doing?”
And a lot of the data we got back was, no, you might’ve gone a little bit too far. We need some more clarity. I think that that continued evolution of that data has given us a prescription for how we want to roll out demand gen, how we think about generating leads and sales level leads from that information, how we continue to evolve and say, “It’s not just the offers, but what feedback do you have for us on those offers, what feedback do you have for us on the message?” So I really think that by not hoarding that data and by using it at every level, marketing becomes a contributor, not just to the brand and to the vision, but to how we are helping sales sell. Sometimes it manifests in KPIs and great pipeline. Sometimes it just manifests in, “Hey, let’s talk about it differently.”
Lisa Martin: Yeah. That’s incredibly important. But your background is fantastic being that you came up from sales, from product marketing, so you understand those levers, understand what they need. To your point about having so much access to data about not hoarding it, I know NetApp’s community partner ecosystem is incredibly important to it. I was there myself many years ago. Then you’d also shared the keyword feedback, and that’s really important for marketers to be able to listen and collaborate with all the constituents you understand, is it about sales leads, is it about pipeline, is it about KPIs, and how those levers change. You talked about the pendulum, which I think is a great reference to what marketing really is. What are some of the key metrics that you roll up into the president, into the office of the CFO to really push marketing where you think it needs to be?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. Great question. I think we roll up the traditional. I’m not going to say, “I don’t do MQLs and SQLs.” I do that. I think what we try to do is put a bit of context to it, so we’re really focusing in on how we connect that to the funnel, the marketing funnel, and then into the pipe in terms of sales stages. Every marketer does this. I’m not a genius in this capacity. I think what we try to do though is reflect back on those are the levers for how we generate pipe, but how do we talk about what the macro is? What are we doing to move the needle in terms of market share? What are we doing to move the needle in terms of affinity to purchase or awareness? Those also are metrics, and I think that that is what marketers, in terms of that hover state, perfecting that hover state, we always need to be looking at how everybody views our data in our metrics in context and be able to talk to them as to who they are.
A board member and a C-staff person is not going to care about how many leads you put into the funnel and that 80% of them weren’t followed up on. They aren’t going to care about what a hand raiser is. They are going to care that marketing is contributing to the funnel and to the pipe, but they are going to care more about how that’s impacting things like market share. Are we growing the company? Are we finding new markets? And so I think what we’re really trying to do, what I’m really trying to do, is to draw those correlations to tighten that up. I think it’s again, that tunnel vision. Marketing can’t have tunnel vision. It can’t just be about the execution. It’s important to have that business lens on it, otherwise it doesn’t work. Pipeline is something I look at every single day, but if I’m not actually looking at market share as well, then I get lost in the numbers and I get lost.
I end up showing up at meetings like marketing’s green. Marketing might be green, but the pipe may be bordering on yellow and market share might be bordering on red. So how do I bridge those and say, “This is the storyline we actually need to tell,” and that opens up that conversation that says, “I think this is working. I’m not seeing it show up here. What else is standing in our way? What are you seeing?” And that’s that not physical, not numbers data, but that’s more contextual data. What’s a customer saying to you? Is the price off? Is a partner saying it’s too slow to deploy? What’s that feedback mechanism that I can take back in and then draw those correlations all the way up.
Lisa Martin: The correlations, but the word collaboration is ringing loudly in my ears in terms of, Gabie, what you’re talking about there. One thing that you and I have spoken about before, as you said, you have to understand your budget and how you’re spending that budget for your CFO to trust you. We know when we go to customer conferences, as you and I do all the time, we say, “Oh, trust is currency between vendors and partners,” but it’s also currency within the ELC within organizations. Talk about your scientific and artistic approach to understanding your budget, where you’re spending so that those CFO conversations so that really there’s trust between you.
