Crowdstrike Harnesses the Power of Generative AI to Transform the Customer and Marketing Team Experiences – Marketing: Art and Science – EP7

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this newest episode of our webcast and podcast, marketing, art, and Science. I'm CMO advisor and host Lisa Martin, and I'm so thrilled to share with you my next guest, Jennifer Johnson, or jj, the CMO of CrowdStrike.

jj, it's so great to have you on the program. I know the audience is gonna learn a ton from you today. Oh, it's so good to be here.

Thanks for having me. Sure. And you know, this is the webcast where we really kind of dissect the artistry and the fusion of science within marketing, within modern marketing.

And we'll talk about things like J'S background, we'll talk about MarTech in action at CrowdStrike. We'll then talk about AI and gen ai and some of the amazing, really results driven things that they're doing. And then JJ iss gonna leave us, leave us with some advice for aspiring CMOs.

So, jj, you have such an interesting backstory. Share it with the audience a little bit about the family business and what inspired you to get into marketing. Yeah, so, um, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

So for those of you in the Midwest, I am a fellow mid westerner at heart. Um, my, my background is family business. So my grandfather, 80 years ago, started a level and tool manufacturing company called Johnson Level and Tool.

So levels, if you don't know, are those things that have the bubbles in them that you use to make sure things are straight. Um, and started that, uh, in Milwaukee again, 80 years ago. Came was a, uh, was a immigrant from Sweden.

Started the company, um, built the company up. My dad and my, uh, my uncle. They ran the company.

Um, just up until about five years ago, we, we ironically sold the company to a Swedish company. So my grandfather came over from Sweden. We wound up selling it to a Swedish company.

So fun, full circle story. Yes. Story.

Um, but, uh, it was a, it was the, the earlier years of my life. And so a lot of my early memories were actually in the, in the plant, in the factory. And so, couple things that it did, it really taught me a good work ethic because work was so ingrained.

And if you know, people, people from Milwaukee, in the Midwest in general, I always say there's salt of the earth and having a good roll up your sleeves, work ethic is part of the DNA of of the Midwest, and especially the blue, more the blue collar industrial cities like Milwaukee. And so, kind of really learned that, like having a really good work ethic and grit from a very young age. And then the other thing that it really ingrained, probably not even realizing it at the time, is that family and business were intertwined.

And so there wasn't really a separation. It was just all part of one and the same. And, you know, now days we talk about things like work-life balance.

And I'm definitely not here to say that work-life balance is not a thing because I think for many people work-life balance is a very important thing. So I think for me, it, it's more about integrating your work and your life together instead of compartmentalizing them separately. Because the way I grew up, they were so intertwined.

Um, and look, I think there's positives to that. I think there's probably some, some, you know, challenges to that too. But I think the positives are more that, you know, you, you really think about work is not something that you just go and do and come home and forget about it.

Right. It's really something that Yep. You know, kind of, you know, you bring into your life and you make it as part of your life.

And I very much am passionate about what I do, and I can't do it unless I'm really all in and mentally and, and physically and everything. So for me, you know, when I go, when I go into a job, it's, it's all in because that's really all I know. You make such a great point that it's really the integration.

We're gonna be talking about the integration of art and science, but the integration of the work and the life, because these days we have, how many screens do I have in front of me right now? Yeah, probably you as well. We're just connected all the time.

And we have that expectation that we are gonna be connected, we can collaborate, we can have these conversations, we can move things forward. Talk a little bit about how you gotta be the CMO of CrowdStrike, obviously, I just saw that, um, you guys just hit the SFB 500 recently. Huge, huge accomplishment there.

Congratulations. But give us kind of that backstory of how you landed at CrowdStrike. Mm-Hmm.

So I've been in enterprise software for marketing for 20 plus years. Um, started in product marketing. So my formative years were definitely spent in more of the, the technical sides of, of marketing.

Um, it, you know, became a CMO. So expanded out, became a CMO, been a CMO for about 10 plus years now. Um, uh, not all in cyber, but at some point I pivoted over into cyber.

And so most of my CMO career has been spent in cybersecurity companies. And I think along the way, I mean, obviously being in cybersecurity, you know, you know, CrowdStrike and, um, I've been actually, I've worked, you know, with or one degree of separation from a lot of the, the people who have been at CrowdStrike since the beginning and, and close to the beginning. Um, so it was, it kind of felt like a, you know, a first cousin, if you will.

