How Pure Storage Leverages Data and AI to Transform the Customer Experience – Marketing: Art and Science -EP13

Hey everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Marketing, art and Science. I'm CMO advisor from the Peach Group, Lisa Martin.

This is a show where we really get to sit down with CMOs weekly and understand how they're balancing the artistry and the science of marketing to convert those prospects into really vocal, loyal advocates. I'm so pleased to welcome my longtime colleague, Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Pure Storage to this episode. Lynn, it's so great to have you on the show.

Thank you for joining us, Lisa, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. You have such an interesting background.

I want the audience to understand CMO peer storage, as I mentioned, but walk me audience through how you got there, because your, even your education is like such an interesting topic. Well, thank you. And you know, I think my story proves that you can start in one place, but then just let your passion take you where, uh, it should.

So I did start out, um, as a double E degree from uc, Berkeley, but after a summer job of coding, which I thought was my lifetime love, I realized I really wanted the interaction with people. I went, uh, back to school, heard from a, a colleague, uh, or a student one year ahead of me, and she had done this thing called technical marketing, and it just fascinated me on how I could take my technical background, but help turn that into what does that mean to a salesperson or a seller. So that's how I got started.

Went into, uh, the original Hewlett Packard as a technical marketing engineer, and over the course of my journey have been at multiple all B2B high tech companies, large and small. I would say the consistent theme is just building and growing businesses. I love that it's fun to do.

I always love to hear those backgrounds that are kind of zigzaggy, um, because most of them are, which really rare. I don't know about you, but it's really rare for me to meet someone in marketing as long as we've been in marketing who actually has a degree in marketing. There's always different, different backgrounds.

Life sciences, EE, computer science, whatnot. That just gives, I think, marketers so much more, well-roundedness in terms of being able to lead marketing organizations and really impact the business. Talk about the, the vision.

You've been CMO at Pure, what, nine months or so? I have. Yes.

Walk us through your vision. What does that look like? Well, for me, vision always first is grounded in the business strategy.

So, and I agree, I think marketing and marketers are more well-rounded when they come from different places. But what we want to do, and what I always uh, ascribe to is take those first 30 to 45 days, do your listening tour and understand the context of the business. So here at Pure, we are doing incredible things, disrupting the storage industry.

The oldest, I would say legacy part of the IT stack with a platform and an as a service approach. And so our marketing vision based on that is to really drive awareness, especially in these times with AI and cyber attacks, that your data storage platform is an advantage to you if you have the right one. And to reach those higher level buyers that today, you know, let's just be frank, they don't think about storage because they don't see the connection to the business.

So our vision is to be that premier innovative provider of an as a service data storage platform. And Pure's been innovating in this space for many years. So it's just an honor for me to be here on this next step of the journey.

Love that. Let's talk now about the science and the art of marketing. Something that you and I have spoken about before is that we both love the fact that it's been become so scientific the last 10 years or so.

How are you leveraging, let's talk about the science piece first. How are you leveraging data science to become proactive so that you get that message out to the, the customers that, uh, why they should go pure, why it's important, especially from a cybersecurity and AI perspective? So I could talk about this forever, so you're gonna have to, to keep grounded on this.

It's one of the core reasons I went, uh, into marketing is that blend of the art and the science. And it is so great with all the tools that we have. So we have a data scientist team here at Pure that is fabulous, and we use data science in every phase of the customer journey.

So from really understanding what are the highest TAM accounts we should be targeting that are ripe for our solution, highest propensity to buy, also, when are they ready? We all know that purchases in IT are going to come over some cycle or there may be other priorities. So we're using that to really develop propensity and, uh, information for our sellers and bringing it to them.

And then we're using data science to really understand what content is resonating the most with different personas. We're selling to seven different personas and we really wanna understand what is resonating. So that's a really brief overview, but we're very grounded in data and the metrics to inform our marketing strategy and continually adjusting.

I love that, what you just described as data scientists foundational to marketing at Pure Storage. You talked about seven different personas and as consumers, and this blends into our business lives, we just expect the content that we're surfed up is going to be relevant, contextual, um, personalized in a non-creepy way. And we have as marketers these tools now that allow us to do just that, to really stay ahead of the competition to differentiate.

