CONTENTS
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
“Sara Varni: Make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value.”
[00:00:00] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Sara Varni, the Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog. Sara, it is such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:33] Sara Varni: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:35] Sunny Manivannan: Great. You're one of the rare CMOs who has cracked a code on integrating product-led growth motions, as well as sales-led growth motions. Many companies are trying to do this, especially in this economy where every dollar counts and so many products are now sort of flexing up and down all the way from SMB, all the way to enterprise. But they tend to have a hard time doing this right. What do you think they get wrong, and what are some principles that you've taken from your successes?
[00:01:06] Sara Varni: Yes. Well, I think you're being very generous when you say I've cracked the code because I think the code is always changing, and you've got to move with the market. I think some of the things that we got right at Twilio as we went through this transition, that's where I had the greatest experience doing this, was really listening to our audience. It sounds like marketing 101 and making sure we weren't just applying an enterprise sales playbook to a very healthy developer ecosystem.
Developers aren't going to go and download your e-book, and then be happy to get a call from a SDR, and reveal their timeline and budget of what they're going to do. That's just not the way the world works. I think you have to figure out the places where you can use elements of what you've done in enterprise B2B marketing, and then check those elements that are just going to turn off the audience. That takes real discipline, and it takes looking at things with real – with a true beginner's mind to make sure that you're not tainting that experience.
We all – I think one of the huge benefits I had at Twilio was the developer evangelist rolled up to marketing. We were all one team. I really had to work with that team to make sure that I understood the core Twilio developer audience and that I didn't do anything that would feel really off-brand and off for them and how they wanted to hear from us.
[00:02:42] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. Going a little bit deeper into the Twilio example, when you came into that role and one of your priorities was to move up market and to go lean in more into sales-led growth, what adjustments or improvements did you feel needed to be made? How do you even start prioritizing that?
[00:03:03] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, my experience in PLG to sales has primarily been in developer-focused companies. But I think it applies broadly to any kind of self-service motion and that people are able to get their hands on the product that you're selling already. They're able to largely see the value of your product without a lot of human intervention. I think your role as marketing is really to make sure you're helping that customer through that journey and not selling to them.
When I think back to my time at Twilio, one of the best lead channels for us was docs because people were trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I set up alerts and notifications via SMS?” They would search on that, and they'd come across our docs. We made sure that it was a great engaging experience that didn't feel like boring documentation. We were able to get them in, get them feeling the love of the brand from that first moment. Then from there, hopefully, bring them further onto our platform and get them doing more things that would ultimately lead to more revenue for Twilio down the road. It really came from a place of helping, not selling.
[00:04:14] Sunny Manivannan: Tell me a little bit more about that. I love the docs example because that's such a great burst of credibility when somebody first comes in contact with your company, and it's through your documentation, especially for developer audience. Tell me a little bit more about helping instead of selling. What does that look like for you? Are there any other examples that come to mind?
[00:04:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think the other element of that is you do have a sales team for a reason, and you do want to build up a relationship with some of your accounts, especially your larger accounts where there might be multiple people involved in the decision. There might be pricing discussions that the person using the product is not as much in control of. You need to make sure that you've got different relationships with your account, especially your larger ones as you move to enterprise.
I think the thing you have to be careful of, so there are moments when you want to engage and you should engage with your sales team. You have to be very careful as to when you do that. We used to look at metrics at Twilio around adoption, and it was a certain threshold that we called it. I think it was called PA10. We saw that a developer had made 10 API calls against our service that we assumed that there was something more significant going on.
At that point, that would trigger a different level of engagement. Maybe not necessarily a salesperson at that point, but that would be a first milestone that we would say, “All right, we can engage this customer in a slightly different, more in-depth way than we might someone who we think is maybe just even a hobbyist trying to play around with SMS APIs and wire up some fun app. We tried to be really careful about when we engage, again, to not tarnish our reputation as a developer-centric brand or someone that really understood how developers wanted to engage with us.
[00:06:06] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. One of the questions I had for you on this topic was while not straightforward, it seems plausible to go from product-led growth and add sales-led growth elements to it where you're going from the bottom all the way to the top. Have you ever seen a company do it the opposite way where you started off a sales-led growth and now you try to come back to SMB and to create more of a self-led experience?
[00:06:37] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you can go about that. You can go about it organically. It might be harder to do. I do see companies go and acquire smaller, leaner, easier to set up products, too, on the low end to defend a flank. I don't know all that much about their developer ecosystem, but I think a company that largely has gone this route is Snowflake, honestly. They started with a pretty heavy enterprise sales motion. I do know over time as their platforms become more robust and it integrates virtually everything, I think that they have started to build up a developer community probably secondary to their primary buying audience.
I don't want to quote that as the gold standard because I don't know all that much about how that evolution has happened. But at a high level, it feels like they've gone that direction versus bottoms up.
[00:07:31] Sunny Manivannan: It seems like definitely spend more time on your documentation is at least rule number – it's one of the first three rules if not rule number one. Then be very careful about not selling and really just helping the user get more value out of your product. Then finally, be careful about exactly when you engage in sort of human-to-human connection with a user, AKA the beginning of a sales process.
[00:07:58] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think they always say rule number one of developers is don't market. Or rule number one of marketing developers is don't market to developers. That probably largely applies to most consumer. Well, to a certain degree, I think in enterprise software, it applies to consumers too more broadly or people that just want to get in and get out. Yes, I think you just have to you be careful to not get too fluffy or forward-looking your language and just say what it is.
[00:08:33] Sunny Manivannan: I'm going to go a little off-script, but it does segue into our next topic. I wanted to ask you this idea of how developers like to be engaged with and how they buy which is sort of very reality-based. Just tell me the facts. Let me make my own decision. Please don't call me and harangue me to go buy your solution. Please just let me figure out whether this is something that I can use for my purposes. If it works great, then I will just buy more from you because I believe in you and I trust in you. Now, that's one way to buy.
Then the other way to buy is sort of this heavy almost evangelism sale where you're saying, “Here's – your world's going to change. We're going to do it with you, and it's going to be awesome. You're going to be a superhero and all these things.” Are the rest of us buying more like developers in this market? Are we more sort of, “Give me the proof. Give me the reality.”? Are you seeing any shifts in that?
[00:09:22] Sara Varni: I definitely think we are in a painkiller versus vitamin environment. You hear that saying a lot, like make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value versus more lofty benefits or things that are going to be hard to measure.
I definitely think that there's been a lot of pressure. It’s good pressure, honestly, on us as marketing teams to really get down to what's in it for the customer. But there's definitely been a shift in the pendulum that way versus like, “Hey, you're going to change the world with this product, and there's going to be unicorns and ponies flying around when you deploy our software, and every employee is going to be happy.” You’re not going to see a lot of that language without hard metrics coupled with it.
[00:10:26] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I think that makes a lot of sense and actually leads directly to my next question which is about the difference between embracing evangelism as a marketer versus sticking to reality, right? You’ve now – companies like Datadog, I would say Twilio, that some developers have very much been about, “Okay, here's what you're going to get. We want to make sure that you are getting the exact accurate truth at every step of the way as a user, and we're going to prove our value through the product.”
That's a very product-led growth motion, whereas sort of the original, frankly, the OG SaaS company, Salesforce, has always been a very evangelism-driven company. It's always been about, “Okay, what is the transformation that we're going to unlock for you,” and then bringing it down to the details of what that's going to look like. You've now done both. You've both embraced evangelism and embraced reality. What are the big differences that you've seen as a marketer?
[00:11:23] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I wouldn't say either approach is wrong. I think it just completely depends on how long it takes someone to adopt your product and who's actually using it at the end of the day. When you're working with a developer audience like we were working with at Twilio, they want their hands on the code as soon as possible. They don't want to hear about a product that they can't actually get their hands on for 18 months. If you're going to announce something, they better be ready at least in some sort of beta or have some sort of access so that they can really get their hands on it. Otherwise, they're going to move on to the next things. They're just practical and trying to get down their list of things.
If you're dealing with a company like Salesforce, which is today but even back in the day is a pretty broad-sweeping platform, it can be the backbone of your customer-centric data, and that's a big decision that doesn't normally happen overnight, especially in enterprise. You need to make sure that you are convincing the customer that they're future-proofed with your product.
That's why, yes, I think Salesforce has been – Salesforce was an incredible training ground for me, but they were – Marc and all the marketing team at Salesforce has always been great about being in front of the trends. Salesforce was talking about AI three years ago. They were – when Facebook and Instagram were just getting off the ground, they talked about how that would relate to business. They talked about IoT. They talked about mobile. They've always been on top of it. I think that that's really helped them expand relationships with large enterprise customers who know all right.
There was that old adage like, “Hey. Way back in the day, no one would get fired for using IBM.” I think Salesforce now has replaced IBM in that sentence. No one's going to get fired for choosing Salesforce because, generally, it has so much functionality that you can bend it to your will and make it do the things you need it to do. I think having that strong evangelical message on top has really helped them continue to be the leader and the 800-pound gorilla in their space.
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: They've been the leader for so long, but it's hard to remember that they were started after 2000. This is not an old company by any means. They've just been a leader in SaaS for so long that we think of them as they've always been here, but they haven't. They're still relatively new compared to the giants that they go up against.
[00:13:47] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:48] Sunny Manivannan: Is there a good middle ground between evangelism and reality? Do you subscribe to the theory that marketing should be X months ahead of the product and should just try to keep the drum be going in that direction? If so, how do you determine what that number of months is? Tell us more about your thoughts.
[00:14:07] Sara Varni: I think on this one I'd actually say it's more segment-specific. If you're selling to SMB midmarket and people who need to get their hands on whatever tool you're selling ASAP, these decisions aren't huge sales cycles, they're not a year to 18-month sale cycles, then I think you want to stay pretty close to reality. You have to have some edge in your message to make sure that you're not getting completely run over by the competition.
But you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver. I'm going to start talking about enterprise now, and you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver there either. But I do think you have a little bit more of a grace period to say hey, and you do. You owe it actually to enterprise customers who have longer road maps and need to plan with you like, “Hey, this is what's on the road map for us for 18 months. This is what you need to think about because it's a partnership. These are the things we should think about building together,” and I think it's 100% fine. Actually, I think it's beneficial to that customer to be ahead of what's actually available in terms of a skew so that they know how to plan with you.
Now, I think the thing that I don't agree with that sometimes happens is people marketing or whoever will announce stuff that never sees the light of day, and that's bad. That I don't think is the way to go. But I think to the extent, you are solid on what's coming in the next year to 18 months, and you're dealing with an enterprise customer base that needs to plan. I think you should be a little bit ahead of reality and to the extent you can communicate what's coming to your customers.
[00:15:41] Sunny Manivannan: You made an amazing point there where you talked about you have more of a grace period with enterprise customers because, yes, they're hiring you to solve a today problem, but they're also really buying into your vision for the tomorrow problem as well, whereas SMB and even lower midmarket, they're buying you before the today problem, and they need it to work today. Those are one to three-month sales cycles. Those are so quick, and your go live happens, I don't know, a day after you sign the contract or two days after you sign the contract. You're in the product, and you're using it. It's a very different experience.
[00:16:13] Sara Varni: Right, right. It better work.
[00:16:16] Sunny Manivannan: It better work. That's great. I want to ask you about a new CMO's first 90 days, which you and I both know it's a role that has seen – I think historically has been fair. Both CRO and CMO have been historically fairly high turnover. But especially over the last two years as companies, I think, have just made so many changes in their revenue teams, there's a lot of new CMOs in seat, and there are going to be new CMOs coming into new jobs much more frequently than before. How does a new CMO “win” their first 90 days?
[00:16:53] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's three major elements I think about. I think it's, first off, getting to know the business, knowing the metric, the key metrics and how success is measured, getting into how marketing pipeline is attributed versus sales without getting super into the weeds but high level kind of knowing, “All right, we do 40% of our business in SMB, 60% in midmarket plus.” Just knowing those high-level dynamics, so you know where to put your energy first. That's the first piece.
I think second is really getting to know your team. I always try to meet with everyone. No matter how large or small my team is, I try to meet with everyone one-on-one as quickly as I can. It’s an investment in time. Don't get me wrong. But I do think it helps you learn very quickly what's working on the team, what's not, where are their places where the team is really stretched thin, where are there places where the team is rich in resources. There's maybe places to scale back. I think that it really helps you learn quickly what's working, what's not on the team, and where you might have gaps.
Then I'd say third, it's really understanding what the CEO cares about, what the exact team overall cares about when it comes to marketing, and really understanding culturally and from a brand perspective what are the things that they love. What are the things that really turn them off? Trying to get a sense of that as quickly as possible. It’s not to manage up. It's honestly to learn the brand more than anything.
I had our first user conference last week and going through some of those elements and walking the show floor with our CEO and looking at certain branding. Or going to an event where the music was a little bit loud, and that's not our vibe. Those are things that I just learned on site walking with him. I think the sooner you can get a sense of what those things are, the better you're – the more you're going to be on brand for the company. Then you can scale from there.
[00:19:19] Sunny Manivannan: I love that example because it really is. You would think that all these companies look the same. But then when you get into the details, there's all these minute differences, and the collection of those across 10, 20 years is really what becomes your brand.
[00:19:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, at Datadog, we've got a full – we've got a science to our – any sort of Datadog demo stations that we have. There's a science to how many demos we can host in an hour and the balance of products that we'd want to see and how we want to bring people into the booth. There's a bunch of history that has gone into the thinking there and the setup.
I think that was an example of something like I just have never seen that in my other CMO roles. It was just something I had to pick up and be like, “Okay. There's a formula here. It seems to work. This is places where we might tweak it here and there.” But this is an approach that's very core to the Datadog brand and how we've gone to market, and this is something that we've got to keep intact and figure out how we improve on the edges.
[00:20:28] Sunny Manivannan: Well, it's great to know that Datadog is really good at using data to glean insights that actually make a difference in the business. That's good news.