Right? Yeah. There was a lot of familiarity there already.

And so that's nice. Um, you know, yeah. And I think when, you know, when we're all going through our careers, we stop and we think about, you know, what do we wanna do?

Is this, you know, the, is this, you know, is for, for me, it was is do I wanna be, you know, do I wanna do something outside of being a CMO? Do I wanna work outside of cybersecurity? And I think where I ultimately landed at, at a point was I like being a CMO.

I like the function of marketing, and I wanna be a CMO, and I really love cybersecurity because it's very mission-driven and purpose-driven. And it really is about doing something that's kind of for the greater good, if you will. Yeah.

And so I said, I wanna be a CMO in cybersecurity. That's what I wanna do for the rest of my career. And so I'm pretty much at the, I I, you know, I don't think I could have picked a better company.

No, I couldn't have picked a better company to, to do that knowing that that was my personal mission and goal. So, you know, when I, uh, when I had the opportunity to, to, you know, come in and, and work for CrowdStrike, I, I leapt at the, you know, at the chance to, to be able to work, uh, with this company and with the people, and with our great technology and our amazing customers. Yeah.

Amazing customers. I met you at Falcon last year, which if you're not familiar, that's CrowdStrike's user conference. And we had some great customer conversations.

I think there's so much value in the voice of the customer really articulating the brand proposition of the company. But cybersecurity is such an interesting topic because it affects everybody. Mm-Hmm.

The threat landscape is, is so amorphous, it's evolving constantly. Yep. Ransomware became a household word.

So you, you, you are in such an interesting time, but also delivering technologies that are saving brands. Yeah. So we can, we can do a whole show on cybersecurity, but I wanna now get into the MarTech stack because you, you got to, um, CrowdStrike about 18 months or so ago, and you kind of had not a blank slate to work with, but walk us through what you inherited and some of the things that weren't there that you said, we've gotta change this, we've gotta bring in the scientific part.

Yeah. We've gotta become data-driven. Yeah.

And we, we talked about this, I think the, the title of this show, art and Science is so perfect, because I talk about that a lot around everything is art and a little bit of art, and a little bit of science. And, um, if those of us in marketing, some of us have probably heard someone along the way say that marketing is arts and crafts, or used to be arts and crafts, which I, by the way, take offense to. I don't love hearing that, because That's right.

Even the, even the art side of marketing is a little more than arts and crafts. But the point I, I think was probably coming from a, an, a good place of that, it was a lot more of the art side. And, you know, over the last 10, 15 years, the science side of marketing has become so much more of, you know, the, the, you know, not the dominant piece of it, but it's become so much more dominant because now you can measure what you do, right?

Yes. And it's not a little bit of a, okay, we think we, you know, we think we, it did this and or we know it had an impact. We just can't completely measure it.

So you need to fuse the two together. So it's not an either or, it's an and, right. And you need to do both, but you also need to bring both together.

So, you know, at CrowdStrike, our brand has always been a strength of, of us as a company. And that's beyond marketing. It's everything.

It's every touch point with the company. Um, but marketing has done an amazing job well before me on really building the brand and bringing a persona around the, the adversaries and the bad guys. And, you know, really for me it was how do we continue to kind of carry that torch forward?

But I saw a real opportunity to invest in the science side of it, right? And we're, you know, we're a multi-billion dollar a RR company. We have 28 products on our platform.

We work with every segment in every industry, um, uh, of, of companies. And so that becomes really complex really quickly. Quickly.

And so art isn't gonna get you where you need to go. You know, we've been very public with the, with the, with the street on our path to, to get to 10 billion in a RR That doesn't happen with art alone. Absolutely.

So we have to really think strategically and, and thoughtfully about the whole customer journey. How are we bringing new customers in? But you know, that's really the kind of the starting point, if you will, right?

It's then how do we get customers to expand logically around the platform? And when you have 28 products, there's a lot of different paths that, that customers can take. And ultimately the goal is to consolidate on our platform.

So you really need the science on that part. And so, you know, it wasn't a blank slate, but what I really looked at when I came in is how do we modernize our tech stack? How do we modernize our ability to be data driven?

