theCUBE + NYSE Wired: CMO Leaders | Laura Heisman, Dynatrace

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Laura Heisman

CMO

Dynatrace

play_circle_outline Maximizing Efficiency and Human Potential: AI Integration in Dynatrace's Products, Marketing, and Operations

play_circle_outline Balancing AI mechanisms with human intuition in marketing for better outcomes

play_circle_outline Shift towards marketing value and loyalty building rather than transactional sales

play_circle_outline Dynatrace's focus on AI observability, developer observability, AI ops for customer success

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Laura Heisman, Dynatrace

Laura Heisman

CMO Dynatrace

Laura Heisman, chief marketing officer of Dynatrace, discusses her insights at the CMO Leaders Summit with theCUBE. As a seasoned expert in marketing leadership, Heisman highlights her experience driving AI transformation at Dynatrace, exploring the role of Artificial Intelligence in enhancing products, processes, and customer engagement. Interviewers including John Furrier and analysts from theCUBE Research dive into how Dynatrace is leveraging AI to lead the market in cutting-edge technology and innovation.

Heisman emphasizes the importance of gove... Read more

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What is integrated into the product and considered in various aspects of the business because it's part of the company's DNA? add

What is the importance of combining AI technology with human intuition in marketing? add

What role does marketing play in building loyalty and ensuring ongoing value for a business? add

What were the highlights of the conference last week and how are they helping customers with their data and systems complexities? add

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Laura Heisman, Dynatrace

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCube. We are here in our Palo Alto Studios for the CMO Leaders Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Laura Heisman is here, the CMO of Dynatrace, Cube alumni. Laura, great to see you. You're just fresh off your user conference.

Laura Heisman

>> I am.

>> Congratulations.

Laura Heisman

>> Thank you.

>> We saw all the coverage on SiliconANGLE. Rob Strechay was there. I got the selfie he did with you there. And again, congratulations.

Laura Heisman

>> Thank you very much. It was a big week. Thrilled to see the success.

>> Well, we're here at the CMO Leaders . I want to get your perspective. You're an industry veteran also leading a great firm. Congratulations on this business success. First, what was the conference like? How did it go? Give us the highlights.

Laura Heisman

>> It was amazing. We really built it as a customer first conference, and so it was there. We had over 50 customers on stages across the event telling their value of what they do with Dynatrace. And nobody tells it better than customers. You learn from your peers, you learn from similar and different industries and we really showcased that, and it was just amazing to see it.

>> Well, I'm excited that you're here. One, Dynatrace is a cutting edge company really contributing to the AI wave and the technology that you guys are building out and enabling customers to use that's going to feed more of the capabilities with theCube and NYSE Wired community that we're building out. We're seeing a lot of conversations around CMOs because it's just another area where AI is being infused, but it has real impact because it affects customers. The brand stories are now moving with AI, so all these tools are available. And so you've seen the pre-AI, you've lived as a CMO on both sides of the wave.

Laura Heisman

>> I have.

>> Now you're on the right side of the wave. Things are fast, they're furious. We just had Julie Choi on from Cerebras. She's having a very busy week. So if you're on the right side, things going to start to move a little bit fast. How does it feel as a CMO right now, I got to take a temperature. What's it like right now?

Laura Heisman

>> It's invigorating. It's what you were doing a year ago may not be the right thing to do anymore. The things that you were doing five years ago are probably obsolete. It is thinking about how to plan for the future. Dynatrace, our products are AI-based. Everything that we do has AI within it. That's a competitive advantage actually of what we do. So it's within our own products, but then it's also within the business.

>> I want to get into some of the CMO best practices, but I want to get first an understanding how you guys are looking at AI because a lot of the customer zero as they call them in some companies, you got to build your own, you use it, you guys are using AI. How are you guys looking at AI right now as you look at your company? Is it product? Is it process? What are some of the areas you guys are implementing AI to help you guys be more effective?

Laura Heisman

>> So it's multiple areas. It's definitely product because it's built into our product. So we think about it from the business side, but then also from a marketing organization and across the business, it's in our DNA because it's in the product. So therefore, how we all actually act across the businesses, we use AI. And so within marketing, the tools that we use, the way that we think about how we're going to be able to connect better with our customers, that all goes into the process. The content that we build, the way that we're thinking about how we build for the future. It is all has an AI component to it.