Talk a little bit about some of some of the key top line metrics that you are delivering to your stakeholders. Yes. And, and if I can, if I can just go back one thing before we get into the metrics.

I think, um, and this is the fun and exciting and super challenging part of marketing, is the tools are often there, the understanding of how to employ them and the change management within your own marketing organization, um, and change management in the c-suite. I mean, let's be candid, right? Marketing today, I believe is we are media houses.

And if you are not a media house, um, it's going to be very difficult to win in your industry because to your point, it's not B2B or B2C. We're all human and we're expecting that personalized content. Yeah.

So, uh, to the metrics, right? And speaking of c-suite, you know, what do they care about? Top line growth, top line, uh, revenue and, you know, cost of of sale, right?

So I think let's ground ourselves in what the CEO, the board, the CFO are, are looking for. And that's what, uh, we support. I am a partner to the CRO and this is what we are driving together.

What gets very interesting is the metrics down a level or a couple of clicks, and we're looking at what's the, uh, really when you start to talk about, uh, a business where you have multiple personas, you know, there's a lot of different, uh, metrics that you can start to look at. Are we reaching all of them? Do we have enough in our database?

Are they engaging? What's the effectiveness of the content? What is the ROI, uh, overall for my campaign?

These are the things that I am tasking my leaders with, really at their level, looking at that one click down from the business metrics and then their managers with how are we doing at the tactic or the channel level and continually driving efficiency and improvement. So it's a broad range of metrics. We could probably spend a whole podcast looking at that, but I think for your listeners, really you have to ground it first in what the business cares about.

Absolutely. That at the end of the day, that's what's most important is how is marketing moving those levers there, pulling on data science, pulling on the artistry, um, to really inform the brand so that ultimately those personas are given exactly what they're looking for in as close to real time as possible. That's really kind of where the sweet spot is.

Yeah. How would you say, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

I was gonna say, so we try to, you know, to combine the two topics in terms of the metrics and the data science, you know, as an example, in an existing customer, how am I demonstrating to the business that I can provide, uh, timing on when that customer's ready to buy, uh, or expand in a solution? And then the efficiency of us delivering that to the seller to shorten the sales cycle. So those are some of the ways that we're really looking at how do we combine the metrics the business cares about with the data science that we have.

How would you say the data science piece is helping to inform or evolve the pure brand? I've known Pure for a very long time. It's always been very bold in its marketing, which I've always admired.

But how, how does the, the the science piece come in to help from a brand perspective? 'cause we think often a brand is art. Yeah.

I'm so glad you love the Pure brand. I mean, again, uh, just an iconic challenger brand. And see we're wearing the orange, uh, love.

Yep. We stand out in a sea of blue, uh, in tech. Thank you.

Well, the data for the brand is critical, uh, with a platform approach and as a service, we're really reaching the VP and the C-suite who are really interested in a new approach. Like, why do I not think about this part of the IT stack in the same simple way I would a collaboration software or my CRM or my virtualization or my cloud? So that's where we're going to get those VPs and C levels interested.

We're using data science, again, to really understand for our target profile of who we believe is ripe for our solution, their readiness. And then we're measuring lift with our brand approach. We're also doing really classic things.

We've been talking about in marketing for a long time, got multiple, uh, versions of brand campaign messages running at the same time. How is the science saying, uh, folks are reacting to that? And we're really drilling into the detail.

Is that by geo? Is it by industry? Are there differences?

Is it by VP versus c-suite? So we're really baking all of that into our brand approach and, uh, being quite agile and and tuning our approach based on that. Sounds like it could get, I mean this is gonna sound silly, but very scientific, very prescriptive down to the personal level.

What's, what messages, what colors, what content is resonating with them to ultimately help them on that self journey that they're probably on before they even get to a pure rep to understand, yeah, we need to be talking to Pure Storage. This is absolutely critical for us. Yeah, that's the goal.

We are trying to really drive that awareness so that it becomes easier for our sellers to get that response, to get that engagement. I mean, as a csuite myself, I can tell you there's very few emails or phone calls that I pick up, uh, for, uh, you know, MarTech stack items in, in our part of the, uh, world. So we're really focused on that.

Are we, uh, there on that journey? No. We have so much more that we can be doing to, uh, make this really efficient and get that reaction.

