CMO Chats with Atul Sharma, Director for Field Marketing, APAC of CockroachDB

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO chats. My name is Atul Sharma, and I am currently Head of APAC Marketing for CockroachDB. I’m a thoroughbred B2B marketing professional, and being a tech marketer is what keeps me going in my professional journey. I like to believe that marketing is like building a house; You need a strong foundation, and of course, you need a safe and secure space for the brand and the customers to interact and engage. This has been my intent, no matter which organisation I’ve worked for in the last 20 years.

Atul, let me get this started because I’m very excited about today’s session. What is your current main marketing focus at the moment, as a leader,

So, Sabrina, if you look at my marketing strategy, where I currently work for CockroachDB, there are three main things that I intend to focus on in my marketing. The first is revenue, the second is recognition, and the third is relationships. Let me unpack that for you a little bit. 

If you look at revenue, I started my career in sales, so I always believed I would be a part of the revenue camp. Hence, I’m currently working very closely with my sales teams to build a healthy opportunity panel for the year. See, Revenue is the heat that keeps the house warm, and that’s why all family members, including marketing, sales, operations, and HR, should be working towards building that healthy revenue pipeline for the company to sustain and prosper. 

The second part, which I mentioned, was recognition. Getting the word out is something that is very critical for me in the current role because CockroachDB might be the best-kept secret in the world of databases. My intention is that as I try to work with my sales and my customers on who we are and what we can do for them, I want to ensure that everybody understands the value of the property we can bring to their table.

That’s the reason why I am focusing on a little bit of what I call bonfire marketing. What I mean by that is that typically, I’ve seen marketers, especially in B2B, where they do one big event or campaign, and then there’s a lull for the next three quarters. Not only have you burnt all your budgets in one big activity, but the recall factor is not there if you end up doing the fireworks kind of marketing approach.

That’s why I intend to invest, and I focus on campaigns which are more sustainable, and carry on for a longer duration. Whether it’s my social media strategy or my event strategy, that’s the underlying factor that I build on. 

The third but most important is relationships.  Just to give you some numbers, if you look at the APAC cloud spending market right now, it’s forecasted to be roughly 30 billion by 2027, growing by, say, 17%. Now,  it’s not possible for any one OEM to cover such a huge market, and that’s where relationships and partners and strategic alignments with different partners become very, very critical. So, at CockroachDB, we work very closely with all top hyperscalers, but currently, our traction with AWS APAC is huge. For me, those are the top three focuses of marketing: revenue, recognition, and relationships.

I love how they all start with r and summarise a lot of the important things. Since we are on the topic of marketing, how do you personally define success in marketing?

Sure. Marketing success varies depending on what phase of your career and what company you normally work for. It kind of changes every one to two years. But if you look at the kind of future of marketing, as I put it, I think a majority of marketers joined the marketing division because they wanted to be something that is away from mathematics and technology.

I’ve heard the answer multiple times, but guess what? I ended up running marketing for a tech company, and marketing has shifted away from the Mad Men era to the Math Men era. This means that if you look at marketing, it’s all about data and all about insights. 

So, I think the marketing definition and success in today’s world is how you ensure that you can be the tag team partner with sales and deliver the assets that the company wants you to be known for. Specifically on B2B, I think the way B2B marketing has evolved over a period of time; what was relevant yesterday is not going to be relevant tomorrow.

That’s why continuous adaptability and agility is something which is expected from marketing as a division. And as a marketing lead, you have to focus on that bit. I think that is where I see marketing success, which is ensuring revenue for the company and ensuring sales are successful. That’s how I define it.

I really love how internal collaboration is still very important, as is adapting externally to a lot of the factors that we’re faced with today. Now I want to check with you as, of course, you have a lot of experience in this industry, but what is would you say is the biggest challenge marketers face today?

Let me try to give you a perspective on that. I’ll go back to the earlier bit I was saying; if you look at general marketers and how they started in this world, the majority of the marketers started coming into this world because they were fancied by the advertising part of it. That is where, when they joined marketing, they had that fancy thing in the eye that it’s all going to be an art form, but marketing has moved away from that. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the clock model framework by Scott Galloway but look at the world of marketing as, let’s say, you’re completing a lap from 12 o’clock in a clockwise direction to 12. So from 12 to four, the pre-purchase marketing thought process is where the majority of the effort is put in by marketing. Think of marketing and sales as the driver and the navigator, running a lap of a racing car.

That is where the marketing is in the driving seat. It is the marketing department that ensures and prepares the market for who the organisation is, what it stands for, and how it can try and focus on the right set of customers to try and get business for. Now, please understand that sales always have to navigate in the 12 to four format, where they clearly call out who our target market is, which is the customers are facing issues with. But in the 12 to four lap, it is marketing which is the driving seat.

If you look at the four to eight on the clock model, sales become the driver, and marketing becomes the navigator. If you look at the purchase stage, it is sales which are in control, and it’s only marketing which is playing a supportive role, where we help in the pipeline acceleration model and ensure that the customer, who’s now warmed up, is eventually going to move towards the closure part of it. 

