CONTENTS
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“Shannon Duffy: The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to their teams and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.”
[00:00:20] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Shannon Duffy, the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon is a seasoned SaaS marketing leader with experience at startups, as well as an epic run at Salesforce. That included marketing leadership roles in the marketing and commerce cloud businesses, as well as Salesforce's platform business, and finally as the Executive Vice President of Cloud and Industry Marketing for Salesforce.
Shannon, you're such a legend, and it's an honor to have you on the Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:52] Shannon Duffy: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I want to start perhaps close to the beginning and have you offer some lessons from the earlier parts of your career. You were actually at a startup that was acquired into Salesforce. Tell us about the startup, and what did you learn about yourself and maybe about careers from this leg of your journey.
[00:01:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I worked for a small little company based in San Mateo. I think we're about 120, 150 people. We were called Jigsaw, and I was drawn to Jigsaw because Jigsaw was using technology to disrupt an old, tired industry, right? Jigsaw was a data company at its core, and it was using this notion of community and collaboration to provide the best data asset possible that then companies would then buy. I just thought that was really cool. It was using the tools, the Internet that we knew, and solved a problem that people had had. I was really, really drawn to it.
I was there for a few years when Salesforce came in and bought us. That was a very interesting experience because I like to tell people like prior to that time, Salesforce, of course, has done massive acquisitions since then; Slack and MuleSoft and Tableau and huge, huge companies. But at the time, we were the first real people, company acquisition that Salesforce had ever done. I would joke at my colleagues that came from acquisitions 10 years later that they had a much easier ride than I did when Salesforce was trying to just determine what to do with us and just the whole process of integrating a business into the Salesforce machine. It was a very interesting period.
What I like to tell people I learned about is I had always admired Salesforce. I mean, obviously, it's just this great company, and it is a sales marketing powerhouse, which if you're in marketing, you definitely admire them. I was excited. We have a term at Asana, nervo excited, to be acquired by this big company. I'm very vocal, and I've told the story internally at Salesforce that my first few six months at Salesforce wasn't what I expected. It was different. One, it was just figuring out the logistics of how Salesforce was going to integrate us, a business, into their ecosystem.
More importantly, it just culturally was very different. I realized through that time. I thought that Salesforce wanted me to be a certain way because I was watching some of the people around me, and I was watching some of the behaviours. I said, “Okay. Well, clearly, these people are the best at what they do. I want to be like these people. I need to act like these people.” It wasn't really true and authentic to who I was. It was a really jarring experience.
One day, I realized. I'm like, “Acting like this or emulating these behaviours is really crushing my soul and my heart.” So I stopped doing it. It was really interesting because once I stopped doing it, I actually started being more successful inside of Salesforce. What I realized, it was like my mind telling me that I was supposed to act this way. It wasn't Salesforce telling me I had to act a certain way. By being true to my authentic self, I ended up having an epic run. I spent 12 years at Salesforce. That was the biggest thing I learned. It's like just because you're in a situation where everyone seems to be the same that doesn't mean there's no room for your authentic self.
[00:04:05] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. You hear the advice of just be yourself or be your authentic self or be your full self. But, really, the context of your experience and the real, okay, here's a company whose culture, at least on the outside definitely didn't resemble anything that I stood for, and how do you then integrate into that, while staying true to who you are and learning about your journey, is fascinating.
How big was Salesforce when they acquired you in terms of employees?
[00:04:33] Shannon Duffy: I want to say more like –
[00:04:34] Sunny Manivannan: What year was this?
[00:04:34] Shannon Duffy: This was May of 2010, so it's been quite a while.
[00:04:38] Sunny Manivannan: Early, early days.
[00:04:39] Shannon Duffy: I want to say we were like 3,500, maybe 4,000 people and when I left, 75,000 to 80,000. It was definitely a seat on the rocket ship, and it was a lot of fun, and I learned a ton about not just marketing but about SAS and go-to-market and product and sales. I mean, Salesforce does many things very, very well.
[00:05:02] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean everything on go-to-market. I think so many of us follow, and I've interviewed so many CMOs from Salesforce who cut their teeth learning as the company grew. It's just incredible to watch the success of so many people come out of that company and just be widely successful after.
[00:05:18] Shannon Duffy: I say this in a loving respectful – it is a CMO factory for a reason. You learn from the best. You were challenged by the best. You were constantly striving to be better, better, better, never best. When you decide that you want to leave or do something else, there's a lot of options because you are a machine of B2B marketing.
[00:05:38] Sunny Manivannan: I have to ask you, just as a marketer myself and as a curious person. What are they doing inside the CMO factory that the rest of us are not doing?
[00:05:46] Shannon Duffy: Here's what I will say. I will say if you are running a business like I did, and by the time I left, I was running most of them from a marketing perspective with the exception of Slack, is you have to understand the total business. You can't just walk in there and start talking about marketing. You have to understand the mechanics of the overall business. How many salespeople are on your product? What is the TAM for your product? What is the size, the ARR, and the ACV? You have to understand that because if you don't understand that, your marketing is not going to be as impactful. That's number one. It's like marketing is connected to the rest of the business.
And two, I think Salesforce strives for excellence in everything. You have to be able to understand your ICP and be able to create messaging and positioning that resonates with them. You have to be able to take that messaging positioning and translate that into content that your sales team can use. You have to able to stand on stage in front of 10,000 people and deliver that content. You have to then sit down with your sales leader and go through their pipe gen mechanics, and how much pipe your demand gen campaigns are driving, and what the pipe coverage is, and what you're doing to fill the holes, right? It’s like definitely gives you a well-rounded view of all the components that go into marketing, driving a successful healthy business.
[00:07:00] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. It's like a top-tier MBA with the concentration in SaaS marketing and SaaS go-to-market.
[00:07:05] Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
[00:07:07] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome, awesome. What career advice did you receive at this point in your career when you were at Salesforce or perhaps even early days at Salesforce that sticks with you to this day?
[00:07:18] Shannon Duffy: I would say know your business. Kind of similar to what I said before, you have to know your business. I love the mantra of better, better, never best. It's very interesting because I've absorbed that so much that sometimes I forget that you need to celebrate the wins a little bit more before you go on to what's wrong. It’s really funny giving feedback to someone who maybe has come from the Salesforce world versus not because you'll be giving someone a review, and the first thing they want to know – they don't want to hear how great they are. They're like, “Tell me everything I can do better,” right? I forget that sometimes.
I do think having a better, better, never best is more in that growth mindset way of thinking. It's like, yes, I did the thing. Yes, I want to celebrate it. But what can I do better next time I think it’s something I've embraced which I think has served me pretty well in my career. Actually, I had a mentorship call with someone this morning, and I gave them that exact same feedback.
[00:08:09] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. I mean the idea of always expecting more, at least wanting more and striving for more, is so timeless and very hard to do. Not easy to do and push yourself that way.
[00:08:17] Shannon Duffy: No.
[00:08:19] Sunny Manivannan: It’s great. I want to ask you now. We've talked a little bit about your career and early lessons learned. You have been on this extremely rare journey as a professional and then a leader and then really a business leader at the highest levels of the industry. It’s all happened in a fairly rapid timeline. We've been in the industry, and it's very hard for people to scale as a company is growing and also take on areas of greater responsibility. It’s almost — you’re adding one slope on top of another slope. Very few people scale all the way as you have.
What advice do you have for somebody who's maybe at the beginning of their leadership journey or somewhere along this path? What would you tell them?
[00:09:04] Shannon Duffy: Oh, so many things. One, of my favourite quotes of all time, is from a Disney movie, Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming. Just keep going because it's easier to stop than it is to continue, especially in times of challenge because that is when you are growing. Accept feedback in the spirit that it's given. It is hard to get feedback sometimes, especially when you put your heart and soul into everything. But you have to have it. Check your ego at the door. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and solve real problems and not just point out the problems but solve them, right?
These are things that I would tell younger Shannon, and I would tell somebody just graduating and starting out today. I would tell people how you show up is really, really important. The example I give is treat every interaction with people outside of maybe your immediate, people that you talk to a million times a day as like a job interview for the future, right? It's a small valley. It's a small industry that we work in. The great thing about it, it’s constantly growing. It is constantly evolving.
People will go on to new opportunities or new cool companies. The first thing they will do is say I need a product marketer, or I need a field marketer, or I need something. They will go through their mental model in their head of who they know. They will remember that time that you showed up in a meeting, and you knew what you were talking about, and you were curious, and you were open to help them solve their problems maybe when it was technically in your job description.
These are the things that I think really separate people from – again, doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you don't have these other qualities, sometimes you just don't get as far.
[00:10:42] Sunny Manivannan: I love the sort of really actionable idea of when somebody is hiring for a role that you would want, do they think of you? Are you in their Rolodex, first of all, and are you in their Rolodex as one of their faves, so to speak?
[00:10:55] Shannon Duffy: Totally. Well, and the flip side is someone will say, “Hey, I'm hiring someone, and so-and-so applied. Do you know so-and-so?” People say you're not supposed to back tread. People do it all the time. Then what do you want them to say? What is your brand? What is that thing that you've left them with?
[00:11:11] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. Love that. Let me ask you now. I’ve talked to you about Salesforce. Let me ask you about Asana. You joined Asana as the CMO a little less than two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. The industry was going through – at least we were at the beginning of a shift in how we were spending money, what was expected of companies. I don't know if ChatGPT had come out by the time you joined Asana. Had it come out?
[00:11:38] Shannon Duffy: It had come out, but it was right about to explode. It was there, but I joined Asana, and I would say a few weeks later, all of a sudden, you couldn't get away from it. It was everywhere.
[00:11:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right. Okay. COVID had kind of receded, and we were now in this more austere time or the beginning of that. ChatGPT was really just a twinkle in our eyes at that point. What was it like to join that company at that time? Tell me about that.
[00:12:04] Shannon Duffy: I joined Asana because Asana is really dedicated to improving and transforming the way people work, but mainly knowledge workers, right? People like us that sit at computers and work in industry such as ours. I had seen the need for a product like Asana that streamlined work, gave visibility and clarity, drove accountability from my time at Salesforce. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is an amazing tool that is going to make so many people's lives so much easier.” I feel very passionate about marketing it, and so that's why I joined.
Then a few weeks later, AI was everywhere and ChatGPT. What’s interesting is when you think about what AI is going to disrupt, it's going to disrupt many different industries, many different fields, many different jobs. But it's also going to disrupt knowledge workers, and how we work together, and how we get work done, and how quickly we get work done, and what type of work is done by humans, and what type of work is done by other things.
I think I was so glad like, “Wow, I picked the right company,” because Asana has a very point of view on two things. One, that we can use AI to make work better, more enjoyable, more effortless. But, also, we really, really believe that the power of AI is to unlock human potential. It’s not to replace humans. It is to make all of us better. I was like, “Okay, that's something I can really get behind and market and feel passionate about, as well as use myself running a 200-person globally diverse time zone, diverse language, diverse marketing team.”
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of the future of work, there is a lot changing. AI is changing a lot of things. What are you seeing from your vantage point? Now, obviously, Asana has been one of the early adopters of really putting AI into your products, and you have such a great core set of data that you could truly transform how knowledge work gets done. There are so many use cases that I can just think of off the top of my head. What are you excited about in terms of AI in Asana, and how do you perhaps use it yourself?
[00:13:55] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I'm excited for AI in Asana for a few reasons. We have this concept of AI teammates. I've actually created a workflow in Asana that writes like me. I have given it prompts. I have given it writing samples that I wrote myself. I'm like, “Oh, this is me sounding really good.” Now, instead of starting from scratch, I will go to this and I will say, “Hey, I need to write this for this purpose, this audience. This is what I wanted to convey,” and I get something that's really good.
That is all done completely in Asana, and what's amazing is I can get the content in Asana. Then I can kick off a workflow that says, “Now, send this to my chief of staff to make sure this gets posted in these channels,” right? It’s like not just actually creating the content. It's how putting the content where it needs to go and getting it to the people that it needs to see. I think, again, for marketing in particular because we create so many things, the potential is endless.
I would say I've talked to a lot of marketers, and it's interesting to me how it's almost like there's two sides of the coin. There are people that are in it and love it, and they are waving the banner for AI. Then there's other marketers that are really still scared and skeptical of it. I just have to say you have to embrace it. This is like 1996 hoping the Internet will go away. It's not going to, right? The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to them, beneficial to their teams, and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.
[00:15:30] Sunny Manivannan: I definitely want something like what you just described, where something writes like you. That used to be a job. That used to be a full-time job for somebody that would write executive communications, right? Now, you're saying, okay, I can at least get you started and maybe get you a good chunk of the way there. Then you can finish it up and do all the other things that need to be done. It's amazing. Do you call those agents? Do you use that word agent?
