Welcome to the session. Today's session uh is about the lessons learned from uh an engineer to CMO. I am Sarana Babu. I'm the uh CMO A here cloud cloud is a media experience cloud company.Uh So the online, when you go online and you go shopping for a dress or you go looking for a car or anything else, any kind of online visual experience is powered by the technology that we offer cloud. Uh So I'm gonna jump to my next slide today. I'm gonna talk about share um my journey from uh I know I started as an engineer and then now uh moved to marketing and now I'm in uh I'm a CMO at uh a SAS company. So I wanted to share my journey and, and some of the key learnings uh that came along this um uh this this unique uh journey that I've had. So the first thing I want to talk about is um having been uh an engineer and moved to marketing, which are two very different um departments and roles gave me uh a very um uh unique perspective. Uh And that's because of the diversity uh of these two roles. And when you have uh so diversity brings unprecedented benefits. I wanna kind of share some of those key nuggets here. Um When I was an engineer, a lot of my time was focused on how the, the, how, right, how to solve something or how to do something.

Uh When I moved to marketing, all of that kind of shifted towards what would I communicate to the marketer? It's kind of shifted towards the work and, and through that transition, it helped me um uh having looked at two different ways of approaching things, right? How is very deep and kind of heads on, which is the what is, you know, not taking something and communicating that out. These are two different ways of looking at things and having done these two different things really helped me then uh really get to the to the why of it, right? Which is why are we doing something and then then get into the water and then have it um similarly kind of moving from engineering where it's very, very technical. Uh and um moving to the thinking about the business problems really helped me then grow into an executive role.

Uh starting from the hard skills when I was an engineer, really focusing on that and then slowly moving to kind of exercising the soft skills and developing them um then allowed me so that kind of transition allowed me to then expand further uh and really get my strategic thinking uh uh uh when, when I was an engineer, a lot of what I was doing was very black and white, but here it works or not.

It is. Um you know, so, and then moving on to more gray areas of problem solving uh and, and, and uh thinking really, then uh there was a huge transition and that really kind of exercised and sharpen my problem solving skills and then kind of, you know, having in dealing with engineers on day to day basis and then moving from that to the marketers, very different people um really helped me build that leadership uh skills because then I was able to understand different types of people, build empathy for different types of people.

Um So really, you know, when you have, when, when you're doing one type of thing or dealing with one type of people and solving one type of problems, uh think of yourself as like a do, right? There is there's no direction, there is no dimension either. Then when you uh get the opportunity to do something really different, right? Which is, which kind of gives you a taste or a perspective of the other side of the spectrum, you think of it as kind of adding another dot And then when you connect the two dots, it it becomes a line and, and then you kind of get like a dimension and direction that you can then use to extrapolate.

Uh and expand that in whatever direction you wanna go. And so it's really not two dots, is not two dots, it's not just a two ex exponential growth that you experience when you uh have two kind of diverse, diverse experiences. Uh it gives you exponential growth. So that's something that was that I learned. Um you know, moving from engineering to marketing, which are two very different type of uh departments that exercise different parts of your brain, make you do very, very different type of things. Um who should have different approaches.

Uh So this, this was extremely powerful for me. So one thing I would recommend is um at least, even if you're not making that kind of uh a radical shift, make sure that you do try at least two new things, two different things, even if it's within the same department, try two, at least two or three different roles that will help you.

Um That will give you that exponential kind of ability to grow exponentially uh which um which is harder when you kind of focus on when you kind of are very one. So that's that. Um so then I wanna uh you know, based on this experience, I wanna share with you four key learnings uh very, very quickly. So the first one is um this, this the shift really helped me uh understand my audience is much better, which is very important for marketers. It helped me uh to embrace technology. That's another thing that really gives every marketer a cutting edge uh let data be your best friend um and then build the machine. So four things that I was able to take from my engineering work and apply in the marketing world to help me differentiate and create a unique perspective uh that gave me uh give me an edge. Uh So first, um they know your audience, but the best marketers have a very deep understanding of the audiences to a point where you uh are able to live almost, you know, um have a perspective that you gain from living in their shoes. And um I was able to build this becau uh mainly because I was, I, I moved from engineering to marketing. It started from me kind of moving from engineering to marketing, selling into very similar and technical audiences.

So I was able to kind of transfer my skills and then I booked my marketing skills and then when I started to um said to more of the business audiences, um these two kind of different data points of being market and being, being uh an engineer, having been an engineer um made me understand that everybody is different, everything is different, depending on someone's perspective, like people come with very, very different perspectives.

Uh And, and it was, it, it having lived two different roles uh help me open my eyes to, to that um in a way that I couldn't have done by just reading about it or kind of going about in, in a the approach uh having lived two different roles instantly, open my eyes to the possibility that or to the reality that everybody is looking at things differently, everybody um processes things differently.