Um, how do we use data? And, you know, now data science and AI is like a whole nother element to it, but like, how do we bring data in to help us be more predictive around where to focus? And I think that's been a huge value in what we've done with just even taking the tech stack as an example, is being able to bring that notion of, of AI and machine learning into the marketing tech stack.

And so, you know, one of the, one of the tools that we, uh, brought in about 18 months ago now is, is six sense. So for those marketers, you probably know six sense. And really that was really instrumental not just to marketing, but to our sales development team that are doing the prospecting.

Because again, we sell that millions of organizations. We sell that every company potentially on the planet, every company on the planet is a potential customer. Absolutely.

So where do you focus? And we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people coming to our website. You know, being able to get that, the insights and the data and the signals on intent, it really helps to almost create that funnel, you know, before the sales cycle really even starts of where do we focus and, and what messages do we send?

'cause you can actually tell, like you can tell what they're in the market for, and you can tell where they are in the buying cycle. So you can like, be very, very targeted with the message, with the offer, um, with the product area. And then, you know, that's one big piece of the equation is how do we be more strategic about who we're bringing in?

And then now we're really layering in data science and the tech stack to be predictive around their propensity to buy and what the next best product is. So that's like a whole nother journey now that we're taking on is, you know what, there's 28 products, right? They could, they could easily, I mean, we know where the logical growth paths are and where the logical next step is, but based on who they are, based on their behavior, based on what they're doing with the technology, you know, kind of bringing in that PLG esque kind of motion of how, like where do we actually help guide them?

So that's been a really big initiative, um, very impactful initiative, um, in the company and in the team, and really giving, giving, marketing a seat at the table of bringing the data to the conversation. And I think that's a big part of it too. Um, and That's pretty differentiating too.

I I, yeah. You mentioned when we were speaking before that you brought data science to the sales team and to become so many organizations say, we're data-driven, or we're, we're working to become data-driven. It's a whole other ball game to actually be living it.

Yeah. And having the impact that you're talking about, the proof in the pudding. Yeah.

Share a little bit about how 28 different products customers at different parts of the journey, hundreds of thousands. You talked about the, the, just the horizontal applicability and impact that, that CrowdStrike has in every industry. What's that journey like from prospect to loyal advocate to expansion?

Mm-Hmm. And how does the MarTech stack and those levers of art and science help really customers go on that journey seamlessly? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think every, you know, anyone who's in this field knows that there's been a lot of data around the percentage of the sales cycle that's done before anyone ever, ever talks to a human being, right? Yeah. And so we have front loaded a lot of our top of funnel, as you would expect with digital, um, digital retargeting using, you know, social media and, and paid social and digital to really like, hone in and like, follow people through that kind of, that front end of the journey.

Um, peer review sites. So there's a whole team that's really a growth marketing team that's digitally focused, that's really focused on driving the right journey before they even get to an SDR, right? Which is, you know, they're the kind of the first person that they would Yeah.

Talk to, to, to help prospect. So there's a whole like, marketing tech stack around, you know, digital, digital retargeting. Six sense plays a key role there because we can obviously, as I said before, we can actually see what people are searching on, what their intent is, what, what, what, what, what they're searching on from a product or what kind of initiatives they have, where they might be in the buyin cycle based on their behavior.

And so we do all that to nurture and, and, and, and basically nurture these prospects and even help the SDR team say, if you have, you know, a hundred people that you can spend time with and call on, um, who are you gonna focus your time on? So that's one whole piece of it. And then, you know, and then it's, of course we get them into a a, a cycle.

I think that becomes a little bit more of it goes from digital led to maybe more in person and physical led. It's an interesting conversation that we're having as a marketing organization right now. How do you move people kind of from that early stage pipeline opportunity to a kind of later stage?

What we're seeing is that this is where you would wanna put in more of your in-person events, your workshops, and they don't always, always have to be in person. They can be virtual, but more hands-on things where they can actually feel, touch, experience the technology, talk to other customers. Our user conference obviously plays a big role in this phase here, right?

To help bring people along. We talk about it as the power of the crowd, and it's real when people feel the magic of, you know, the, the momentum we have, and you were at Falcon last year, like, it's real. Um, and then, and then once they become a customer, there's, you know, typically a, you know, a logical land.

