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Surbhi Agarwal

CMO

Applied Intuition

play_circle_outline Importance of AI for CMOs

play_circle_outline Impact of AI on understanding target audiences and creating targeted messaging

play_circle_outline Real-time data and decision-making in marketing

play_circle_outline Strategic Implementation of AI: Leveraging Technology and Talent for Marketing Success

play_circle_outline Importance of brand repetition and revenue impact in account-based marketing

play_circle_outline Mastering the Golden Triangle: Customer-First Approach, AI Caution, and Effective Product Marketing Strategies

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Surbhi Agarwal

Surbhi Agarwal

CMO Applied Intuition

Surbhi Agarwal, chief marketing officer of Applied Intuition, joins theCUBE's CMO Leaders series to discuss the evolving role of AI in marketing strategies. A seasoned B2B marketer, Agarwal sheds light on the transition from traditional playbooks to AI-driven approaches that enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency. Interviewed by theCUBE Research and analysts, she explores the opportunities AI presents for chief marketing officers (CMOs) in enhancing speed and data utilization.

Key takeaways from the discussion focus on understanding cus... Read more

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What are some insights on the opportunities for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in integrating AI into their strategies, given the context of past industry transformations such as the internet boom and mobile boom? add

What are some benefits of using AI in market research for B2B marketers? add

What are some examples of using real-time data for marketing and business decision-making? add

What are some considerations a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) should take into account when setting goals for their company? add

What are some important factors that CEOs should consider beyond just leads, conversions, and dollar per lead when evaluating marketing outcomes and the impact on revenue? add

What key factors should CMOs consider in their organizational structure and technology adoption to ensure they are not blindly following biased or inaccurate AI-generated content strategies? add

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>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE are here for the CMO Leaders series program with theCUBE and NYSE Wired community. Surbhi Agarwal, CMO of Applied Intuitions here, seasoned B2B marketer. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you last night at the reception at the NYSE Wired party/reception.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> It was fun.

>> It was a lot of fun. Brian Baumann and the team were there, so it's really great. TheCUBE team was there as well. What's been clear is that the engagement around CMOs is super high. I always love the CMO opportunity with AI because I see value with what we do with theCUBE, but now you're starting to see the operational mindset of a CMO who's out either in a big company or even as a startup, see value in reaching customers faster because AI is about speed and data.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> And efficiency.

>> And efficiency. So you can actually put that together at all stages of the life cycle of a company. So it's not as siloed playbooks, you can actually get the job done. So we were chatting about that briefly. What's your take on the AI wave right now for CMOs? You're leading a company right now. What's the opportunity for CMOs from your view?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Well, there's a huge opportunity for CMOs to think through AI and how to bring it into their strategies. I work for Applied Intuition, which is a series E company. I took the company from series D two E very recently, just last year. But there are a lot of things which are happening. If you take a step back, in my experience of last over 20 years in the industry, the first transformation was the internet boom and then came the mobile boom. These are very pivotal to think through what AI would mean. Any of these big changes, it impacts how you're thinking and impacting human behavior. Now, if you think about the internet boom, it got brands very close to the consumers. You were not just exposed to brands through TV commercials or internet or radios. Now you had internet to literally type gap.com and learn about products and technology. It was more like a two-way conversation starting to happen. Similarly, when mobile came, the technology moved to your nightstand into your pockets, and there was a lot of user generated data and creativity which came along with it. So we have seen burst in mobile payments in apps like Snapchat and so forth. So whether we are thinking more from a consumer standpoint or for B2B, my whole experience is B2B, but ultimately it's B2B2C, because large companies like enterprises are also building products and solutions which impact and benefit the consumers. So for CMOs, if you think about it, they have to really think through not just the strategies, but how can they impact or change human behavior? How can they understand their market better and then how can they take it through the entire journey? And AI has done a fantastic job very recently Perplexity announced their campaign, Shop Like a Pro. It really shows you how with one click you can buy a product. So if you are a busy mom ordering a diaper for your kid or a student designing your dorm room, it's so easy. Just quick search, provide your preferences, price preferences, style, and you can just with one click purchase it all. So it's really amazing.