And I, again, I think that is applying a lot of what maybe has traditionally been thought of as more of a a B2C kind of emotion, but we can use all these techniques here in B2B to really stand out, um, uh, you know, with the customer, which is our goal. Absolutely. How has the MarTech stack that you've implemented, that Pure has been working on for a while, I suppose as well influenced and facilitated the sales alignment with marketing?

Because that's something that we talk about a lot as well. It's challenging. Um, but I think nowadays there's so much more from an observability perspective that sales can get because of the marketing science that's behind it.

Yeah, you're so right on this. So have a fantastic, uh, marketing ops team, and you hit the nail on the head. Uh, you know, I think where we often continue to forget both internal to companies and with our external customers is, um, the tech is one piece of it, but there's the change management, the education.

So we have progressed quite far, uh, in the down the path of moving to buying groups, uh, which is not focused on a single lead that we would pass to sales. But as you might imagine, uh, for most high tech B2B sales of any consequence, there's multiple people in that sale from maybe yeah, VP of IT to procurement to maybe finance, you know, folks in the IT team. Um, that's been pretty, uh, natural conversation with sellers.

But then the action of how are we delivering that information? What do they do differently? What does our SDR organization do differently?

That's the area that is really critical for marketers to be hand in hand with their sales organization. And so what it has done, and it's fantastic, is we have, um, joint meetings regularly on how we are transitioning to this. And it's really brought tighter alignment.

Uh, and I will say that pure sales and marketing already had a very strong relationship, but now we're in this joint go to market conversation and it's really facilitated it. So in a way, the tech stack has facilitated us getting even tighter on how we're going to market. And that's so critical.

'cause at the end of the day, you both want to bring those customers in, convert them to loyal advocates. Everyone's on the same page. With respect to that, I love how you really leaned into the science part of marketing.

I, I think I love like you taking complex, esoteric information and distilling it into digestible components is something that that fascinates me about marketing. Something that I love, I know you do as well, but let's talk about the art piece because the sizzle the arts, oh yeah. We talked about pure bold brand.

I've, I've seen it for so many years now. What is the art piece to you and how do you fuse or blend it or balance it with science? Yeah, and, and you have to have both, you know, because also we're, we buy as humans, we want a good story.

We wanna feel good. Yes, we wanna feel like we are, uh, doing right for our, you know, whether it be our team, our company, our customers. So, uh, it is an absolute and of the two, and certainly with brand, uh, we are leaning into the, the art and the emotion.

Uh, one of the things that I, I learned, uh, back in the day is really how impactful a brand can be when it taps into that emotion. And, you know, let's be, let's just be honest, right? You know, with all the tools that marketers have, um, and thinking about it and how much they are bombarded with all the messages from vendors, if you have a really functional brand, very kind of product spec feature out, are you really gonna break through the noise?

Versus if you can pull a story, pull on a heart string, you know, can you rise above and, and grab their attention? And so Pure, I think, has done that well over the course of its history today we're doing that. Uh, and in particular, you know, touching on a theme that is, is really emerging around the globe, which is that of sustainability.

Um, and how can we solve a business problem and also help with the sustainability aspect, which, uh, may be part of the business's need, but may also just work with the, uh, the emotion of I'm helping doing good, passing it forward. So, uh, watch for our, our newer ads that are coming out, um, on sustainability. And that's where we're really trying to tap into that emotion to bring the awareness of, of Pure's entire, uh, platform and, and the reach in what we can do.

I'm so glad you brought up the emotion piece because it's critical from a differentiation perspective. I think you hit that nail on the head with tell a story that evokes a response from me, a prospect when you're talking about sustainability. A a lot of, a lot of, uh, customers I interview have sustainability requirements and initiatives within their organization such that they're only gonna be working even if at the RFP level with companies like Pure who have, aren't just talking the talk about sustainability, but actually have the data to demonstrate how the technologies that they're delivering are helping organizations to meet their sustainability objectives.

So I think that emotion piece that you hit on is, um, is unique to pure, um, but incredibly important. Yeah, and, and you know, here's where, if we come back to blending a little bit of the data science, uh, you know, sustainability overall as a topic is maybe a little stronger in Europe for some obvious reasons in the us. Uh, it's there, but it is more around power and space right now.