Gabie Boko: Yeah. I want to equate trust, not friendship. We can be friends or not be friends, and that is okay. The CFO in the office of finance doesn’t have to like or believe in marketing in order for it to trust that I’m managing the budget, I’m making smart decisions, and that I’m equating that back to those metrics we talked about. They do have to be able to know that I am doing extreme due diligence on how I spend money, how I’m looking for economies of scale, what the overall customer, the CAC, right, cost of customer acquisition could be. But that’s back to those metrics. That’s that collaboration on the metrics. He might not like the pipeline numbers and not might be able to see MQLs don’t drive revenue. I don’t get that. But he can see that contribution to market share and he can see that I am spending my money wisely that is contributing to deals.
So I think it’s really about that trust and establishing that trust. He needs to trust that I’m doing my best, he to trust that we agree on how I manage the money, how I deploy the money, and how I’m tracking metrics. He doesn’t have to be my best friend. I’m not sure we are best friends, but we are at least in a circle of trust, which is dictated by me being a good business partner and not being, “You can trust me,” or this is the right spend, but having data to back that up and say, “Nope, this is what we see. This is what we’re going to try.” That reminds me marketing is about risk, unfortunately and fortunately. That’s why a lot of us are in this. And sometimes you can’t quantify that. And that makes finance people super freaked out.
It starts to get into that zone where it’s like, “Well, I wouldn’t do that.” Well, I know you wouldn’t do that, but… so how do I make you feel good about that? I’m doing that, but I’m mitigating that risk with these other avenues. So that’s that level of you have to build that relationship.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. You bring a great point about the risk and those that are risk averse and those that lean into it and really understand how do we dial those art and science levers and really use the data to inform where we can dial down the risk, where it makes sense, and where we’re going to see measurable impact to the overall business. We talked a lot about the science piece and I told you I geek out on the science piece and I can tell you do too.
Let’s look at the artistry piece. You last year at NetApp INSIGHT, your user conference, annual user conference, talked about intelligent data infrastructure as the new brand, and I had the great pleasure of being part of INSIGHT last year. Share with the audience the brand that you launched, why intelligent data infrastructure? Because I go to so many conferences as you and I were talking about the other day, and AI is everywhere. It’s in every title of every keynote, et cetera. Jensen Huang is everywhere these days too, but you really focus on the intelligence there. Help us understand how you came up with that and where the artistry and the science are in demonstrating that is the right brand for NetApp.
Gabie Boko: Yeah. That’s a great choice and a great conversation. I think marketers have the distinct pleasure of being a contributor in the executive team who builds on their predecessors, and we also serve at the pleasure of that executive team. So a lot of times, some or most times, executives have great ideas and they drive marketing down a specific path and doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means that it’s a storyline for which a company is built for a specific moment. NetApp has had multiple CMOs, and I am currently serving in that same seat. What we discovered coming in to that seat was that perhaps we had over-rotated and outpaced, not that it was wrong, but we had over-rotated and outpaced our customers, and maybe we had outpaced the market as well where we were talking about things that maybe nobody else knew how to define, and maybe we weren’t doing a good enough job defining it.
There is nothing wrong with that. I think what we decided to do is say, “You know what? Let’s take a step back and let’s understand who we are.” When we talk about intelligent data infrastructure, we want to build on that legacy of all my predecessors who were in data fabric, who we’re in data, who in the cloud, and say, “How do we reinterpret that for today and give ourselves a future landing pad?” The other thing that we noticed is that we were getting directed with all these great ideas, we were just adding a comma. So every time somebody talked about who we are, it was like idea, comma, idea, comma, idea, comma which your brand can’t sustain that for any length of time because you then become not the whole of those words, you become the commas and that we’re not defining ourselves. So those two things together really said to us we needed to go back to basics and we needed to reestablish who we were.