[00:15:53] Shannon Duffy: We call it a teammate because I think, to me, an agent sounds like a cold thing that is somewhere producing something, where a teammate is like – it's like a member of my team. It's there. It wants to help. It wants to be productive. It wants to make the whole project thrive, so we call it AI teammates.
[00:16:10] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about agent being cold because I feel the same way. It’s just the latest in a pattern of Silicon Valley naming things in a very not inhuman way or unhuman way, so to speak. Teammate sounds a lot better. Excellent.
Let me ask you a question about this fear around AI because I think we all feel it around us. When you're selling some of these solutions, you first get skepticism that it won't work. Once you overcome that, then you get the fear of, “Okay, this is working, but I was doing that before.” I know this is a big question. What advice would you have for marketers to go at least address that fear in how we talk about some of these products because the fear is real?
[00:16:59] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I think the fear is real. I would say two things about that. One, you have to use it. Using it will stop the fear, right? Because you will understand what it can do and what it cannot do. Once you start using it, you're able to see the ways that you can make it better. I think that helps with that fear, right? Because there's still a need for the human interaction, the human making sure because AI can still come up with some weird things, right? Every once in a while, I ask something. I was like, “Whoa, where did that come from,” right? It’s like you still need that human, that training, that learning together.
The other thing I think kind of related but maybe slightly tangential is I do think if you're a marketer out there and you are marketing a product, an AI-enabled product or an AI product or whatever it is, this is where we have a really opportunity to lead because what we need to do is help position this. We need to be the trusted advisors to our customers. We need to talk to them about how they can use AI that comes from our product, comes from our service in a way that is beneficial to them and their company.
That is where marketing comes in, right? That's the beauty of marketing is to take something that may be essentially boring and turn it into like, “No, no, no. We're actually here to help you and here's how. Here's why. Here's the content we have that will help train you on this new AI product.” There’s a lot of potential there that I think we’re just scratching the surface.
[00:18:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's wonderful. Well, let me turn the page. I want to ask you about just the SaaS industry overall. I call this section SaaS talk. We just talked about as marketers, as a marketing leader, what kinds of SaaS companies do you like and SaaS marketing and so on. The first question I have for you is do you have a favorite SaaS company homepage? Or you can select multiple homepages that you love. They can't be Asana or Salesforce.
[00:18:42] Shannon Duffy: I have so much respect for HubSpot. I think HubSpot does phenomenal marketing. I think they basically created – they redefined creative content marketing and this concept of inbound. Anyone who can create something like that that has the whole industry watching and emulating gets mad, mad props from me. Good job, HubSpot.
[00:19:04] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. I want to ask you about SaaS apps that you love to use. That's the next question. Are there any SaaS apps that you love to use at work? Then I'll ask you, are there any apps that you use personally that you really love?
[00:19:15] Shannon Duffy: Other than Asana, and I do use Asana. I know everyone expects me to say that. But I promise you I use Asana constantly. We use a lot of Slack for communication as well. Of course, it's funny because we don't actually use a lot of email, which I know sounds crazy. But with Asana, it’s possible. But I do make sure I check my calendar and things like that. I'm pretty basic with the SaaS apps. Sorry, I don't have more interesting.
[00:19:37] Sunny Manivannan: No worries. It's good to keep it that way at work. What about at home?
[00:19:41] Shannon Duffy: I mean, I don't cook, so thank you to DoorDash, whoever invented that, the Duffy family, 10 out of 10. DoorDash I love. I love Instagram. I love looking at pretty things and keeping up with friends. Trying to think what else. Again, not a lot of excitement over here.
[00:19:56] Sunny Manivannan: Hey, stick to the basics. Nothing wrong with that. I want to ask asked you about customer stories. You've obviously attracted so much with your customers throughout your career. Do you have any favourite customer stories of technology impacting their lives? Anything come to mind?
[00:20:11] Shannon Duffy: This is where I got to use some Asana stories. I mean, Asana is helping great, great brands like Accor, which is an amazing hotel chain based in Europe. They run Sofitel and many different brands. They are completely running all their global campaigns on Asana, which, again, if you think about historically, it's very difficult the amount of time zones and languages and employees being all over the place. That's one that I love. I think IPG Mediabrands is another example. It is like a group of agencies that are completely using Asana to run campaigns everywhere.
[00:20:50] Sunny Manivannan: Shannon, one of the things I'm very curious about is when you come into a new situation and you've taken on so many different new roles in your career. Let's take Asana for an example. When you came in as CMO at Asana, how do you think about the team? How do you think about what is the team that's needed to achieve the company's goals? What's your process over those first several weeks to go figure this out? How do you think about team structure?
[00:21:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes, absolutely. I think whenever you're taking a new role or a new team, you have to listen and you have to understand how things got to where they were. That said, I think there's a few non-negotiables. I think that's really important.
Now, I believe, and you can say this is because of my background as a product marketer, but the first most important thing is what are you saying about your product to your desired customer because if you don't have that nailed, nothing else matters. Your campaigns won't be as effective. Your events won't be as meaningful. Your comms will be meaningless. You have to really nail that messaging and that positioning and that value prop to the key buyer.
For me, I do like what is the product marketing team structure. Do they have a strong leader? Do they have someone that not only understands the product and can talk to the product team but can turn that into a really good story that sales can sell? That’s really important, like what is your product marketing.
The second thing, you need to be able to drive demand, right? What is your revenue marketing demand gen team? What does that look like? Do you have the people in region? Do you have the people that have that mix between doing events versus digital campaign? Do they understand the intersection between the both? Having a really strong lead there. Next, usually, if you have demand gen, you need something to put in that demand gen. You need content, right? What is your content strategy? Who is running your content and your thought leadership? Again, what is that platform, and how does that relate to the messaging and positioning that your product marketing team is putting out?
Then just as important but maybe not as cool or fun is what does your marketing ops like? How are you measuring success? Do you have a strong marketing analytics team? Do you have a strong ops team? What is your MarTech stack? I mean, this is not a new concept for marketers, but you have to understand that stuff. You have to understand because I guarantee you, some of your budget or some of the budget that your ET team or IT team has marked for you is going to your MarTech stack. Do those things talk together? Do they communicate with each other? Is your data siloed? Not super sexy and not maybe the creative reason why we got into marketing, but you have to understand it, and you have to be passionate about making sure it all works together
Then lastly, on the other side, what is your brand and creative? Here's the secret. A lot of the stuff that people market is kind of the same stuff. CRM was a container for data, right? Really, that's what – but what makes it cool and interesting and gives customers that emotional connection, it's how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels. That’s where that creative – that magic. Your head of brand, your head of creative can really, really bring that to whatever it is that you're selling. That's the way I think of structuring the departments in a marketing team.
[00:24:04] Sunny Manivannan: The place where Asana as a company and the place where the category of work management is today, as CMO, are you finding yourself evangelizing the category more or talking more about the company's differentiators versus alternatives? I guess another way to ask the question is are you still talking to prospective customers that are doing this in a very, very inefficient, completely siloed way across the organization? Or are they just using something else that's worse?
[00:24:33] Shannon Duffy: We have to do both, which on my good days, I find an incredibly amazing intellectual challenge that I get really excited about. That is like, “Wow, this is really hard.” What's interesting about work management is you have companies that are just using it and killing it and have completely redefined the way their organizations work together across department and the visibility and the clarity and the accountability they have. Then there are huge companies that are using it on spreadsheets. It's almost like they haven't unlocked that there's a better way. To answer your question, we have to do both, and that's some of the context switching.
I do think, again, with the AI conversation, work management is going to change probably as rapidly, if not more, than any other category in software. It’s great to be at Asana where I feel like we have the potential to be driving that conversation versus getting the downstream effect and having to make something from it.
[00:25:27] Sunny Manivannan: You totally are on that last point about talking about AI as your teammate. I think that's so fascinating because there's so much of the conversation today, at least in sort of Silicon Valley circles, revolves around, okay, it's a fixed pie, and AI is not going to do this piece that human beings were doing before, and it's very zero-sum. Whereas I think your view of the world seems much more realistic and pragmatic of, “Okay, well, you just have all these helpers that want to help you win, and they just want to help you do a good job.” I think bringing that message to, I don't know, a company that is not in our industry and maybe isn't thinking about this on a day-to-day basis and telling them, “Imagine you just doubled your workforce. What would that look like?”
[00:26:07] Shannon Duffy: Exactly. I think I love what you said because this is something I remind myself and my team all the time is I literally live in the probably exact centre of Silicon Valley, right? I work in San Francisco every day. I drive to work, and I just – AI billboards are just like everywhere. But we have built Asana to help humanity thrive, and humanity doesn't all live in Silicon Valley, right? We have customers who live in other countries where AI might have different regulations. We have customers that might live in the Midwest in a manufacturing company. It’s really, really important to us that we democratize this technology for everyone.
Again, going back to marketing, that means we need to explain it in a way that everyone can understand, everyone can use it, and people aren't scared of it. They truly do see this as something that is going to make their lives better.
[00:26:57] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. We could talk about this for several hours. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to in the future. I will turn the page to what I like to call peer-bound talk. The idea really here is we're all influenced by our peers, and you actually even mentioned this earlier when you said, “Hey, Silicon Valley is small network, and we all talk to each other.” I couldn't agree more. I'll ask you a couple of questions to round out our conversation about what's inspired you and what are the things that you'd recommend to your peers, our listeners. Maybe I’ll start by asking you one book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[00:27:33] Shannon Duffy: I love the book the Multipliers. It is literally my management philosophy. You can read the book. You can watch the videos, even have training. That was a huge – I think of these unlock moments in the career of Shannon, me becoming who I am and experiencing that content and really seeing that there was a way to lead and a way that I would want to be led. It was absolutely amazing.
The spoiler, if you haven't read it, many, many people have, it's basically you give everyone one job too big. Most of the time, people will grow into it, and surprise you and themselves with what they can accomplish. You let people fail once, and you course correct them quickly. You ask questions. It's just a great, great book if someone who's kind of looking to – for a way to really crystallize their leadership style, it was monumental for me.
[00:28:25] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. I 100% second that recommendation. Also, one of my pivot points in my career as early manager I think is when I read that book and completely changed a whole lot of things for me. Still learning the lessons I would say but definitely changed how I approached management and leadership.
[00:28:40] Shannon Duffy: Yes. An enabler, not a diminisher.
[00:28:43] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. That's exactly right. Wonderful. Last question for you, who are your favorite SaaS marketers? I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum.
[00:28:53] Shannon Duffy: I'm going to give you one answer. I'm going to – because here's the thing. I feel blessed that being in the CM – I probably shouldn't call it a CMO factory. That sounds bad. Maybe like a CMO school or something. Some amazing marketers that I still keep in touch with, some that were my mentors, some that were my peers. I mean, Stephanie Buscemi, Sarah Franklin, two previous CMOs of Salesforce. Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo now. I mentioned Sarah Franklin. Now, she's the CEO of Lattice. Emma Chalwin, CMO of Workday. Some people that are still at Salesforce; Eric Stahl, Lynne Zaledonis.
What's interesting, I didn't always agree with these people. But the way of thinking outside the box, challenging to do better, that friendly even almost competition to out market when we're all over different – Sara Varni, if I didn't mention her, amazing CMO of Twilio, now Datadog, right? I just learned so much from watching them lead, watching the market. I'm definitely the marketer I am today from having worked with all those people. I admire all of them greatly.
[00:29:57] Sunny Manivannan: It's an incredible list. I've had the privilege of interviewing Sara Varni. I have one request, which is at some point, all of you should get together and write the definitive book on marketing in SaaS. I think that thing would sell like hotcakes.
[00:30:15] Shannon Duffy: I mean, again, I've thought about Julie Liegl who is CMO of Slack for a while before they were – yes. We have a lot to say. We do actually get together. But usually we're drinking wine and not necessarily talking about SaaS. But we can channel our energy in that book, bestseller, New York Times.
[00:30:31] Sunny Manivannan: You should just invite one of your Asana AI teammates into that.
[00:30:33] Shannon Duffy: Oh, my God. That is brilliant.
[00:30:35] Sunny Manivannan: Into the channel and just say, “Just channel this, and let's get a book out of this.” I bet even that would be a great first draft.
[00:30:41] Shannon Duffy: You've just blown my mind. We will dedicate the book to you, Sunny, for that amazing idea in the foreword.
[00:30:46] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, Shannon, I'm so proud to have you on here. Thank you so, so much. I learned a lot from just this brief conversation. Again, thank you for taking the time to come on the Peerbound Podcast, and it's been a privilege.
[00:30:59] Shannon Duffy: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sunny.
[00:31:01] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Bye.
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“Shannon Duffy: The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to their teams and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.”