>> And you're no stranger to data. Obviously you live it every day with Dynatrace. Data is very valuable. And the marketing side, there's been a generation of MarTech, marketing technology over the years. Email marketing, inbound marketing, performance marketing. Even in the brand marketing, there's been some tools, but now, all that data is now existing for big companies. Startups have a little bit different challenge because they're born in AI, kind of like born in the cloud generation ago. But for most companies, they have to look at what they have and figure it out. How do you approach this and how would you talk to CMOs watching? Okay, there's an opportunity here to lean towards the strategic business goals while serving the objective, which is talk to customers, have them do business with you, retain them. It sounds simple to say it, but it's not. Now that all this other pre-existing. How do you think about that?

Laura Heisman

>> Data is everything. I mean, it's a complex world. There is more and more data. AI is bringing more and more data to us. And so it's how do you make the complexity of data not complex? And as a marketer, we have to think about that as far as simplicity and how do you take that information to simplify it? Whether it be the tools that you're using to make sure that you're using everything and not just investing in things. I mean, that's the biggest thing we look at, and we actually have a governance channel within our company to be sure that we are optimizing everything we invest in. So we don't just go try a bunch of different things. And then we have to look at it from our day-to-day, what are we doing as far as all of our different programs within marketing and how do we use that data to simplify, but also it gives us a lot of insights into what people are doing.

>> I love the comment about governance because this is not obvious to most people who think about marketing, but governance built in from day one is kind of the security side of the AI on the marketing side because obviously, security is built in all technology from day one and now, it's kind of above the line. It's a board level... Marketing has moved above the line, some people say, use this above the line, meaning boardroom level, because governance is the guardrails. And two years ago, you and I did a CUBE interview, two years ago now, you reminded me, I thought it was a year and now it's two, that we had a conversation about the AI trust, safety, just thinking about that piece of it. But now, governance has to be built in. Share your vision on this because a lot's changed since then. More velocity of product, models are getting smaller, faster, cheap. We saw DeepSeek happen. That's kind like the enterprise version of the ChatGPT moment. People go, "Oh, my God, you can be clever and resourceful." Now AI is coming in much faster. What's changed in the AI safety guardrails piece?

Laura Heisman

>> I mean, two years ago, we were watching people get onto ChatGPT and putting things in there that they should never have put, and it was putting businesses at risk. And I remember back then when we first met, I was at another company, but it was a marketing AI council that came together and said, there's a lot of opportunity here, but it was a how are we going to do this while being compliant, while not putting ourselves at risk? And they were really, really on the bleeding edge. And so that's amazing that that was only two years ago. Time goes so fast, it feels like AI's just been part of the conversation now much longer. And then here we are, fast-forward two years, and governance has to be the starting place because if not, you have people that mean the best, but it could get people in trouble. And so you want to be sure that you're going into this with some control. We have a governance council that looks at any AI tool that we're going to invest in to be sure it goes through the security checks, to be sure that there's a need for it, to be sure it's not duplicative of something that we already have. And it all starts there before we can even get it installed and into our systems. And so now, it is let's use the tools, let's be more efficient, let's work towards what AI can do the best for us, but let's be sure that it goes through those checks and balances.

>> What's some of the benefits of doing this? Because some would say, I said it on theCUBE many times that sometimes governance and compliance can slow innovation down, but in this case, this actually accelerates it. So can you share why governance is thought through in the beginning? What are some of the upside benefits there?

Laura Heisman

>> So that's the benefit of doing it at the beginning, because what happens too many times is you start to deploy something and then somebody realizes there's a risk. So this way we do it, we have a committee, it gets fast-paced through that and it doesn't slow us down. And so right away, we know is it going to fit with our systems or is it not? Then we can implement and we can go. And so that's a very different pace than where I've experienced in the past. We've bought something, we've tried it, suddenly a risk, red flag, whatever it is, happens. You're, I don't know, three quarters through the deployment and you go, "I cannot continue this anymore." We've wiped that out. And so it's that risk part that gets assessed early on so that you can go and move forward.

>> Laura, you bring up a good point. And just connecting dots, we've been doing a lot of research around AI transformation projects, certainly in the enterprise infrastructure level is more problematic in the sense of the problem and opportunity is that things are getting stuck in purgatory. I call POC purgatory because the resilience bar is so high, but people haven't figured out, okay, the transformation involves process and platforms and tools. Customers tend to be okay with adjusting process for the benefit of an end-to-end workflow with data that they have. They see value in that. The minute you start saying, "I got to start playing with the tools and platforms," the people who actually built those systems are like, "Whoa, hold on." So it tends to slow down deployment. So okay, that seems to be kind of the current situation, but when you get into the guardrails and integration, people are having success by integrating, not trying to replace tools. First, do you see the same thing? If so or not, what's that mean?