We believe we were on the front end of innovation with both our data fabric and our cloud perspectives, we still believe that. But we needed to lean into it in a way that was really realistic for our customers and our partners. We needed to listen to them and hear that you’re still not saying what I need you to say. We also knew that AI was coming. I mean, it’s not like it just woke up yesterday, it’s been coming for about 18 months. And we didn’t want to make the same mistakes. We didn’t want to do, what I call, AI washing, which is Dot AI. Everything we do has AI in it. We felt that we needed to rise above that and give ourselves a little bit more bandwidth to describe other aspects of what my predecessors had talked about, things like software and analytics and what intelligence brings to your company when you evaluate your data.
So we leaned really hard into our core, which is data; our legacy and how we define our legacy, which is infrastructure and which is on premises as in cloud. It’s not just one or the other. And then we really wanted to both hold that with intelligence. We said, “It’s got to be more than just AI.” AI will continue to influence us for years to come, just like cloud has, just like data has. We want to be able to string that together in a really meaningful way for us and for the customers who would buy into that vision and want to partner with us in the future. And I think that that’s what marketers have to do. We have to be able to assess where we were, assess what the market is saying to us in the future, and bring that together in something that people respond to.
It doesn’t mean that you’re always right. Intelligent data infrastructure with a collection of words and terms and conversations across many people, even people who didn’t know us. And I think what’s really resonant about that is that it feels realistic now. It feels like we’ve listened. We took stock of who we were and where we were going, and we found a new path forward. And for the marketer, the chief marketer, who comes after me, I hope that they are able to do the exact same thing with the exact same principles.
Lisa Martin: The reality component is really table stakes these days. I really admire how you talked about the collaboration, the feedback loop with partners and customers, analysts, press, influencers, et cetera, to really understand, “Are we going in the right direction, are we not?” So that instead of being reactive, you’re really being not just realistic, but proactive. Do you feel here we are nearing rounding third base in 2024, almost 2025, is marketing in a turning point? If so, is that a good thing?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. I think it is. I think it is. I think maybe we’re getting a little bit of our multiple Ps back if we want to go back to that. We’re not just about promotion anymore, and I think that’s good. It’s good for companies, it’s good for marketers to be able to find those aspects of vision and strategy and the collaboration with product. All of these pieces were at any given time taken away or moved out. Again, it’s that pendulum swing. As companies change, marketing is always there. It’s either bigger or it’s less. It’s centralized. It’s decentralized. I think marketers have a really important role to play in companies B2B or B2C. And I think if we can understand that our role is not only caretaker and protector, but great collaborator from past, present, and future, then we take a little bit of that power back and can sit in a chair in all honesty and be able to talk about the business and not just sit and be the king or queen of execution, right?
Lisa Martin: Yeah.
Gabie Boko: Marketers have a tendency to go straight into the details. We have a tendency to do. We’re all very articulate. We like to talk. We’re very outgoing, most of us. We like to fix. We like to do. I think it’s the ability to be quiet and be that continuity for a company. It’s super important that marketers are able to do that and to take that back. Nobody wants marketing to change every three years. Nobody wants marketing to change every five years. We need to find our way back to the continuity for the soul of the company, and I think that requires us to be reflective and collaborative on our own as people.
Lisa Martin: Completely agree. I think that’s such a great position to be in, not just to talk about it, but to be able to live it and execute on it. We talked about AI washing and I was on the shop network the other day talking about the The Magnificent Seven and investors. Everyone’s so focused on the hundreds of billions that are being spent on AI infrastructure, and what’s going on with Nvidia, and all these things. And investors now want to see where’s the proof in the pudding, and I think a lot of folks don’t understand that there’s a lot of… it’s not going to happen in the third quarter, it’s going to be it’s longing. How do you leverage… You talk about AI washing, not doing it, how organizations can get around that, but how do you lean into some of those fun jitter-tooth AI tools that we all have probably open on one of our screens, and where do you leverage that in the art and the science of marketing at NetApp?