>> I always used to love that phrase from the dorm room to the boardroom and everything in between because you could do whatever you want with the internet, direct navigation, replace direct mail, and some of the money that went into print, and that was a big pie that got bigger for the online side. You mentioned the mobile piece. I think that was a really cool point because that brought in your pocket, nightstand. Now AI is here now, we are born in the AI world now with data. What does it replace? What changes in your mind? Because I think what we're seeing now is hyper privatization, so you got the self-service with the web, direct navigation, find what you're looking for. Search comes out of that. Mobile is more intimate relationship, user-generated content, and then you're getting at something where it's the B2B to the customer where you can actually think about the customer's customer.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Absolutely.

>> Okay. And then help that process be much more active versus buy my software and good luck. Let me know how it works versus now being participant. What's your view on this? I think this is where I see really good opportunities for B2B marketers to be like B2C, if you will, but B2B2C.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think in B2B space, just understanding your customer is even more pivotal, because we are working with large enterprises with thousands of people. It's not just an account name. You're not just looking at 20 accounts, but you're actually looking at thousands of people, hundreds and thousands of people working in these accounts. The way I look at it is how do you understand these target audiences much more deeper so that you can create targeted narrative messaging so that it's more relevant to them. Now with AI, you are able to do that much better because with market research, which is AI driven, you're able to get to the intent data very quickly, which was never existing in the past. So all the B2B marketeers were really working with their sales team, customer support team to figure this out or just read Gartner reports out there. But now you can take a much more active stance by understanding your customer at a much deeper level. From there, you design your campaigns and your outputs to the customer in the sense what messaging are they seeing, what CTAs are they looking at? CTAs are call to action. Should they be coming back to your website? Should there be a demo that should be presented to them and next steps? I'm very data driven and my organization runs like that. Being an engineer, I run marketing really black and white, and that really helps us understand the intent for the customer. What do they care about? What messaging should we provide to them? What happens next, and the whole cycle, because it's not just a very linear path. As all the marketeers know, it's so challenging to understand whole dark funnel and beyond, and I think that's the magic which AI brings in. I would just say that it's not completely solved. I think AI is still evolving, right? There's strategies, there are tools out there, there are products out there, but it's not like one product which fits all. We have a CRM system, whether it's Markitor or HubSpot. You can start with the foundational elements. You start building your whole AI mar-tech stack, marketing stack. But I think the challenge is there's still much many more point tool solutions that you have to build in to really create that demand, understand the customer and deliver outcomes.

>> Great insights I want to put aside for a second. We'll come back to your superpower, but every CMO has that superpower that they ground on and then kind of holistically integrate in. But you brought up Gartner and you brought up some of these things like the mar-tech stack. Those older systems have data in them and also the operations of marketing has always been, I mean, I'll say lagging, but in the sense of time to get the data. So they have data, they do things in market, you got CTAs, you've got performance marketing, all these things. But now the cycle of data coming back into the system is faster. So talk about that aspect of real time because if you're in the rearview mirror, you're lagging. It's like a video game. No one wants to play a video game lagging and players playing video, they know that's not good. You get killed all the time. It was multiplayer game, but your dashboards are okay, can see dashboards being okay, last quarter we had sales. But when you get into the personalization where you're actually pushing stuff out, the blowback of positive data coming in, if you're not understanding that in real time, it's not there. And if research is lagging and hey, that report's great, but that was started six months earlier, the leads came in six months other than we're in the good leads. So mechanisms like email marketing, traditional research, they're all being disrupted. So what's your view on this? Because real time is becoming a tactical advantage.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Real time is magic. I launched one of the real time products at Google Cloud way back over five, six years ago. I'll tell you from a marketing and a business leader standpoint, even this is a message for CEOs also. They need to understand their customer and their intent in real time. What that means is what are they purchasing, why are they purchasing and how is that impacting? Now for CMOs in particular, I'll give you two really cool examples that we have used, which I personally really like. One is A-B testing. Now, A-B testing is around for a while. We know you throw a campaign A, throw a campaign B, and then try comparing them. What happens is if you're not doing that in real time, you're doing it in every, say 48 hours or five days, you're already losing that much interest. There's no lack of data. In fact, the data has grown multiple folds right now. I'm a big proponent of garbage in, garbage out, GIGO. I grew up with that as a engineering, in my engineering side, and I truly believe that if we are leading with slow data or historic data, there'll be a lot of bias in the system. How we are making decisions will not be impactful because you're not understanding the fast evolving consumer behavior, the human behavior out there. And that's so important for both CMOs as well as CEOs as they're making decisions. There has to be a flywheel, a very fast approach, very fast flywheel. You can't wait for quarterly dashboards. You can't even wait for weekly dashboards. It's happening on an hourly basis and sometimes even by the minute. The other example I'll give you beyond A-B testing is how marketers are using different technologies for search engine optimization as well as social media strategies. There are multiple tools out there. How do you put something on LinkedIn which grabs attention, which grabs engagement? That's one place where all of us are trying to go forward with. But what does a consumer see or what does your actual user see is very important. If you're doing talent branding, if you're trying to grow your organization, it's even more pertinent to have them to understand what do we do? Why do we do? Are we targeting the right audience? Is there a direct fit or not? And that is the feedback loop that comes in from many different audience types and all together in the organization, and this is where the marketing leads.