The last and the most important phase, the post-purchase phase, between eight and 12 is where I think both sales marketing share the space of driving and navigating. Because, I think, customer references become a very, very critical part of the post-purchase mode, like when a customer speaks well of you. Word of mouth, as you know, always travels longer than a company talking about itself. That’s how I gain success in marketing.

Got it. I think you’ve provided a really good perspective on how each department plays a really definite role, whether it be marketing or sales being the one driving the force. Everyone and every particular piece plays a big role in a puzzle. Let’s talk about marketing relationships with sales. What I specifically wanted to get out of that is, what do you think is the most successful campaign that maybe you know marketing has led, or marketing has led in collaboration with sales?

I think, Sabrina, if you look at the world today, everything has evolved. Let me just give you a statistic: if you look at the Fortune 500 companies from 1955 and the Fortune 500 list today, only roughly about 49 companies are still on that list. This means that 90% of the companies have not survived the test of time. What I’m going with this is that in today’s time, staying relevant is very, very critical.

That is where the majority of marketers actually struggle because unless and until you are relevant to your customers and your sales, you will see value. But if you don’t, if you are not able to bring in that value addition to the table, nobody’s going to give you a seat on the table. 

Now, if you look at success with sales, I think there are three things that sales worry about, and those three things are commissions, commissions and commissions. What I mean by that is that if you help the sales team make money and be successful in their job, I think they will see value in what marketing brings to the table.

Personally, in my journey of 20 years, what I have seen is that if we are able to give back time to our sales team for doing more calls and actually trying to get more business, they value it. If you understand their pain points and what they’re feeling on the field, you can help pave that path to their success and help them close deals; they value marketing. 

And at the end of the day, if you are that partner to sales where they can come to when they get stuck in a deal, and you’re able to help them nudge forward towards the deal, that’s what they value marketing.

In different phases of my career, I have done different things with sales, whether it’s big format events, getting them the interview with an executive not closing, trying to help them capture a newer territory through telecalling, or trying to be of help to them in doing a very one to many format, ABM format roundtable, which helps them get the introduction, it’s worked well. So, it’s very difficult to pinpoint one tactic. I think tactics are a part of success. It’s more about understanding sales better and helping them be successful is where marketing shines.

We’re all for the support that each area needs to make to be able to fill that gap. Since we’re talking about events, I wanted to know specifically what’s the most successful event or engagement piece you’ve hosted. What made it successful?

Typically, the tactic of events is something that the sales team will always find the most impactful. The reason for that is the sales always prefer and like the interaction, not during, but after and before the events with the customers. Which is something that virtual events will never be able to take. I mean, look at what happened during COVID.

Everybody had to pivot to virtual events because there was no other option, but the moment post-COVID happened, everybody had to bounce back to face-to-face events with a vengeance. So clearly, I think awareness is a good start, but action is what is most relevant to sales—that’s why events become very critical. 

Now, what I have personally seen successful with sales in one of the two or three big events, I can tell you, which has worked well for us. In my past life working for AWS, where there was a lot of traction that we were already having with the technical audience because AWS was a technical organisation and had a strong technology foothold, but we were not able to get enough traction at the executive level.

That is where we started building a property called executive leaders, where we started talking about not only what the tech did for the tech teams, but what were the outcomes and the business benefits of that technology. That is how you differentiate the thought process of what a tech person gets on a table from what a marketing person gets on a table.

Of course, at the end of the day, it’s the technology that runs the car; it’s that car that helps you go from point A to point B, it’s that car that helps you save time, and is that car that helps you elevate your status in society. The outcomes and the benefits of what that product and solution do are what marketing gives on a table. That’s exactly what we did with that particular event called exec leaders. We were able to tap into the top 250 accounts and build a pipeline of about 8 million, and eventually, that property became a yearly event to follow through.

Well, I’m very happy to hear about how the success of this event was able to propel you to where you are now and what you do at CockroachDB. Could you share a little bit more about how you measured the events ROI now as a leader or how that impacted pipeline or lead generation? 

Let me now get you the context of how we normally, you know, judge the success of events in my current organisation. So, if you look at CockroachDB, we don’t have a classical format. That is where, typically, in B2B, everything that stands has been MQL or SQL. But I think sometimes, and a lot of markets might not like me when I say this, but it’s a lot of vanity metrics when you come to MQL or SQL.

At the end of the day, when, let’s say, you run a campaign, and there are a lot of people who have downloaded a content asset of yours, which marketing will call an MQL, Sales don’t see value in that. Because, for them, valuable conversation is when a customer wants to talk to you about something which they already have context for.

Gartner had printed that study a long time back, which is, if you look at the journey of a customer before they talk to a sales guy, it was roughly about 59% about three years back. Now, that journey is almost 71%, which means the customer has already done their research, and almost 71% of the journey is already done before they talk to a customer. I think content strategy is important, but we need to get away from the vanity metrics of impressions and MQL or SQL.

What we do at CockroachDB is something called a factor of the number of meetings, post and pre-event. There’s something called E.R.A., which is Engagement-Rich Accounts. The success of marketing and sales is judged by the amount and the scoring that we’re able to put on a customer by how much engagement we have had with that customer.