[00:20:33] Sara Varni: Sure, yes. No, that's – we definitely – we live up to our name on that front, for sure.
[00:20:39] Sunny Manivannan: I want to ask you if you would be willing to oblige me to just take me into your first 90 days at a few of the companies that you've been at. What was the same? What's been different about each company when you first started?
[00:20:52] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, every company was at a different phase of growth. When I started at Twilio, it was a super interesting time to join the company. The company was doing about 400 million in revenue with about 30 sales reps. When I came on, we had decided to really grow the sales team. In earnest, this is all public knowledge, but Twilio had – Uber was one of their largest customers. I think it was like double digits percentage of their overall revenue.
One day, they basically decided that their bill with to was too large, and they decided to multisource for SMS. That was a big wakeup call for the company, and that's when we really decided like, “Hey, we need to put more of an account management function at the minimum in place to make sure that we understand what's really happening within these accounts versus just being self-service."
When I was brought on, it was – my first 90 days was really about, all right, thinking about how we can set up this infrastructure alongside a sales team that's growing really quickly to think about growing pipeline together. I remember in the first 90 days, one of the things I stood up was just the basic pipeline council. At Salesforce, we had – I probably had four pipeline councils a week, depending on what vertical I was trying to drive or product or whatever. But we just set up a very basic pipeline council so that marketing and sales and partners would get in the same room and say, “All right, what can we realistically put up percentage-wise as teams, and how can we best collaborate together?” That was – if I think back to Twilio, it's almost six years ago now which is crazy. That's how I spent my first 90 days.
Attentive was in hyper-growth mode when I joined. It was the end of ’21, and this was just when the market was still – the IPO market was just flying, and Attentive was putting in all the pieces in place to be part of that movement. We were just – really, the first 90 days were, all right, thinking about what are some of the things you would need to get out in the market before you went dark if we were going to go public, and what are – because that was just something that I learned in that process.
For anyone who joins a company that's close to going public, these are things to think about. Once you go into a dark period, you can't do things like broad-based advertising if you haven't done it before. We wanted to do all that stuff in the case that we decided to file so that we could still do it through the filing process. Within 90 days, I spun up a big ad campaign. We had billboards in Time Square and in different markets across the country. We did Wall Street Journal ads. That was great because it was like it created a forcing function to get on the same page with messaging.
Again, it was an example where I had to work with the execs to understand: these are things they hate, these are things they like and appreciate. I think hard deadlines drive decisions, and they drive feedback. That was really helpful to me in that 90 days. At Datadog it has – things have been – I'm joining Datadog at a place where it's much more established versus at Twilio or at Attentive. Maybe it's because it's my third CMO role. I know a little bit more. It's like having your third kid. You understand. You're like, “All right, I got this now. I've figured it out. Just get in the car.” That's kind of what I say about having a third kid, like they're just along for the ride. No.
I think at Datadog, some of the challenges that I talked about at Twilio or at Attentive, those haven't been on the table. It's been more about – I think that the most interesting thing about my time at Datadog is that the person who was in my role before was here for 10 years, and so they've established an incredible machine, and there's so much about this team that's high-functioning and working well.
I think it's been me spending 90 days, thinking about what do I want to keep entirely in place, and where are some areas to tweak and scale. I definitely – I don't want to drastically change anything that's working well, and so I'm careful to ask a lot of questions and make sure that, all right, if I'm tweaking brand things here and there, is there a reason we haven't gone down that path in the past?
Sometimes, there is. There's a very good reason why we haven't done certain things. Then sometimes, it's like, “Well, we just haven't asked in a few years because we went down that path before, and that didn't seem like something that the exec team wanted to do. So we haven't pursued it again.” There's certain – I try to ask a lot of questions and make sure that I'm keeping the things that are part of the brand intact that are working well. Then also thinking about, all right, how can we swap out some things or add some things to really scale this brand and help us expand in new markets.
[00:26:02] Sunny Manivannan: That's amazing. I mean, I just love each of these three stories in the different situations that the company was in when you joined the company. The idea of a pipeline council and just knowing that that worked from previous environments and bringing that into a new environment, that's hugely valuable in of itself. I loved your story about having to order one of everything from the menu because, otherwise, you couldn't order it at all for the next X days. It’s an amazing story.
[00:26:29] Sara Varni: Yes. Those are where – they're just things you – I wouldn't have – I'd never been to a company that wasn't public, and so I didn't understand any of those elements. That's just stuff I had to pick up and learn, and you learn something everywhere you go. I feel very fortunate to have been at three awesome companies as a CMO.
[00:26:48] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I think many of us, at least those who actually look at SaaS company ads when they're out on the street, which I'm one of those people, I think we all remember when Attentive started doing that. It was just all of a sudden everywhere. Now, we get the story behind it. It's great.
[00:27:03] Sara Varni: Good.
[00:27:04] Sunny Manivannan: It's great.
[00:27:04] Sara Varni: I'm glad you saw –
[00:27:06] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. I think a lot of us did, definitely in New York City. Let me ask you on the flip side of this. What mistakes do you think, especially early career VPs of marketing or CMOs making their first 90 days, that reduces their chances of really succeeding long term in that role at that company.
[00:27:24] Sara Varni: I think there's a few things. I think one is bringing your playbook from wherever and just thinking you can apply it, blanket to whatever company you end up going to. I think there's – you go through a period where you leave a company and you go to the next and you say like, “Well, that,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You have to really just stop. You have to – I have to catch myself or else I'll do that all day long.
I think people sometimes change too much too fast, and I think that there's often council you'll get from coaches or mentors that are like, “Hey, you have to make your mark in the first 90 days and put some stuff up on the board.” That's true. I definitely think you want to get some wins on the board. But there are certain things that might take a quarter or two, especially at a larger company, to understand why a team has evolved the way it has or why it's the size it is. It takes a couple programs or projects to get through to to understand that.
On the flip side, I will say sometimes people don't move fast enough. I think you have to find the right kind of happy medium there. I think if you wait too long to make changes, you become native to the company. I think you have to be – I think it's important to write on paper or in slides, whatever your take in the first month with the company and where you think the gaps are. Then look at that every month and make sure you don't lose sight of that because your first impressions and your gut reaction are often pretty close to the truth.
I think, especially from a brand perspective, and I think as you get further into the company and get more native to things, your ability to pick up on that stuff becomes just more muted. I think you've got to keep those first reactions written down in something that you reference so that that stays as your North Star of like, “Hey, we've got room to grow or room to push ourselves in certain directions.”
[00:29:27] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Okay, I want to talk a little bit of SaaS with you, SaaS company homepages, just SaaS marketing stuff. My first question to you along these lines is do you have a favorite customer story, SaaS customer story from your background or any stories that you've seen?
[00:29:44] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I especially loved going to Twilio from – Salesforce had some of the biggest customers, huge logos. They did so many cool demos and case studies. But I loved going to Twilio because I got more access to consumer side. One of the stories I always loved was with Medtronic. Medtronic had developed a new system for basically any sort of – a insulin detector that children would wear on their arms could now notify a parent if the child was going to go into any sort of diabetic shock.
The way that Medtronic would tell the story together with Twilio was that this absolutely unlocked a lot of activities and new ways of living for children especially who couldn't do sports beforehand or couldn't be too far away from their parents or a close supervision, whatever it was. Now, they had all this freedom because they basically had a way to constantly track that they were safe and going to be healthy. I thought that was just such a very cool pulls at the heartstring story about how technology was really affecting people's lives.
[00:31:02] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, amazing story, and I think sometimes we forget just – we stare at so many product dashboards and numbers all day that we forget that technology now is everywhere in our lives and is making a huge impact in every facet of our lives. Amazing story, amazing story. Favorite SaaS company homepage.
[00:31:23] Sara Varni: I always – and this is probably a pretty generic answer because I feel like everyone references this. But I love Stripe’s website for a couple of different reasons. I think they've been able to talk to both developers and the business. I think they strike that right message that we were talking about between evangelism and being more kind of what you see is what you get. I think they've got really great product names that you can generally get what the product does, but it doesn't say like, “Hey, we do, I don't know, credit card processing.” They come up with clever references.
It’s partially the website and the structure, and it's clean and easy to navigate. But it's also, I think, their – my comment is reflective on their branding and the way they name their products and organize themselves that I think makes them stand out for me.
[00:32:17] Sunny Manivannan: I totally agree. I mean, they're one of the companies that I look to for website inspiration pretty much every time I write a new product page or a new company page. It's part of what I'm doing now. It's just they seem to demand a level of clarity and thinking that just pervades everywhere, and it's awesome to see that.
[00:32:37] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:32:38] Sunny Manivannan: Very cool. All right, last question on the SaaS front. What is your favorite enterprise software tool or business software tool?
[00:32:45] Sara Varni: I love Tableau. I was lucky to use it at Twilio, and that was a really great tool for us to bring together not only our sales team and marketers that were campaign-focused but also our developer evangelist. We all lived in there, and I just think it's super easy. Especially if you're running a global sales team, you can instantly get to like, “All right, commercial APAC is not performing on lead count in a matter of clicks.” That's just something that's just been super powerful for me as I've tried to make sure my team's focused on the right hot spots.
[00:33:28] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. This is The Peerbound Podcast. We clearly believe that we're all influenced by our peers. This is the peer influences section. First question for you is do you have a book and/or movie recommendation.
[00:33:40] Sara Varni: I'm trying to read 18 books this year. I know for most people that might sound ridiculous. But I don't know. Every time I try to read, maybe it's just because I get up early to work out or work long days, I just end up falling asleep, so 18 is – it's a lot. For me, I just read Demon Copperhead which was recommended to me by a few different people. It was excellent. I highly recommend, very good.
[00:34:08] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. Okay. Eighteen books sounds like a lot, to be honest. I mean, it's tough to get –
[00:34:11] Sara Varni: Ok good. Now, I feel better. But I have a friend that I ride the ferry with every morning, and she does – I think a book a week is her thing. I was just like, “I can't. I'm not worthy.”
[00:34:24] Sunny Manivannan: Those people are so annoying. They're so annoying.
[00:34:26] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, but it’s like I wish. It's awesome. It’s awesome.
[00:34:30] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Here we are, just mere mortals trying to read a couple of books a month maybe if we can afford that. Then they're just racing past us, so annoying.
[00:34:38] Sara Varni: Well, the challenge is, too, I just picked up another book, Covenant of Water, which was referred. What I do every year, I don't know if it's helpful to people, but I don't use Facebook all that much anymore. But I do find it very helpful to get recommendations from a broad group of friends. I'll say like, “Hey, what books do you recommend?” I get some great ones every year doing that.
Anyway, someone recommended Covenant of Water, but the problem is it's 800 pages long, so I've been on the same book for three months, which is a problem. I'm going to really have to catch up in the back half of the year, but I've got this.
[00:35:09] Sunny Manivannan: Talk about misaligned incentives, right? You're goaling yourself on a number of books, but then you can't really read the long books because then you feel like you're getting further away from your goal, even though you're reading.
[00:35:19] Sara Varni: Yes, exactly. It’s going to be – there might be a lot of short stories in the back half if I'm going to hit my target. We'll see.
[00:35:24] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. My aspirational reading story, I can't believe I'm sharing this in public, but basically I've had a Kindle now for two years. I now buy so many – I buy a Kindle book a week, so I could theoretically be reading 50 books a year. But my actual number of books read is maybe a third of that, maybe a quarter because it's just very hard to find three hours to get through a book. I'm not a good sort of serial reader. I got to get through a whole book in one sitting. With kids, it’s just really hard.
[00:35:53] Sara Varni: It is, for sure.
[00:35:55] Sunny Manivannan: So funny. Okay, last question for you. Who are the peers that influence you as a marketing leader and as a marketer?
[00:36:02] Sara Varni: I think of people – I have different people who influence me in different ways. I really admire Denise Persson from Snowflake and I – they are at a slightly different scale than us. I looked at her for advice on like, “Hey, what's around the corner for us, and what do I need to be thinking about?” I think she's interesting that she started Snowflake pretty early and has stayed on as the CMO the whole time it scaled, which is really remarkable. She's straightforward and I just think a super smart person.
Jamie Domenici is someone I worked with at Salesforce. She's incredibly creative. She's the CMO right now at Klaviyo. She's just great at creating memorable messaging that a sales team will go and repeat. I still remember from like eight years ago she had this campaign. She ran with our sales team called Find, Win, Keep. There's been a lot of campaigns I've seen since then, and I still remember it was just very straightforward, simple, got everyone to recite it. She's really creative that way.
Shannon Duffy, also CMO to Asana. Shannon is incredible when it comes to sales program. She's great. I have traveled. She's also from Salesforce. We traveled together on a couple sales enablement trips to Europe. I would like to just be listening to everything she was doing because she was just really good about it didn't matter if it was a non-technical persona or a technical persona. She would just like break it down, get sales-focused. She's also just great at building amazing teams and has fun at work, too. She’s good balance of getting work done but also making sure that you're having a good time and taking care of your people. She's just got a great group of people that have been working for her for a number of years.
Then Jeff Titterton, someone I met actually through COVID. We had a lot of CMO groups that we’d form during COVID, just to swap notes about how you should be looking at your metrics, all the – I don't know if everyone remembers. But through COVID, all the metrics were really crazy as we saw all of the digital acceleration. Then we lapped those metrics, and our bosses were mad that we weren't still growing at that same clip. Jeff, he was part of my COVID support group. I just, again, think he's a really smart, practical CMO that I really respect.
[00:38:33] Sunny Manivannan: That's an amazing list, Sara. Those COVID bonds go a long way, for sure.
[00:38:39] Sara Varni: Yes, for sure.
[00:38:41] Sunny Manivannan: Thank you so, so much. This was such a brilliant conversation. I have so many more questions for you. But I know you've got a run, so just greatly appreciate you being here. Again, it was an honor. Thank you.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
“Sara Varni: Make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value.”