>> So you're a fan of fast?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Absolutely.

>> Get stuff out fast and have mechanisms in place. So first of all, love that insight. My mind gets blown. I'm a CMO, like, oh man, that's really, I love, but my head just exploded. Take me through how to do it. What's the playbook? Because a lot of people recognize that they got to do things differently. So a little bit of a change management kind of mindset of, okay, I don't want to blow up the whole village to just bring in the new, how do I phase it in? I might have a mar-tech stack. Do I kill that? Or I just abstract on top of it? You're starting to see AI be a facilitator to make more efficient. What was harder things to do in the past? Yeah, I could have get that dashboard because it's just too much development time. I didn't have the budget. I was too tired, want to go home. Whatever reason or excuse it either was structural, technical or just not enough time. What changes with AI in your mind and how do people start the path?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, I think first starts with the goal. Not every CMO would have the same goal. Depending on which stage of the company they are in, which year they are in, which quarter they are in, their goals may be very different. Now my approach is doing more with less. I learned that in my previous job as a CMO at Yellow.ai, doing more with less, especially in a high growth startup, you have to adopt that hat. With that it means you have to think through three aspects of it. Are you ready to adopt AI technology? Do you have the right talent to do that? Is there a need or you're just being told to do that? Is there a need that you're solving for? And then what is the business outcome? What is the impact, which is are you able to drive efficiency doing more with less? I think that's something which is very, very important. That's the baseline. For all startup CMOs they know how budgets are so important. We always try to be budget-friendly. Even in large companies, even at Google Cloud, we are very strict on how do we use the budget, where do we use it and why? So if you think about it for CMOs today, what they should be looking at if they're trying to solve for, let's divide the customer cycle, customer journey in three phases, top of the funnel, middle funnel and bottom of the funnel. Top of the funnel they're looking at a lot of market research, understanding data, collecting insights and so forth. This is where your foundational elements have to be very clean. It's imperative. You have to have your mar-tech stack really clean. Does not mean you have to rip and replace everything. There are point tools which can be added on top of it. There are tools out there which even LinkedIn provides more like sales Navigator, so which are like add-on plugins. Many people don't even know about it. How to use them, how to generate insights. You may be paying for a premium version of LinkedIn, but you really don't know how to use it from an enterprise use standpoint. So first, explore what you have, evaluate where you are, and then add those point tools. I will tell you, I have done migrations for CRM, power.to, HubSpot in this company from A to B. You have to sometimes do that for cost reasons, efficiency reasons, and also how you can get things more faster. The second piece, when you come more to the middle of the funnel stage, John, I think it's really important to navigate the campaign design, campaign optimization. I don't believe dashboarding and all that comes much later. For me, predictive analytics is what I led with even six years back and even today with AI, that has become much more faster. So how do you do that? You bring in the right technology and the right people. This is this place where you definitely need more talented people because you're building new ways of content. Content is becoming more snippety, more video-based. How can you use newer forms of content? It doesn't have to be long form anymore. It depends on what market you are in, which problem you're solving for. Your users maybe looking for much more short form of content or engaging content. How do we define that? So various forms of new content have come out, reels and short videos and podcasts and other format. So how can you create those content is very important. Who are you targeting it to, even more important. So your product marketing organization who are actually trying to understand need and build products, this is the place where they should be really plugged in to understand what technology to use. How do you take the market research in, build something which will be valuable for the bottom of the funnel? It's no more about win-loss analysis. It's no more about MQL to SQL. I truly think that the whole approach of this whole linear cycle of taking leads to MQLs, to SQLs and ops is so outdated that that is not how we approach -