That engagement can be a full 360-degree view of the number of activities: they’ve been a part of events, they’ve taken part in calls we’ve had with the customer and the likes of those. Also, when we meet a customer at an event, we eventually have an SDR team that follows through, and the success of that event in ROI is judged by the number of meetings we’ve had in the next three weeks.  

So, if you met the customer and the customer showed interest, we put that at state zero. If a customer is willing to now have another conversation with the broader team, we put that at stage one. And when a customer commits to a POC, we put a stage two. That’s how we put the ROI format. As you can see, it’s fairly quantifiable. You can follow through, and then you can look at the data after the end of the year and judge which event or activity actually worked for you.

This brings a smile to me because I love how things get quantifiable based on the scoring and stage system. It feels like it’s very streamlined to understand and even personalise the way that you reach out to these leaders. I love how you explained all of that, and we are actually down to our couple of last questions. So I’m very excited about this part as well; given that you’ve been in the industry for a long time already, I want to know what career advice you would give to anyone starting in the marketing industry.

Sure. Thank you. I think Sabina, to the people who would want to join marketing now in the 2024+ world, I would say that don’t join the marketing industry just because you feel you’re a creative person. Don’t get fancied by the world of advertising, which is usually every MBA student’s first view of marketing. Because as I mentioned earlier, the industry has moved on long from there. Join the field of marketing because you see the value of what marketing brings to the table. 

Personally, if I had to tell you, I would say that, as CMOs, you need to understand that you need to go beyond the gamut of marketing to maintain and sustain the field of marketing. Until then, we try to work in a periphery of saying, ‘I am the brand custodian, and that’s what I do.’ I don’t think the longevity of this function is going to be within the paradigm of the brand. 

Unless and until you are able to break that barrier and move towards revenue, ou break that barrier, and you try and get towards what you do for the customer, think backwards from the customer’s needs, and help that conversation put on the table is where the field of marketing will be.

Anybody who’s joining marketing now should focus on how they can be the representative of their possible customer internally in the organisation. That is what marketing is supposed to be, and not just a creative person. Of course, it will always have a bit of art to it, but that’s not just what marketing defines. It has much more than just a creative side of it. 

There’s a lot to explore with the marketing role today, especially since it has evolved with the use of data, numbers, and analytics to determine how people respond. What do you believe would be the biggest opportunity that marketing leaders today might not have been able to see in the past?

If you look at it now, I can talk more about B2B because that’s what I’ve survived and thrived in my professional life. I think in today’s time, my concern is that the majority of the brands are sinking in the sea of sameness. Everybody wants to look different, but they end up looking the same.

If you look at social media, the majority of the brands are we-ing on themselves. What I mean by that is that they just talk about, ‘We can do this. We are better than that. We do this, and we are better than normal’. That thought process is something that needs to evolve.  I think in future, you will be forced to differentiate, or you will die. That’s one thing marketers definitely need to work towards. 

Second, I think the marketing department and a marketer need to either entertain the customer, educate the customer, encourage the customer, or empower your customer. If you’re not doing either one of those or more of those, then clearly, marketing is not pulling its weight. That is where I see an opportunity for us to start thinking about the marketing function more holistically than just about one or the other. In the end, the third thing I will say is that marketing is all about persuasion. You cannot persuade somebody unless and until you know them.

That’s why I would suggest that the marketing department and marketer should invest time, effort, and budget to understand the customer a bit more. It’s like you need to date your customer before you propose marriage. If you don’t invest enough time in that, clearly asking the question too soon will ensure that you’re not able to get the desired result you’re looking at; no matter how good your intentions are, intentions don’t get you business. Hard work does, efforts do, and that’s where the opportunity of marketing lies.

Beautiful. Get to know your customers before proposing to them. I love that last question for you. Atul, how would you describe the role of a marketing leader in one word? And why?

I think, Sabrina if you had to describe the role of a CMO in one word, I would say a collaborator. I think it is the marketing department and the marketing leader who’s able to actually cross-functionally talk to anybody and everybody and have a point of view.

I think it is the CMO who’s able to understand the value proposition from a customer perspective. I don’t know how many CMOS or marketing team leaders actually talk to customers, but I have seen personally that a conversation that I have with the customer is a very different conversation that a sales leader has with the customer. I think there are things that a marketer can get away with by asking a customer, which a salesperson will never do.

As a collaborator, you’re able to be that bridge which fills the gap between sales and the customer. Also, between sales and other departments, I think that perspective is lost sometimes because a lot of the departments within the organisations are far from sales.

That’s why marketers must help that internal gap also by trying to help organisations understand how sales can be supported better. It’s like how your mother runs the house and doesn’t get enough credit, for that’s exactly what the marketing department does.

The potential is that if this department runs well and has the motherly instincts of ensuring that you nurture the customer, you support your sales, and you’re able to check the departments who are not doing the right things but still try and pull them up in the right direction; the whole engine works seamlessly. That is the power of a CMO or a marketing department.