Name: Martina Trucco, At-Bay
Uploaded: 2025-02-14T21:36:00.000Z
Duration: 21 min 19 s

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Martina Trucco

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AT Bay

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Martina Trucco, At-Bay

Martina Trucco

CMO AT Bay

Martina Trucco, the chief marketing officer of AtBay, joins theCUBE to share her insights on the evolving role of CMOs at the CMO Summit. Hosted by John Furrier in Palo Alto, the discussion delves into how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping marketing strategies and the importance of aligning CMO functions with sales goals. Trucco emphasizes the significance of revenue in her role, highlighting how brand value is ultimately tied to the bottom line. She discusses collaborative dynamics with go-to-market teams to ensure marketing objectives align with business... Read more

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Martina Trucco, At-Bay

>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in our Palo Alto Studios. We're talking about the CMO Summit. These are the leaders in the CMO area, marketing area, around how AI is changing and transforming the world, in combination with the NYC Wired community. Martina Trucco is here, the CMO of AtBay. Martina, great to see you on this side of theCube. Usually we see you at the events.

Martina Trucco

>> That's right. First time for me. Thank you so much for having me.

>> Well, I was super excited that you're coming on because it's the CMO Leaders Summit, and we've had many conversations off camera around how do you use organic, how do you use social, how do you use data? How do you get content out there? You've touched many things that CMOs do to drive engagement in sales.

Martina Trucco

>> That's right.

>> This is the name-

Martina Trucco

>> That is the name of the game, actually. I think not enough people realize that for the CMO, job number one is revenue. Everybody likes to talk about brand, but the reason brand is important is because of revenue. And the reason a really good connection with the go-to-market team is important is because of revenue. That's why we're here. It's the revenue, as I like to say. So I think that's always a great place to start, is to remind ourselves, what are we doing here? What is our purpose?

>> And I have so many horror stories that people share with me around the ROI. "We have to manufacture numbers and just fake it up here, and then we're good. We have ROI." Well, what's the sales increase? Right? At the end of the day, the scoreboard-

Martina Trucco

>> Definitely.

>> What's on the scoreboard is sales.

Martina Trucco

>> Right. The business's objectives or marketing's objectives. Everything else is below the line. Right?

>> I got to ask you, so one of the things that's coming up in the CMO Summit is that interdisciplinary skills at the CMO level, whether it's the CMO or the team working together becomes critical because now you're starting to see more holistic campaigns that are less one-and-done. You go to an event, you stand up a booth, you shut it down, someone else takes over. Digital is a separate department. This is all changing. What's your take on the ability to have a diverse interdisciplinary skill set?

Martina Trucco

>> It's a must-have, for sure. And I think part of your job as a CMO is first to know, what kind of CMO are you? What kind of a marketing executive are you? You always want to be T-shaped, I think, right? So you need to be good at overseeing everything. But usually, you've come up through a couple of areas that you were really strong. And so knowing, what does this company need from you? And then what do you bring to the table? And then so that also tells you, who are the people that you need around? Because you need people that are even better than you are to have an amazing team. And that thing that you said about actually having everyone not siloed in the marketing department, I just think is more critical than ever.

>> I love the T superpower metaphor because you have to have that holistic view, but also you have to have a superpower. So two questions. What is your T? How do people figure out their T? Sometimes you get lost in the swimming through all the mechanisms, and some people may take their eye off the prize.

Martina Trucco

>> Right. Lots of frameworks, right?

>> Yeah. So what's your T? And how do people understand? First of all, your last name begins with T.

Martina Trucco

>> That's right.

>> So that's good. So what is your T? And how do people figure it out?