Laura Heisman

>> Well, I think what you mean is by integrating into what we already have. So AI is an addition or integrates into how we think about what we're doing within the marketing organization. It's not a replacement, it's additive. It helps bring out the biggest human potential of the team by being able to integrate into our tool stack, and then also human intuition of what it is that we should be doing. So I agree in the sense that it's a two-part equation. There's AI and then there's the human side and we bring it together to be able to do what's best for our customers.

>> I love the human piece. I want to follow up on that and say, okay, "process and mechanisms", I put that in quotes, sometimes you can get a little bit too focused on metrics and we have a MarTech stack. I've seen some CMOs say, "I got to get this Demand Gen stuff, the metrics." And then figure out, okay, where's the ROI? Wait a minute, what am I trying to do? And then one side, you have look at, I am going to build some craft into the process to leverage the mechanisms. The mechanisms aren't driving the craft. The craft is driving this. You're seeing this in cybersecurity right now, a lot of rules and regulations, but craft is about judgment. It's like being book smart, check, AI, street smart is like the craft. How do you see that in marketing? Because yes, jobs may change, go away in one area, but they'll develop in others. What's your vision on this? Because this is going to be the real conversation because it's not about jobs going away. It's about the better jobs.

Laura Heisman

>> That's exactly it. I mean, it really is about human potential. I think that marketers, if you don't adopt AI and understand the craft of AI, you become legacy and you have to be a modern marketer today. It's not an option. It's not do I want to use AI tools? It's you have to. But that brings out the best of us in humans because AI, we know it. The answers you get, they don't necessarily sound very human.

>> It's book smart.

Laura Heisman

>> It does sound robotic at times or it's overly fluffy because it's got every adjective you can think. And so you need that human intuition. You need that human side of things. And I think actually, what I have found and the feedback I get is employees are happier because it's not the tasks and it's not the day-to-day stuff that they're working on anymore, it is that I can actually apply my expertise. What I bring to the table is used the best because something else has given me that basic level of information and I can actually turn it into this great thing. And so the outcomes I see are better results because you've got that two sides of the coin coming together, and the people are really stepping up and learning a new craft and being able to do better outcomes.

>> Someone was using an example earlier around you got a new engine in the car, but also, you got to get new tires and you got to drive it eventually. And that's the AI. That's happening, so that's all good. I agree. Now the question I want to ask you, because you're a senior executive, you've been at the big companies, so you know what life's like. And for the people who work in a big company, they know you're in budget meetings, you're aligning with the business, you have stakeholders, peers, you have business goals you're trying to do. And when you look at the structural change that AI is going to have to a company, things are evolving. What's your view on this? Because you're starting to see some patterns emerging. In some companies, the CMO aligns with the CFO if it's a transformation project or maybe a business transformation, or CEO, if it's a brand or something strategic, maybe even the CISO if it's a security... So you start to see thinking around that, and then the teams underneath the CMO are changing multiple interdisciplinary capabilities. Digital becomes embedded in comms, AR, and IR. So you're seeing old traditional mechanisms and workflows and organizational structures being looked at. I'm not saying you guys are, I'm just saying in general. In your view, as experienced executive, how's that going to play out in your mind? Because I think that's going to be a conversation around, okay, how do we organize our resources? What's the constraints that we have? Yeah, budgets are always going to be constrained. Budgets aren't going up. No one said, "Hey, we're going to double our budget.", unless there's a big objective and money's being made, but our growth, resources are about team.

Laura Heisman

>> So I look at my job as being I'm there to help the business. So I'm the chief marketing officer, but I'm really there to be able to do great things for the business. And no marketing organization is the same anywhere. I think we all experience that exactly. But no matter what, there are steps to the selling process. So whether you work for a consumer business or an enterprise software business or whatever type of business you work for, there are steps to it. And nowadays, business has changed because people don't want to go to sellers immediately or in some cases, at all. So they want to be able to read, they want to be able to understand content, they want to get their hands on and try things. So that alignment changes across the board. I always say that our marketers are sellers and our sellers are marketers. And it goes across the business. Everybody, I believe, is actually a marketer and they help to be able to describe the company no matter who they are or what role they play. And that is part of selling and that changes how you actually go about customers trying, buying, hearing about you, all of that. So it is a total shift in how organizations are going about working with their customers and letting them know who we are and what we do.