And so yes, understanding, uh, the slight differentiation and message can make a massive difference in your, your campaign, uh, and tying it, right? We're tying it into the hot topic of the moment. And I will say, you and I talked about this, it's not just the moment, uh, ai, right?

We're at the absolutely ginning of this very long journey, uh, for all of us on ai. And that has an incredible impact on power, uh, consumption in the data center. It does, it does.

It almost comes full circle from that perspective. Let's now switch to talking about emerging technologies like ai. You know, you've seen a number of big waves in technology in your time in the industry.

What, where does the AI wave To that point, right? And where, but where does the AI wave fit from your perspective? 'cause we, we, we talk about this all the time with customers, with clients, with the, the mainstream media, and people have this laser focus on AI and all the investments going on and wanna see where's the ROI, we're not there yet.

We're early inning. So what do you see the AI wave compared to some of the other waves like mobility and wifi and the internet, for example? So I think you just nailed it, right?

Uh, this, uh, wave is, you know, as significant as mobility and the internet, if not more, right? Honestly, you're reading many of the same things that I am that is saying that it is much more, uh, impactful, but it certainly is as impactful and like these other waves. It, we are at early innings of this journey, uh, both for how our customers use it, as well as how we use it in marketing, but it is, it is not, uh, going away.

And I think there's been a little bit of, you know, are, are we, is it over overhyped? And certainly that happens with these tech cycles, but, uh, it is here to stay and it's fundamentally changing everything we do. So it's a big focus, uh, both external in terms of how we help our customers be AI ready and also internal in marketing, How you, you just said AI ready.

I, I wanna, I wanna kind of pivot on that for a second. How do you, how does prc what, what is AI ready? Because customers, you know, we go to so many technology conferences, you and I, Lynn and, and AI is part of every, pretty much every, um, theme, every keynote, every presentation.

It's, it's their, so kind of the fear of AI washing and the me a lot of the messages to, to the prospects and the customers are, if you're not in AI right now, you're too late. You're already behind. Do you think that is, um, a, a sense that customers have in terms of how can I become AI ready when everyone's telling me if I'm not in it already, I'm too late?

Yeah. Well, I would say, uh, it's, it's never too late to get started. And again, we're in early innings, and if we take a page from the past with mobility and we think about when the first Apple phone came out, and can we imagine what we can do today with our phone, the apps, and all of the things that were invented with that?

Yeah. That would be the vision I would paint for, you know, we can't even imagine where this is going. Right?

Right. com. When we talk about AI ready, we're really starting to talk to organizations about, uh, their data storage strategy, their security around it, because of the, uh, intense use of data, what kinds of use cases they might be starting to think of, and how is their infrastructure an enabler for that, uh, versus something that's holding them back.

So right. Without double clicking into it, I think that what we see right now with customer feedback is they're super interested in it. They're just starting to really think through what are the bigger use cases.

We haven't hit that wave yet. We're really working still, I think in very early days on efficiency use cases and not the fundamental transformative use cases that I know are coming to all of our industries. I agree.

I I believe they're on their way as well. Every time I'm on Schwab network, they always ask me, where are we with ai? Is it hype?

Is it, is it a, is it a bubble? And I say, you know, a lot of a lot of organizations are in pilot phase to understand where, what are some of the quickest when we can get right now? And a lot of that to your point is, is around the efficiency gains.

I think every CMOI talked to, just talked to one an hour ago, same thing. They're bringing in AI and their technologies and in their marketing and delivering significant efficiency gains, which eventually will make its way to cost savings. So when those investors and, and the street is looking for, where's the ROI of the AI investments we're gonna get there.

Yeah. But as you said, it's, we're, we're in the kind of the first lab, and that's okay, but we can only imagine, or we can't really imagine what some of the great things are to come, uh, where AI can be hugely impactful. But to me, from a storage perspective, you know, we go, AI runs on data Pure helps organizations securely store that data for as long as it needs to be there.

So in a way, pure is kind of foundational to organizations being AI ready. Well, and if I were to add, not just securely store that data, but, you know, put it in a platform approach so that you can easily transition from training to inference and also do it with the incredible efficiency of flash, which is 10 x more efficient from a power and a space than hard disk and give in everything we talked a little bit about with sustainability, that is more critical than ever because, uh, many organizations do not have the room, uh, in the data center or the electricity and the water to cool. It does not exist.