[00:00:20] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Shannon Duffy, the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon is a seasoned SaaS marketing leader with experience at startups, as well as an epic run at Salesforce. That included marketing leadership roles in the marketing and commerce cloud businesses, as well as Salesforce's platform business, and finally as the Executive Vice President of Cloud and Industry Marketing for Salesforce.
Shannon, you're such a legend, and it's an honor to have you on the Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:52] Shannon Duffy: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I want to start perhaps close to the beginning and have you offer some lessons from the earlier parts of your career. You were actually at a startup that was acquired into Salesforce. Tell us about the startup, and what did you learn about yourself and maybe about careers from this leg of your journey.
[00:01:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I worked for a small little company based in San Mateo. I think we're about 120, 150 people. We were called Jigsaw, and I was drawn to Jigsaw because Jigsaw was using technology to disrupt an old, tired industry, right? Jigsaw was a data company at its core, and it was using this notion of community and collaboration to provide the best data asset possible that then companies would then buy. I just thought that was really cool. It was using the tools, the Internet that we knew, and solved a problem that people had had. I was really, really drawn to it.
I was there for a few years when Salesforce came in and bought us. That was a very interesting experience because I like to tell people like prior to that time, Salesforce, of course, has done massive acquisitions since then; Slack and MuleSoft and Tableau and huge, huge companies. But at the time, we were the first real people, company acquisition that Salesforce had ever done. I would joke at my colleagues that came from acquisitions 10 years later that they had a much easier ride than I did when Salesforce was trying to just determine what to do with us and just the whole process of integrating a business into the Salesforce machine. It was a very interesting period.
What I like to tell people I learned about is I had always admired Salesforce. I mean, obviously, it's just this great company, and it is a sales marketing powerhouse, which if you're in marketing, you definitely admire them. I was excited. We have a term at Asana, nervo excited, to be acquired by this big company. I'm very vocal, and I've told the story internally at Salesforce that my first few six months at Salesforce wasn't what I expected. It was different. One, it was just figuring out the logistics of how Salesforce was going to integrate us, a business, into their ecosystem.
More importantly, it just culturally was very different. I realized through that time. I thought that Salesforce wanted me to be a certain way because I was watching some of the people around me, and I was watching some of the behaviours. I said, “Okay. Well, clearly, these people are the best at what they do. I want to be like these people. I need to act like these people.” It wasn't really true and authentic to who I was. It was a really jarring experience.
One day, I realized. I'm like, “Acting like this or emulating these behaviours is really crushing my soul and my heart.” So I stopped doing it. It was really interesting because once I stopped doing it, I actually started being more successful inside of Salesforce. What I realized, it was like my mind telling me that I was supposed to act this way. It wasn't Salesforce telling me I had to act a certain way. By being true to my authentic self, I ended up having an epic run. I spent 12 years at Salesforce. That was the biggest thing I learned. It's like just because you're in a situation where everyone seems to be the same that doesn't mean there's no room for your authentic self.
[00:04:05] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. You hear the advice of just be yourself or be your authentic self or be your full self. But, really, the context of your experience and the real, okay, here's a company whose culture, at least on the outside definitely didn't resemble anything that I stood for, and how do you then integrate into that, while staying true to who you are and learning about your journey, is fascinating.
How big was Salesforce when they acquired you in terms of employees?
[00:04:33] Shannon Duffy: I want to say more like –
[00:04:34] Sunny Manivannan: What year was this?
[00:04:34] Shannon Duffy: This was May of 2010, so it's been quite a while.
[00:04:38] Sunny Manivannan: Early, early days.
[00:04:39] Shannon Duffy: I want to say we were like 3,500, maybe 4,000 people and when I left, 75,000 to 80,000. It was definitely a seat on the rocket ship, and it was a lot of fun, and I learned a ton about not just marketing but about SAS and go-to-market and product and sales. I mean, Salesforce does many things very, very well.
[00:05:02] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean everything on go-to-market. I think so many of us follow, and I've interviewed so many CMOs from Salesforce who cut their teeth learning as the company grew. It's just incredible to watch the success of so many people come out of that company and just be widely successful after.
[00:05:18] Shannon Duffy: I say this in a loving respectful – it is a CMO factory for a reason. You learn from the best. You were challenged by the best. You were constantly striving to be better, better, better, never best. When you decide that you want to leave or do something else, there's a lot of options because you are a machine of B2B marketing.
[00:05:38] Sunny Manivannan: I have to ask you, just as a marketer myself and as a curious person. What are they doing inside the CMO factory that the rest of us are not doing?
[00:05:46] Shannon Duffy: Here's what I will say. I will say if you are running a business like I did, and by the time I left, I was running most of them from a marketing perspective with the exception of Slack, is you have to understand the total business. You can't just walk in there and start talking about marketing. You have to understand the mechanics of the overall business. How many salespeople are on your product? What is the TAM for your product? What is the size, the ARR, and the ACV? You have to understand that because if you don't understand that, your marketing is not going to be as impactful. That's number one. It's like marketing is connected to the rest of the business.
And two, I think Salesforce strives for excellence in everything. You have to be able to understand your ICP and be able to create messaging and positioning that resonates with them. You have to be able to take that messaging positioning and translate that into content that your sales team can use. You have to able to stand on stage in front of 10,000 people and deliver that content. You have to then sit down with your sales leader and go through their pipe gen mechanics, and how much pipe your demand gen campaigns are driving, and what the pipe coverage is, and what you're doing to fill the holes, right? It’s like definitely gives you a well-rounded view of all the components that go into marketing, driving a successful healthy business.
[00:07:00] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. It's like a top-tier MBA with the concentration in SaaS marketing and SaaS go-to-market.
[00:07:05] Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
[00:07:07] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome, awesome. What career advice did you receive at this point in your career when you were at Salesforce or perhaps even early days at Salesforce that sticks with you to this day?
[00:07:18] Shannon Duffy: I would say know your business. Kind of similar to what I said before, you have to know your business. I love the mantra of better, better, never best. It's very interesting because I've absorbed that so much that sometimes I forget that you need to celebrate the wins a little bit more before you go on to what's wrong. It’s really funny giving feedback to someone who maybe has come from the Salesforce world versus not because you'll be giving someone a review, and the first thing they want to know – they don't want to hear how great they are. They're like, “Tell me everything I can do better,” right? I forget that sometimes.
I do think having a better, better, never best is more in that growth mindset way of thinking. It's like, yes, I did the thing. Yes, I want to celebrate it. But what can I do better next time I think it’s something I've embraced which I think has served me pretty well in my career. Actually, I had a mentorship call with someone this morning, and I gave them that exact same feedback.
[00:08:09] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. I mean the idea of always expecting more, at least wanting more and striving for more, is so timeless and very hard to do. Not easy to do and push yourself that way.
[00:08:17] Shannon Duffy: No.
[00:08:19] Sunny Manivannan: It’s great. I want to ask you now. We've talked a little bit about your career and early lessons learned. You have been on this extremely rare journey as a professional and then a leader and then really a business leader at the highest levels of the industry. It’s all happened in a fairly rapid timeline. We've been in the industry, and it's very hard for people to scale as a company is growing and also take on areas of greater responsibility. It’s almost — you’re adding one slope on top of another slope. Very few people scale all the way as you have.
What advice do you have for somebody who's maybe at the beginning of their leadership journey or somewhere along this path? What would you tell them?
[00:09:04] Shannon Duffy: Oh, so many things. One, of my favourite quotes of all time, is from a Disney movie, Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming. Just keep going because it's easier to stop than it is to continue, especially in times of challenge because that is when you are growing. Accept feedback in the spirit that it's given. It is hard to get feedback sometimes, especially when you put your heart and soul into everything. But you have to have it. Check your ego at the door. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and solve real problems and not just point out the problems but solve them, right?
These are things that I would tell younger Shannon, and I would tell somebody just graduating and starting out today. I would tell people how you show up is really, really important. The example I give is treat every interaction with people outside of maybe your immediate, people that you talk to a million times a day as like a job interview for the future, right? It's a small valley. It's a small industry that we work in. The great thing about it, it’s constantly growing. It is constantly evolving.
People will go on to new opportunities or new cool companies. The first thing they will do is say I need a product marketer, or I need a field marketer, or I need something. They will go through their mental model in their head of who they know. They will remember that time that you showed up in a meeting, and you knew what you were talking about, and you were curious, and you were open to help them solve their problems maybe when it was technically in your job description.
These are the things that I think really separate people from – again, doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you don't have these other qualities, sometimes you just don't get as far.
[00:10:42] Sunny Manivannan: I love the sort of really actionable idea of when somebody is hiring for a role that you would want, do they think of you? Are you in their Rolodex, first of all, and are you in their Rolodex as one of their faves, so to speak?
[00:10:55] Shannon Duffy: Totally. Well, and the flip side is someone will say, “Hey, I'm hiring someone, and so-and-so applied. Do you know so-and-so?” People say you're not supposed to back tread. People do it all the time. Then what do you want them to say? What is your brand? What is that thing that you've left them with?
[00:11:11] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. Love that. Let me ask you now. I’ve talked to you about Salesforce. Let me ask you about Asana. You joined Asana as the CMO a little less than two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. The industry was going through – at least we were at the beginning of a shift in how we were spending money, what was expected of companies. I don't know if ChatGPT had come out by the time you joined Asana. Had it come out?
[00:11:38] Shannon Duffy: It had come out, but it was right about to explode. It was there, but I joined Asana, and I would say a few weeks later, all of a sudden, you couldn't get away from it. It was everywhere.
[00:11:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right. Okay. COVID had kind of receded, and we were now in this more austere time or the beginning of that. ChatGPT was really just a twinkle in our eyes at that point. What was it like to join that company at that time? Tell me about that.
[00:12:04] Shannon Duffy: I joined Asana because Asana is really dedicated to improving and transforming the way people work, but mainly knowledge workers, right? People like us that sit at computers and work in industry such as ours. I had seen the need for a product like Asana that streamlined work, gave visibility and clarity, drove accountability from my time at Salesforce. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is an amazing tool that is going to make so many people's lives so much easier.” I feel very passionate about marketing it, and so that's why I joined.
Then a few weeks later, AI was everywhere and ChatGPT. What’s interesting is when you think about what AI is going to disrupt, it's going to disrupt many different industries, many different fields, many different jobs. But it's also going to disrupt knowledge workers, and how we work together, and how we get work done, and how quickly we get work done, and what type of work is done by humans, and what type of work is done by other things.
I think I was so glad like, “Wow, I picked the right company,” because Asana has a very point of view on two things. One, that we can use AI to make work better, more enjoyable, more effortless. But, also, we really, really believe that the power of AI is to unlock human potential. It’s not to replace humans. It is to make all of us better. I was like, “Okay, that's something I can really get behind and market and feel passionate about, as well as use myself running a 200-person globally diverse time zone, diverse language, diverse marketing team.”
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of the future of work, there is a lot changing. AI is changing a lot of things. What are you seeing from your vantage point? Now, obviously, Asana has been one of the early adopters of really putting AI into your products, and you have such a great core set of data that you could truly transform how knowledge work gets done. There are so many use cases that I can just think of off the top of my head. What are you excited about in terms of AI in Asana, and how do you perhaps use it yourself?
[00:13:55] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I'm excited for AI in Asana for a few reasons. We have this concept of AI teammates. I've actually created a workflow in Asana that writes like me. I have given it prompts. I have given it writing samples that I wrote myself. I'm like, “Oh, this is me sounding really good.” Now, instead of starting from scratch, I will go to this and I will say, “Hey, I need to write this for this purpose, this audience. This is what I wanted to convey,” and I get something that's really good.
That is all done completely in Asana, and what's amazing is I can get the content in Asana. Then I can kick off a workflow that says, “Now, send this to my chief of staff to make sure this gets posted in these channels,” right? It’s like not just actually creating the content. It's how putting the content where it needs to go and getting it to the people that it needs to see. I think, again, for marketing in particular because we create so many things, the potential is endless.
I would say I've talked to a lot of marketers, and it's interesting to me how it's almost like there's two sides of the coin. There are people that are in it and love it, and they are waving the banner for AI. Then there's other marketers that are really still scared and skeptical of it. I just have to say you have to embrace it. This is like 1996 hoping the Internet will go away. It's not going to, right? The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to them, beneficial to their teams, and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.
[00:15:30] Sunny Manivannan: I definitely want something like what you just described, where something writes like you. That used to be a job. That used to be a full-time job for somebody that would write executive communications, right? Now, you're saying, okay, I can at least get you started and maybe get you a good chunk of the way there. Then you can finish it up and do all the other things that need to be done. It's amazing. Do you call those agents? Do you use that word agent?