I mean, we obviously try to get that land as big as possible, but there's typical product set that usually is in that land, in that first initial deal. And then it's looking at data science to say, okay, you know, customers that look like this, that behave like this, that use the product like this tend to, you know, this is tend how they tend to expand, or this is your typical PLG using analytics, using data, using data science around, you know, the propensity to buy to say like, customers that look like this, they might, you know, buy 10 x more because I, I was CMO of a company named Amplitude that does exactly this, right? It helps you with digital analytics to actually understand what customers are most profitable, what customer journeys are gonna actually net the most revenue.

So those are the things we look at. Um, so we, we kind of tailor the, the digital and the tech stack with the in-person events that help educate customers on, on expansion. And of course, customer storytelling is woven throughout, um, that entire journey.

I think the last thing I'd say is, you know, having data, this is less about the tech stack and more about the analytics. I think one of the biggest things that we've done that has transformed in a very positive way, our, and we had a great relationship with sales bef, like we've always had a great relationship with sales, but one of the things that transformed it the most was marketing, and in particular field marketing coming to the table with data. So, you know, many times it's like the activity, the activity trap that field marketers can fall into where, you know, if they don't come with a point of view, if they don't come with data, a lot of times it turns into, you know, what do you wanna do?

Sales team and sales team, you know, will give them their wishlist of all the things that they wanna do. And there's good intent, right? But, you know, at the, at the same time, like, they're not marketers, and if you support 20 salespeople, you're gonna get 20 different iterations of a plan.

And then all of a sudden the field marketer is looking at it going, how am I gonna execute all of this? Because I, there's no way. And then you fall into this activity, I call it the activity trap, right?

Yeah. And then it's more is better, right? That's not more is not better.

We, we hopefully know that as marketers. So this flipped it completely on its head. Where now field marketing can come to the table with data.

We have, we track pipeline, we have pipeline goals by all the way down to a rep rep level, and we have pipeline goals that we work with rev ops to set by week. So every week that our field marketers can go to their sales teams and say, okay, here's where you're doing, where you're doing a great job in building and converting pipe. Here's where you have some weaknesses.

They can get it granularly down to an individual rep, say, Hey, this rep might be having some challenges, what's going on? And that allows us to rapidly, you know, in shift our investment where we need to, to kinda help adjust to, to, to fill those gap areas. But it also drives a different discussion because we're leading the discussion in the places where the business needs it to go to.

Not because a sales leader with all the best intentions they have is coming up with their wishlist of, of things, right? And so, I mean, it, it's not only given marketing a seat at the table to drive the right discussion, but the sales team obviously appreciates it too. Yeah.

Because we're coming with something of value to them. And so it's, I mean, it's, it's really transformed that whole relationship. And I believe that, you know, field marketers are, you know, a really important piece of the equation.

And I think with, you know, COVID, there was a lot of discussion about everything's gonna move to digital. What's the future of field marketing? Right?

What we're seeing is you still need, you know, and it's not just about running events, but you still need like in person, you need in person, you need a combination of digital and physical events and programs. And so how you bring those things together and do it in the right way to support the business, you know, field marketing then becomes the CMO of their territory instead of the event planner. Oh, I like that.

That's awesome. The, the synergies that you're describing that marketing has with sales at CrowdStrike is unique. I talk with a lot of CMOs.

I'm fortunate to have this position and, and some of 'em really nailed sales and marketing relationship. Um, I've seen, uh, CMOs that, that own the SDRs, for example. But what you're doing to, to really create this individual pipeline and, and leverage the data to, to help sales sell better, is marketing really leading the company in terms of helping to influence and generate revenue that you can actually track.

That's right. Which is huge. That's all about generating revenue at the end of the day, right?

That's right. It is. I mean, like, we have a, we, we love the work that we do with our brand.

It's amazing. It makes everybody feel really good. And that affinity does wind up translating to revenue at some point.

Because, you know, we do a Super Bowl commercial. People love seeing that the company that they're investing in is a Super Bowl advertiser. It makes people feel better and more confident in their decision.

Ultimately, everything we're doing is to drive revenue. We're a, we're a for-profit company, right? I mean, yes.