Gabie Boko: Oh, that’s my favorite part. Again, we talked about risk and experimentation, and I think AI marketing can be one of the best experimental places for AI. How we develop content with ChatGPT, how we think about the personalization of the customer journey, how we think about tools that simplify what we do and save us money. Marketing is the most perfect bed to do that type of experimentation. I think the other way I look at it, especially here at NetApp, thinking about that brand that we were just talking about with intelligent data infrastructure is that AI runs on data. There is nothing stronger than the amount of data that marketing can contribute and control or be a part of that conversation. So when you’re thinking about the future of AI, yes, that story isn’t fully written yet, but marketing has everything to be a contributor to that story.
It can be not just what we see today with ChatGPT and content and performance in that, but it can be the optimization for how we think about AI and data moving forward. And I think that’s a really nice nexus for marketers to think about. You don’t have to just say, “I’m AI.” You can actually, based on what you control and you touch, you can actually be a great driver and a great partner to people inside your company and to your customers if you focus on the fact that that data is there and that’s what AI feeds off of.
Lisa Martin: Absolutely. I always think of it like the Pac-Man, the AI feeding off the data. Maybe Ms. Pac-Man will say. But it’s incredibly important, and I love how you’re leaning into the risk that you talked about earlier. I think it’s a very important topic for CMOs and marketers alike to address and say, “Yes, there is risk here, and we’re really navigating that course understanding, leveraging data,” where it makes sense to lean into that. And then we see results. You talked about outpacing, we’re going to talk about that in our last section here in a second, outpacing the market, but that’s so important for organizations to be able to be eyes wide open, proactive to your point, realistic, and listening to those collective voices around them that really help inform are we going in the right direction?
Because if we’re not, we got a course correct and then everybody wins. Leave us with the final story, our fail the fab section where we love to… I always say failure is not a bad F word, it’s often how we learn and grow and navigate. But you talked about outpacing the market. Give our audience within this context of this final section of the conversation, what was going on there when you realized we’re outpacing the market, we’re hearing it from our key constituents. What was it like and how did you course correct to really just do that course correct?
Gabie Boko: Yeah. I think that that’s something that marketers always have to be aware of, and you are aware of it personally as well. I personally know when I am outpacing or not clear in a conversation. Communication should be one of our core strengths, so I am always course correcting my own personal self for when I am not able to bring people along. It’s the same thing when you have an idea that you know the market is talking about AI is one of those, cloud was one of those for us where we used all of the right language. It was not technically incorrect. It was not technically or strategically wrong, but we didn’t do a good enough job maybe helping our customers make that transition because they were not ready with their roadmaps and their spends. So when I say we were outpacing the market, we were not wrong. We were strategically right.
But we moved a little bit too fast from our biggest constituents, which is our customers. And that leaves you out there on your own on an island, and I think that that’s… Again, it’s not a failure, it’s a learning. That’s why you do message testing. You find a way to bring it back, and so that’s really what we’ve really wanted to do is to say, “It’s not wrong. How do we bring it back and connect the dots so that people can be on this journey with us versus feeling like we’re so far ahead, they don’t know how to tap into us.” So that, again, like I said, it’s you as a person. You have to do that. We have to do that as a company messaging as well.
Lisa Martin: Yeah. I always think the voice of the customer, and there’s really few things that are stronger in terms of validation, whether that’s validation that your messaging is spot on, you’ve nailed your value prop or validation that, “Hey, we are not ready for this,” and you just talked about that beautifully there. September 2024 NetApp INSIGHT. Be looking there for great things to come from your team and the company, and excited to hear some of those great customer stories. Gabie, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for walking through the turning point that marketing’s at how you’re leaning into risk, how you are leaning into the relationships with the CFO, the president, customers, partners, and that powerful NetApp partner community. We so appreciate your time and your insights.
Gabie Boko: Thanks a lot, Lisa. It was fun to talk to you.
Lisa Martin: Excellent. Likewise. We want to thank you for tuning into this latest episode of Marketing: Art & Science. And remind you in a couple of weeks, we launch a new episode. We’ll see you all soon.
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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.