Martina Trucco

>> Yeah, I think for me, a couple of things that I joke around about, also that I'm a marketer by accident. I started out in strategy and portfolio management. And so for me, what that meant was I always had a really strong connection to the product and working with product teams. And so that combined with having a lot of experience building technology brands, for me, what that really has meant is that I'm really strong in brand and thought leadership, but also the product marketing fundamentals that make for really, really good storytelling. And I think that's really different than someone who may have come up from a performance marketing culture where they were super deeply invested in rigorously building these campaigns that are driving revenue. And so I think that part of your ability to figure out what you're great at is one, what do you love doing as a marketer? Because I think that's the best way to have a great time at work. But also, a lot of it comes from the experience that you've built up over your career. And I think for marketers, those who have come up in the profession have really typically had one or a few paths where they've got that deep experience and that really helps you have that area that you know what you're working on.

>> Martina, is there a persona of Ts? Like you mentioned performance marketing. If I'm a CEO, I want to know who I'm working with, so I'm interviewing or talking to folks. How do you put these into buckets? And if you can. Everyone's different. Everyone's got their own kind of thing, but is there a categorical... Performance marketing is pretty obvious. You know who those people are because they're good at what they do. Performance based, growth hacking.

Martina Trucco

>> You know certainly what they're good at. But even within there, there's a lot of specialization. And I think the question that you asked is such a fundamental question that CEOs really need to think about when they are hiring a CMO. And especially here in the Bay Area where we have so many hyper-growth companies. The person that you need, if you're hiring a CMO for a series A rapidly scaling company, is really different than the type of person that you need to run a company that is D or E and is now getting ready to go public. And so I think you first need to look at, what is the company stage? Where are you on that growth journey? What does the company need? What kind of company are you? It's really different if you are B2C versus B2B, right? And so I think looking at what you need as a company, and then you figure out that match and you say if you're trying to do a big play and you're trying to create a category, you need a CMO who has deep experience in thought leadership and figuring out how to build category. And then again, even within those performance marketers, you want to look in there and see, what have they really focused on? Is it account-based marketing or have they really focused on B2C campaigns? Because it's a completely different skillset.

>> So would you put people in the categories like, okay, performance marketing, brand, you have brand folks-

Martina Trucco

>> Definitely. Yep.

>> What are other categories that you would-

Martina Trucco

>> Product marketers, I think would be-

>> Archetype someone?

Martina Trucco

>> Yeah. Product marketing is definitely, I think one of those other really areas that you can be really T-shaped in where you've been riding shotgun throughout your career with those product teams, bringing something to market, doing that messaging and positioning. And so I think those are your big domain areas.

>> I was talking to a guest yesterday who was part of the program and he was saying for startups, you might not want to hire a full-blown CEO because your strategy, the T there is get the beachhead, which is product-led. It's pretty product-focused because-

Martina Trucco

>> Very much.

>> The value proposition is what's going to entice the transaction, the sale.

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> So marketing the value proposition is very much a product marketing thing.

Martina Trucco

>> It is.

>> And then once you get your series C funding, then you can scale. It's more of a scaling question. So take me through that nuance. Explain the difference between the folks watching that. It's a much different world if you're a startup from series A to series C and then series C to public offering.

Martina Trucco

>> That's right. I think brand is definitely something that you build over many years and then you reap the rewards, you harvest the seeds that you were able to sow many years later. And so you can't ignore it from the beginning. But I do think you're spot on in that in the early days, getting validation from the market on the product is critical. And so the positioning of the product and getting that across is huge. And I think a lot of times what starts out being your brand strategy there is really about positioning the company and often about positioning the executive and the mission. And that usually goes a long way because you don't have as many proof points. Everybody's going on belief in those early stages until you start to see that flywheel going. And then I think as you go later stages, to your point, what's really critical is starting to specialize the team for scale. So that's something that for me, when I made the transition from being at big companies where we've known each other since my HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise days to going, getting the startup bug, that's where you realize when you go to a team instead of 150 people, where maybe you've got 15 or 20, what you really want to do as you're moving that team and growing them is figuring out where do you bring in those specialists now to build out those functions where maybe you had people who were generalists who were playing a bunch of different positions. And I think that's the big shift from the earlier stages to getting ready to be that professional world-class team that you know want to build towards.