>> I like your view on that because I think marketing something is marketing value. Selling something is selling the car. Hey, can I sell you something? They're different things. One's transactional. Can I sell you my watch? Versus, hey, this is a good opportunity for you. I'm marketing. It's very nuanced and this is really key. AI is kind of a holistic relationship game when you're in the sales process. Some things are transactional, you can market value and then do transactions. Talk about that because I think this is really interesting from a marketing standpoint that marketing is selling in a way because you're marketing value.

Laura Heisman

>> It's building loyalty. I mean, you are selling your value, absolutely. Your ongoing value. A sale is a one-time thing at times. Sometimes it's longer term. But the business is constantly iterating. There are updates. Every company is innovating and wants everyone to know about those innovations. And marketing's there to be able to help make sure that that is known. And again, AI has a part in that because it can help us with the table stakes of explaining or understanding or testing things. But there's the human side also of what is it we should be doing to be able to spread the word, build that loyalty, get the renewals, get the new sale, get the upsell, whatever it is we're trying to do.

>> Laura, it's funny, Dave and I always talk like, "Hey, business is changing radically. Sales and marketing's changing radically, but the game is still the same." A lead is still a lead, lead generation. It's categorical. Marketing is marketing. You have customers, you have support, you have campaigns, cognitive dissonance campaigns, you have all kinds of mechanisms that you know that you do. It's just how you did it is changing.

Laura Heisman

>> Completely.

>> So share your thoughts on, for the folks watching that are looking at their CMO journey in the future, what are some things that you see that are pretty obvious of new things to do, and what areas do you see that would be, in the old school ways, a huge transformation project, something too hard to get at that's possible now? I'll give you an example. Companies like Glean and these search companies that doing the reg, they cracked the enterprise search game, which is hard. It was hard to crack in the previous generation because all these databases are involved. But with AI abstraction layer, they can do it. So there you go. You can easy to find stuff across multiple databases. Traditionally an old, hard problem. In marketing, what are some of those areas that you see that's like, "We've been trying to crack the code on that."? Is it account-based... What's your thoughts? I don't know. That's why I'm asking.

Laura Heisman

>> So we've gone through this major transformation. I mean, if you go 10 years ago, people would say, "Oh, let's just get a billboard up." Now, I think that's much lower in the priorities. Then it was, let's move to digital marketing and let's figure out search optimization and everything else you could think of. Now, that's even decreasing. Stats say it's going to decrease by 25% by 2026. And so the crack, the thing we're trying to crack open, that code that we're trying to crack open is really a thing that everything that has to do with all these LLMs and what's being picked up and what is the code to get picked up and understood because you can't pay to be above the fold of a search engine. You can't pay for certain things. And so that is the magic code that we're all trying to figure out right now so that we can contribute and be heard and therefore build the loyalty and the understanding and everything else that we've been talking about.

>> I was talking to a startup, fractional CMO, which is very hot right now and we'll get to that in a second in startups. They don't need the resource they used to need. They just get a fractional, part-time experienced person with AI, they can do magical things. He said to me, he said, "A lot of the things going out right there is that if my early sales team walks to a customer and they've never heard of us, that's a problem." So brand marketing narratives become interesting. It's not we're going to do a big branding, it's yes, you got to do that, that's the brand promise, but then let's slice the salami into multiple things and then deploy the brand for awareness, which drives organic. Do you see the brand side more important now than ever before or is that just more of the flagship activity?

Laura Heisman

>> Yeah, no, I've been studying this a lot lately. 86% of buyers start with a brand that they know. And so if you are not in that brand that they know, you are not even considered. That's a huge stat because that means from day one, you're not-

>> You're out....

Laura Heisman

>> even being considered.

>> So all the sales is worthless, all the sales costs are pretty much-

Laura Heisman

>> Correct. So you've got to be known. So that is the... Again, it goes back to that golden moment of how do you get people to know your brand? How do you increase that value? And I think AI is going to help a lot because it really does change, like search optimization cost decreasing. It means you can't pay for that, that you have to find other ways to be able to be picked up through all of these different models and languages and everything.