You know, but, but at the end of the day, like you have to, you have to bring those two things together. I think the, the other thing that we've done a, like a really great, or, you know, we're continuing to do a really great job of is fusing the art and science together, bringing brand and demand together. So, you know, when you, when you have that amazing brand campaign, when you see that Super Bowl ad, it's not just, wow, they just did a Super Bowl ad and then went away.

It's connecting the storytelling from that ad all the way through to the storytelling. They see when they go to the website, they go to digital they, and connecting the brand story, story to the platform and product story. And yes.

You know, that sounds logical, but sometimes it's not done and in Oh, right. Sometimes, a lot of times it's not done right. Where you have a brand message and you have a product message, and they don't necessarily logically connect, right?

Yeah. Or people have to do like what I call the mental math, right. To connect the dots.

Right. To connect those two stories together. We make it a much more seamless connection between brand and platform.

It's integrated. Yes. I'd love to, to just kind of double click on, on the Super Bowl commercial a little bit.

We've talked a lot about the science and the foundation Mm-Hmm. How you brought data science to sales, the individual pipeline creation that's really data driven. What was some of the artistry involved in getting that message out in the Super Bowl commercial?

For anyone that didn't see it, I'm sure they can find it on YouTube, but, Mm-Hmm. I'd love to just kind of get your, like, what was the artistry and sizzle that that really helped carry that brand message forward? Yeah.

Um, so we've done two Super Bowl ads this last year and the year before. Um, a couple things. And, you know, the decision to do a Super Bowl ad, you know, we believe that we have a responsibility to bring cybersecurity to the mainstream because it's, you know, it's such an existential threat to all of us as consumers and as one of the larger, largest companies that, you know, super Bowl commercials are not inexpensive.

We can, you know, not everyone can afford to do it. We believe it's, it's, it's almost like carrying the flag for the industry in a way Yeah. To bring the importance of cybersecurity to everyone, and to do that to a mainstream audience.

It als it, it obviously has to be a very, you know, it has to be a simple, it has to be a relatable message. It has to tie it together in a way people can understand. So the first year that we did the Super Bowl ad, it was about taking an event in history, the Trojan horse, and, and like, and actually tying it as the most infamous breach in history that people can relate to.

And tying it to what would've happened if they had CrowdStrike. So you're taking some, some events that everyone hopefully knows of on some level and tying it to our technology. Um, and even the words we used of how we described what we did, it was very simple.

And so, you know, the, the, the average person could probably get it on some level. And the notion we stop breach. Like, it's not just the notion, it's our, it's our mission.

It's not just the tagline, it's our vision, it's our mission. We stop breaches. That's what we do.

And so we stopped the most infamous, you know, in that story, we stopped the most infamous breach in history, right? Um, so now juxtapose that with the Super Bowl commercial last year, and we took it to the future, right? So we went from the past to the future, and, uh, it was a future, kind of a future western, if you will, um, where we actually brought the, the adversaries, the bad guys to life.

And so these are, um, these are actual, each of the adversaries, they were kind of the, you know, the, the, you know, the, the outlaws, the, you know, the bad guys that kind of came into the town, right? And there were four of 'em that represented actual adversary groups that we track. So one of the things we've done as a brand is we've put personas around hacking groups and ad ECR groups and nation state, um, groups and given them personas.

And, you know, that's how we have, you know, that's how we track them. That's how we talk about them. So they, they have a look and a feel to them.

And so we brought them to life in a very sinister way. And ad and then our heroine, Charlotte. So the other thing we did is we came up with, you know, how are we gonna put a, a persona to our brand around, you know, positivity and truth and wisdom and protection?

And, and we came up with our cybersecurity heroine, Charlotte, who is in both years ads. And so she kind of, you know, comes in and saves the day, if you will. But in the end, it's the story of good and evil.

We're good, and the bad guys are, you know, the adversaries are evil and yeah. Something that people can, you know, people can relate to. Um, and look, all of that is, you know how I said it is, if you don't know anything about cybersecurity, and all you took away from it is that CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike is cybersecurity.

When you think cybersecurity, you think CrowdStrike, that's a, that's a win. That's A win. If you Are, yeah.