[00:00:00] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Sara Varni, the Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog. Sara, it is such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:33] Sara Varni: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:35] Sunny Manivannan: Great. You're one of the rare CMOs who has cracked a code on integrating product-led growth motions, as well as sales-led growth motions. Many companies are trying to do this, especially in this economy where every dollar counts and so many products are now sort of flexing up and down all the way from SMB, all the way to enterprise. But they tend to have a hard time doing this right. What do you think they get wrong, and what are some principles that you've taken from your successes?
[00:01:06] Sara Varni: Yes. Well, I think you're being very generous when you say I've cracked the code because I think the code is always changing, and you've got to move with the market. I think some of the things that we got right at Twilio as we went through this transition, that's where I had the greatest experience doing this, was really listening to our audience. It sounds like marketing 101 and making sure we weren't just applying an enterprise sales playbook to a very healthy developer ecosystem.
Developers aren't going to go and download your e-book, and then be happy to get a call from a SDR, and reveal their timeline and budget of what they're going to do. That's just not the way the world works. I think you have to figure out the places where you can use elements of what you've done in enterprise B2B marketing, and then check those elements that are just going to turn off the audience. That takes real discipline, and it takes looking at things with real – with a true beginner's mind to make sure that you're not tainting that experience.
We all – I think one of the huge benefits I had at Twilio was the developer evangelist rolled up to marketing. We were all one team. I really had to work with that team to make sure that I understood the core Twilio developer audience and that I didn't do anything that would feel really off-brand and off for them and how they wanted to hear from us.
[00:02:42] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. Going a little bit deeper into the Twilio example, when you came into that role and one of your priorities was to move up market and to go lean in more into sales-led growth, what adjustments or improvements did you feel needed to be made? How do you even start prioritizing that?
[00:03:03] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, my experience in PLG to sales has primarily been in developer-focused companies. But I think it applies broadly to any kind of self-service motion and that people are able to get their hands on the product that you're selling already. They're able to largely see the value of your product without a lot of human intervention. I think your role as marketing is really to make sure you're helping that customer through that journey and not selling to them.
When I think back to my time at Twilio, one of the best lead channels for us was docs because people were trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I set up alerts and notifications via SMS?” They would search on that, and they'd come across our docs. We made sure that it was a great engaging experience that didn't feel like boring documentation. We were able to get them in, get them feeling the love of the brand from that first moment. Then from there, hopefully, bring them further onto our platform and get them doing more things that would ultimately lead to more revenue for Twilio down the road. It really came from a place of helping, not selling.
[00:04:14] Sunny Manivannan: Tell me a little bit more about that. I love the docs example because that's such a great burst of credibility when somebody first comes in contact with your company, and it's through your documentation, especially for developer audience. Tell me a little bit more about helping instead of selling. What does that look like for you? Are there any other examples that come to mind?
[00:04:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think the other element of that is you do have a sales team for a reason, and you do want to build up a relationship with some of your accounts, especially your larger accounts where there might be multiple people involved in the decision. There might be pricing discussions that the person using the product is not as much in control of. You need to make sure that you've got different relationships with your account, especially your larger ones as you move to enterprise.
I think the thing you have to be careful of, so there are moments when you want to engage and you should engage with your sales team. You have to be very careful as to when you do that. We used to look at metrics at Twilio around adoption, and it was a certain threshold that we called it. I think it was called PA10. We saw that a developer had made 10 API calls against our service that we assumed that there was something more significant going on.
At that point, that would trigger a different level of engagement. Maybe not necessarily a salesperson at that point, but that would be a first milestone that we would say, “All right, we can engage this customer in a slightly different, more in-depth way than we might someone who we think is maybe just even a hobbyist trying to play around with SMS APIs and wire up some fun app. We tried to be really careful about when we engage, again, to not tarnish our reputation as a developer-centric brand or someone that really understood how developers wanted to engage with us.
[00:06:06] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. One of the questions I had for you on this topic was while not straightforward, it seems plausible to go from product-led growth and add sales-led growth elements to it where you're going from the bottom all the way to the top. Have you ever seen a company do it the opposite way where you started off a sales-led growth and now you try to come back to SMB and to create more of a self-led experience?
[00:06:37] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you can go about that. You can go about it organically. It might be harder to do. I do see companies go and acquire smaller, leaner, easier to set up products, too, on the low end to defend a flank. I don't know all that much about their developer ecosystem, but I think a company that largely has gone this route is Snowflake, honestly. They started with a pretty heavy enterprise sales motion. I do know over time as their platforms become more robust and it integrates virtually everything, I think that they have started to build up a developer community probably secondary to their primary buying audience.
I don't want to quote that as the gold standard because I don't know all that much about how that evolution has happened. But at a high level, it feels like they've gone that direction versus bottoms up.
[00:07:31] Sunny Manivannan: It seems like definitely spend more time on your documentation is at least rule number – it's one of the first three rules if not rule number one. Then be very careful about not selling and really just helping the user get more value out of your product. Then finally, be careful about exactly when you engage in sort of human-to-human connection with a user, AKA the beginning of a sales process.
[00:07:58] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think they always say rule number one of developers is don't market. Or rule number one of marketing developers is don't market to developers. That probably largely applies to most consumer. Well, to a certain degree, I think in enterprise software, it applies to consumers too more broadly or people that just want to get in and get out. Yes, I think you just have to you be careful to not get too fluffy or forward-looking your language and just say what it is.
[00:08:33] Sunny Manivannan: I'm going to go a little off-script, but it does segue into our next topic. I wanted to ask you this idea of how developers like to be engaged with and how they buy which is sort of very reality-based. Just tell me the facts. Let me make my own decision. Please don't call me and harangue me to go buy your solution. Please just let me figure out whether this is something that I can use for my purposes. If it works great, then I will just buy more from you because I believe in you and I trust in you. Now, that's one way to buy.
Then the other way to buy is sort of this heavy almost evangelism sale where you're saying, “Here's – your world's going to change. We're going to do it with you, and it's going to be awesome. You're going to be a superhero and all these things.” Are the rest of us buying more like developers in this market? Are we more sort of, “Give me the proof. Give me the reality.”? Are you seeing any shifts in that?
[00:09:22] Sara Varni: I definitely think we are in a painkiller versus vitamin environment. You hear that saying a lot, like make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value versus more lofty benefits or things that are going to be hard to measure.
I definitely think that there's been a lot of pressure. It’s good pressure, honestly, on us as marketing teams to really get down to what's in it for the customer. But there's definitely been a shift in the pendulum that way versus like, “Hey, you're going to change the world with this product, and there's going to be unicorns and ponies flying around when you deploy our software, and every employee is going to be happy.” You’re not going to see a lot of that language without hard metrics coupled with it.
[00:10:26] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I think that makes a lot of sense and actually leads directly to my next question which is about the difference between embracing evangelism as a marketer versus sticking to reality, right? You’ve now – companies like Datadog, I would say Twilio, that some developers have very much been about, “Okay, here's what you're going to get. We want to make sure that you are getting the exact accurate truth at every step of the way as a user, and we're going to prove our value through the product.”
That's a very product-led growth motion, whereas sort of the original, frankly, the OG SaaS company, Salesforce, has always been a very evangelism-driven company. It's always been about, “Okay, what is the transformation that we're going to unlock for you,” and then bringing it down to the details of what that's going to look like. You've now done both. You've both embraced evangelism and embraced reality. What are the big differences that you've seen as a marketer?
[00:11:23] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I wouldn't say either approach is wrong. I think it just completely depends on how long it takes someone to adopt your product and who's actually using it at the end of the day. When you're working with a developer audience like we were working with at Twilio, they want their hands on the code as soon as possible. They don't want to hear about a product that they can't actually get their hands on for 18 months. If you're going to announce something, they better be ready at least in some sort of beta or have some sort of access so that they can really get their hands on it. Otherwise, they're going to move on to the next things. They're just practical and trying to get down their list of things.
If you're dealing with a company like Salesforce, which is today but even back in the day is a pretty broad-sweeping platform, it can be the backbone of your customer-centric data, and that's a big decision that doesn't normally happen overnight, especially in enterprise. You need to make sure that you are convincing the customer that they're future-proofed with your product.
That's why, yes, I think Salesforce has been – Salesforce was an incredible training ground for me, but they were – Marc and all the marketing team at Salesforce has always been great about being in front of the trends. Salesforce was talking about AI three years ago. They were – when Facebook and Instagram were just getting off the ground, they talked about how that would relate to business. They talked about IoT. They talked about mobile. They've always been on top of it. I think that that's really helped them expand relationships with large enterprise customers who know all right.
There was that old adage like, “Hey. Way back in the day, no one would get fired for using IBM.” I think Salesforce now has replaced IBM in that sentence. No one's going to get fired for choosing Salesforce because, generally, it has so much functionality that you can bend it to your will and make it do the things you need it to do. I think having that strong evangelical message on top has really helped them continue to be the leader and the 800-pound gorilla in their space.
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: They've been the leader for so long, but it's hard to remember that they were started after 2000. This is not an old company by any means. They've just been a leader in SaaS for so long that we think of them as they've always been here, but they haven't. They're still relatively new compared to the giants that they go up against.
[00:13:47] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:48] Sunny Manivannan: Is there a good middle ground between evangelism and reality? Do you subscribe to the theory that marketing should be X months ahead of the product and should just try to keep the drum be going in that direction? If so, how do you determine what that number of months is? Tell us more about your thoughts.
[00:14:07] Sara Varni: I think on this one I'd actually say it's more segment-specific. If you're selling to SMB midmarket and people who need to get their hands on whatever tool you're selling ASAP, these decisions aren't huge sales cycles, they're not a year to 18-month sale cycles, then I think you want to stay pretty close to reality. You have to have some edge in your message to make sure that you're not getting completely run over by the competition.
But you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver. I'm going to start talking about enterprise now, and you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver there either. But I do think you have a little bit more of a grace period to say hey, and you do. You owe it actually to enterprise customers who have longer road maps and need to plan with you like, “Hey, this is what's on the road map for us for 18 months. This is what you need to think about because it's a partnership. These are the things we should think about building together,” and I think it's 100% fine. Actually, I think it's beneficial to that customer to be ahead of what's actually available in terms of a skew so that they know how to plan with you.
Now, I think the thing that I don't agree with that sometimes happens is people marketing or whoever will announce stuff that never sees the light of day, and that's bad. That I don't think is the way to go. But I think to the extent, you are solid on what's coming in the next year to 18 months, and you're dealing with an enterprise customer base that needs to plan. I think you should be a little bit ahead of reality and to the extent you can communicate what's coming to your customers.
[00:15:41] Sunny Manivannan: You made an amazing point there where you talked about you have more of a grace period with enterprise customers because, yes, they're hiring you to solve a today problem, but they're also really buying into your vision for the tomorrow problem as well, whereas SMB and even lower midmarket, they're buying you before the today problem, and they need it to work today. Those are one to three-month sales cycles. Those are so quick, and your go live happens, I don't know, a day after you sign the contract or two days after you sign the contract. You're in the product, and you're using it. It's a very different experience.
[00:16:13] Sara Varni: Right, right. It better work.
[00:16:16] Sunny Manivannan: It better work. That's great. I want to ask you about a new CMO's first 90 days, which you and I both know it's a role that has seen – I think historically has been fair. Both CRO and CMO have been historically fairly high turnover. But especially over the last two years as companies, I think, have just made so many changes in their revenue teams, there's a lot of new CMOs in seat, and there are going to be new CMOs coming into new jobs much more frequently than before. How does a new CMO “win” their first 90 days?
[00:16:53] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's three major elements I think about. I think it's, first off, getting to know the business, knowing the metric, the key metrics and how success is measured, getting into how marketing pipeline is attributed versus sales without getting super into the weeds but high level kind of knowing, “All right, we do 40% of our business in SMB, 60% in midmarket plus.” Just knowing those high-level dynamics, so you know where to put your energy first. That's the first piece.
I think second is really getting to know your team. I always try to meet with everyone. No matter how large or small my team is, I try to meet with everyone one-on-one as quickly as I can. It’s an investment in time. Don't get me wrong. But I do think it helps you learn very quickly what's working on the team, what's not, where are their places where the team is really stretched thin, where are there places where the team is rich in resources. There's maybe places to scale back. I think that it really helps you learn quickly what's working, what's not on the team, and where you might have gaps.
Then I'd say third, it's really understanding what the CEO cares about, what the exact team overall cares about when it comes to marketing, and really understanding culturally and from a brand perspective what are the things that they love. What are the things that really turn them off? Trying to get a sense of that as quickly as possible. It’s not to manage up. It's honestly to learn the brand more than anything.
I had our first user conference last week and going through some of those elements and walking the show floor with our CEO and looking at certain branding. Or going to an event where the music was a little bit loud, and that's not our vibe. Those are things that I just learned on site walking with him. I think the sooner you can get a sense of what those things are, the better you're – the more you're going to be on brand for the company. Then you can scale from there.
[00:19:19] Sunny Manivannan: I love that example because it really is. You would think that all these companies look the same. But then when you get into the details, there's all these minute differences, and the collection of those across 10, 20 years is really what becomes your brand.
[00:19:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, at Datadog, we've got a full – we've got a science to our – any sort of Datadog demo stations that we have. There's a science to how many demos we can host in an hour and the balance of products that we'd want to see and how we want to bring people into the booth. There's a bunch of history that has gone into the thinking there and the setup.
I think that was an example of something like I just have never seen that in my other CMO roles. It was just something I had to pick up and be like, “Okay. There's a formula here. It seems to work. This is places where we might tweak it here and there.” But this is an approach that's very core to the Datadog brand and how we've gone to market, and this is something that we've got to keep intact and figure out how we improve on the edges.
[00:20:28] Sunny Manivannan: Well, it's great to know that Datadog is really good at using data to glean insights that actually make a difference in the business. That's good news.
[00:20:33] Sara Varni: Sure, yes. No, that's – we definitely – we live up to our name on that front, for sure.