[00:15:53] Shannon Duffy: We call it a teammate because I think, to me, an agent sounds like a cold thing that is somewhere producing something, where a teammate is like – it's like a member of my team. It's there. It wants to help. It wants to be productive. It wants to make the whole project thrive, so we call it AI teammates.
[00:16:10] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about agent being cold because I feel the same way. It’s just the latest in a pattern of Silicon Valley naming things in a very not inhuman way or unhuman way, so to speak. Teammate sounds a lot better. Excellent.
Let me ask you a question about this fear around AI because I think we all feel it around us. When you're selling some of these solutions, you first get skepticism that it won't work. Once you overcome that, then you get the fear of, “Okay, this is working, but I was doing that before.” I know this is a big question. What advice would you have for marketers to go at least address that fear in how we talk about some of these products because the fear is real?
[00:16:59] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I think the fear is real. I would say two things about that. One, you have to use it. Using it will stop the fear, right? Because you will understand what it can do and what it cannot do. Once you start using it, you're able to see the ways that you can make it better. I think that helps with that fear, right? Because there's still a need for the human interaction, the human making sure because AI can still come up with some weird things, right? Every once in a while, I ask something. I was like, “Whoa, where did that come from,” right? It’s like you still need that human, that training, that learning together.
The other thing I think kind of related but maybe slightly tangential is I do think if you're a marketer out there and you are marketing a product, an AI-enabled product or an AI product or whatever it is, this is where we have a really opportunity to lead because what we need to do is help position this. We need to be the trusted advisors to our customers. We need to talk to them about how they can use AI that comes from our product, comes from our service in a way that is beneficial to them and their company.
That is where marketing comes in, right? That's the beauty of marketing is to take something that may be essentially boring and turn it into like, “No, no, no. We're actually here to help you and here's how. Here's why. Here's the content we have that will help train you on this new AI product.” There’s a lot of potential there that I think we’re just scratching the surface.
[00:18:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's wonderful. Well, let me turn the page. I want to ask you about just the SaaS industry overall. I call this section SaaS talk. We just talked about as marketers, as a marketing leader, what kinds of SaaS companies do you like and SaaS marketing and so on. The first question I have for you is do you have a favorite SaaS company homepage? Or you can select multiple homepages that you love. They can't be Asana or Salesforce.
[00:18:42] Shannon Duffy: I have so much respect for HubSpot. I think HubSpot does phenomenal marketing. I think they basically created – they redefined creative content marketing and this concept of inbound. Anyone who can create something like that that has the whole industry watching and emulating gets mad, mad props from me. Good job, HubSpot.
[00:19:04] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. I want to ask you about SaaS apps that you love to use. That's the next question. Are there any SaaS apps that you love to use at work? Then I'll ask you, are there any apps that you use personally that you really love?
[00:19:15] Shannon Duffy: Other than Asana, and I do use Asana. I know everyone expects me to say that. But I promise you I use Asana constantly. We use a lot of Slack for communication as well. Of course, it's funny because we don't actually use a lot of email, which I know sounds crazy. But with Asana, it’s possible. But I do make sure I check my calendar and things like that. I'm pretty basic with the SaaS apps. Sorry, I don't have more interesting.
[00:19:37] Sunny Manivannan: No worries. It's good to keep it that way at work. What about at home?
[00:19:41] Shannon Duffy: I mean, I don't cook, so thank you to DoorDash, whoever invented that, the Duffy family, 10 out of 10. DoorDash I love. I love Instagram. I love looking at pretty things and keeping up with friends. Trying to think what else. Again, not a lot of excitement over here.
[00:19:56] Sunny Manivannan: Hey, stick to the basics. Nothing wrong with that. I want to ask asked you about customer stories. You've obviously attracted so much with your customers throughout your career. Do you have any favourite customer stories of technology impacting their lives? Anything come to mind?
[00:20:11] Shannon Duffy: This is where I got to use some Asana stories. I mean, Asana is helping great, great brands like Accor, which is an amazing hotel chain based in Europe. They run Sofitel and many different brands. They are completely running all their global campaigns on Asana, which, again, if you think about historically, it's very difficult the amount of time zones and languages and employees being all over the place. That's one that I love. I think IPG Mediabrands is another example. It is like a group of agencies that are completely using Asana to run campaigns everywhere.
[00:20:50] Sunny Manivannan: Shannon, one of the things I'm very curious about is when you come into a new situation and you've taken on so many different new roles in your career. Let's take Asana for an example. When you came in as CMO at Asana, how do you think about the team? How do you think about what is the team that's needed to achieve the company's goals? What's your process over those first several weeks to go figure this out? How do you think about team structure?
[00:21:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes, absolutely. I think whenever you're taking a new role or a new team, you have to listen and you have to understand how things got to where they were. That said, I think there's a few non-negotiables. I think that's really important.
Now, I believe, and you can say this is because of my background as a product marketer, but the first most important thing is what are you saying about your product to your desired customer because if you don't have that nailed, nothing else matters. Your campaigns won't be as effective. Your events won't be as meaningful. Your comms will be meaningless. You have to really nail that messaging and that positioning and that value prop to the key buyer.
For me, I do like what is the product marketing team structure. Do they have a strong leader? Do they have someone that not only understands the product and can talk to the product team but can turn that into a really good story that sales can sell? That’s really important, like what is your product marketing.
The second thing, you need to be able to drive demand, right? What is your revenue marketing demand gen team? What does that look like? Do you have the people in region? Do you have the people that have that mix between doing events versus digital campaign? Do they understand the intersection between the both? Having a really strong lead there. Next, usually, if you have demand gen, you need something to put in that demand gen. You need content, right? What is your content strategy? Who is running your content and your thought leadership? Again, what is that platform, and how does that relate to the messaging and positioning that your product marketing team is putting out?
Then just as important but maybe not as cool or fun is what does your marketing ops like? How are you measuring success? Do you have a strong marketing analytics team? Do you have a strong ops team? What is your MarTech stack? I mean, this is not a new concept for marketers, but you have to understand that stuff. You have to understand because I guarantee you, some of your budget or some of the budget that your ET team or IT team has marked for you is going to your MarTech stack. Do those things talk together? Do they communicate with each other? Is your data siloed? Not super sexy and not maybe the creative reason why we got into marketing, but you have to understand it, and you have to be passionate about making sure it all works together
Then lastly, on the other side, what is your brand and creative? Here's the secret. A lot of the stuff that people market is kind of the same stuff. CRM was a container for data, right? Really, that's what – but what makes it cool and interesting and gives customers that emotional connection, it's how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels. That’s where that creative – that magic. Your head of brand, your head of creative can really, really bring that to whatever it is that you're selling. That's the way I think of structuring the departments in a marketing team.
[00:24:04] Sunny Manivannan: The place where Asana as a company and the place where the category of work management is today, as CMO, are you finding yourself evangelizing the category more or talking more about the company's differentiators versus alternatives? I guess another way to ask the question is are you still talking to prospective customers that are doing this in a very, very inefficient, completely siloed way across the organization? Or are they just using something else that's worse?
[00:24:33] Shannon Duffy: We have to do both, which on my good days, I find an incredibly amazing intellectual challenge that I get really excited about. That is like, “Wow, this is really hard.” What's interesting about work management is you have companies that are just using it and killing it and have completely redefined the way their organizations work together across department and the visibility and the clarity and the accountability they have. Then there are huge companies that are using it on spreadsheets. It's almost like they haven't unlocked that there's a better way. To answer your question, we have to do both, and that's some of the context switching.
I do think, again, with the AI conversation, work management is going to change probably as rapidly, if not more, than any other category in software. It’s great to be at Asana where I feel like we have the potential to be driving that conversation versus getting the downstream effect and having to make something from it.
[00:25:27] Sunny Manivannan: You totally are on that last point about talking about AI as your teammate. I think that's so fascinating because there's so much of the conversation today, at least in sort of Silicon Valley circles, revolves around, okay, it's a fixed pie, and AI is not going to do this piece that human beings were doing before, and it's very zero-sum. Whereas I think your view of the world seems much more realistic and pragmatic of, “Okay, well, you just have all these helpers that want to help you win, and they just want to help you do a good job.” I think bringing that message to, I don't know, a company that is not in our industry and maybe isn't thinking about this on a day-to-day basis and telling them, “Imagine you just doubled your workforce. What would that look like?”
[00:26:07] Shannon Duffy: Exactly. I think I love what you said because this is something I remind myself and my team all the time is I literally live in the probably exact centre of Silicon Valley, right? I work in San Francisco every day. I drive to work, and I just – AI billboards are just like everywhere. But we have built Asana to help humanity thrive, and humanity doesn't all live in Silicon Valley, right? We have customers who live in other countries where AI might have different regulations. We have customers that might live in the Midwest in a manufacturing company. It’s really, really important to us that we democratize this technology for everyone.
Again, going back to marketing, that means we need to explain it in a way that everyone can understand, everyone can use it, and people aren't scared of it. They truly do see this as something that is going to make their lives better.
[00:26:57] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. We could talk about this for several hours. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to in the future. I will turn the page to what I like to call peer-bound talk. The idea really here is we're all influenced by our peers, and you actually even mentioned this earlier when you said, “Hey, Silicon Valley is small network, and we all talk to each other.” I couldn't agree more. I'll ask you a couple of questions to round out our conversation about what's inspired you and what are the things that you'd recommend to your peers, our listeners. Maybe I’ll start by asking you one book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[00:27:33] Shannon Duffy: I love the book the Multipliers. It is literally my management philosophy. You can read the book. You can watch the videos, even have training. That was a huge – I think of these unlock moments in the career of Shannon, me becoming who I am and experiencing that content and really seeing that there was a way to lead and a way that I would want to be led. It was absolutely amazing.
The spoiler, if you haven't read it, many, many people have, it's basically you give everyone one job too big. Most of the time, people will grow into it, and surprise you and themselves with what they can accomplish. You let people fail once, and you course correct them quickly. You ask questions. It's just a great, great book if someone who's kind of looking to – for a way to really crystallize their leadership style, it was monumental for me.
[00:28:25] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. I 100% second that recommendation. Also, one of my pivot points in my career as early manager I think is when I read that book and completely changed a whole lot of things for me. Still learning the lessons I would say but definitely changed how I approached management and leadership.
[00:28:40] Shannon Duffy: Yes. An enabler, not a diminisher.
[00:28:43] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. That's exactly right. Wonderful. Last question for you, who are your favorite SaaS marketers? I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum.
[00:28:53] Shannon Duffy: I'm going to give you one answer. I'm going to – because here's the thing. I feel blessed that being in the CM – I probably shouldn't call it a CMO factory. That sounds bad. Maybe like a CMO school or something. Some amazing marketers that I still keep in touch with, some that were my mentors, some that were my peers. I mean, Stephanie Buscemi, Sarah Franklin, two previous CMOs of Salesforce. Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo now. I mentioned Sarah Franklin. Now, she's the CEO of Lattice. Emma Chalwin, CMO of Workday. Some people that are still at Salesforce; Eric Stahl, Lynne Zaledonis.
What's interesting, I didn't always agree with these people. But the way of thinking outside the box, challenging to do better, that friendly even almost competition to out market when we're all over different – Sara Varni, if I didn't mention her, amazing CMO of Twilio, now Datadog, right? I just learned so much from watching them lead, watching the market. I'm definitely the marketer I am today from having worked with all those people. I admire all of them greatly.
[00:29:57] Sunny Manivannan: It's an incredible list. I've had the privilege of interviewing Sara Varni. I have one request, which is at some point, all of you should get together and write the definitive book on marketing in SaaS. I think that thing would sell like hotcakes.
[00:30:15] Shannon Duffy: I mean, again, I've thought about Julie Liegl who is CMO of Slack for a while before they were – yes. We have a lot to say. We do actually get together. But usually we're drinking wine and not necessarily talking about SaaS. But we can channel our energy in that book, bestseller, New York Times.
[00:30:31] Sunny Manivannan: You should just invite one of your Asana AI teammates into that.
[00:30:33] Shannon Duffy: Oh, my God. That is brilliant.
[00:30:35] Sunny Manivannan: Into the channel and just say, “Just channel this, and let's get a book out of this.” I bet even that would be a great first draft.
[00:30:41] Shannon Duffy: You've just blown my mind. We will dedicate the book to you, Sunny, for that amazing idea in the foreword.
[00:30:46] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, Shannon, I'm so proud to have you on here. Thank you so, so much. I learned a lot from just this brief conversation. Again, thank you for taking the time to come on the Peerbound Podcast, and it's been a privilege.
[00:30:59] Shannon Duffy: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sunny.
[00:31:01] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Bye.
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“Shannon Duffy: The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to their teams and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.”