If you're in cybersecurity and you kind of understood some of the more nuance nuances of the story, like who these adversary groups were, that notion that, you know, it was a little futuristic. So it was bringing in AI into the ad in a way, right? And our, and our technology is, you know, part the human element of like our threat researchers and our threat hunters together with our technology and our AI driven technology.

Like bringing that together as part of our differentiation. So if you understand cybersecurity and technology, you probably got some of the more nuanced messaging in, in the story, but like, there was something for everyone. And that's the beauty of, that's the beauty of storytelling, really.

Yes. Yes. Um, and it makes people feel good, you know?

It does. I'm a partner of CrowdStrike. I'm a customer of CrowdStrike.

I'm an employee of CrowdStrike. I am so proud that I'm affiliated with this company. Yeah.

And in the end, that's success. Oh, totally. And, and we got that when I, like I said, I met you at Falcon last fall and the, just the, the, the voices of the customers really sharing, not just stories of were faster, more efficient, but really metrics driven outcomes is huge.

I'm a huge fan of customer marketing and of customers really sharing it and, and with what they're doing, but how it's actually really impacting the business was, yeah. That was a, that was a great, um, kind of theme that I think we brought out of Falcon last year. Yeah.

Last kind of section for you, you mentioned ai. I know that CrowdStrike is really leaning into gen ai, walk the audience through what you're doing there. 'cause it's really remarkable and you've got results that are demonstrating it's working, it's impactful.

Yeah. And well, AI as a company, AI has been in our technology since day one. And now we have generative AI in our technology as a marketing organization.

We are leaning heavily into generative AI to help accelerate how we work as marketers. So we have over 25 different use cases across the marketing organization right now that we're using chat t for. And that's everything from things you would think about, like content creation, that's kind of the obvious one that marketers are using it for, to, you know, creating digital headlines for ab testing to, uh, best practices, you know, planning templates to, I mean, writing our, our, our email copy for the SDRs or editing, editing content.

I mean, it translations, it's ev it's kind of like there's a lot that we're, we're doing across the board. Oh, yeah. Um, one of the things that we did is we've used it to help relaunch parts of our website.

And the thing I would stress to marketers is it, it does not replace humans full stop. You can use chat GBT and there's even a little bit of an art in chat GBT to if you've, if you've used it to, you know, you, you have to kind of ask the question and keep refining it and keep asking and prompting it to get to the kind of the answer that you want. And so there's a little bit of art in that.

And then when you get the answer, there's refinement that has to happen after that. You're not gonna get something and just copy and paste it and put it on your website and say that that's it. Right?

Like, you, you have to, you have to really like, have the human like element to keep refining the messaging. But I mean, we were able to move, I mean, it went from months to a few weeks in terms of how fast we were able to move to kind of get some of these new areas of our site launched. And it's not only like the speed in which we're able to operate the conversion.

I mean, it's in, it's amazing that the conversion improvement, so when people come onto our site, it's a much more rich experience. It's a much more engaging experience. They're finding the content they want, they're engaging with content more.

Um, and so it, we've we're proving that it, that it works. And so that's my kind of, my message I think to anyone out there is like, if you're, if you're like kind of resisting it consciously or not, don't resist it. 'cause it, it actually does really help.

And you can start it, you can start using it with just basic things like, help me write this email. You know? I mean, yeah.

It just takes like some things off of your plate that helps you kind of accelerate things. I found that very useful. Um, the other thing is it doesn't replace humans.

You still need humans for it. Um, absolutely. It can just help do your job faster.

And so I'm, you know, I'm a big believer, I'm seen at work. Um, and so I'm really driving this into the team and, you know, the success breeds success. So when the team saw how successful this one team was in, you know, their projects and how much, you know, internal recognition they were getting, every team now all of a sudden is raising their hands.

They wanna be the next one to, to go, right? And they're like, we wanna do it now. And so it, it, it's contagious, right?

And so we're, you know, we're seeing a lot of, of good initial suc success with it that we'll continue to use. SO'S outstanding. Yeah.

Um, you talked about the, the website updates. You mentioned to me the other day that you guys are using it for AB testing, but your, your proof is in the data. You, you talked about the, the impact of conversions alone Yeah.