[00:20:39] Sunny Manivannan: I want to ask you if you would be willing to oblige me to just take me into your first 90 days at a few of the companies that you've been at. What was the same? What's been different about each company when you first started?
[00:20:52] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, every company was at a different phase of growth. When I started at Twilio, it was a super interesting time to join the company. The company was doing about 400 million in revenue with about 30 sales reps. When I came on, we had decided to really grow the sales team. In earnest, this is all public knowledge, but Twilio had – Uber was one of their largest customers. I think it was like double digits percentage of their overall revenue.
One day, they basically decided that their bill with to was too large, and they decided to multisource for SMS. That was a big wakeup call for the company, and that's when we really decided like, “Hey, we need to put more of an account management function at the minimum in place to make sure that we understand what's really happening within these accounts versus just being self-service."
When I was brought on, it was – my first 90 days was really about, all right, thinking about how we can set up this infrastructure alongside a sales team that's growing really quickly to think about growing pipeline together. I remember in the first 90 days, one of the things I stood up was just the basic pipeline council. At Salesforce, we had – I probably had four pipeline councils a week, depending on what vertical I was trying to drive or product or whatever. But we just set up a very basic pipeline council so that marketing and sales and partners would get in the same room and say, “All right, what can we realistically put up percentage-wise as teams, and how can we best collaborate together?” That was – if I think back to Twilio, it's almost six years ago now which is crazy. That's how I spent my first 90 days.
Attentive was in hyper-growth mode when I joined. It was the end of ’21, and this was just when the market was still – the IPO market was just flying, and Attentive was putting in all the pieces in place to be part of that movement. We were just – really, the first 90 days were, all right, thinking about what are some of the things you would need to get out in the market before you went dark if we were going to go public, and what are – because that was just something that I learned in that process.
For anyone who joins a company that's close to going public, these are things to think about. Once you go into a dark period, you can't do things like broad-based advertising if you haven't done it before. We wanted to do all that stuff in the case that we decided to file so that we could still do it through the filing process. Within 90 days, I spun up a big ad campaign. We had billboards in Time Square and in different markets across the country. We did Wall Street Journal ads. That was great because it was like it created a forcing function to get on the same page with messaging.
Again, it was an example where I had to work with the execs to understand: these are things they hate, these are things they like and appreciate. I think hard deadlines drive decisions, and they drive feedback. That was really helpful to me in that 90 days. At Datadog it has – things have been – I'm joining Datadog at a place where it's much more established versus at Twilio or at Attentive. Maybe it's because it's my third CMO role. I know a little bit more. It's like having your third kid. You understand. You're like, “All right, I got this now. I've figured it out. Just get in the car.” That's kind of what I say about having a third kid, like they're just along for the ride. No.
I think at Datadog, some of the challenges that I talked about at Twilio or at Attentive, those haven't been on the table. It's been more about – I think that the most interesting thing about my time at Datadog is that the person who was in my role before was here for 10 years, and so they've established an incredible machine, and there's so much about this team that's high-functioning and working well.
I think it's been me spending 90 days, thinking about what do I want to keep entirely in place, and where are some areas to tweak and scale. I definitely – I don't want to drastically change anything that's working well, and so I'm careful to ask a lot of questions and make sure that, all right, if I'm tweaking brand things here and there, is there a reason we haven't gone down that path in the past?
Sometimes, there is. There's a very good reason why we haven't done certain things. Then sometimes, it's like, “Well, we just haven't asked in a few years because we went down that path before, and that didn't seem like something that the exec team wanted to do. So we haven't pursued it again.” There's certain – I try to ask a lot of questions and make sure that I'm keeping the things that are part of the brand intact that are working well. Then also thinking about, all right, how can we swap out some things or add some things to really scale this brand and help us expand in new markets.
[00:26:02] Sunny Manivannan: That's amazing. I mean, I just love each of these three stories in the different situations that the company was in when you joined the company. The idea of a pipeline council and just knowing that that worked from previous environments and bringing that into a new environment, that's hugely valuable in of itself. I loved your story about having to order one of everything from the menu because, otherwise, you couldn't order it at all for the next X days. It’s an amazing story.
[00:26:29] Sara Varni: Yes. Those are where – they're just things you – I wouldn't have – I'd never been to a company that wasn't public, and so I didn't understand any of those elements. That's just stuff I had to pick up and learn, and you learn something everywhere you go. I feel very fortunate to have been at three awesome companies as a CMO.
[00:26:48] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I think many of us, at least those who actually look at SaaS company ads when they're out on the street, which I'm one of those people, I think we all remember when Attentive started doing that. It was just all of a sudden everywhere. Now, we get the story behind it. It's great.
[00:27:03] Sara Varni: Good.
[00:27:04] Sunny Manivannan: It's great.
[00:27:04] Sara Varni: I'm glad you saw –
[00:27:06] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. I think a lot of us did, definitely in New York City. Let me ask you on the flip side of this. What mistakes do you think, especially early career VPs of marketing or CMOs making their first 90 days, that reduces their chances of really succeeding long term in that role at that company.
[00:27:24] Sara Varni: I think there's a few things. I think one is bringing your playbook from wherever and just thinking you can apply it, blanket to whatever company you end up going to. I think there's – you go through a period where you leave a company and you go to the next and you say like, “Well, that,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You have to really just stop. You have to – I have to catch myself or else I'll do that all day long.
I think people sometimes change too much too fast, and I think that there's often council you'll get from coaches or mentors that are like, “Hey, you have to make your mark in the first 90 days and put some stuff up on the board.” That's true. I definitely think you want to get some wins on the board. But there are certain things that might take a quarter or two, especially at a larger company, to understand why a team has evolved the way it has or why it's the size it is. It takes a couple programs or projects to get through to to understand that.
On the flip side, I will say sometimes people don't move fast enough. I think you have to find the right kind of happy medium there. I think if you wait too long to make changes, you become native to the company. I think you have to be – I think it's important to write on paper or in slides, whatever your take in the first month with the company and where you think the gaps are. Then look at that every month and make sure you don't lose sight of that because your first impressions and your gut reaction are often pretty close to the truth.
I think, especially from a brand perspective, and I think as you get further into the company and get more native to things, your ability to pick up on that stuff becomes just more muted. I think you've got to keep those first reactions written down in something that you reference so that that stays as your North Star of like, “Hey, we've got room to grow or room to push ourselves in certain directions.”
[00:29:27] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Okay, I want to talk a little bit of SaaS with you, SaaS company homepages, just SaaS marketing stuff. My first question to you along these lines is do you have a favorite customer story, SaaS customer story from your background or any stories that you've seen?
[00:29:44] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I especially loved going to Twilio from – Salesforce had some of the biggest customers, huge logos. They did so many cool demos and case studies. But I loved going to Twilio because I got more access to consumer side. One of the stories I always loved was with Medtronic. Medtronic had developed a new system for basically any sort of – a insulin detector that children would wear on their arms could now notify a parent if the child was going to go into any sort of diabetic shock.
The way that Medtronic would tell the story together with Twilio was that this absolutely unlocked a lot of activities and new ways of living for children especially who couldn't do sports beforehand or couldn't be too far away from their parents or a close supervision, whatever it was. Now, they had all this freedom because they basically had a way to constantly track that they were safe and going to be healthy. I thought that was just such a very cool pulls at the heartstring story about how technology was really affecting people's lives.
[00:31:02] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, amazing story, and I think sometimes we forget just – we stare at so many product dashboards and numbers all day that we forget that technology now is everywhere in our lives and is making a huge impact in every facet of our lives. Amazing story, amazing story. Favorite SaaS company homepage.
[00:31:23] Sara Varni: I always – and this is probably a pretty generic answer because I feel like everyone references this. But I love Stripe’s website for a couple of different reasons. I think they've been able to talk to both developers and the business. I think they strike that right message that we were talking about between evangelism and being more kind of what you see is what you get. I think they've got really great product names that you can generally get what the product does, but it doesn't say like, “Hey, we do, I don't know, credit card processing.” They come up with clever references.
It’s partially the website and the structure, and it's clean and easy to navigate. But it's also, I think, their – my comment is reflective on their branding and the way they name their products and organize themselves that I think makes them stand out for me.
[00:32:17] Sunny Manivannan: I totally agree. I mean, they're one of the companies that I look to for website inspiration pretty much every time I write a new product page or a new company page. It's part of what I'm doing now. It's just they seem to demand a level of clarity and thinking that just pervades everywhere, and it's awesome to see that.
[00:32:37] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:32:38] Sunny Manivannan: Very cool. All right, last question on the SaaS front. What is your favorite enterprise software tool or business software tool?
[00:32:45] Sara Varni: I love Tableau. I was lucky to use it at Twilio, and that was a really great tool for us to bring together not only our sales team and marketers that were campaign-focused but also our developer evangelist. We all lived in there, and I just think it's super easy. Especially if you're running a global sales team, you can instantly get to like, “All right, commercial APAC is not performing on lead count in a matter of clicks.” That's just something that's just been super powerful for me as I've tried to make sure my team's focused on the right hot spots.
[00:33:28] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. This is The Peerbound Podcast. We clearly believe that we're all influenced by our peers. This is the peer influences section. First question for you is do you have a book and/or movie recommendation.
[00:33:40] Sara Varni: I'm trying to read 18 books this year. I know for most people that might sound ridiculous. But I don't know. Every time I try to read, maybe it's just because I get up early to work out or work long days, I just end up falling asleep, so 18 is – it's a lot. For me, I just read Demon Copperhead which was recommended to me by a few different people. It was excellent. I highly recommend, very good.
[00:34:08] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. Okay. Eighteen books sounds like a lot, to be honest. I mean, it's tough to get –
[00:34:11] Sara Varni: Ok good. Now, I feel better. But I have a friend that I ride the ferry with every morning, and she does – I think a book a week is her thing. I was just like, “I can't. I'm not worthy.”
[00:34:24] Sunny Manivannan: Those people are so annoying. They're so annoying.
[00:34:26] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, but it’s like I wish. It's awesome. It’s awesome.
[00:34:30] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Here we are, just mere mortals trying to read a couple of books a month maybe if we can afford that. Then they're just racing past us, so annoying.
[00:34:38] Sara Varni: Well, the challenge is, too, I just picked up another book, Covenant of Water, which was referred. What I do every year, I don't know if it's helpful to people, but I don't use Facebook all that much anymore. But I do find it very helpful to get recommendations from a broad group of friends. I'll say like, “Hey, what books do you recommend?” I get some great ones every year doing that.
Anyway, someone recommended Covenant of Water, but the problem is it's 800 pages long, so I've been on the same book for three months, which is a problem. I'm going to really have to catch up in the back half of the year, but I've got this.
[00:35:09] Sunny Manivannan: Talk about misaligned incentives, right? You're goaling yourself on a number of books, but then you can't really read the long books because then you feel like you're getting further away from your goal, even though you're reading.
[00:35:19] Sara Varni: Yes, exactly. It’s going to be – there might be a lot of short stories in the back half if I'm going to hit my target. We'll see.
[00:35:24] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. My aspirational reading story, I can't believe I'm sharing this in public, but basically I've had a Kindle now for two years. I now buy so many – I buy a Kindle book a week, so I could theoretically be reading 50 books a year. But my actual number of books read is maybe a third of that, maybe a quarter because it's just very hard to find three hours to get through a book. I'm not a good sort of serial reader. I got to get through a whole book in one sitting. With kids, it’s just really hard.
[00:35:53] Sara Varni: It is, for sure.
[00:35:55] Sunny Manivannan: So funny. Okay, last question for you. Who are the peers that influence you as a marketing leader and as a marketer?
[00:36:02] Sara Varni: I think of people – I have different people who influence me in different ways. I really admire Denise Persson from Snowflake and I – they are at a slightly different scale than us. I looked at her for advice on like, “Hey, what's around the corner for us, and what do I need to be thinking about?” I think she's interesting that she started Snowflake pretty early and has stayed on as the CMO the whole time it scaled, which is really remarkable. She's straightforward and I just think a super smart person.
Jamie Domenici is someone I worked with at Salesforce. She's incredibly creative. She's the CMO right now at Klaviyo. She's just great at creating memorable messaging that a sales team will go and repeat. I still remember from like eight years ago she had this campaign. She ran with our sales team called Find, Win, Keep. There's been a lot of campaigns I've seen since then, and I still remember it was just very straightforward, simple, got everyone to recite it. She's really creative that way.
Shannon Duffy, also CMO to Asana. Shannon is incredible when it comes to sales program. She's great. I have traveled. She's also from Salesforce. We traveled together on a couple sales enablement trips to Europe. I would like to just be listening to everything she was doing because she was just really good about it didn't matter if it was a non-technical persona or a technical persona. She would just like break it down, get sales-focused. She's also just great at building amazing teams and has fun at work, too. She’s good balance of getting work done but also making sure that you're having a good time and taking care of your people. She's just got a great group of people that have been working for her for a number of years.
Then Jeff Titterton, someone I met actually through COVID. We had a lot of CMO groups that we’d form during COVID, just to swap notes about how you should be looking at your metrics, all the – I don't know if everyone remembers. But through COVID, all the metrics were really crazy as we saw all of the digital acceleration. Then we lapped those metrics, and our bosses were mad that we weren't still growing at that same clip. Jeff, he was part of my COVID support group. I just, again, think he's a really smart, practical CMO that I really respect.
[00:38:33] Sunny Manivannan: That's an amazing list, Sara. Those COVID bonds go a long way, for sure.
[00:38:39] Sara Varni: Yes, for sure.
[00:38:41] Sunny Manivannan: Thank you so, so much. This was such a brilliant conversation. I have so many more questions for you. But I know you've got a run, so just greatly appreciate you being here. Again, it was an honor. Thank you.
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“Sara Varni: Make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value.”