>> Team formation is critical. I love that point. I had to ask you about the structural change. AI's going to be coming in. It's here.

Martina Trucco

>> It's here.

>> It's going to get accelerated. So we'll get into some of the things on how you see it unfolding in the tactical way. But alignment with executives is critically starting to see coalitions where security, we saw this in security when we've talked about this off camera, security has been below the line. But then recently, obviously in many years it's come up. It's a boardroom issue. Marketing is been below the line a little bit in some companies. Then it's been coming up the line. So building a coalition with the CEO or CFO, how do you see those relationships forming? They're different in different companies, but if it's a CMO with the CFO, maybe it's an ROI equation. So again, back to sales seems to be the theme. What structural alignment do you see the CMO changing or doubling down on? And then how do you look at the silo piece of departments and things like that nature?

Martina Trucco

>> Yeah. I think it comes back to what I said in the beginning, which is it's all about the revenue. And so when you look at that, that means that the go-to-market has to be a shared objective. And so the CMO and the chief revenue officer have to be in lockstep to say, "Okay. This is the goal that we have. As the marketing lead, what do I need to deliver to you when it comes to pipeline? What do you need in terms of being able to then convert that?" And then also the thing that's overarching all of it, which I think sometimes we can forget, is the customer is the through line through all of it. And so if you think about that entire life cycle of the customer, once you've acquired that customer, marketing's job is also to help retain that customer, remind them of the value that the company has delivered to them. But all of that is always in service of, what are the business objectives? When it comes to, I think there's all different kinds of executives out there. I think I have always felt luckiest when I've had a CFO who is also a really communications marketing-minded CFO because then those conversations are incredibly clear. They're incredibly straightforward when you get someone that has that clear dialogue with you and then it's less about trying to justify numbers on a spreadsheet. And it's really always coming back to, what are the business objectives? What do we need to invest to get there? What do we know is going to be the outcome of this? And let's go do it.

>> It's a shared scoreboard. Customers, customer retention, revenue, all drives the number.

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> Everything else is underneath. I want to ask you about AI coming into the workflow. So obviously marketing is a great vertical where there's great use cases. Writing blog posts, doing copy, ChatGPT, everyone started using it, but now you're starting to see a more operational integration around the intellectual property of the workflows and the data. So real time becomes big. So you're starting to see more automation and reduced heavy lifting. But now the role of marketing, because more of an operator, you're lever pulling and pushing buttons, how do you see that unfolding in the marketing areas and what is the disruptive enablement? Disruptive is the key word because it's going to disrupt.

Martina Trucco

>> It's going to disrupt. I'll tell you my hot take on this is that I think the CRM systems of today and the systems of record that we have invested so much in are going to be obsolete in a couple of years because of AI agents. I just think that... There's actually a really interesting take that a lot of people have been looking at, which is Klarna came out a few months ago and talked about how they had gotten rid of Salesforce and then Workday because they trained their AI agents against that entire corpus of data. And then they built internal systems to handle all of that. And if you think about that, where today you can ask in a very natural way to an LLM, "What was the sales in the Southwest region last quarter?" You needed to build an entire system to do that before. You don't need that anymore. And so I think that is the thing that is going to be crazy in marketing. Because so many of us have invested, again, our entire careers in understanding how to build a marketing automation stack, how to tune that thing so that it sings and you can run your campaigns. It's happening, and I think this is the next big thing that's coming for us.

>> Well, I've been using the martech stack as a pinata all week because it's a lot that, you can pound that all day long and-

Martina Trucco

>> Totally.

>> Take swings at it.

Martina Trucco

>> We love to hate it.

>> Well, there's double sides of that coin, right? Because there's data in there. So the question is, are we extracting that data? Are the agents overlaying on top? Can I get value out of that data?