Is huge. And it's kind of going viral, no pun intended. Within CrowdStrike, you're saying more teams are saying, we want to be the next team to actually leverage gen AI to make big impacts that ultimately impact revenue.

Yeah, I think that's a great message. I'm, I'm completely with you on the use of gen AI for good. Um, I use it a lot myself, and it's, it's fun how you can interact with it to be creative.

And I think as marketers in tech, I don't know if you feel the same way, but I always feel like we've a sense of responsibility Yeah. To help get that aware, that message out there much more consistently about all the positive elements that are coming from AI and tools like Gen ai, because there's so much fear factor out there in the general public that sees Yes, jobs being replaced, et cetera. You're saying, no, it's, it's really humans and AI together.

And I see that a lot with all the companies that I talk with, and you just kind of embodied that as well. Yeah. Last question for you, JJ, is what advice would you have to somebody who is kind of following in your footsteps, wants to get to that CMO stage, um, based on kind of your backstory of how you got to where you are?

Yeah. Um, great question. I think that taking risks is really important and taking calculated risks because people, you know, people can take varying levels of risks based on, you know, their life and their personal situations and all of that.

But I think it's more about, when I say take risks, I think it's seizing opportunities as they come. Um, my first, my first job in tech marketing was an internship at, uh, Veritas Software. I think we talked about this.

And it was back in the early two thousands when, uh, all of the, uh, Enron, WorldCom, if you remember back then, all the corporate governance scandals were happening. And that really created all these regulations around data governance, data retention, data security, data privacy. Sarbanes Oxley was the big one.

Um, hipaa, there's, you know, mm-hmm. Things that still exist today, right? From, from that timeframe.

And I worked at a data storage company. And so there was a lot of questions around, well, what does this mean for data storage and retention and backup and recovery and archiving and all of that because of these regulations? So my internship was to go research these regulations and figure out how to map the regulations to the value proposition of our technology, um, and build content around it.

So, uh, I was doing my internship and one day I got a call from my boss and said, there is, uh, you know, our CEO is going on some broadcast, it was probably CNBC, um, some broadcast to talk about the impact of these regulations on the industry. And so he needs to get briefed. And that was a moment where probably my, my naivete probably worked in my advantage that I said, okay, I'll go brief them.

Yeah, Yeah. And so, And so I went and briefed him and, and sent the briefing document and, uh, it was great and, uh, worked out really well and I got a job out of it. So I think that's awesome.

Part of it is being prepared, right? They say like, was it like luck is opportunity meets preparation? Um, that probably was a bit of being lucky in that definition.

Um, but yeah, you know, seizing those moments when they come to you and not being afraid, um, and taking risks, you know, sometimes, you know, I, I've, I've, my path has sometimes taken a, you know, it hasn't been a straight line. Sometimes it's kind of taken a bit of a, a left or a right turn to, you know, you kind of go laterally to move five steps forward. Sure.

Right? Sure. Yeah.

Um, and I think those things are okay. Like if you really think about like, how is this gonna help me get to the next thing? And you think kind of like two steps ahead.

Um, that's how I always thi I always think, and not everything needs to be a linear, linear straight line. Sometimes going to the side is, is gonna actually get you there faster or get you to somewhere you didn't even know you wanted to go. Exactly.

Yeah. And so that's, when I talk about taking risks, it's taking risks. Sometimes you don't know what the outcome's gonna be, but you have an idea.

Um, right. And, uh, you know, that I think that everyone I've talked to has, uh, that's, that's been successful in their career, has kind of had an element of, of that plus a good mentor. Get a good mentor, agree Everyone else.

Definitely good Mentor. Yeah. Ah, that's such great advice.

I'm with you on all of that. Taking those calculated risks, being prepared and just being open to possibilities, I think, um, is just what I would echo in terms of what you said. But jj, it's been so great having you on the program.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us on marketing, art, and science, sharing the foundations that you put in place, how you're bringing the data science to sales, how marketing and sales are so synergistic, and the use of, of AI and gen AI within CrowdStrike's tools and marketing and the impact that you're having to the business. This has been a fantastic episode. I'm sure the audience loved it.

So again, thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for It's great to be here. Thank you.

Excellent. We wanna thank you for tuning in and remind you in two weeks we drop another episode of marketing, art, and science. So stay tuned.

We'll see you then.