[00:00:00] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Sara Varni, the Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog. Sara, it is such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:33] Sara Varni: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:35] Sunny Manivannan: Great. You're one of the rare CMOs who has cracked a code on integrating product-led growth motions, as well as sales-led growth motions. Many companies are trying to do this, especially in this economy where every dollar counts and so many products are now sort of flexing up and down all the way from SMB, all the way to enterprise. But they tend to have a hard time doing this right. What do you think they get wrong, and what are some principles that you've taken from your successes?
[00:01:06] Sara Varni: Yes. Well, I think you're being very generous when you say I've cracked the code because I think the code is always changing, and you've got to move with the market. I think some of the things that we got right at Twilio as we went through this transition, that's where I had the greatest experience doing this, was really listening to our audience. It sounds like marketing 101 and making sure we weren't just applying an enterprise sales playbook to a very healthy developer ecosystem.
Developers aren't going to go and download your e-book, and then be happy to get a call from a SDR, and reveal their timeline and budget of what they're going to do. That's just not the way the world works. I think you have to figure out the places where you can use elements of what you've done in enterprise B2B marketing, and then check those elements that are just going to turn off the audience. That takes real discipline, and it takes looking at things with real – with a true beginner's mind to make sure that you're not tainting that experience.
We all – I think one of the huge benefits I had at Twilio was the developer evangelist rolled up to marketing. We were all one team. I really had to work with that team to make sure that I understood the core Twilio developer audience and that I didn't do anything that would feel really off-brand and off for them and how they wanted to hear from us.
[00:02:42] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. Going a little bit deeper into the Twilio example, when you came into that role and one of your priorities was to move up market and to go lean in more into sales-led growth, what adjustments or improvements did you feel needed to be made? How do you even start prioritizing that?
[00:03:03] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, my experience in PLG to sales has primarily been in developer-focused companies. But I think it applies broadly to any kind of self-service motion and that people are able to get their hands on the product that you're selling already. They're able to largely see the value of your product without a lot of human intervention. I think your role as marketing is really to make sure you're helping that customer through that journey and not selling to them.
When I think back to my time at Twilio, one of the best lead channels for us was docs because people were trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I set up alerts and notifications via SMS?” They would search on that, and they'd come across our docs. We made sure that it was a great engaging experience that didn't feel like boring documentation. We were able to get them in, get them feeling the love of the brand from that first moment. Then from there, hopefully, bring them further onto our platform and get them doing more things that would ultimately lead to more revenue for Twilio down the road. It really came from a place of helping, not selling.
[00:04:14] Sunny Manivannan: Tell me a little bit more about that. I love the docs example because that's such a great burst of credibility when somebody first comes in contact with your company, and it's through your documentation, especially for developer audience. Tell me a little bit more about helping instead of selling. What does that look like for you? Are there any other examples that come to mind?
[00:04:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think the other element of that is you do have a sales team for a reason, and you do want to build up a relationship with some of your accounts, especially your larger accounts where there might be multiple people involved in the decision. There might be pricing discussions that the person using the product is not as much in control of. You need to make sure that you've got different relationships with your account, especially your larger ones as you move to enterprise.
I think the thing you have to be careful of, so there are moments when you want to engage and you should engage with your sales team. You have to be very careful as to when you do that. We used to look at metrics at Twilio around adoption, and it was a certain threshold that we called it. I think it was called PA10. We saw that a developer had made 10 API calls against our service that we assumed that there was something more significant going on.
At that point, that would trigger a different level of engagement. Maybe not necessarily a salesperson at that point, but that would be a first milestone that we would say, “All right, we can engage this customer in a slightly different, more in-depth way than we might someone who we think is maybe just even a hobbyist trying to play around with SMS APIs and wire up some fun app. We tried to be really careful about when we engage, again, to not tarnish our reputation as a developer-centric brand or someone that really understood how developers wanted to engage with us.
[00:06:06] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. One of the questions I had for you on this topic was while not straightforward, it seems plausible to go from product-led growth and add sales-led growth elements to it where you're going from the bottom all the way to the top. Have you ever seen a company do it the opposite way where you started off a sales-led growth and now you try to come back to SMB and to create more of a self-led experience?
[00:06:37] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you can go about that. You can go about it organically. It might be harder to do. I do see companies go and acquire smaller, leaner, easier to set up products, too, on the low end to defend a flank. I don't know all that much about their developer ecosystem, but I think a company that largely has gone this route is Snowflake, honestly. They started with a pretty heavy enterprise sales motion. I do know over time as their platforms become more robust and it integrates virtually everything, I think that they have started to build up a developer community probably secondary to their primary buying audience.
I don't want to quote that as the gold standard because I don't know all that much about how that evolution has happened. But at a high level, it feels like they've gone that direction versus bottoms up.
[00:07:31] Sunny Manivannan: It seems like definitely spend more time on your documentation is at least rule number – it's one of the first three rules if not rule number one. Then be very careful about not selling and really just helping the user get more value out of your product. Then finally, be careful about exactly when you engage in sort of human-to-human connection with a user, AKA the beginning of a sales process.
[00:07:58] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think they always say rule number one of developers is don't market. Or rule number one of marketing developers is don't market to developers. That probably largely applies to most consumer. Well, to a certain degree, I think in enterprise software, it applies to consumers too more broadly or people that just want to get in and get out. Yes, I think you just have to you be careful to not get too fluffy or forward-looking your language and just say what it is.
[00:08:33] Sunny Manivannan: I'm going to go a little off-script, but it does segue into our next topic. I wanted to ask you this idea of how developers like to be engaged with and how they buy which is sort of very reality-based. Just tell me the facts. Let me make my own decision. Please don't call me and harangue me to go buy your solution. Please just let me figure out whether this is something that I can use for my purposes. If it works great, then I will just buy more from you because I believe in you and I trust in you. Now, that's one way to buy.
Then the other way to buy is sort of this heavy almost evangelism sale where you're saying, “Here's – your world's going to change. We're going to do it with you, and it's going to be awesome. You're going to be a superhero and all these things.” Are the rest of us buying more like developers in this market? Are we more sort of, “Give me the proof. Give me the reality.”? Are you seeing any shifts in that?
[00:09:22] Sara Varni: I definitely think we are in a painkiller versus vitamin environment. You hear that saying a lot, like make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value versus more lofty benefits or things that are going to be hard to measure.
I definitely think that there's been a lot of pressure. It’s good pressure, honestly, on us as marketing teams to really get down to what's in it for the customer. But there's definitely been a shift in the pendulum that way versus like, “Hey, you're going to change the world with this product, and there's going to be unicorns and ponies flying around when you deploy our software, and every employee is going to be happy.” You’re not going to see a lot of that language without hard metrics coupled with it.
[00:10:26] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I think that makes a lot of sense and actually leads directly to my next question which is about the difference between embracing evangelism as a marketer versus sticking to reality, right? You’ve now – companies like Datadog, I would say Twilio, that some developers have very much been about, “Okay, here's what you're going to get. We want to make sure that you are getting the exact accurate truth at every step of the way as a user, and we're going to prove our value through the product.”
That's a very product-led growth motion, whereas sort of the original, frankly, the OG SaaS company, Salesforce, has always been a very evangelism-driven company. It's always been about, “Okay, what is the transformation that we're going to unlock for you,” and then bringing it down to the details of what that's going to look like. You've now done both. You've both embraced evangelism and embraced reality. What are the big differences that you've seen as a marketer?
[00:11:23] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I wouldn't say either approach is wrong. I think it just completely depends on how long it takes someone to adopt your product and who's actually using it at the end of the day. When you're working with a developer audience like we were working with at Twilio, they want their hands on the code as soon as possible. They don't want to hear about a product that they can't actually get their hands on for 18 months. If you're going to announce something, they better be ready at least in some sort of beta or have some sort of access so that they can really get their hands on it. Otherwise, they're going to move on to the next things. They're just practical and trying to get down their list of things.
If you're dealing with a company like Salesforce, which is today but even back in the day is a pretty broad-sweeping platform, it can be the backbone of your customer-centric data, and that's a big decision that doesn't normally happen overnight, especially in enterprise. You need to make sure that you are convincing the customer that they're future-proofed with your product.
That's why, yes, I think Salesforce has been – Salesforce was an incredible training ground for me, but they were – Marc and all the marketing team at Salesforce has always been great about being in front of the trends. Salesforce was talking about AI three years ago. They were – when Facebook and Instagram were just getting off the ground, they talked about how that would relate to business. They talked about IoT. They talked about mobile. They've always been on top of it. I think that that's really helped them expand relationships with large enterprise customers who know all right.
There was that old adage like, “Hey. Way back in the day, no one would get fired for using IBM.” I think Salesforce now has replaced IBM in that sentence. No one's going to get fired for choosing Salesforce because, generally, it has so much functionality that you can bend it to your will and make it do the things you need it to do. I think having that strong evangelical message on top has really helped them continue to be the leader and the 800-pound gorilla in their space.
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: They've been the leader for so long, but it's hard to remember that they were started after 2000. This is not an old company by any means. They've just been a leader in SaaS for so long that we think of them as they've always been here, but they haven't. They're still relatively new compared to the giants that they go up against.
[00:13:47] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:48] Sunny Manivannan: Is there a good middle ground between evangelism and reality? Do you subscribe to the theory that marketing should be X months ahead of the product and should just try to keep the drum be going in that direction? If so, how do you determine what that number of months is? Tell us more about your thoughts.
[00:14:07] Sara Varni: I think on this one I'd actually say it's more segment-specific. If you're selling to SMB midmarket and people who need to get their hands on whatever tool you're selling ASAP, these decisions aren't huge sales cycles, they're not a year to 18-month sale cycles, then I think you want to stay pretty close to reality. You have to have some edge in your message to make sure that you're not getting completely run over by the competition.
But you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver. I'm going to start talking about enterprise now, and you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver there either. But I do think you have a little bit more of a grace period to say hey, and you do. You owe it actually to enterprise customers who have longer road maps and need to plan with you like, “Hey, this is what's on the road map for us for 18 months. This is what you need to think about because it's a partnership. These are the things we should think about building together,” and I think it's 100% fine. Actually, I think it's beneficial to that customer to be ahead of what's actually available in terms of a skew so that they know how to plan with you.
Now, I think the thing that I don't agree with that sometimes happens is people marketing or whoever will announce stuff that never sees the light of day, and that's bad. That I don't think is the way to go. But I think to the extent, you are solid on what's coming in the next year to 18 months, and you're dealing with an enterprise customer base that needs to plan. I think you should be a little bit ahead of reality and to the extent you can communicate what's coming to your customers.
[00:15:41] Sunny Manivannan: You made an amazing point there where you talked about you have more of a grace period with enterprise customers because, yes, they're hiring you to solve a today problem, but they're also really buying into your vision for the tomorrow problem as well, whereas SMB and even lower midmarket, they're buying you before the today problem, and they need it to work today. Those are one to three-month sales cycles. Those are so quick, and your go live happens, I don't know, a day after you sign the contract or two days after you sign the contract. You're in the product, and you're using it. It's a very different experience.
[00:16:13] Sara Varni: Right, right. It better work.
[00:16:16] Sunny Manivannan: It better work. That's great. I want to ask you about a new CMO's first 90 days, which you and I both know it's a role that has seen – I think historically has been fair. Both CRO and CMO have been historically fairly high turnover. But especially over the last two years as companies, I think, have just made so many changes in their revenue teams, there's a lot of new CMOs in seat, and there are going to be new CMOs coming into new jobs much more frequently than before. How does a new CMO “win” their first 90 days?
[00:16:53] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's three major elements I think about. I think it's, first off, getting to know the business, knowing the metric, the key metrics and how success is measured, getting into how marketing pipeline is attributed versus sales without getting super into the weeds but high level kind of knowing, “All right, we do 40% of our business in SMB, 60% in midmarket plus.” Just knowing those high-level dynamics, so you know where to put your energy first. That's the first piece.
I think second is really getting to know your team. I always try to meet with everyone. No matter how large or small my team is, I try to meet with everyone one-on-one as quickly as I can. It’s an investment in time. Don't get me wrong. But I do think it helps you learn very quickly what's working on the team, what's not, where are their places where the team is really stretched thin, where are there places where the team is rich in resources. There's maybe places to scale back. I think that it really helps you learn quickly what's working, what's not on the team, and where you might have gaps.
Then I'd say third, it's really understanding what the CEO cares about, what the exact team overall cares about when it comes to marketing, and really understanding culturally and from a brand perspective what are the things that they love. What are the things that really turn them off? Trying to get a sense of that as quickly as possible. It’s not to manage up. It's honestly to learn the brand more than anything.
I had our first user conference last week and going through some of those elements and walking the show floor with our CEO and looking at certain branding. Or going to an event where the music was a little bit loud, and that's not our vibe. Those are things that I just learned on site walking with him. I think the sooner you can get a sense of what those things are, the better you're – the more you're going to be on brand for the company. Then you can scale from there.
[00:19:19] Sunny Manivannan: I love that example because it really is. You would think that all these companies look the same. But then when you get into the details, there's all these minute differences, and the collection of those across 10, 20 years is really what becomes your brand.
[00:19:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, at Datadog, we've got a full – we've got a science to our – any sort of Datadog demo stations that we have. There's a science to how many demos we can host in an hour and the balance of products that we'd want to see and how we want to bring people into the booth. There's a bunch of history that has gone into the thinking there and the setup.
I think that was an example of something like I just have never seen that in my other CMO roles. It was just something I had to pick up and be like, “Okay. There's a formula here. It seems to work. This is places where we might tweak it here and there.” But this is an approach that's very core to the Datadog brand and how we've gone to market, and this is something that we've got to keep intact and figure out how we improve on the edges.
[00:20:28] Sunny Manivannan: Well, it's great to know that Datadog is really good at using data to glean insights that actually make a difference in the business. That's good news.
[00:20:33] Sara Varni: Sure, yes. No, that's – we definitely – we live up to our name on that front, for sure.