>> You mentioned the billboard, that's exactly why billboards were there, weren't just... Get the brand out there. You mentioned something earlier I want to get your thoughts on because I think awareness has been a big thing. Earned media, which I study a lot, because we're in the organic flow with theCUBE, you talk to comms people, they're like, "We're earned media. We don't pay." Well, sometimes you pay for media, but paid media and performance marketing and search is changing. But in the organic, I go... I always say to them, "Well, who pays your salary?" So you pay for a team to go get earned media, which was the old model of getting on the paper, getting a write-up. Yeah, you want to get on the journal, you want New York Times, you want the mainstream media, great. You want to get some visibility. Those are reach vehicles. Great, no problem with that. But now, that you have an earned media brand opportunity direct in the organics networks, which is you have to earn it. Now, define earned. Because now, that becomes... You don't want to pay for earning it. Reputation is you earn the reputation. You can't buy reputation. So how do you look at earned media? Because that means that comms becomes interesting because you got to go out and earn it. You had an event, you earned it. You guys had a great event, I saw the footage, Rob was there, report back. So you do that. That's what your job is. So take me through because now, comms becomes strategic. What's your thoughts on that? Because this is kind of a new tell sign, we're starting to see a little bit more of that.

Laura Heisman

>> Yeah. Comms itself has changed drastically over the years. It used to be you'd have internal comms, you'd have external comms. Now, everything internal is external. Everything external is internal. It's all one. You need to be able to share. Your employees are just as important as all of the earned media that you get. And really, earned media now, press releases are a thing of the past, but they're a thing of the future. And how you tell your story in a press release, those get picked up by all of these languages, by all of these models. That's really important to think about. How you put information into blogs, that also gets picked up. It's the authority that you put into all of these, what your own content. So it's not just even comms, I'd say it's even broader than that. It's content and how you tell your story and your content, now that's changing because you want to be able to educate all of these models.

>> So it's a living brand activity always.

Laura Heisman

>> Always.

>> So it's an always-on brand.

Laura Heisman

>> Always completely always-on. Whatever model you're using, whatever website, like I said, blog, press release, digital marketing, LinkedIn, whatever it is, it is always-on and everything is captured. There's no going back and erasing the past anymore. It is captured everywhere. And so telling that brand, telling that story through all these mechanisms are to your benefit.

>> Laura, it's great to have you on theCUBE here for this special summit. You've got a great career. You're doing great at Dynatrace. Congratulations.

Laura Heisman

>> Thank you.

>> What advice would you have for CMOs that are breaking into the business or CEOs that are in big company that are in the battle room right now, in the war room going, okay, how do I figure all this out? I want to really kind of reboot my marketing organization. I want to start implementing a modern approach. I might want to lean in here or there. What advice, what best practices, pro tips that you could share?

Laura Heisman

>> We just talked about it, content. Content is king, queen, however you want to put it. It is essential how you tell your story. And then using AI to your benefit, having to figure that out for your business. If you're small, investing in AI can help you in ways where you don't have to go invest in really big teams fast. If you're bigger, you're using AI already and it's being able to use that for exponential growth. And it's just using all of that to think about how to tell your story and your narrative over time.

>> Yeah, the expression, doing more with less has always been around for decades. And that's business. You got to do more with less, but now you can do it.

Laura Heisman

>> Yep.

>> All right, final minute. Give a quick plug for Dynatrace. You had the big event, you hit it at the top. What's going on at Dynatrace? Give a quick update on the momentum and success. You had a new branding. Give us a quick one-minute commercial.

Laura Heisman

>> So it was amazing. Last week, we had perform our conference for all of our users there. We highlighted how we're really helping our customers with their complexities of data and systems and all of the information that they use and how they can then use that information to be able to unlock their businesses and be able to succeed and innovate and be able to push their businesses forward. And so our announcements largely focused on AI observability, developer observability, AI ops, everything you can think of in the now. And we're helping our customers really be able to succeed for their future because they have a lot of data that they need to be able to use and be successful and be able to help their customers.

>> You guys have been doing great. We love observability. It's a super critical aspect of cloud native and what's going to power all the AI applications. Thanks for coming in, really appreciate it.

Laura Heisman

>> Thank you.

>> Okay. We are here for the CMO Leaders, theCUBE and the NYSE Wired community. Brian Baumann, the founder and his team are here today. Open community with theCUBE, sharing content with you. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.