[00:00:20] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Shannon Duffy, the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon is a seasoned SaaS marketing leader with experience at startups, as well as an epic run at Salesforce. That included marketing leadership roles in the marketing and commerce cloud businesses, as well as Salesforce's platform business, and finally as the Executive Vice President of Cloud and Industry Marketing for Salesforce.
Shannon, you're such a legend, and it's an honor to have you on the Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:52] Shannon Duffy: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I want to start perhaps close to the beginning and have you offer some lessons from the earlier parts of your career. You were actually at a startup that was acquired into Salesforce. Tell us about the startup, and what did you learn about yourself and maybe about careers from this leg of your journey.
[00:01:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I worked for a small little company based in San Mateo. I think we're about 120, 150 people. We were called Jigsaw, and I was drawn to Jigsaw because Jigsaw was using technology to disrupt an old, tired industry, right? Jigsaw was a data company at its core, and it was using this notion of community and collaboration to provide the best data asset possible that then companies would then buy. I just thought that was really cool. It was using the tools, the Internet that we knew, and solved a problem that people had had. I was really, really drawn to it.
I was there for a few years when Salesforce came in and bought us. That was a very interesting experience because I like to tell people like prior to that time, Salesforce, of course, has done massive acquisitions since then; Slack and MuleSoft and Tableau and huge, huge companies. But at the time, we were the first real people, company acquisition that Salesforce had ever done. I would joke at my colleagues that came from acquisitions 10 years later that they had a much easier ride than I did when Salesforce was trying to just determine what to do with us and just the whole process of integrating a business into the Salesforce machine. It was a very interesting period.
What I like to tell people I learned about is I had always admired Salesforce. I mean, obviously, it's just this great company, and it is a sales marketing powerhouse, which if you're in marketing, you definitely admire them. I was excited. We have a term at Asana, nervo excited, to be acquired by this big company. I'm very vocal, and I've told the story internally at Salesforce that my first few six months at Salesforce wasn't what I expected. It was different. One, it was just figuring out the logistics of how Salesforce was going to integrate us, a business, into their ecosystem.
More importantly, it just culturally was very different. I realized through that time. I thought that Salesforce wanted me to be a certain way because I was watching some of the people around me, and I was watching some of the behaviours. I said, “Okay. Well, clearly, these people are the best at what they do. I want to be like these people. I need to act like these people.” It wasn't really true and authentic to who I was. It was a really jarring experience.
One day, I realized. I'm like, “Acting like this or emulating these behaviours is really crushing my soul and my heart.” So I stopped doing it. It was really interesting because once I stopped doing it, I actually started being more successful inside of Salesforce. What I realized, it was like my mind telling me that I was supposed to act this way. It wasn't Salesforce telling me I had to act a certain way. By being true to my authentic self, I ended up having an epic run. I spent 12 years at Salesforce. That was the biggest thing I learned. It's like just because you're in a situation where everyone seems to be the same that doesn't mean there's no room for your authentic self.
[00:04:05] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. You hear the advice of just be yourself or be your authentic self or be your full self. But, really, the context of your experience and the real, okay, here's a company whose culture, at least on the outside definitely didn't resemble anything that I stood for, and how do you then integrate into that, while staying true to who you are and learning about your journey, is fascinating.
How big was Salesforce when they acquired you in terms of employees?
[00:04:33] Shannon Duffy: I want to say more like –
[00:04:34] Sunny Manivannan: What year was this?
[00:04:34] Shannon Duffy: This was May of 2010, so it's been quite a while.
[00:04:38] Sunny Manivannan: Early, early days.
[00:04:39] Shannon Duffy: I want to say we were like 3,500, maybe 4,000 people and when I left, 75,000 to 80,000. It was definitely a seat on the rocket ship, and it was a lot of fun, and I learned a ton about not just marketing but about SAS and go-to-market and product and sales. I mean, Salesforce does many things very, very well.
[00:05:02] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean everything on go-to-market. I think so many of us follow, and I've interviewed so many CMOs from Salesforce who cut their teeth learning as the company grew. It's just incredible to watch the success of so many people come out of that company and just be widely successful after.
[00:05:18] Shannon Duffy: I say this in a loving respectful – it is a CMO factory for a reason. You learn from the best. You were challenged by the best. You were constantly striving to be better, better, better, never best. When you decide that you want to leave or do something else, there's a lot of options because you are a machine of B2B marketing.
[00:05:38] Sunny Manivannan: I have to ask you, just as a marketer myself and as a curious person. What are they doing inside the CMO factory that the rest of us are not doing?
[00:05:46] Shannon Duffy: Here's what I will say. I will say if you are running a business like I did, and by the time I left, I was running most of them from a marketing perspective with the exception of Slack, is you have to understand the total business. You can't just walk in there and start talking about marketing. You have to understand the mechanics of the overall business. How many salespeople are on your product? What is the TAM for your product? What is the size, the ARR, and the ACV? You have to understand that because if you don't understand that, your marketing is not going to be as impactful. That's number one. It's like marketing is connected to the rest of the business.
And two, I think Salesforce strives for excellence in everything. You have to be able to understand your ICP and be able to create messaging and positioning that resonates with them. You have to be able to take that messaging positioning and translate that into content that your sales team can use. You have to able to stand on stage in front of 10,000 people and deliver that content. You have to then sit down with your sales leader and go through their pipe gen mechanics, and how much pipe your demand gen campaigns are driving, and what the pipe coverage is, and what you're doing to fill the holes, right? It’s like definitely gives you a well-rounded view of all the components that go into marketing, driving a successful healthy business.
[00:07:00] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. It's like a top-tier MBA with the concentration in SaaS marketing and SaaS go-to-market.
[00:07:05] Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
[00:07:07] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome, awesome. What career advice did you receive at this point in your career when you were at Salesforce or perhaps even early days at Salesforce that sticks with you to this day?
[00:07:18] Shannon Duffy: I would say know your business. Kind of similar to what I said before, you have to know your business. I love the mantra of better, better, never best. It's very interesting because I've absorbed that so much that sometimes I forget that you need to celebrate the wins a little bit more before you go on to what's wrong. It’s really funny giving feedback to someone who maybe has come from the Salesforce world versus not because you'll be giving someone a review, and the first thing they want to know – they don't want to hear how great they are. They're like, “Tell me everything I can do better,” right? I forget that sometimes.
I do think having a better, better, never best is more in that growth mindset way of thinking. It's like, yes, I did the thing. Yes, I want to celebrate it. But what can I do better next time I think it’s something I've embraced which I think has served me pretty well in my career. Actually, I had a mentorship call with someone this morning, and I gave them that exact same feedback.
[00:08:09] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. I mean the idea of always expecting more, at least wanting more and striving for more, is so timeless and very hard to do. Not easy to do and push yourself that way.
[00:08:17] Shannon Duffy: No.
[00:08:19] Sunny Manivannan: It’s great. I want to ask you now. We've talked a little bit about your career and early lessons learned. You have been on this extremely rare journey as a professional and then a leader and then really a business leader at the highest levels of the industry. It’s all happened in a fairly rapid timeline. We've been in the industry, and it's very hard for people to scale as a company is growing and also take on areas of greater responsibility. It’s almost — you’re adding one slope on top of another slope. Very few people scale all the way as you have.
What advice do you have for somebody who's maybe at the beginning of their leadership journey or somewhere along this path? What would you tell them?
[00:09:04] Shannon Duffy: Oh, so many things. One, of my favourite quotes of all time, is from a Disney movie, Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming. Just keep going because it's easier to stop than it is to continue, especially in times of challenge because that is when you are growing. Accept feedback in the spirit that it's given. It is hard to get feedback sometimes, especially when you put your heart and soul into everything. But you have to have it. Check your ego at the door. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and solve real problems and not just point out the problems but solve them, right?
These are things that I would tell younger Shannon, and I would tell somebody just graduating and starting out today. I would tell people how you show up is really, really important. The example I give is treat every interaction with people outside of maybe your immediate, people that you talk to a million times a day as like a job interview for the future, right? It's a small valley. It's a small industry that we work in. The great thing about it, it’s constantly growing. It is constantly evolving.
People will go on to new opportunities or new cool companies. The first thing they will do is say I need a product marketer, or I need a field marketer, or I need something. They will go through their mental model in their head of who they know. They will remember that time that you showed up in a meeting, and you knew what you were talking about, and you were curious, and you were open to help them solve their problems maybe when it was technically in your job description.
These are the things that I think really separate people from – again, doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you don't have these other qualities, sometimes you just don't get as far.
[00:10:42] Sunny Manivannan: I love the sort of really actionable idea of when somebody is hiring for a role that you would want, do they think of you? Are you in their Rolodex, first of all, and are you in their Rolodex as one of their faves, so to speak?
[00:10:55] Shannon Duffy: Totally. Well, and the flip side is someone will say, “Hey, I'm hiring someone, and so-and-so applied. Do you know so-and-so?” People say you're not supposed to back tread. People do it all the time. Then what do you want them to say? What is your brand? What is that thing that you've left them with?
[00:11:11] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. Love that. Let me ask you now. I’ve talked to you about Salesforce. Let me ask you about Asana. You joined Asana as the CMO a little less than two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. The industry was going through – at least we were at the beginning of a shift in how we were spending money, what was expected of companies. I don't know if ChatGPT had come out by the time you joined Asana. Had it come out?
[00:11:38] Shannon Duffy: It had come out, but it was right about to explode. It was there, but I joined Asana, and I would say a few weeks later, all of a sudden, you couldn't get away from it. It was everywhere.
[00:11:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right. Okay. COVID had kind of receded, and we were now in this more austere time or the beginning of that. ChatGPT was really just a twinkle in our eyes at that point. What was it like to join that company at that time? Tell me about that.
[00:12:04] Shannon Duffy: I joined Asana because Asana is really dedicated to improving and transforming the way people work, but mainly knowledge workers, right? People like us that sit at computers and work in industry such as ours. I had seen the need for a product like Asana that streamlined work, gave visibility and clarity, drove accountability from my time at Salesforce. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is an amazing tool that is going to make so many people's lives so much easier.” I feel very passionate about marketing it, and so that's why I joined.
Then a few weeks later, AI was everywhere and ChatGPT. What’s interesting is when you think about what AI is going to disrupt, it's going to disrupt many different industries, many different fields, many different jobs. But it's also going to disrupt knowledge workers, and how we work together, and how we get work done, and how quickly we get work done, and what type of work is done by humans, and what type of work is done by other things.
I think I was so glad like, “Wow, I picked the right company,” because Asana has a very point of view on two things. One, that we can use AI to make work better, more enjoyable, more effortless. But, also, we really, really believe that the power of AI is to unlock human potential. It’s not to replace humans. It is to make all of us better. I was like, “Okay, that's something I can really get behind and market and feel passionate about, as well as use myself running a 200-person globally diverse time zone, diverse language, diverse marketing team.”
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of the future of work, there is a lot changing. AI is changing a lot of things. What are you seeing from your vantage point? Now, obviously, Asana has been one of the early adopters of really putting AI into your products, and you have such a great core set of data that you could truly transform how knowledge work gets done. There are so many use cases that I can just think of off the top of my head. What are you excited about in terms of AI in Asana, and how do you perhaps use it yourself?
[00:13:55] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I'm excited for AI in Asana for a few reasons. We have this concept of AI teammates. I've actually created a workflow in Asana that writes like me. I have given it prompts. I have given it writing samples that I wrote myself. I'm like, “Oh, this is me sounding really good.” Now, instead of starting from scratch, I will go to this and I will say, “Hey, I need to write this for this purpose, this audience. This is what I wanted to convey,” and I get something that's really good.
That is all done completely in Asana, and what's amazing is I can get the content in Asana. Then I can kick off a workflow that says, “Now, send this to my chief of staff to make sure this gets posted in these channels,” right? It’s like not just actually creating the content. It's how putting the content where it needs to go and getting it to the people that it needs to see. I think, again, for marketing in particular because we create so many things, the potential is endless.
I would say I've talked to a lot of marketers, and it's interesting to me how it's almost like there's two sides of the coin. There are people that are in it and love it, and they are waving the banner for AI. Then there's other marketers that are really still scared and skeptical of it. I just have to say you have to embrace it. This is like 1996 hoping the Internet will go away. It's not going to, right? The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to them, beneficial to their teams, and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.
[00:15:30] Sunny Manivannan: I definitely want something like what you just described, where something writes like you. That used to be a job. That used to be a full-time job for somebody that would write executive communications, right? Now, you're saying, okay, I can at least get you started and maybe get you a good chunk of the way there. Then you can finish it up and do all the other things that need to be done. It's amazing. Do you call those agents? Do you use that word agent?
[00:15:53] Shannon Duffy: We call it a teammate because I think, to me, an agent sounds like a cold thing that is somewhere producing something, where a teammate is like – it's like a member of my team. It's there. It wants to help. It wants to be productive. It wants to make the whole project thrive, so we call it AI teammates.