[00:20:39] Sunny Manivannan: I want to ask you if you would be willing to oblige me to just take me into your first 90 days at a few of the companies that you've been at. What was the same? What's been different about each company when you first started?
[00:20:52] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, every company was at a different phase of growth. When I started at Twilio, it was a super interesting time to join the company. The company was doing about 400 million in revenue with about 30 sales reps. When I came on, we had decided to really grow the sales team. In earnest, this is all public knowledge, but Twilio had – Uber was one of their largest customers. I think it was like double digits percentage of their overall revenue.
One day, they basically decided that their bill with to was too large, and they decided to multisource for SMS. That was a big wakeup call for the company, and that's when we really decided like, “Hey, we need to put more of an account management function at the minimum in place to make sure that we understand what's really happening within these accounts versus just being self-service."
When I was brought on, it was – my first 90 days was really about, all right, thinking about how we can set up this infrastructure alongside a sales team that's growing really quickly to think about growing pipeline together. I remember in the first 90 days, one of the things I stood up was just the basic pipeline council. At Salesforce, we had – I probably had four pipeline councils a week, depending on what vertical I was trying to drive or product or whatever. But we just set up a very basic pipeline council so that marketing and sales and partners would get in the same room and say, “All right, what can we realistically put up percentage-wise as teams, and how can we best collaborate together?” That was – if I think back to Twilio, it's almost six years ago now which is crazy. That's how I spent my first 90 days.
Attentive was in hyper-growth mode when I joined. It was the end of ’21, and this was just when the market was still – the IPO market was just flying, and Attentive was putting in all the pieces in place to be part of that movement. We were just – really, the first 90 days were, all right, thinking about what are some of the things you would need to get out in the market before you went dark if we were going to go public, and what are – because that was just something that I learned in that process.
For anyone who joins a company that's close to going public, these are things to think about. Once you go into a dark period, you can't do things like broad-based advertising if you haven't done it before. We wanted to do all that stuff in the case that we decided to file so that we could still do it through the filing process. Within 90 days, I spun up a big ad campaign. We had billboards in Time Square and in different markets across the country. We did Wall Street Journal ads. That was great because it was like it created a forcing function to get on the same page with messaging.
Again, it was an example where I had to work with the execs to understand: these are things they hate, these are things they like and appreciate. I think hard deadlines drive decisions, and they drive feedback. That was really helpful to me in that 90 days. At Datadog it has – things have been – I'm joining Datadog at a place where it's much more established versus at Twilio or at Attentive. Maybe it's because it's my third CMO role. I know a little bit more. It's like having your third kid. You understand. You're like, “All right, I got this now. I've figured it out. Just get in the car.” That's kind of what I say about having a third kid, like they're just along for the ride. No.
I think at Datadog, some of the challenges that I talked about at Twilio or at Attentive, those haven't been on the table. It's been more about – I think that the most interesting thing about my time at Datadog is that the person who was in my role before was here for 10 years, and so they've established an incredible machine, and there's so much about this team that's high-functioning and working well.
I think it's been me spending 90 days, thinking about what do I want to keep entirely in place, and where are some areas to tweak and scale. I definitely – I don't want to drastically change anything that's working well, and so I'm careful to ask a lot of questions and make sure that, all right, if I'm tweaking brand things here and there, is there a reason we haven't gone down that path in the past?
Sometimes, there is. There's a very good reason why we haven't done certain things. Then sometimes, it's like, “Well, we just haven't asked in a few years because we went down that path before, and that didn't seem like something that the exec team wanted to do. So we haven't pursued it again.” There's certain – I try to ask a lot of questions and make sure that I'm keeping the things that are part of the brand intact that are working well. Then also thinking about, all right, how can we swap out some things or add some things to really scale this brand and help us expand in new markets.
[00:26:02] Sunny Manivannan: That's amazing. I mean, I just love each of these three stories in the different situations that the company was in when you joined the company. The idea of a pipeline council and just knowing that that worked from previous environments and bringing that into a new environment, that's hugely valuable in of itself. I loved your story about having to order one of everything from the menu because, otherwise, you couldn't order it at all for the next X days. It’s an amazing story.
[00:26:29] Sara Varni: Yes. Those are where – they're just things you – I wouldn't have – I'd never been to a company that wasn't public, and so I didn't understand any of those elements. That's just stuff I had to pick up and learn, and you learn something everywhere you go. I feel very fortunate to have been at three awesome companies as a CMO.
[00:26:48] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I think many of us, at least those who actually look at SaaS company ads when they're out on the street, which I'm one of those people, I think we all remember when Attentive started doing that. It was just all of a sudden everywhere. Now, we get the story behind it. It's great.
[00:27:03] Sara Varni: Good.
[00:27:04] Sunny Manivannan: It's great.
[00:27:04] Sara Varni: I'm glad you saw –
[00:27:06] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. I think a lot of us did, definitely in New York City. Let me ask you on the flip side of this. What mistakes do you think, especially early career VPs of marketing or CMOs making their first 90 days, that reduces their chances of really succeeding long term in that role at that company.
[00:27:24] Sara Varni: I think there's a few things. I think one is bringing your playbook from wherever and just thinking you can apply it, blanket to whatever company you end up going to. I think there's – you go through a period where you leave a company and you go to the next and you say like, “Well, that,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You have to really just stop. You have to – I have to catch myself or else I'll do that all day long.
I think people sometimes change too much too fast, and I think that there's often council you'll get from coaches or mentors that are like, “Hey, you have to make your mark in the first 90 days and put some stuff up on the board.” That's true. I definitely think you want to get some wins on the board. But there are certain things that might take a quarter or two, especially at a larger company, to understand why a team has evolved the way it has or why it's the size it is. It takes a couple programs or projects to get through to to understand that.
On the flip side, I will say sometimes people don't move fast enough. I think you have to find the right kind of happy medium there. I think if you wait too long to make changes, you become native to the company. I think you have to be – I think it's important to write on paper or in slides, whatever your take in the first month with the company and where you think the gaps are. Then look at that every month and make sure you don't lose sight of that because your first impressions and your gut reaction are often pretty close to the truth.
I think, especially from a brand perspective, and I think as you get further into the company and get more native to things, your ability to pick up on that stuff becomes just more muted. I think you've got to keep those first reactions written down in something that you reference so that that stays as your North Star of like, “Hey, we've got room to grow or room to push ourselves in certain directions.”
[00:29:27] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Okay, I want to talk a little bit of SaaS with you, SaaS company homepages, just SaaS marketing stuff. My first question to you along these lines is do you have a favorite customer story, SaaS customer story from your background or any stories that you've seen?
[00:29:44] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I especially loved going to Twilio from – Salesforce had some of the biggest customers, huge logos. They did so many cool demos and case studies. But I loved going to Twilio because I got more access to consumer side. One of the stories I always loved was with Medtronic. Medtronic had developed a new system for basically any sort of – a insulin detector that children would wear on their arms could now notify a parent if the child was going to go into any sort of diabetic shock.
The way that Medtronic would tell the story together with Twilio was that this absolutely unlocked a lot of activities and new ways of living for children especially who couldn't do sports beforehand or couldn't be too far away from their parents or a close supervision, whatever it was. Now, they had all this freedom because they basically had a way to constantly track that they were safe and going to be healthy. I thought that was just such a very cool pulls at the heartstring story about how technology was really affecting people's lives.
[00:31:02] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, amazing story, and I think sometimes we forget just – we stare at so many product dashboards and numbers all day that we forget that technology now is everywhere in our lives and is making a huge impact in every facet of our lives. Amazing story, amazing story. Favorite SaaS company homepage.
[00:31:23] Sara Varni: I always – and this is probably a pretty generic answer because I feel like everyone references this. But I love Stripe’s website for a couple of different reasons. I think they've been able to talk to both developers and the business. I think they strike that right message that we were talking about between evangelism and being more kind of what you see is what you get. I think they've got really great product names that you can generally get what the product does, but it doesn't say like, “Hey, we do, I don't know, credit card processing.” They come up with clever references.
It’s partially the website and the structure, and it's clean and easy to navigate. But it's also, I think, their – my comment is reflective on their branding and the way they name their products and organize themselves that I think makes them stand out for me.
[00:32:17] Sunny Manivannan: I totally agree. I mean, they're one of the companies that I look to for website inspiration pretty much every time I write a new product page or a new company page. It's part of what I'm doing now. It's just they seem to demand a level of clarity and thinking that just pervades everywhere, and it's awesome to see that.
[00:32:37] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:32:38] Sunny Manivannan: Very cool. All right, last question on the SaaS front. What is your favorite enterprise software tool or business software tool?
[00:32:45] Sara Varni: I love Tableau. I was lucky to use it at Twilio, and that was a really great tool for us to bring together not only our sales team and marketers that were campaign-focused but also our developer evangelist. We all lived in there, and I just think it's super easy. Especially if you're running a global sales team, you can instantly get to like, “All right, commercial APAC is not performing on lead count in a matter of clicks.” That's just something that's just been super powerful for me as I've tried to make sure my team's focused on the right hot spots.
[00:33:28] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. This is The Peerbound Podcast. We clearly believe that we're all influenced by our peers. This is the peer influences section. First question for you is do you have a book and/or movie recommendation.
[00:33:40] Sara Varni: I'm trying to read 18 books this year. I know for most people that might sound ridiculous. But I don't know. Every time I try to read, maybe it's just because I get up early to work out or work long days, I just end up falling asleep, so 18 is – it's a lot. For me, I just read Demon Copperhead which was recommended to me by a few different people. It was excellent. I highly recommend, very good.
[00:34:08] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. Okay. Eighteen books sounds like a lot, to be honest. I mean, it's tough to get –
[00:34:11] Sara Varni: Ok good. Now, I feel better. But I have a friend that I ride the ferry with every morning, and she does – I think a book a week is her thing. I was just like, “I can't. I'm not worthy.”
[00:34:24] Sunny Manivannan: Those people are so annoying. They're so annoying.
[00:34:26] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, but it’s like I wish. It's awesome. It’s awesome.
[00:34:30] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Here we are, just mere mortals trying to read a couple of books a month maybe if we can afford that. Then they're just racing past us, so annoying.
[00:34:38] Sara Varni: Well, the challenge is, too, I just picked up another book, Covenant of Water, which was referred. What I do every year, I don't know if it's helpful to people, but I don't use Facebook all that much anymore. But I do find it very helpful to get recommendations from a broad group of friends. I'll say like, “Hey, what books do you recommend?” I get some great ones every year doing that.
Anyway, someone recommended Covenant of Water, but the problem is it's 800 pages long, so I've been on the same book for three months, which is a problem. I'm going to really have to catch up in the back half of the year, but I've got this.
[00:35:09] Sunny Manivannan: Talk about misaligned incentives, right? You're goaling yourself on a number of books, but then you can't really read the long books because then you feel like you're getting further away from your goal, even though you're reading.
[00:35:19] Sara Varni: Yes, exactly. It’s going to be – there might be a lot of short stories in the back half if I'm going to hit my target. We'll see.
[00:35:24] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. My aspirational reading story, I can't believe I'm sharing this in public, but basically I've had a Kindle now for two years. I now buy so many – I buy a Kindle book a week, so I could theoretically be reading 50 books a year. But my actual number of books read is maybe a third of that, maybe a quarter because it's just very hard to find three hours to get through a book. I'm not a good sort of serial reader. I got to get through a whole book in one sitting. With kids, it’s just really hard.
[00:35:53] Sara Varni: It is, for sure.
[00:35:55] Sunny Manivannan: So funny. Okay, last question for you. Who are the peers that influence you as a marketing leader and as a marketer?
[00:36:02] Sara Varni: I think of people – I have different people who influence me in different ways. I really admire Denise Persson from Snowflake and I – they are at a slightly different scale than us. I looked at her for advice on like, “Hey, what's around the corner for us, and what do I need to be thinking about?” I think she's interesting that she started Snowflake pretty early and has stayed on as the CMO the whole time it scaled, which is really remarkable. She's straightforward and I just think a super smart person.
Jamie Domenici is someone I worked with at Salesforce. She's incredibly creative. She's the CMO right now at Klaviyo. She's just great at creating memorable messaging that a sales team will go and repeat. I still remember from like eight years ago she had this campaign. She ran with our sales team called Find, Win, Keep. There's been a lot of campaigns I've seen since then, and I still remember it was just very straightforward, simple, got everyone to recite it. She's really creative that way.
Shannon Duffy, also CMO to Asana. Shannon is incredible when it comes to sales program. She's great. I have traveled. She's also from Salesforce. We traveled together on a couple sales enablement trips to Europe. I would like to just be listening to everything she was doing because she was just really good about it didn't matter if it was a non-technical persona or a technical persona. She would just like break it down, get sales-focused. She's also just great at building amazing teams and has fun at work, too. She’s good balance of getting work done but also making sure that you're having a good time and taking care of your people. She's just got a great group of people that have been working for her for a number of years.
Then Jeff Titterton, someone I met actually through COVID. We had a lot of CMO groups that we’d form during COVID, just to swap notes about how you should be looking at your metrics, all the – I don't know if everyone remembers. But through COVID, all the metrics were really crazy as we saw all of the digital acceleration. Then we lapped those metrics, and our bosses were mad that we weren't still growing at that same clip. Jeff, he was part of my COVID support group. I just, again, think he's a really smart, practical CMO that I really respect.
[00:38:33] Sunny Manivannan: That's an amazing list, Sara. Those COVID bonds go a long way, for sure.
[00:38:39] Sara Varni: Yes, for sure.
[00:38:41] Sunny Manivannan: Thank you so, so much. This was such a brilliant conversation. I have so many more questions for you. But I know you've got a run, so just greatly appreciate you being here. Again, it was an honor. Thank you.
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“Sara Varni: Make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value.”