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> And then the cost for that. So I can see the buy-build philosophy of, "Hey, I'm paying X to this vendor. I can just code away and then have this interface be more natural for my users." So the martech stack has been this legacy set of mechanisms. Data becomes the critical piece in all this and the workflow. So martech stacks has been classic. I've talked to CMOS and said, "Hey, my first year in the job, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to establish the martech stack. Get my series B funding."

Martina Trucco

>> Sometimes that's what you need to do, right? You need an engine inside the car.

>> Yeah. So how do people deal with the current engine? They go, "Okay, I'm racing now on the track and the other car is better. The competition has a better engine and better tuned vehicle."

Martina Trucco

>> Yeah. I definitely think to your point, the data is ultimately the thing that you're working towards. And so if you're building the martech stack today, maybe you're going to build with what's out there today and they're good solutions. But I think what's critical is to make sure that you know what it is that you need to know, what kind of data do you need to bring in to enrich what you need to know about your customers? What does sales need to enrich their outreach? And capturing all of that, capturing all the signal and the buyer intent through your particular sales process, I think is the most important thing. And then, will the technologies that actually are in there that help you leverage that data and turn it into insights or turn it into campaigns that you execute, will those change? Absolutely. Where I do think where AI is going to make a really interesting difference in terms of the value is, I think companies that are adding value are going to be the ones that help democratize this for a non-technical consumer. Again, if you look at that example where we talked about Klarna, there's an entire engineering team in-house that is doing that. For a series B company where the decision is build your product or build a MarTech stack, it's very clear that you should be investing in the product. You focus on your core. So a company that comes in and gives you value in terms of taking away that complexity and making it a little bit more democratized for a non-technical user, I think there's a ton of value in that, in being able to spread this around to companies.

>> Yeah, you bring up a good point. This has come up on other interviews where some previous guests have been saying, I brought up, "Hey," the big enterprises like the big banks. And they're like, "No, it's not about the big companies. It's the ones in the middle that are most vulnerable." On security, for instance.

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> And marketing, the same thing applies where it's like they don't have the big budgets.

Martina Trucco

>> Yep.

>> So getting-

Martina Trucco

>> Everything has to work harder.

>> Yeah. So that's an opportunity. So either you see them developing AI what should a growing company... Let me rephrase. What would your advice be if you were the CMO of, say, a series B company that has to establish operations, number one? The second one is, I'm a growth company, I got to grow. And then the existing, I'd say enterprise, big enterprise, but not the super brand, big budgets, but they have a lot of inertia, so startups. You're the CMO of a startup, growth and then established company. What do you do?

Martina Trucco

>> Let's see. Well-

>> With AI.

Martina Trucco

>> That's a tall prescription so let's see if we can-

>> We have 10 minutes. Go.

Martina Trucco

>> We can break it down in 10 minutes.

>> No, no. Hit me with it.

Martina Trucco

>> Ultimately, I think what it comes down to is today, I think a lot of the value isn't augmenting the team that you've got. And so first you have to come back to, you got to know what it is that you're working on. But I think when it comes to things like using AI in a really useful way to help you augment your content creation, to help slice and dice, or as I like to say, we joke about it in my team. You carve the content turkey. You made a great turkey. You got to slice it up in lots of ways so that you have leftovers the next day too. AI is really good at helping you make that happen and just doing it a lot faster. And so I'll give you a really good example, which is super fun. We had done a piece last year on financial fraud, which is the number one cyber crime right now based on all of our research. And so we did a whole piece on, "Here's these things that you need to know and here's how to protect your company." And then so for the holidays, we're like, "Can we do something fun?" And we gave it to the AI that we're using on content. We said, "Rewrite this from Santa's perspective. How does Santa keep the North Pole safe from financial fraud?" And then of course they rewrote it about checking the vendor for the reindeer feed and-

>> Supply chain.