[00:16:10] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about agent being cold because I feel the same way. It’s just the latest in a pattern of Silicon Valley naming things in a very not inhuman way or unhuman way, so to speak. Teammate sounds a lot better. Excellent.
Let me ask you a question about this fear around AI because I think we all feel it around us. When you're selling some of these solutions, you first get skepticism that it won't work. Once you overcome that, then you get the fear of, “Okay, this is working, but I was doing that before.” I know this is a big question. What advice would you have for marketers to go at least address that fear in how we talk about some of these products because the fear is real?
[00:16:59] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I think the fear is real. I would say two things about that. One, you have to use it. Using it will stop the fear, right? Because you will understand what it can do and what it cannot do. Once you start using it, you're able to see the ways that you can make it better. I think that helps with that fear, right? Because there's still a need for the human interaction, the human making sure because AI can still come up with some weird things, right? Every once in a while, I ask something. I was like, “Whoa, where did that come from,” right? It’s like you still need that human, that training, that learning together.
The other thing I think kind of related but maybe slightly tangential is I do think if you're a marketer out there and you are marketing a product, an AI-enabled product or an AI product or whatever it is, this is where we have a really opportunity to lead because what we need to do is help position this. We need to be the trusted advisors to our customers. We need to talk to them about how they can use AI that comes from our product, comes from our service in a way that is beneficial to them and their company.
That is where marketing comes in, right? That's the beauty of marketing is to take something that may be essentially boring and turn it into like, “No, no, no. We're actually here to help you and here's how. Here's why. Here's the content we have that will help train you on this new AI product.” There’s a lot of potential there that I think we’re just scratching the surface.
[00:18:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's wonderful. Well, let me turn the page. I want to ask you about just the SaaS industry overall. I call this section SaaS talk. We just talked about as marketers, as a marketing leader, what kinds of SaaS companies do you like and SaaS marketing and so on. The first question I have for you is do you have a favorite SaaS company homepage? Or you can select multiple homepages that you love. They can't be Asana or Salesforce.
[00:18:42] Shannon Duffy: I have so much respect for HubSpot. I think HubSpot does phenomenal marketing. I think they basically created – they redefined creative content marketing and this concept of inbound. Anyone who can create something like that that has the whole industry watching and emulating gets mad, mad props from me. Good job, HubSpot.
[00:19:04] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. I want to ask you about SaaS apps that you love to use. That's the next question. Are there any SaaS apps that you love to use at work? Then I'll ask you, are there any apps that you use personally that you really love?
[00:19:15] Shannon Duffy: Other than Asana, and I do use Asana. I know everyone expects me to say that. But I promise you I use Asana constantly. We use a lot of Slack for communication as well. Of course, it's funny because we don't actually use a lot of email, which I know sounds crazy. But with Asana, it’s possible. But I do make sure I check my calendar and things like that. I'm pretty basic with the SaaS apps. Sorry, I don't have more interesting.
[00:19:37] Sunny Manivannan: No worries. It's good to keep it that way at work. What about at home?
[00:19:41] Shannon Duffy: I mean, I don't cook, so thank you to DoorDash, whoever invented that, the Duffy family, 10 out of 10. DoorDash I love. I love Instagram. I love looking at pretty things and keeping up with friends. Trying to think what else. Again, not a lot of excitement over here.
[00:19:56] Sunny Manivannan: Hey, stick to the basics. Nothing wrong with that. I want to ask asked you about customer stories. You've obviously attracted so much with your customers throughout your career. Do you have any favourite customer stories of technology impacting their lives? Anything come to mind?
[00:20:11] Shannon Duffy: This is where I got to use some Asana stories. I mean, Asana is helping great, great brands like Accor, which is an amazing hotel chain based in Europe. They run Sofitel and many different brands. They are completely running all their global campaigns on Asana, which, again, if you think about historically, it's very difficult the amount of time zones and languages and employees being all over the place. That's one that I love. I think IPG Mediabrands is another example. It is like a group of agencies that are completely using Asana to run campaigns everywhere.
[00:20:50] Sunny Manivannan: Shannon, one of the things I'm very curious about is when you come into a new situation and you've taken on so many different new roles in your career. Let's take Asana for an example. When you came in as CMO at Asana, how do you think about the team? How do you think about what is the team that's needed to achieve the company's goals? What's your process over those first several weeks to go figure this out? How do you think about team structure?
[00:21:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes, absolutely. I think whenever you're taking a new role or a new team, you have to listen and you have to understand how things got to where they were. That said, I think there's a few non-negotiables. I think that's really important.
Now, I believe, and you can say this is because of my background as a product marketer, but the first most important thing is what are you saying about your product to your desired customer because if you don't have that nailed, nothing else matters. Your campaigns won't be as effective. Your events won't be as meaningful. Your comms will be meaningless. You have to really nail that messaging and that positioning and that value prop to the key buyer.
For me, I do like what is the product marketing team structure. Do they have a strong leader? Do they have someone that not only understands the product and can talk to the product team but can turn that into a really good story that sales can sell? That’s really important, like what is your product marketing.
The second thing, you need to be able to drive demand, right? What is your revenue marketing demand gen team? What does that look like? Do you have the people in region? Do you have the people that have that mix between doing events versus digital campaign? Do they understand the intersection between the both? Having a really strong lead there. Next, usually, if you have demand gen, you need something to put in that demand gen. You need content, right? What is your content strategy? Who is running your content and your thought leadership? Again, what is that platform, and how does that relate to the messaging and positioning that your product marketing team is putting out?
Then just as important but maybe not as cool or fun is what does your marketing ops like? How are you measuring success? Do you have a strong marketing analytics team? Do you have a strong ops team? What is your MarTech stack? I mean, this is not a new concept for marketers, but you have to understand that stuff. You have to understand because I guarantee you, some of your budget or some of the budget that your ET team or IT team has marked for you is going to your MarTech stack. Do those things talk together? Do they communicate with each other? Is your data siloed? Not super sexy and not maybe the creative reason why we got into marketing, but you have to understand it, and you have to be passionate about making sure it all works together
Then lastly, on the other side, what is your brand and creative? Here's the secret. A lot of the stuff that people market is kind of the same stuff. CRM was a container for data, right? Really, that's what – but what makes it cool and interesting and gives customers that emotional connection, it's how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels. That’s where that creative – that magic. Your head of brand, your head of creative can really, really bring that to whatever it is that you're selling. That's the way I think of structuring the departments in a marketing team.
[00:24:04] Sunny Manivannan: The place where Asana as a company and the place where the category of work management is today, as CMO, are you finding yourself evangelizing the category more or talking more about the company's differentiators versus alternatives? I guess another way to ask the question is are you still talking to prospective customers that are doing this in a very, very inefficient, completely siloed way across the organization? Or are they just using something else that's worse?
[00:24:33] Shannon Duffy: We have to do both, which on my good days, I find an incredibly amazing intellectual challenge that I get really excited about. That is like, “Wow, this is really hard.” What's interesting about work management is you have companies that are just using it and killing it and have completely redefined the way their organizations work together across department and the visibility and the clarity and the accountability they have. Then there are huge companies that are using it on spreadsheets. It's almost like they haven't unlocked that there's a better way. To answer your question, we have to do both, and that's some of the context switching.
I do think, again, with the AI conversation, work management is going to change probably as rapidly, if not more, than any other category in software. It’s great to be at Asana where I feel like we have the potential to be driving that conversation versus getting the downstream effect and having to make something from it.
[00:25:27] Sunny Manivannan: You totally are on that last point about talking about AI as your teammate. I think that's so fascinating because there's so much of the conversation today, at least in sort of Silicon Valley circles, revolves around, okay, it's a fixed pie, and AI is not going to do this piece that human beings were doing before, and it's very zero-sum. Whereas I think your view of the world seems much more realistic and pragmatic of, “Okay, well, you just have all these helpers that want to help you win, and they just want to help you do a good job.” I think bringing that message to, I don't know, a company that is not in our industry and maybe isn't thinking about this on a day-to-day basis and telling them, “Imagine you just doubled your workforce. What would that look like?”
[00:26:07] Shannon Duffy: Exactly. I think I love what you said because this is something I remind myself and my team all the time is I literally live in the probably exact centre of Silicon Valley, right? I work in San Francisco every day. I drive to work, and I just – AI billboards are just like everywhere. But we have built Asana to help humanity thrive, and humanity doesn't all live in Silicon Valley, right? We have customers who live in other countries where AI might have different regulations. We have customers that might live in the Midwest in a manufacturing company. It’s really, really important to us that we democratize this technology for everyone.
Again, going back to marketing, that means we need to explain it in a way that everyone can understand, everyone can use it, and people aren't scared of it. They truly do see this as something that is going to make their lives better.
[00:26:57] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. We could talk about this for several hours. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to in the future. I will turn the page to what I like to call peer-bound talk. The idea really here is we're all influenced by our peers, and you actually even mentioned this earlier when you said, “Hey, Silicon Valley is small network, and we all talk to each other.” I couldn't agree more. I'll ask you a couple of questions to round out our conversation about what's inspired you and what are the things that you'd recommend to your peers, our listeners. Maybe I’ll start by asking you one book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[00:27:33] Shannon Duffy: I love the book the Multipliers. It is literally my management philosophy. You can read the book. You can watch the videos, even have training. That was a huge – I think of these unlock moments in the career of Shannon, me becoming who I am and experiencing that content and really seeing that there was a way to lead and a way that I would want to be led. It was absolutely amazing.
The spoiler, if you haven't read it, many, many people have, it's basically you give everyone one job too big. Most of the time, people will grow into it, and surprise you and themselves with what they can accomplish. You let people fail once, and you course correct them quickly. You ask questions. It's just a great, great book if someone who's kind of looking to – for a way to really crystallize their leadership style, it was monumental for me.
[00:28:25] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. I 100% second that recommendation. Also, one of my pivot points in my career as early manager I think is when I read that book and completely changed a whole lot of things for me. Still learning the lessons I would say but definitely changed how I approached management and leadership.
[00:28:40] Shannon Duffy: Yes. An enabler, not a diminisher.
[00:28:43] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. That's exactly right. Wonderful. Last question for you, who are your favorite SaaS marketers? I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum.
[00:28:53] Shannon Duffy: I'm going to give you one answer. I'm going to – because here's the thing. I feel blessed that being in the CM – I probably shouldn't call it a CMO factory. That sounds bad. Maybe like a CMO school or something. Some amazing marketers that I still keep in touch with, some that were my mentors, some that were my peers. I mean, Stephanie Buscemi, Sarah Franklin, two previous CMOs of Salesforce. Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo now. I mentioned Sarah Franklin. Now, she's the CEO of Lattice. Emma Chalwin, CMO of Workday. Some people that are still at Salesforce; Eric Stahl, Lynne Zaledonis.
What's interesting, I didn't always agree with these people. But the way of thinking outside the box, challenging to do better, that friendly even almost competition to out market when we're all over different – Sara Varni, if I didn't mention her, amazing CMO of Twilio, now Datadog, right? I just learned so much from watching them lead, watching the market. I'm definitely the marketer I am today from having worked with all those people. I admire all of them greatly.
[00:29:57] Sunny Manivannan: It's an incredible list. I've had the privilege of interviewing Sara Varni. I have one request, which is at some point, all of you should get together and write the definitive book on marketing in SaaS. I think that thing would sell like hotcakes.
[00:30:15] Shannon Duffy: I mean, again, I've thought about Julie Liegl who is CMO of Slack for a while before they were – yes. We have a lot to say. We do actually get together. But usually we're drinking wine and not necessarily talking about SaaS. But we can channel our energy in that book, bestseller, New York Times.
[00:30:31] Sunny Manivannan: You should just invite one of your Asana AI teammates into that.
[00:30:33] Shannon Duffy: Oh, my God. That is brilliant.
[00:30:35] Sunny Manivannan: Into the channel and just say, “Just channel this, and let's get a book out of this.” I bet even that would be a great first draft.
[00:30:41] Shannon Duffy: You've just blown my mind. We will dedicate the book to you, Sunny, for that amazing idea in the foreword.
[00:30:46] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, Shannon, I'm so proud to have you on here. Thank you so, so much. I learned a lot from just this brief conversation. Again, thank you for taking the time to come on the Peerbound Podcast, and it's been a privilege.
[00:30:59] Shannon Duffy: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sunny.
[00:31:01] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Bye.
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“Shannon Duffy: The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to their teams and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.”
[00:00:20] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Shannon Duffy, the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon is a seasoned SaaS marketing leader with experience at startups, as well as an epic run at Salesforce. That included marketing leadership roles in the marketing and commerce cloud businesses, as well as Salesforce's platform business, and finally as the Executive Vice President of Cloud and Industry Marketing for Salesforce.