[00:00:00] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Sara Varni, the Chief Marketing Officer at Datadog. Sara, it is such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:33] Sara Varni: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:35] Sunny Manivannan: Great. You're one of the rare CMOs who has cracked a code on integrating product-led growth motions, as well as sales-led growth motions. Many companies are trying to do this, especially in this economy where every dollar counts and so many products are now sort of flexing up and down all the way from SMB, all the way to enterprise. But they tend to have a hard time doing this right. What do you think they get wrong, and what are some principles that you've taken from your successes?
[00:01:06] Sara Varni: Yes. Well, I think you're being very generous when you say I've cracked the code because I think the code is always changing, and you've got to move with the market. I think some of the things that we got right at Twilio as we went through this transition, that's where I had the greatest experience doing this, was really listening to our audience. It sounds like marketing 101 and making sure we weren't just applying an enterprise sales playbook to a very healthy developer ecosystem.
Developers aren't going to go and download your e-book, and then be happy to get a call from a SDR, and reveal their timeline and budget of what they're going to do. That's just not the way the world works. I think you have to figure out the places where you can use elements of what you've done in enterprise B2B marketing, and then check those elements that are just going to turn off the audience. That takes real discipline, and it takes looking at things with real – with a true beginner's mind to make sure that you're not tainting that experience.
We all – I think one of the huge benefits I had at Twilio was the developer evangelist rolled up to marketing. We were all one team. I really had to work with that team to make sure that I understood the core Twilio developer audience and that I didn't do anything that would feel really off-brand and off for them and how they wanted to hear from us.
[00:02:42] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. Going a little bit deeper into the Twilio example, when you came into that role and one of your priorities was to move up market and to go lean in more into sales-led growth, what adjustments or improvements did you feel needed to be made? How do you even start prioritizing that?
[00:03:03] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, my experience in PLG to sales has primarily been in developer-focused companies. But I think it applies broadly to any kind of self-service motion and that people are able to get their hands on the product that you're selling already. They're able to largely see the value of your product without a lot of human intervention. I think your role as marketing is really to make sure you're helping that customer through that journey and not selling to them.
When I think back to my time at Twilio, one of the best lead channels for us was docs because people were trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I set up alerts and notifications via SMS?” They would search on that, and they'd come across our docs. We made sure that it was a great engaging experience that didn't feel like boring documentation. We were able to get them in, get them feeling the love of the brand from that first moment. Then from there, hopefully, bring them further onto our platform and get them doing more things that would ultimately lead to more revenue for Twilio down the road. It really came from a place of helping, not selling.
[00:04:14] Sunny Manivannan: Tell me a little bit more about that. I love the docs example because that's such a great burst of credibility when somebody first comes in contact with your company, and it's through your documentation, especially for developer audience. Tell me a little bit more about helping instead of selling. What does that look like for you? Are there any other examples that come to mind?
[00:04:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think the other element of that is you do have a sales team for a reason, and you do want to build up a relationship with some of your accounts, especially your larger accounts where there might be multiple people involved in the decision. There might be pricing discussions that the person using the product is not as much in control of. You need to make sure that you've got different relationships with your account, especially your larger ones as you move to enterprise.
I think the thing you have to be careful of, so there are moments when you want to engage and you should engage with your sales team. You have to be very careful as to when you do that. We used to look at metrics at Twilio around adoption, and it was a certain threshold that we called it. I think it was called PA10. We saw that a developer had made 10 API calls against our service that we assumed that there was something more significant going on.
At that point, that would trigger a different level of engagement. Maybe not necessarily a salesperson at that point, but that would be a first milestone that we would say, “All right, we can engage this customer in a slightly different, more in-depth way than we might someone who we think is maybe just even a hobbyist trying to play around with SMS APIs and wire up some fun app. We tried to be really careful about when we engage, again, to not tarnish our reputation as a developer-centric brand or someone that really understood how developers wanted to engage with us.
[00:06:06] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. One of the questions I had for you on this topic was while not straightforward, it seems plausible to go from product-led growth and add sales-led growth elements to it where you're going from the bottom all the way to the top. Have you ever seen a company do it the opposite way where you started off a sales-led growth and now you try to come back to SMB and to create more of a self-led experience?
[00:06:37] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you can go about that. You can go about it organically. It might be harder to do. I do see companies go and acquire smaller, leaner, easier to set up products, too, on the low end to defend a flank. I don't know all that much about their developer ecosystem, but I think a company that largely has gone this route is Snowflake, honestly. They started with a pretty heavy enterprise sales motion. I do know over time as their platforms become more robust and it integrates virtually everything, I think that they have started to build up a developer community probably secondary to their primary buying audience.
I don't want to quote that as the gold standard because I don't know all that much about how that evolution has happened. But at a high level, it feels like they've gone that direction versus bottoms up.
[00:07:31] Sunny Manivannan: It seems like definitely spend more time on your documentation is at least rule number – it's one of the first three rules if not rule number one. Then be very careful about not selling and really just helping the user get more value out of your product. Then finally, be careful about exactly when you engage in sort of human-to-human connection with a user, AKA the beginning of a sales process.
[00:07:58] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think they always say rule number one of developers is don't market. Or rule number one of marketing developers is don't market to developers. That probably largely applies to most consumer. Well, to a certain degree, I think in enterprise software, it applies to consumers too more broadly or people that just want to get in and get out. Yes, I think you just have to you be careful to not get too fluffy or forward-looking your language and just say what it is.
[00:08:33] Sunny Manivannan: I'm going to go a little off-script, but it does segue into our next topic. I wanted to ask you this idea of how developers like to be engaged with and how they buy which is sort of very reality-based. Just tell me the facts. Let me make my own decision. Please don't call me and harangue me to go buy your solution. Please just let me figure out whether this is something that I can use for my purposes. If it works great, then I will just buy more from you because I believe in you and I trust in you. Now, that's one way to buy.
Then the other way to buy is sort of this heavy almost evangelism sale where you're saying, “Here's – your world's going to change. We're going to do it with you, and it's going to be awesome. You're going to be a superhero and all these things.” Are the rest of us buying more like developers in this market? Are we more sort of, “Give me the proof. Give me the reality.”? Are you seeing any shifts in that?
[00:09:22] Sara Varni: I definitely think we are in a painkiller versus vitamin environment. You hear that saying a lot, like make sure that your product is absolutely necessary. You hear that in good times and bad times. But I think especially in this market where budgets are certainly tighter, you better make sure that you are solving a real problem and communicating that value versus more lofty benefits or things that are going to be hard to measure.
I definitely think that there's been a lot of pressure. It’s good pressure, honestly, on us as marketing teams to really get down to what's in it for the customer. But there's definitely been a shift in the pendulum that way versus like, “Hey, you're going to change the world with this product, and there's going to be unicorns and ponies flying around when you deploy our software, and every employee is going to be happy.” You’re not going to see a lot of that language without hard metrics coupled with it.
[00:10:26] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I think that makes a lot of sense and actually leads directly to my next question which is about the difference between embracing evangelism as a marketer versus sticking to reality, right? You’ve now – companies like Datadog, I would say Twilio, that some developers have very much been about, “Okay, here's what you're going to get. We want to make sure that you are getting the exact accurate truth at every step of the way as a user, and we're going to prove our value through the product.”
That's a very product-led growth motion, whereas sort of the original, frankly, the OG SaaS company, Salesforce, has always been a very evangelism-driven company. It's always been about, “Okay, what is the transformation that we're going to unlock for you,” and then bringing it down to the details of what that's going to look like. You've now done both. You've both embraced evangelism and embraced reality. What are the big differences that you've seen as a marketer?
[00:11:23] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I wouldn't say either approach is wrong. I think it just completely depends on how long it takes someone to adopt your product and who's actually using it at the end of the day. When you're working with a developer audience like we were working with at Twilio, they want their hands on the code as soon as possible. They don't want to hear about a product that they can't actually get their hands on for 18 months. If you're going to announce something, they better be ready at least in some sort of beta or have some sort of access so that they can really get their hands on it. Otherwise, they're going to move on to the next things. They're just practical and trying to get down their list of things.
If you're dealing with a company like Salesforce, which is today but even back in the day is a pretty broad-sweeping platform, it can be the backbone of your customer-centric data, and that's a big decision that doesn't normally happen overnight, especially in enterprise. You need to make sure that you are convincing the customer that they're future-proofed with your product.
That's why, yes, I think Salesforce has been – Salesforce was an incredible training ground for me, but they were – Marc and all the marketing team at Salesforce has always been great about being in front of the trends. Salesforce was talking about AI three years ago. They were – when Facebook and Instagram were just getting off the ground, they talked about how that would relate to business. They talked about IoT. They talked about mobile. They've always been on top of it. I think that that's really helped them expand relationships with large enterprise customers who know all right.
There was that old adage like, “Hey. Way back in the day, no one would get fired for using IBM.” I think Salesforce now has replaced IBM in that sentence. No one's going to get fired for choosing Salesforce because, generally, it has so much functionality that you can bend it to your will and make it do the things you need it to do. I think having that strong evangelical message on top has really helped them continue to be the leader and the 800-pound gorilla in their space.
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: They've been the leader for so long, but it's hard to remember that they were started after 2000. This is not an old company by any means. They've just been a leader in SaaS for so long that we think of them as they've always been here, but they haven't. They're still relatively new compared to the giants that they go up against.
[00:13:47] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:48] Sunny Manivannan: Is there a good middle ground between evangelism and reality? Do you subscribe to the theory that marketing should be X months ahead of the product and should just try to keep the drum be going in that direction? If so, how do you determine what that number of months is? Tell us more about your thoughts.
[00:14:07] Sara Varni: I think on this one I'd actually say it's more segment-specific. If you're selling to SMB midmarket and people who need to get their hands on whatever tool you're selling ASAP, these decisions aren't huge sales cycles, they're not a year to 18-month sale cycles, then I think you want to stay pretty close to reality. You have to have some edge in your message to make sure that you're not getting completely run over by the competition.
But you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver. I'm going to start talking about enterprise now, and you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver there either. But I do think you have a little bit more of a grace period to say hey, and you do. You owe it actually to enterprise customers who have longer road maps and need to plan with you like, “Hey, this is what's on the road map for us for 18 months. This is what you need to think about because it's a partnership. These are the things we should think about building together,” and I think it's 100% fine. Actually, I think it's beneficial to that customer to be ahead of what's actually available in terms of a skew so that they know how to plan with you.
Now, I think the thing that I don't agree with that sometimes happens is people marketing or whoever will announce stuff that never sees the light of day, and that's bad. That I don't think is the way to go. But I think to the extent, you are solid on what's coming in the next year to 18 months, and you're dealing with an enterprise customer base that needs to plan. I think you should be a little bit ahead of reality and to the extent you can communicate what's coming to your customers.
[00:15:41] Sunny Manivannan: You made an amazing point there where you talked about you have more of a grace period with enterprise customers because, yes, they're hiring you to solve a today problem, but they're also really buying into your vision for the tomorrow problem as well, whereas SMB and even lower midmarket, they're buying you before the today problem, and they need it to work today. Those are one to three-month sales cycles. Those are so quick, and your go live happens, I don't know, a day after you sign the contract or two days after you sign the contract. You're in the product, and you're using it. It's a very different experience.
[00:16:13] Sara Varni: Right, right. It better work.
[00:16:16] Sunny Manivannan: It better work. That's great. I want to ask you about a new CMO's first 90 days, which you and I both know it's a role that has seen – I think historically has been fair. Both CRO and CMO have been historically fairly high turnover. But especially over the last two years as companies, I think, have just made so many changes in their revenue teams, there's a lot of new CMOs in seat, and there are going to be new CMOs coming into new jobs much more frequently than before. How does a new CMO “win” their first 90 days?
[00:16:53] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I think there's three major elements I think about. I think it's, first off, getting to know the business, knowing the metric, the key metrics and how success is measured, getting into how marketing pipeline is attributed versus sales without getting super into the weeds but high level kind of knowing, “All right, we do 40% of our business in SMB, 60% in midmarket plus.” Just knowing those high-level dynamics, so you know where to put your energy first. That's the first piece.
I think second is really getting to know your team. I always try to meet with everyone. No matter how large or small my team is, I try to meet with everyone one-on-one as quickly as I can. It’s an investment in time. Don't get me wrong. But I do think it helps you learn very quickly what's working on the team, what's not, where are their places where the team is really stretched thin, where are there places where the team is rich in resources. There's maybe places to scale back. I think that it really helps you learn quickly what's working, what's not on the team, and where you might have gaps.
Then I'd say third, it's really understanding what the CEO cares about, what the exact team overall cares about when it comes to marketing, and really understanding culturally and from a brand perspective what are the things that they love. What are the things that really turn them off? Trying to get a sense of that as quickly as possible. It’s not to manage up. It's honestly to learn the brand more than anything.
I had our first user conference last week and going through some of those elements and walking the show floor with our CEO and looking at certain branding. Or going to an event where the music was a little bit loud, and that's not our vibe. Those are things that I just learned on site walking with him. I think the sooner you can get a sense of what those things are, the better you're – the more you're going to be on brand for the company. Then you can scale from there.
[00:19:19] Sunny Manivannan: I love that example because it really is. You would think that all these companies look the same. But then when you get into the details, there's all these minute differences, and the collection of those across 10, 20 years is really what becomes your brand.
[00:19:32] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, at Datadog, we've got a full – we've got a science to our – any sort of Datadog demo stations that we have. There's a science to how many demos we can host in an hour and the balance of products that we'd want to see and how we want to bring people into the booth. There's a bunch of history that has gone into the thinking there and the setup.
I think that was an example of something like I just have never seen that in my other CMO roles. It was just something I had to pick up and be like, “Okay. There's a formula here. It seems to work. This is places where we might tweak it here and there.” But this is an approach that's very core to the Datadog brand and how we've gone to market, and this is something that we've got to keep intact and figure out how we improve on the edges.
[00:20:28] Sunny Manivannan: Well, it's great to know that Datadog is really good at using data to glean insights that actually make a difference in the business. That's good news.