Martina Trucco

>> Exactly. Mrs. Claus's supply chain for the cookies. And that's the kind of thing that it's lighthearted and fun and so it maybe wouldn't be worth it if you only have a couple of people who are working on all these things, but AI can really accelerate you getting there. That one's really a little bit frivolous, but we've had lots of great examples.

>> That's enjoyable, that's entertaining, but also it might not be the most strategic to sales, but it actually hits your targeted customer in a way that's clever and innovating, but it's part of the holistic program.

Martina Trucco

>> It absolutely is. And that's where that balance comes back to where we talked about brand is a thing, an affinity that you've built over many years. These are the touch points that build that as well. And so I think for an early-stage company, figuring out how to be able to do a lot of things at the same time, AI can really augment your team and help you do that. I think as you start to grow, again, some of the things that I think are really exciting are things like, for example, when you look at advertising, how do things like the video AI generators or the image AI generators come into play to help your creative team and your design team just move so much faster? If I think about the hours that my design teams and I have spent looking at stock photography to find the perfect shot because we didn't have time to do a shoot, and how can we get this for this website that conveys this idea, it's that time spent is being radically reduced, and that is a huge efficiency for the team, and that unlocks your ability to do a lot more A-B testing, a lot more piloting of campaigns. And I think that's the key thing for companies who are scaling is being able to move through that experimentation.

>> Agility.

Martina Trucco

>> Yes, the agility and the time saved and being able to do that is second to none.

>> You put up a great point about time saving and also the steps it takes to do stuff. And if you look at the value of AI, if you look at reducing friction, but reducing the steps it takes to do something, making it easier is key. We've worked together over the past decade in multiple companies you've been involved in. Content marketing, we'd love content marketers. We're in the content business.

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> But there's a new way to engage, right? So what's your take on companies that want to, who have been doing content market, maybe slow not getting it right, but now have an opportunity with AI to reconstitute a workflow or establish a new team? What would you do as a content strategist for a marketer saying, "Hey, this is what we want to do for the next five years"?

Martina Trucco

>> I think it comes down to the core of it has to be the perspective that you have. You need a POV. Ideally, you've got something to teach people. I fundamentally believe education is the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to thought leadership and content marketing. And if you give someone something of value, you teach them something, they're going to remember your brand. And so you've already done the right thing. You don't need to beat them over the head with it. So I think the core of it is really understanding, what is it that you're going to tell people, what is valuable to them. And then once you do that, I think that's the nugget where your people and their brain power need to be operating on. And then there's so much of that that then can be transformed into all of these things that appear across the content, the multiverse of content. And that's where AI really, I think augments the team. And so in our case, we do a lot of original research in terms of security risks and cyber crime trends and things like that. And so that really forms the core of it. And then we say, "Okay. How can we, after we've done that work, we've done that research, we have that perspective, how do we then bring that to life, contextualize it for security audience versus a business audience versus an insurance audience?" And it really depends on who you're talking to.

>> And the objectives you got mind share-

Martina Trucco

>> Absolutely.

>> Nurturing, cognitive dissonance.

Martina Trucco

>> Yep.

>> And prospect-

Martina Trucco

>> And then you break it down and you really think about what level in the funnel are you? Are you doing a very high level thought leadership piece to build category? Are you doing something that connects it to the brand? Are you making it then connected to the product or something more transactional? You have to think about the strategy as you build all those things together, but it always comes down to that nugget of what's that idea that you have and that point of view that you're going to teach people.

>> Martina, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspective on our CMO Leaders series, what are you doing and why, and making it go faster.

Martina Trucco

>> Been a lot of fun, John. Thanks so much for having me.

>> Thanks for coming on. Okay. We are here in Palo Alto for theCUBE. CMO leaders with the NYC Wired community. Brian Baumann, the founder and team are here. Big reception going on with 100 CMOs tonight. We'll see you later. Thanks for watching.