And that helped me really kind of prioritize understanding the audiences as a very first step to being a good marketer. Uh And so I would, I would definitely emphasize and do at least two different roles in your career to develop that level of empathy. Because once you do two, it then as I mentioned before, it's an exponential growth, right? So then we're able to actually very quickly and easily extrapolate um and kind of do that for multiple audiences. So that's the the first part that really really helped me uh from kind of being do doing the shift. The second thing is embracing technology um when I was back when I was an engineer, marketing was not as technical as it is today. I will show you this loomis cape which if you're familiar with this chief market publishes this of all the vendors that are in the marketing space. Uh And, and right now, it's actually at 9000 vendors in this space. So marketing has can become very tech technical. Uh And today you have, you can tap into these tools to really, there's a lot of cutting edge innovation that these tools allow you to do and so tap into that, it's an easy way to tap into that. Um So some of the things that will help me is explore new product every week. So just kind of make it a programmatic thing. Um And another thing I would say is given the the explosion of SAS.

Um the best practice would be to build a stack um like a techno tech technology stack uh that can be operated by marketers. Most of these sounds are very, very easy to use, very user friendly. Uh and and very intuitive, there's no need for training certification or anything like that. So make sure that this can be operated by your markets and sufficiently. And this really improves your efficiency when you cut the dependency from, you know, someone else technically doesn't have to operate if you're not depending on uh a a technical resource to um launch your campaigns. Uh And, and if, if uh the more independent you meet your staff and self sufficient, the faster you can move. So that's something I would say embrace technology. Every marketer should uh also be a technologist um in a way. So that's another learning coming directly from that work.

Fourth thing uh data is your best friend. There are many, many areas in which I have used data and this is not a comprehensiveness by any means. But uh some of these are more advanced like using machine learning. Some of these are uh very very, just a little bit um more basic but very very essential. So scoring is one you can, you can either use if you have high volume, you you can use machine learning or you could just if, if you're kind of a low volume, high touch type of business, then you still can do that. Uh using a traditional methods with scoring is something that uh really has um made by marketing, more targeted and high return forecasting, the predictive analytics and whatnot to make sure that use your history tap into your history patterns repeat, right? Uh Most of the time.

Uh So forecasting is, is a kind of another kind of discipline that really help me uh be a more efficient and more effective marketer chat and email bots. And if you're not using technologies like chat um or email, automate email responses, this really helped me scale much faster than I could actually build, build the team like head count and whatnot. We were able to grow much faster than our head count quotes. And and this is really essential for that experimentation. A B testing black box testing, white box system, lift, testing and whatnot. But I think everything approaching everything is an experimentation viewpoint is very, very essential. This also directed comes from the technology world, but from the adult framework.

Uh and I found this extremely um useful and makes you a much, much better market uh unit economics. And Roy uh I'm always focused on unit economics and Roy making sure that the efficient economic models that would help your business grow in a, in a scalable, predictable way.

And then finally measure and track everything, right. Um uh Find ways that meaningful ways to measure something, it doesn't always have to be revenue, but it could be something else but find meaningful ways to measure and track everything. Um So being a data driven moor is kind of a need today and uh it's very, very critical. Uh Again, that kind of mentality comes from uh really helped me. My learning comes from from the engineering world where everything is black and white. Uh marketing was not, but it's more and more becoming uh very quantitative, very measurable and very, very um die. And finally, I wanna kind of uh this is my last point, but this also comes directly from my uh engineering work. When I was an engineer, we never wrote most of the time we never wrote a code that was like a one time to solve one problem. It was always there was a problem. We tried to kind of uh look into the why and what is causing the problem and we would build up, build something to fix the cause so that all of the possible problems that could come from the same root cause are automatically fixed when you fix this one root cause uh and what I call that is gonna build the machine, right?

If you have to like um in the agriculture where if you have to grow patty, you could just buy the seeds and do it all manual one time or you could build that whole machinery and then kind of then the process and the methodology is there and, and you can keep scaling that. So that's my approach always to marketing. I, I always think about building channels and motions versus campaigns. Um When you think that way, then it kind of becomes OK. So how do you kind of start building that from kind of, you know, proving the viability of something? It's an emerging phase, experimentation, exploitation. Then you, if something is viable, then you can go to scaling phase, how you scale that? Then once it's scaled, then you kind of optimize it from kind of mature with them. Uh So I always take that framework and I'm always building a machine. Uh Anytime II I try to minimize solving one time problems and one on problems. It's always been building a machine and this um helps set up your company for longer term success and your marketing department.

So that's, those are the, the, the four things I wanted to share with you. These are big learnings for me as an engineer who kind of took the start to marketing and then uh you know, um uh climb my way up to leadership. Um Thank you. So if you have any questions I would love to answer this.