[00:20:33] Sara Varni: Sure, yes. No, that's – we definitely – we live up to our name on that front, for sure.
[00:20:39] Sunny Manivannan: I want to ask you if you would be willing to oblige me to just take me into your first 90 days at a few of the companies that you've been at. What was the same? What's been different about each company when you first started?
[00:20:52] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, every company was at a different phase of growth. When I started at Twilio, it was a super interesting time to join the company. The company was doing about 400 million in revenue with about 30 sales reps. When I came on, we had decided to really grow the sales team. In earnest, this is all public knowledge, but Twilio had – Uber was one of their largest customers. I think it was like double digits percentage of their overall revenue.
One day, they basically decided that their bill with to was too large, and they decided to multisource for SMS. That was a big wakeup call for the company, and that's when we really decided like, “Hey, we need to put more of an account management function at the minimum in place to make sure that we understand what's really happening within these accounts versus just being self-service."
When I was brought on, it was – my first 90 days was really about, all right, thinking about how we can set up this infrastructure alongside a sales team that's growing really quickly to think about growing pipeline together. I remember in the first 90 days, one of the things I stood up was just the basic pipeline council. At Salesforce, we had – I probably had four pipeline councils a week, depending on what vertical I was trying to drive or product or whatever. But we just set up a very basic pipeline council so that marketing and sales and partners would get in the same room and say, “All right, what can we realistically put up percentage-wise as teams, and how can we best collaborate together?” That was – if I think back to Twilio, it's almost six years ago now which is crazy. That's how I spent my first 90 days.
Attentive was in hyper-growth mode when I joined. It was the end of ’21, and this was just when the market was still – the IPO market was just flying, and Attentive was putting in all the pieces in place to be part of that movement. We were just – really, the first 90 days were, all right, thinking about what are some of the things you would need to get out in the market before you went dark if we were going to go public, and what are – because that was just something that I learned in that process.
For anyone who joins a company that's close to going public, these are things to think about. Once you go into a dark period, you can't do things like broad-based advertising if you haven't done it before. We wanted to do all that stuff in the case that we decided to file so that we could still do it through the filing process. Within 90 days, I spun up a big ad campaign. We had billboards in Time Square and in different markets across the country. We did Wall Street Journal ads. That was great because it was like it created a forcing function to get on the same page with messaging.
Again, it was an example where I had to work with the execs to understand: these are things they hate, these are things they like and appreciate. I think hard deadlines drive decisions, and they drive feedback. That was really helpful to me in that 90 days. At Datadog it has – things have been – I'm joining Datadog at a place where it's much more established versus at Twilio or at Attentive. Maybe it's because it's my third CMO role. I know a little bit more. It's like having your third kid. You understand. You're like, “All right, I got this now. I've figured it out. Just get in the car.” That's kind of what I say about having a third kid, like they're just along for the ride. No.
I think at Datadog, some of the challenges that I talked about at Twilio or at Attentive, those haven't been on the table. It's been more about – I think that the most interesting thing about my time at Datadog is that the person who was in my role before was here for 10 years, and so they've established an incredible machine, and there's so much about this team that's high-functioning and working well.
I think it's been me spending 90 days, thinking about what do I want to keep entirely in place, and where are some areas to tweak and scale. I definitely – I don't want to drastically change anything that's working well, and so I'm careful to ask a lot of questions and make sure that, all right, if I'm tweaking brand things here and there, is there a reason we haven't gone down that path in the past?
Sometimes, there is. There's a very good reason why we haven't done certain things. Then sometimes, it's like, “Well, we just haven't asked in a few years because we went down that path before, and that didn't seem like something that the exec team wanted to do. So we haven't pursued it again.” There's certain – I try to ask a lot of questions and make sure that I'm keeping the things that are part of the brand intact that are working well. Then also thinking about, all right, how can we swap out some things or add some things to really scale this brand and help us expand in new markets.
[00:26:02] Sunny Manivannan: That's amazing. I mean, I just love each of these three stories in the different situations that the company was in when you joined the company. The idea of a pipeline council and just knowing that that worked from previous environments and bringing that into a new environment, that's hugely valuable in of itself. I loved your story about having to order one of everything from the menu because, otherwise, you couldn't order it at all for the next X days. It’s an amazing story.
[00:26:29] Sara Varni: Yes. Those are where – they're just things you – I wouldn't have – I'd never been to a company that wasn't public, and so I didn't understand any of those elements. That's just stuff I had to pick up and learn, and you learn something everywhere you go. I feel very fortunate to have been at three awesome companies as a CMO.
[00:26:48] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I think many of us, at least those who actually look at SaaS company ads when they're out on the street, which I'm one of those people, I think we all remember when Attentive started doing that. It was just all of a sudden everywhere. Now, we get the story behind it. It's great.
[00:27:03] Sara Varni: Good.
[00:27:04] Sunny Manivannan: It's great.
[00:27:04] Sara Varni: I'm glad you saw –
[00:27:06] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. I think a lot of us did, definitely in New York City. Let me ask you on the flip side of this. What mistakes do you think, especially early career VPs of marketing or CMOs making their first 90 days, that reduces their chances of really succeeding long term in that role at that company.
[00:27:24] Sara Varni: I think there's a few things. I think one is bringing your playbook from wherever and just thinking you can apply it, blanket to whatever company you end up going to. I think there's – you go through a period where you leave a company and you go to the next and you say like, “Well, that,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You have to really just stop. You have to – I have to catch myself or else I'll do that all day long.
I think people sometimes change too much too fast, and I think that there's often council you'll get from coaches or mentors that are like, “Hey, you have to make your mark in the first 90 days and put some stuff up on the board.” That's true. I definitely think you want to get some wins on the board. But there are certain things that might take a quarter or two, especially at a larger company, to understand why a team has evolved the way it has or why it's the size it is. It takes a couple programs or projects to get through to to understand that.
On the flip side, I will say sometimes people don't move fast enough. I think you have to find the right kind of happy medium there. I think if you wait too long to make changes, you become native to the company. I think you have to be – I think it's important to write on paper or in slides, whatever your take in the first month with the company and where you think the gaps are. Then look at that every month and make sure you don't lose sight of that because your first impressions and your gut reaction are often pretty close to the truth.
I think, especially from a brand perspective, and I think as you get further into the company and get more native to things, your ability to pick up on that stuff becomes just more muted. I think you've got to keep those first reactions written down in something that you reference so that that stays as your North Star of like, “Hey, we've got room to grow or room to push ourselves in certain directions.”
[00:29:27] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Okay, I want to talk a little bit of SaaS with you, SaaS company homepages, just SaaS marketing stuff. My first question to you along these lines is do you have a favorite customer story, SaaS customer story from your background or any stories that you've seen?
[00:29:44] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, I especially loved going to Twilio from – Salesforce had some of the biggest customers, huge logos. They did so many cool demos and case studies. But I loved going to Twilio because I got more access to consumer side. One of the stories I always loved was with Medtronic. Medtronic had developed a new system for basically any sort of – a insulin detector that children would wear on their arms could now notify a parent if the child was going to go into any sort of diabetic shock.
The way that Medtronic would tell the story together with Twilio was that this absolutely unlocked a lot of activities and new ways of living for children especially who couldn't do sports beforehand or couldn't be too far away from their parents or a close supervision, whatever it was. Now, they had all this freedom because they basically had a way to constantly track that they were safe and going to be healthy. I thought that was just such a very cool pulls at the heartstring story about how technology was really affecting people's lives.
[00:31:02] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, amazing story, and I think sometimes we forget just – we stare at so many product dashboards and numbers all day that we forget that technology now is everywhere in our lives and is making a huge impact in every facet of our lives. Amazing story, amazing story. Favorite SaaS company homepage.
[00:31:23] Sara Varni: I always – and this is probably a pretty generic answer because I feel like everyone references this. But I love Stripe’s website for a couple of different reasons. I think they've been able to talk to both developers and the business. I think they strike that right message that we were talking about between evangelism and being more kind of what you see is what you get. I think they've got really great product names that you can generally get what the product does, but it doesn't say like, “Hey, we do, I don't know, credit card processing.” They come up with clever references.
It’s partially the website and the structure, and it's clean and easy to navigate. But it's also, I think, their – my comment is reflective on their branding and the way they name their products and organize themselves that I think makes them stand out for me.
[00:32:17] Sunny Manivannan: I totally agree. I mean, they're one of the companies that I look to for website inspiration pretty much every time I write a new product page or a new company page. It's part of what I'm doing now. It's just they seem to demand a level of clarity and thinking that just pervades everywhere, and it's awesome to see that.
[00:32:37] Sara Varni: Yes, absolutely.
[00:32:38] Sunny Manivannan: Very cool. All right, last question on the SaaS front. What is your favorite enterprise software tool or business software tool?
[00:32:45] Sara Varni: I love Tableau. I was lucky to use it at Twilio, and that was a really great tool for us to bring together not only our sales team and marketers that were campaign-focused but also our developer evangelist. We all lived in there, and I just think it's super easy. Especially if you're running a global sales team, you can instantly get to like, “All right, commercial APAC is not performing on lead count in a matter of clicks.” That's just something that's just been super powerful for me as I've tried to make sure my team's focused on the right hot spots.
[00:33:28] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. This is The Peerbound Podcast. We clearly believe that we're all influenced by our peers. This is the peer influences section. First question for you is do you have a book and/or movie recommendation.
[00:33:40] Sara Varni: I'm trying to read 18 books this year. I know for most people that might sound ridiculous. But I don't know. Every time I try to read, maybe it's just because I get up early to work out or work long days, I just end up falling asleep, so 18 is – it's a lot. For me, I just read Demon Copperhead which was recommended to me by a few different people. It was excellent. I highly recommend, very good.
[00:34:08] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. Okay. Eighteen books sounds like a lot, to be honest. I mean, it's tough to get –
[00:34:11] Sara Varni: Ok good. Now, I feel better. But I have a friend that I ride the ferry with every morning, and she does – I think a book a week is her thing. I was just like, “I can't. I'm not worthy.”
[00:34:24] Sunny Manivannan: Those people are so annoying. They're so annoying.
[00:34:26] Sara Varni: Yes. I mean, but it’s like I wish. It's awesome. It’s awesome.
[00:34:30] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Here we are, just mere mortals trying to read a couple of books a month maybe if we can afford that. Then they're just racing past us, so annoying.
[00:34:38] Sara Varni: Well, the challenge is, too, I just picked up another book, Covenant of Water, which was referred. What I do every year, I don't know if it's helpful to people, but I don't use Facebook all that much anymore. But I do find it very helpful to get recommendations from a broad group of friends. I'll say like, “Hey, what books do you recommend?” I get some great ones every year doing that.
Anyway, someone recommended Covenant of Water, but the problem is it's 800 pages long, so I've been on the same book for three months, which is a problem. I'm going to really have to catch up in the back half of the year, but I've got this.
[00:35:09] Sunny Manivannan: Talk about misaligned incentives, right? You're goaling yourself on a number of books, but then you can't really read the long books because then you feel like you're getting further away from your goal, even though you're reading.
[00:35:19] Sara Varni: Yes, exactly. It’s going to be – there might be a lot of short stories in the back half if I'm going to hit my target. We'll see.
[00:35:24] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. My aspirational reading story, I can't believe I'm sharing this in public, but basically I've had a Kindle now for two years. I now buy so many – I buy a Kindle book a week, so I could theoretically be reading 50 books a year. But my actual number of books read is maybe a third of that, maybe a quarter because it's just very hard to find three hours to get through a book. I'm not a good sort of serial reader. I got to get through a whole book in one sitting. With kids, it’s just really hard.
[00:35:53] Sara Varni: It is, for sure.
[00:35:55] Sunny Manivannan: So funny. Okay, last question for you. Who are the peers that influence you as a marketing leader and as a marketer?
[00:36:02] Sara Varni: I think of people – I have different people who influence me in different ways. I really admire Denise Persson from Snowflake and I – they are at a slightly different scale than us. I looked at her for advice on like, “Hey, what's around the corner for us, and what do I need to be thinking about?” I think she's interesting that she started Snowflake pretty early and has stayed on as the CMO the whole time it scaled, which is really remarkable. She's straightforward and I just think a super smart person.
Jamie Domenici is someone I worked with at Salesforce. She's incredibly creative. She's the CMO right now at Klaviyo. She's just great at creating memorable messaging that a sales team will go and repeat. I still remember from like eight years ago she had this campaign. She ran with our sales team called Find, Win, Keep. There's been a lot of campaigns I've seen since then, and I still remember it was just very straightforward, simple, got everyone to recite it. She's really creative that way.
Shannon Duffy, also CMO to Asana. Shannon is incredible when it comes to sales program. She's great. I have traveled. She's also from Salesforce. We traveled together on a couple sales enablement trips to Europe. I would like to just be listening to everything she was doing because she was just really good about it didn't matter if it was a non-technical persona or a technical persona. She would just like break it down, get sales-focused. She's also just great at building amazing teams and has fun at work, too. She’s good balance of getting work done but also making sure that you're having a good time and taking care of your people. She's just got a great group of people that have been working for her for a number of years.
Then Jeff Titterton, someone I met actually through COVID. We had a lot of CMO groups that we’d form during COVID, just to swap notes about how you should be looking at your metrics, all the – I don't know if everyone remembers. But through COVID, all the metrics were really crazy as we saw all of the digital acceleration. Then we lapped those metrics, and our bosses were mad that we weren't still growing at that same clip. Jeff, he was part of my COVID support group. I just, again, think he's a really smart, practical CMO that I really respect.
[00:38:33] Sunny Manivannan: That's an amazing list, Sara. Those COVID bonds go a long way, for sure.
[00:38:39] Sara Varni: Yes, for sure.
[00:38:41] Sunny Manivannan: Thank you so, so much. This was such a brilliant conversation. I have so many more questions for you. But I know you've got a run, so just greatly appreciate you being here. Again, it was an honor. Thank you.
