How to Redefine Marketing Leadership: Chats with Gabriel

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Azion?

“I’m the CMO at Azion. I’ve been in the tech space for a while, leading different kinds of marketing teams, especially in developer tool companies. At Azion, I lead the marketing team and help the company scale and grow across different verticals. We’re a platform to build, scale, and secure applications, and we’ve been creating a new space in the market over the years.”

 

How did you get into marketing, and how did you end up becoming the CMO at Azion?

“So, I’m an engineer. and I was an engineer for a long time before getting excited about marketing. But once I started working with marketing, sales, and go-to-market, I realised connecting those two worlds is a beauty that fascinates me. You get the data and specificity engineers love, with the care and creativity that marketers bring, and you find a really strong spot.

I joined Azion because I was advising the company first, and then I was invited to become the CMO to recreate the marketing organisation inside the company.”

Marketing leaders often have to balance multiple priorities. If you had to choose one or two that define your team’s focus, what would they be, and why are they important?

“For me, I like my teams to focus on company metrics and business goals. When I think about how marketing influences the company, I’m looking at pipeline, revenue, reducing churn, and accelerating our go-to-market strategy.

Marketing isn’t just an accessory department doing flashy things. You need to help the business move forward.”

 

What would you say is your biggest challenge right now?

“In my case, the biggest challenge for marketers right now is rethinking all their playbooks.

AI is levelling the game because everyone has access to tools that used to be reserved for more specialised marketers.

LLMs are changing how people search, navigate the web, and consume products.

Many channels we relied on, like email and advertising, simply don’t work the same way anymore. So the challenge is reinventing those channels.”

 

You mentioned challenge and opportunity. What’s the opportunity in all of this?

“The difference now is how you use AI to differentiate and create unique, crafted experiences at scale. Marketers used to do that by hand, like with ABM, but now you can do it at a much higher scale and lower cost.

Essentially, the real advantage comes from finding the sweet spot: using AI for busy work so you’re not wasting time, and using it strategically so your output is actually distinct.”

 

What are you doing right now to differentiate yourself and your work?

“First, it’s about deeply understanding the technology, how platforms work, what the latest advances are, and how to tune models. My engineering background helps a lot there. There are variables you can adjust for tone, language, directness, and how your output comes across, whether it’s text, video, or audio.

The goal is getting crisp answers and crisp execution.

Second, it’s making sure we do purposeful things. We need to think through why we’re doing something, rather than throwing content out on every channel.

That just creates noise, dilutes the brand, and wastes the audience’s attention. If you lose attention with the wrong messaging or ads, you lose momentum, and you lose time.”

 

Who is your ICP, what topics are they most interested in, and what resonates with them?

“We’re speaking to a technical audience: developers, security folks, and infrastructure people. They communicate differently from other industries. They want you to be direct, trustworthy, and technically credible. They don’t like marketing fluff or exaggerations without proof.

You have to be authentic and show you’re genuinely trying to help them, not just sell. The balance is giving value right away while also introducing a product, concept, or idea they might not be familiar with.

That’s the daily exercise, through campaigns, channels, and even how we express the brand through design, so that a developer, a CISO, or a CTO feels they belong with us and that we communicate in the way they expect.”

 

What’s the most effective channel to reach that audience?

“Developers might feel niche, but it’s a gigantic audience; the software market is one of the biggest in the world. The key is not using broad marketing tactics. You need community, documentation, and influencers far more than traditional media.

You have to be in places like Discord, Reddit, GitHub, and historically, Stack Overflow. You find where they spend time daily, and you show up there to be helpful.

With a developer audience, anything forced or overly direct gets rejected. It has to be nuanced, long-term, and focused on providing value, and then awareness grows naturally.”

 

Which marketing initiatives does your sales department tend to be most grateful for or excited about?

“The ones where we work together. Too often, marketing launches initiatives that are disconnected from sales reality. Marketing has two roles: supporting the short term to help close pipeline, and building long-term awareness and brand equity that pays off over time.

Success is when we balance both well: bringing events that help close deals, delivering content and collateral when needed, and building a solid message that sales can pitch confidently.

When customers say, ‘I already know you, I’ve seen this,’ conversion becomes much easier. The best marketing and sales relationships are those where this balance is clear and sales understands the dual nature of marketing.”

 

2025 has come to a close. How did it go, and what was the most successful strategy for the year?

“It was a great year. We grew and hit our goals. The biggest focus was building a marketing team that can scale and creating repeatable playbooks, not hacks or short-term blips you can’t reproduce.

We invested in building motions that are cost-effective, repeatable, and adaptable across geographies, segments, and teams.

In 2026, we have more playbooks, and they’re more effective, so it’s about expanding them while continuing to experiment and research. It’s also about having control: understanding what happens when you invest more in a tactic, how it affects the funnel and the brand, and what changes when you scale up or pull back.”

 

How would you describe the role of the CMO in one word, and why?

“A trust builder. The CMO has to create a brand in the market and show the company is trustworthy and worth people’s time to think about, read about, and engage with. If a company doesn’t connect with its audience, the CMO isn’t doing a great job. The core is getting people to look at you and aspire to be close to what you’re building.”

 

What career advice would you give to someone starting in marketing?

“Don’t specialise too quickly. Try different areas and become a generalist first, because marketing works as a mix of channels and campaigns that support each other. It’s rarely one single thing that solves the problem.

Explore different aspects of marketing early, understand the value of working horizontally, and later you’ll find the path and the area where you have the most impact.”

 

If you could ask other marketing leaders one question, what would it be?

“How do you keep reinventing yourself? How do you transform yourself every year? As you get older, there’s a tendency to stick to old playbooks, the things you know worked before.

I’m always looking for inspiration on how people rethink what they do and remove themselves from their comfort zone.

That’s a leader’s biggest challenge: staying up to date and re-evaluating your values, skills, and learnings to make sure you’re building the right ones — or finding new ones when needed.”