And so we wanna do our part in helping organizations be able to take advantage of this incredible technology, um, but do it in a more efficient and sustainable way. You know, and what I wanna also maybe come back to is in marketing, because I think, you know, we have to look at how we are using this technology as well. So we're really, today in these early innings as well, we formed a marketing AI council, uh, or AI for marketers aim because we have to have an acronym.

Um, and getting the users, uh, some of the users in our organization, um, sharing use cases, sharing how, uh, they are applying it to the different parts of marketing, which is so exciting because it's really every department from creative to the web, to the data science team, to product marketing, can all use it. And I think we're seeing today a couple of classes of, you know, just efficiency framing of problems, uh, summarization of data or great bodies of information, and that is helping us right now, uh, make our marketers more productive, um, and get to results faster. And that's, that's what we're working on now.

So I'm super excited about what the team is doing. I imagine there's a lot of hand raisers across marketing functions, and we wanna be next. We've got a great idea for a use case where we think ai, gen AI can be a huge efficiency booster for us.

How do you stop, right? Um, because I imagine everybody in marketing wants to be part of this. Well, super fortunate here at Pure, uh, very advanced.

And we have a CTO that focuses on AI for the company, uh, enterprise Chat, GPT licenses. So we are, uh, very ad uh, you know, advanced in company-wide in terms of using AI in the different functions. Uh, so we haven't had to stack rank so much so far using and chat GPT Enterprise Chat, GPT, uh, has been made available for us to use.

And you can do so many things with that already. Uh, and of course that's what, you know, as I would caution all is that's what keeps your data safe, right? So, uh, not using anything that, uh, would be proprietary or would go out into the public models.

And, and so right now I don't, I don't have that, uh, that constraint. And we are learning as fast as we can. I have fascinating use case from our A BM Center of Excellence where they are using it to also start to personalize content, uh, yes for our one-to-one a BM approach and make that process faster.

And that gets back to what we talked about, which is marketing today is really needs to deliver that personalized content. We're a media house in many ways. And so it's one of our, our great use cases that we're exploring right now is how we can do that more efficiently.

I think that's fantastic. It sounds like your approach is really methodical. It's very strategic, it's very much aligned to the business strategy, and it sounds like customers are really finding value in that.

Last question before we wrap up, 'cause I know we could keep talking, give advice to those future CMOs who are following in your footsteps. You talked about the, the breadth and the depth that you bring from a background perspective. You're leaning into emerging technologies, you're driving marketing with the art and the science.

How would you advise that the next generation of CMOs to continue learning to get to your level? Oh, well, uh, I appreciate that. I feel that, uh, first of all, my, my biggest tip to anyone at any stage of their career is be curious, keep learning.

That I think is probably the secret to career success and keeping yourself energized, keeping yourself engaged with the business. And that's been the hallmark. I didn't start out thinking I would be a CMO, uh, or want to be a CMO.

Uh, it was really an extension of my curiosity about what more could I do in marketing? And over the course of my career in marketing, I've had, um, the opportunity to do many different marketing jobs. Uh, and that's informed my, my role today.

And that would be maybe my second piece of, of advice is I think it's really critical to have whether that be a more well-rounded business experience to bring to marketing or a well-rounded marketing experience. Uh, because leaders in marketing have to have lot of perspective to bring to the table around how to align to the business strategy, CEOs, CFOs are looking for what are the insights from the market? How are you addressing them to best, uh, create that growth at an efficient pace?

Um, and also increasingly advising the organization on the communication of key corporate messages, whether that be sustainability or diversity. And so all of this, um, requires that more well-rounded approach. And I just encourage folks to take those steps in their career to have new, new experiences and to keep learning, follow your career path that way versus set out just for a title.

I couldn't agree. Marlyn, thank you so much for sharing that Great advice. I love the whole stay curious theme.

I think that gets you so far and there's so much untapped potential there. We thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your insights, your journey with our audience. I know they learned a ton from this limb.

Thank you. Oh, Lisa, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

It's been great to talk about marketing, art, and science with you. I Love it. Thank you.

We wanna thank you for tuning into this latest episode of the podcast, Pearl Locus. I'm Lisa Martin, I'll see you next time.