Shannon, you're such a legend, and it's an honor to have you on the Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.
[00:00:52] Shannon Duffy: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I want to start perhaps close to the beginning and have you offer some lessons from the earlier parts of your career. You were actually at a startup that was acquired into Salesforce. Tell us about the startup, and what did you learn about yourself and maybe about careers from this leg of your journey.
[00:01:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I worked for a small little company based in San Mateo. I think we're about 120, 150 people. We were called Jigsaw, and I was drawn to Jigsaw because Jigsaw was using technology to disrupt an old, tired industry, right? Jigsaw was a data company at its core, and it was using this notion of community and collaboration to provide the best data asset possible that then companies would then buy. I just thought that was really cool. It was using the tools, the Internet that we knew, and solved a problem that people had had. I was really, really drawn to it.
I was there for a few years when Salesforce came in and bought us. That was a very interesting experience because I like to tell people like prior to that time, Salesforce, of course, has done massive acquisitions since then; Slack and MuleSoft and Tableau and huge, huge companies. But at the time, we were the first real people, company acquisition that Salesforce had ever done. I would joke at my colleagues that came from acquisitions 10 years later that they had a much easier ride than I did when Salesforce was trying to just determine what to do with us and just the whole process of integrating a business into the Salesforce machine. It was a very interesting period.
What I like to tell people I learned about is I had always admired Salesforce. I mean, obviously, it's just this great company, and it is a sales marketing powerhouse, which if you're in marketing, you definitely admire them. I was excited. We have a term at Asana, nervo excited, to be acquired by this big company. I'm very vocal, and I've told the story internally at Salesforce that my first few six months at Salesforce wasn't what I expected. It was different. One, it was just figuring out the logistics of how Salesforce was going to integrate us, a business, into their ecosystem.
More importantly, it just culturally was very different. I realized through that time. I thought that Salesforce wanted me to be a certain way because I was watching some of the people around me, and I was watching some of the behaviours. I said, “Okay. Well, clearly, these people are the best at what they do. I want to be like these people. I need to act like these people.” It wasn't really true and authentic to who I was. It was a really jarring experience.
One day, I realized. I'm like, “Acting like this or emulating these behaviours is really crushing my soul and my heart.” So I stopped doing it. It was really interesting because once I stopped doing it, I actually started being more successful inside of Salesforce. What I realized, it was like my mind telling me that I was supposed to act this way. It wasn't Salesforce telling me I had to act a certain way. By being true to my authentic self, I ended up having an epic run. I spent 12 years at Salesforce. That was the biggest thing I learned. It's like just because you're in a situation where everyone seems to be the same that doesn't mean there's no room for your authentic self.
[00:04:05] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. You hear the advice of just be yourself or be your authentic self or be your full self. But, really, the context of your experience and the real, okay, here's a company whose culture, at least on the outside definitely didn't resemble anything that I stood for, and how do you then integrate into that, while staying true to who you are and learning about your journey, is fascinating.
How big was Salesforce when they acquired you in terms of employees?
[00:04:33] Shannon Duffy: I want to say more like –
[00:04:34] Sunny Manivannan: What year was this?
[00:04:34] Shannon Duffy: This was May of 2010, so it's been quite a while.
[00:04:38] Sunny Manivannan: Early, early days.
[00:04:39] Shannon Duffy: I want to say we were like 3,500, maybe 4,000 people and when I left, 75,000 to 80,000. It was definitely a seat on the rocket ship, and it was a lot of fun, and I learned a ton about not just marketing but about SAS and go-to-market and product and sales. I mean, Salesforce does many things very, very well.
[00:05:02] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean everything on go-to-market. I think so many of us follow, and I've interviewed so many CMOs from Salesforce who cut their teeth learning as the company grew. It's just incredible to watch the success of so many people come out of that company and just be widely successful after.
[00:05:18] Shannon Duffy: I say this in a loving respectful – it is a CMO factory for a reason. You learn from the best. You were challenged by the best. You were constantly striving to be better, better, better, never best. When you decide that you want to leave or do something else, there's a lot of options because you are a machine of B2B marketing.
[00:05:38] Sunny Manivannan: I have to ask you, just as a marketer myself and as a curious person. What are they doing inside the CMO factory that the rest of us are not doing?
[00:05:46] Shannon Duffy: Here's what I will say. I will say if you are running a business like I did, and by the time I left, I was running most of them from a marketing perspective with the exception of Slack, is you have to understand the total business. You can't just walk in there and start talking about marketing. You have to understand the mechanics of the overall business. How many salespeople are on your product? What is the TAM for your product? What is the size, the ARR, and the ACV? You have to understand that because if you don't understand that, your marketing is not going to be as impactful. That's number one. It's like marketing is connected to the rest of the business.
And two, I think Salesforce strives for excellence in everything. You have to be able to understand your ICP and be able to create messaging and positioning that resonates with them. You have to be able to take that messaging positioning and translate that into content that your sales team can use. You have to able to stand on stage in front of 10,000 people and deliver that content. You have to then sit down with your sales leader and go through their pipe gen mechanics, and how much pipe your demand gen campaigns are driving, and what the pipe coverage is, and what you're doing to fill the holes, right? It’s like definitely gives you a well-rounded view of all the components that go into marketing, driving a successful healthy business.
[00:07:00] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. It's like a top-tier MBA with the concentration in SaaS marketing and SaaS go-to-market.
[00:07:05] Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
[00:07:07] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome, awesome. What career advice did you receive at this point in your career when you were at Salesforce or perhaps even early days at Salesforce that sticks with you to this day?
[00:07:18] Shannon Duffy: I would say know your business. Kind of similar to what I said before, you have to know your business. I love the mantra of better, better, never best. It's very interesting because I've absorbed that so much that sometimes I forget that you need to celebrate the wins a little bit more before you go on to what's wrong. It’s really funny giving feedback to someone who maybe has come from the Salesforce world versus not because you'll be giving someone a review, and the first thing they want to know – they don't want to hear how great they are. They're like, “Tell me everything I can do better,” right? I forget that sometimes.
I do think having a better, better, never best is more in that growth mindset way of thinking. It's like, yes, I did the thing. Yes, I want to celebrate it. But what can I do better next time I think it’s something I've embraced which I think has served me pretty well in my career. Actually, I had a mentorship call with someone this morning, and I gave them that exact same feedback.
[00:08:09] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. I mean the idea of always expecting more, at least wanting more and striving for more, is so timeless and very hard to do. Not easy to do and push yourself that way.
[00:08:17] Shannon Duffy: No.
[00:08:19] Sunny Manivannan: It’s great. I want to ask you now. We've talked a little bit about your career and early lessons learned. You have been on this extremely rare journey as a professional and then a leader and then really a business leader at the highest levels of the industry. It’s all happened in a fairly rapid timeline. We've been in the industry, and it's very hard for people to scale as a company is growing and also take on areas of greater responsibility. It’s almost — you’re adding one slope on top of another slope. Very few people scale all the way as you have.
What advice do you have for somebody who's maybe at the beginning of their leadership journey or somewhere along this path? What would you tell them?
[00:09:04] Shannon Duffy: Oh, so many things. One, of my favourite quotes of all time, is from a Disney movie, Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming. Just keep going because it's easier to stop than it is to continue, especially in times of challenge because that is when you are growing. Accept feedback in the spirit that it's given. It is hard to get feedback sometimes, especially when you put your heart and soul into everything. But you have to have it. Check your ego at the door. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and solve real problems and not just point out the problems but solve them, right?
These are things that I would tell younger Shannon, and I would tell somebody just graduating and starting out today. I would tell people how you show up is really, really important. The example I give is treat every interaction with people outside of maybe your immediate, people that you talk to a million times a day as like a job interview for the future, right? It's a small valley. It's a small industry that we work in. The great thing about it, it’s constantly growing. It is constantly evolving.
People will go on to new opportunities or new cool companies. The first thing they will do is say I need a product marketer, or I need a field marketer, or I need something. They will go through their mental model in their head of who they know. They will remember that time that you showed up in a meeting, and you knew what you were talking about, and you were curious, and you were open to help them solve their problems maybe when it was technically in your job description.
These are the things that I think really separate people from – again, doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you don't have these other qualities, sometimes you just don't get as far.
[00:10:42] Sunny Manivannan: I love the sort of really actionable idea of when somebody is hiring for a role that you would want, do they think of you? Are you in their Rolodex, first of all, and are you in their Rolodex as one of their faves, so to speak?
[00:10:55] Shannon Duffy: Totally. Well, and the flip side is someone will say, “Hey, I'm hiring someone, and so-and-so applied. Do you know so-and-so?” People say you're not supposed to back tread. People do it all the time. Then what do you want them to say? What is your brand? What is that thing that you've left them with?
[00:11:11] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. Love that. Let me ask you now. I’ve talked to you about Salesforce. Let me ask you about Asana. You joined Asana as the CMO a little less than two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. The industry was going through – at least we were at the beginning of a shift in how we were spending money, what was expected of companies. I don't know if ChatGPT had come out by the time you joined Asana. Had it come out?
[00:11:38] Shannon Duffy: It had come out, but it was right about to explode. It was there, but I joined Asana, and I would say a few weeks later, all of a sudden, you couldn't get away from it. It was everywhere.
[00:11:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right. Okay. COVID had kind of receded, and we were now in this more austere time or the beginning of that. ChatGPT was really just a twinkle in our eyes at that point. What was it like to join that company at that time? Tell me about that.
[00:12:04] Shannon Duffy: I joined Asana because Asana is really dedicated to improving and transforming the way people work, but mainly knowledge workers, right? People like us that sit at computers and work in industry such as ours. I had seen the need for a product like Asana that streamlined work, gave visibility and clarity, drove accountability from my time at Salesforce. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is an amazing tool that is going to make so many people's lives so much easier.” I feel very passionate about marketing it, and so that's why I joined.
Then a few weeks later, AI was everywhere and ChatGPT. What’s interesting is when you think about what AI is going to disrupt, it's going to disrupt many different industries, many different fields, many different jobs. But it's also going to disrupt knowledge workers, and how we work together, and how we get work done, and how quickly we get work done, and what type of work is done by humans, and what type of work is done by other things.
I think I was so glad like, “Wow, I picked the right company,” because Asana has a very point of view on two things. One, that we can use AI to make work better, more enjoyable, more effortless. But, also, we really, really believe that the power of AI is to unlock human potential. It’s not to replace humans. It is to make all of us better. I was like, “Okay, that's something I can really get behind and market and feel passionate about, as well as use myself running a 200-person globally diverse time zone, diverse language, diverse marketing team.”
[00:13:29] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of the future of work, there is a lot changing. AI is changing a lot of things. What are you seeing from your vantage point? Now, obviously, Asana has been one of the early adopters of really putting AI into your products, and you have such a great core set of data that you could truly transform how knowledge work gets done. There are so many use cases that I can just think of off the top of my head. What are you excited about in terms of AI in Asana, and how do you perhaps use it yourself?
[00:13:55] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I'm excited for AI in Asana for a few reasons. We have this concept of AI teammates. I've actually created a workflow in Asana that writes like me. I have given it prompts. I have given it writing samples that I wrote myself. I'm like, “Oh, this is me sounding really good.” Now, instead of starting from scratch, I will go to this and I will say, “Hey, I need to write this for this purpose, this audience. This is what I wanted to convey,” and I get something that's really good.
That is all done completely in Asana, and what's amazing is I can get the content in Asana. Then I can kick off a workflow that says, “Now, send this to my chief of staff to make sure this gets posted in these channels,” right? It’s like not just actually creating the content. It's how putting the content where it needs to go and getting it to the people that it needs to see. I think, again, for marketing in particular because we create so many things, the potential is endless.
I would say I've talked to a lot of marketers, and it's interesting to me how it's almost like there's two sides of the coin. There are people that are in it and love it, and they are waving the banner for AI. Then there's other marketers that are really still scared and skeptical of it. I just have to say you have to embrace it. This is like 1996 hoping the Internet will go away. It's not going to, right? The marketers that will continue to thrive and take on the big roles and leadership are the ones that are going to embrace this and learn how to make it beneficial to them, beneficial to their teams, and truly, truly find that amazing balance between what humans can do and what AI can do to augment it.
[00:15:30] Sunny Manivannan: I definitely want something like what you just described, where something writes like you. That used to be a job. That used to be a full-time job for somebody that would write executive communications, right? Now, you're saying, okay, I can at least get you started and maybe get you a good chunk of the way there. Then you can finish it up and do all the other things that need to be done. It's amazing. Do you call those agents? Do you use that word agent?
[00:15:53] Shannon Duffy: We call it a teammate because I think, to me, an agent sounds like a cold thing that is somewhere producing something, where a teammate is like – it's like a member of my team. It's there. It wants to help. It wants to be productive. It wants to make the whole project thrive, so we call it AI teammates.
[00:16:10] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about agent being cold because I feel the same way. It’s just the latest in a pattern of Silicon Valley naming things in a very not inhuman way or unhuman way, so to speak. Teammate sounds a lot better. Excellent.
Let me ask you a question about this fear around AI because I think we all feel it around us. When you're selling some of these solutions, you first get skepticism that it won't work. Once you overcome that, then you get the fear of, “Okay, this is working, but I was doing that before.” I know this is a big question. What advice would you have for marketers to go at least address that fear in how we talk about some of these products because the fear is real?
[00:16:59] Shannon Duffy: Yes. I think the fear is real. I would say two things about that. One, you have to use it. Using it will stop the fear, right? Because you will understand what it can do and what it cannot do. Once you start using it, you're able to see the ways that you can make it better. I think that helps with that fear, right? Because there's still a need for the human interaction, the human making sure because AI can still come up with some weird things, right? Every once in a while, I ask something. I was like, “Whoa, where did that come from,” right? It’s like you still need that human, that training, that learning together.
The other thing I think kind of related but maybe slightly tangential is I do think if you're a marketer out there and you are marketing a product, an AI-enabled product or an AI product or whatever it is, this is where we have a really opportunity to lead because what we need to do is help position this. We need to be the trusted advisors to our customers. We need to talk to them about how they can use AI that comes from our product, comes from our service in a way that is beneficial to them and their company.
That is where marketing comes in, right? That's the beauty of marketing is to take something that may be essentially boring and turn it into like, “No, no, no. We're actually here to help you and here's how. Here's why. Here's the content we have that will help train you on this new AI product.” There’s a lot of potential there that I think we’re just scratching the surface.
[00:18:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's wonderful. Well, let me turn the page. I want to ask you about just the SaaS industry overall. I call this section SaaS talk. We just talked about as marketers, as a marketing leader, what kinds of SaaS companies do you like and SaaS marketing and so on. The first question I have for you is do you have a favorite SaaS company homepage? Or you can select multiple homepages that you love. They can't be Asana or Salesforce.
[00:18:42] Shannon Duffy: I have so much respect for HubSpot. I think HubSpot does phenomenal marketing. I think they basically created – they redefined creative content marketing and this concept of inbound. Anyone who can create something like that that has the whole industry watching and emulating gets mad, mad props from me. Good job, HubSpot.
[00:19:04] Sunny Manivannan: Excellent. I want to ask you about SaaS apps that you love to use. That's the next question. Are there any SaaS apps that you love to use at work? Then I'll ask you, are there any apps that you use personally that you really love?
[00:19:15] Shannon Duffy: Other than Asana, and I do use Asana. I know everyone expects me to say that. But I promise you I use Asana constantly. We use a lot of Slack for communication as well. Of course, it's funny because we don't actually use a lot of email, which I know sounds crazy. But with Asana, it’s possible. But I do make sure I check my calendar and things like that. I'm pretty basic with the SaaS apps. Sorry, I don't have more interesting.
[00:19:37] Sunny Manivannan: No worries. It's good to keep it that way at work. What about at home?
[00:19:41] Shannon Duffy: I mean, I don't cook, so thank you to DoorDash, whoever invented that, the Duffy family, 10 out of 10. DoorDash I love. I love Instagram. I love looking at pretty things and keeping up with friends. Trying to think what else. Again, not a lot of excitement over here.
[00:19:56] Sunny Manivannan: Hey, stick to the basics. Nothing wrong with that. I want to ask asked you about customer stories. You've obviously attracted so much with your customers throughout your career. Do you have any favourite customer stories of technology impacting their lives? Anything come to mind?
[00:20:11] Shannon Duffy: This is where I got to use some Asana stories. I mean, Asana is helping great, great brands like Accor, which is an amazing hotel chain based in Europe. They run Sofitel and many different brands. They are completely running all their global campaigns on Asana, which, again, if you think about historically, it's very difficult the amount of time zones and languages and employees being all over the place. That's one that I love. I think IPG Mediabrands is another example. It is like a group of agencies that are completely using Asana to run campaigns everywhere.
[00:20:50] Sunny Manivannan: Shannon, one of the things I'm very curious about is when you come into a new situation and you've taken on so many different new roles in your career. Let's take Asana for an example. When you came in as CMO at Asana, how do you think about the team? How do you think about what is the team that's needed to achieve the company's goals? What's your process over those first several weeks to go figure this out? How do you think about team structure?
[00:21:14] Shannon Duffy: Yes, absolutely. I think whenever you're taking a new role or a new team, you have to listen and you have to understand how things got to where they were. That said, I think there's a few non-negotiables. I think that's really important.
Now, I believe, and you can say this is because of my background as a product marketer, but the first most important thing is what are you saying about your product to your desired customer because if you don't have that nailed, nothing else matters. Your campaigns won't be as effective. Your events won't be as meaningful. Your comms will be meaningless. You have to really nail that messaging and that positioning and that value prop to the key buyer.
For me, I do like what is the product marketing team structure. Do they have a strong leader? Do they have someone that not only understands the product and can talk to the product team but can turn that into a really good story that sales can sell? That’s really important, like what is your product marketing.
The second thing, you need to be able to drive demand, right? What is your revenue marketing demand gen team? What does that look like? Do you have the people in region? Do you have the people that have that mix between doing events versus digital campaign? Do they understand the intersection between the both? Having a really strong lead there. Next, usually, if you have demand gen, you need something to put in that demand gen. You need content, right? What is your content strategy? Who is running your content and your thought leadership? Again, what is that platform, and how does that relate to the messaging and positioning that your product marketing team is putting out?
Then just as important but maybe not as cool or fun is what does your marketing ops like? How are you measuring success? Do you have a strong marketing analytics team? Do you have a strong ops team? What is your MarTech stack? I mean, this is not a new concept for marketers, but you have to understand that stuff. You have to understand because I guarantee you, some of your budget or some of the budget that your ET team or IT team has marked for you is going to your MarTech stack. Do those things talk together? Do they communicate with each other? Is your data siloed? Not super sexy and not maybe the creative reason why we got into marketing, but you have to understand it, and you have to be passionate about making sure it all works together
Then lastly, on the other side, what is your brand and creative? Here's the secret. A lot of the stuff that people market is kind of the same stuff. CRM was a container for data, right? Really, that's what – but what makes it cool and interesting and gives customers that emotional connection, it's how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels. That’s where that creative – that magic. Your head of brand, your head of creative can really, really bring that to whatever it is that you're selling. That's the way I think of structuring the departments in a marketing team.
[00:24:04] Sunny Manivannan: The place where Asana as a company and the place where the category of work management is today, as CMO, are you finding yourself evangelizing the category more or talking more about the company's differentiators versus alternatives? I guess another way to ask the question is are you still talking to prospective customers that are doing this in a very, very inefficient, completely siloed way across the organization? Or are they just using something else that's worse?
[00:24:33] Shannon Duffy: We have to do both, which on my good days, I find an incredibly amazing intellectual challenge that I get really excited about. That is like, “Wow, this is really hard.” What's interesting about work management is you have companies that are just using it and killing it and have completely redefined the way their organizations work together across department and the visibility and the clarity and the accountability they have. Then there are huge companies that are using it on spreadsheets. It's almost like they haven't unlocked that there's a better way. To answer your question, we have to do both, and that's some of the context switching.
I do think, again, with the AI conversation, work management is going to change probably as rapidly, if not more, than any other category in software. It’s great to be at Asana where I feel like we have the potential to be driving that conversation versus getting the downstream effect and having to make something from it.
[00:25:27] Sunny Manivannan: You totally are on that last point about talking about AI as your teammate. I think that's so fascinating because there's so much of the conversation today, at least in sort of Silicon Valley circles, revolves around, okay, it's a fixed pie, and AI is not going to do this piece that human beings were doing before, and it's very zero-sum. Whereas I think your view of the world seems much more realistic and pragmatic of, “Okay, well, you just have all these helpers that want to help you win, and they just want to help you do a good job.” I think bringing that message to, I don't know, a company that is not in our industry and maybe isn't thinking about this on a day-to-day basis and telling them, “Imagine you just doubled your workforce. What would that look like?”
[00:26:07] Shannon Duffy: Exactly. I think I love what you said because this is something I remind myself and my team all the time is I literally live in the probably exact centre of Silicon Valley, right? I work in San Francisco every day. I drive to work, and I just – AI billboards are just like everywhere. But we have built Asana to help humanity thrive, and humanity doesn't all live in Silicon Valley, right? We have customers who live in other countries where AI might have different regulations. We have customers that might live in the Midwest in a manufacturing company. It’s really, really important to us that we democratize this technology for everyone.
Again, going back to marketing, that means we need to explain it in a way that everyone can understand, everyone can use it, and people aren't scared of it. They truly do see this as something that is going to make their lives better.
[00:26:57] Sunny Manivannan: A hundred percent. We could talk about this for several hours. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to in the future. I will turn the page to what I like to call peer-bound talk. The idea really here is we're all influenced by our peers, and you actually even mentioned this earlier when you said, “Hey, Silicon Valley is small network, and we all talk to each other.” I couldn't agree more. I'll ask you a couple of questions to round out our conversation about what's inspired you and what are the things that you'd recommend to your peers, our listeners. Maybe I’ll start by asking you one book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[00:27:33] Shannon Duffy: I love the book the Multipliers. It is literally my management philosophy. You can read the book. You can watch the videos, even have training. That was a huge – I think of these unlock moments in the career of Shannon, me becoming who I am and experiencing that content and really seeing that there was a way to lead and a way that I would want to be led. It was absolutely amazing.
The spoiler, if you haven't read it, many, many people have, it's basically you give everyone one job too big. Most of the time, people will grow into it, and surprise you and themselves with what they can accomplish. You let people fail once, and you course correct them quickly. You ask questions. It's just a great, great book if someone who's kind of looking to – for a way to really crystallize their leadership style, it was monumental for me.
[00:28:25] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. I 100% second that recommendation. Also, one of my pivot points in my career as early manager I think is when I read that book and completely changed a whole lot of things for me. Still learning the lessons I would say but definitely changed how I approached management and leadership.
[00:28:40] Shannon Duffy: Yes. An enabler, not a diminisher.
[00:28:43] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. That's exactly right. Wonderful. Last question for you, who are your favorite SaaS marketers? I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum.
[00:28:53] Shannon Duffy: I'm going to give you one answer. I'm going to – because here's the thing. I feel blessed that being in the CM – I probably shouldn't call it a CMO factory. That sounds bad. Maybe like a CMO school or something. Some amazing marketers that I still keep in touch with, some that were my mentors, some that were my peers. I mean, Stephanie Buscemi, Sarah Franklin, two previous CMOs of Salesforce. Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo now. I mentioned Sarah Franklin. Now, she's the CEO of Lattice. Emma Chalwin, CMO of Workday. Some people that are still at Salesforce; Eric Stahl, Lynne Zaledonis.
What's interesting, I didn't always agree with these people. But the way of thinking outside the box, challenging to do better, that friendly even almost competition to out market when we're all over different – Sara Varni, if I didn't mention her, amazing CMO of Twilio, now Datadog, right? I just learned so much from watching them lead, watching the market. I'm definitely the marketer I am today from having worked with all those people. I admire all of them greatly.
[00:29:57] Sunny Manivannan: It's an incredible list. I've had the privilege of interviewing Sara Varni. I have one request, which is at some point, all of you should get together and write the definitive book on marketing in SaaS. I think that thing would sell like hotcakes.
[00:30:15] Shannon Duffy: I mean, again, I've thought about Julie Liegl who is CMO of Slack for a while before they were – yes. We have a lot to say. We do actually get together. But usually we're drinking wine and not necessarily talking about SaaS. But we can channel our energy in that book, bestseller, New York Times.
[00:30:31] Sunny Manivannan: You should just invite one of your Asana AI teammates into that.
[00:30:33] Shannon Duffy: Oh, my God. That is brilliant.
[00:30:35] Sunny Manivannan: Into the channel and just say, “Just channel this, and let's get a book out of this.” I bet even that would be a great first draft.
[00:30:41] Shannon Duffy: You've just blown my mind. We will dedicate the book to you, Sunny, for that amazing idea in the foreword.
[00:30:46] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, Shannon, I'm so proud to have you on here. Thank you so, so much. I learned a lot from just this brief conversation. Again, thank you for taking the time to come on the Peerbound Podcast, and it's been a privilege.
[00:30:59] Shannon Duffy: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sunny.
[00:31:01] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Bye.