>> And what replaces it. Brand and content, because you bring in a couple of points here that I think are cool, which is if product marketing's involved growth, product value proposition is what sells the customer. So content is data and you could have diverse cuts of data, the nuggets, the reels, the long form for podcasts, so website content. So content seems to be one brand. What replaces the linear lead MQS?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> It's account-based marketing. That's something like a keyword you may have heard from a lot of marketeers, but many of them use it as just a keyword. But I will tell you what that means in very simple language. You have to understand your account, segment them, as we always do. Whale accounts, just high value accounts, mid-tier, long tail accounts. Now you would create specific programs, one-to-one programs for these high touch accounts, white glove approaches, round tables, dinner events, and so forth. For the mid-tier, you would have much more like one-to-many kind of programs, and then for the long tail could be more organic. You are not spending any dollars, they're just coming to your website.

>> Yeah, little Demand Gen action.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Exactly. I think where most of the CMOs are still stuck in, they're trying to use a strategy for the long tail and thinking that would work for the top, like their whale accounts. I like to call them whale accounts because they give us the most value. There is a complete different approach. Some people call it ABM, some people call it ABX. It's account-based experience. How do you deliver that customer experience in the way that it's most impactful? And these are large accounts that we are talking about.

>> So what and the why is different because the strategies are different based upon the segmentation. Because you're either selling more through the account, the relationships are fairly targetable.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> So this is the stage where you need to get new resources in your organization who understands account-based marketing. The outcome of it is not just directly like okay, leads, right? Because many CEOs will ask how many leads, how much conversion, how much dollar per lead? No, you're looking at brand repetition. You're looking at the depth of connections that you're making in a particular account and the impact of it in terms of revenue. Because as a CMO you have to be really, really closely tied to the revenue. So I think that's something very important, and this is where you can buy new technology. There are tools out there like SixSense, Demandbase. Demandbase is more traditional. It's been out there, but there are newer technology which is actually being able to understand customer intent and so forth, and you would try to stitch it all together. At Applied Intuition we don't use any of those products just yet. We have our own system that we built in our own space.

>> So you built your own system?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> We built our own systems. We get point tools, see what works for us, pile it and pivot and so forth. We are not just putting all the eggs in one basket because that doesn't work for our business. So again, it's -

>> A lot of people are actually looking at building their own systems because of the user experience uptake-

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Absolutely.

>> Making sure everyone's on the same page with the tools.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah.

>> Well, this is a masterclass. I have to ask you one more follow-up question. This is phenomenal. Okay, I'm going to deploy this segmentation. I have to see that relevant. I know you do work with a lot of startups, have a lot of startup experience. Startups are like the canary in the coal mine. They're like the deep seek style mindset 'cause they have constraints. Everyone has to do more with less, depending on where you are. Some say, "Oh yeah, doing more or less with the rich big companies is a lot different because their version of less is still huge." But if you're a startup, they're usually the canary in the coal mine pointing at tools. What do you see startups using for AI tools right now to do things like demand gen? Because that's a nice mid-range one to many, and then I'll see the demand gen, the long tail is okay, use the tools because you don't need to deploy people if you're going to hit the long tail. And then obviously the whales is a different stretch. It's more direct, but mid-range to long tail. So the torso, the belly, and the tail and the power law. How would you describe the cutting edge pro-tip or tools for companies to implement? And usually the startups seem to have a good 'cause they're optimized.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, we optimize because we test, fail, pivot very fast, right?

>> What's your go-to?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, so I think the biggest go-to is using additional add-on tools on LinkedIn, like I was telling you. Sales Navigator is a great tool to use, not just by the sales team, but also by the marketing team. How do we design our campaigns? How do we understand the market? If you're sending invites for, say, events that we are hosting, we would use that as well from there. There are other databases and tools out there like Bombora and others, how you would fit it all together in, it's very important to define those journeys. I truly am not a proponent of just buying one tool and just pushing it all out. We have done that mistake, by the way, in my previous company, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a particular demand-gen tool and then-

>> You're locked in.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> We were not able to, yeah. And as a SaaS business, which is spreading across multiple different industries, you would just get a lot of noise also, because with the PII and the data privacy, you would not be able to identify who from Gap really visited your website. You would know a person in the age group of X or demographic of Y or a location of Z is visiting you. But that's still quite broad because it's Gap and we are talking about such large organizations. So in order to sliver it down, it's really important that as you're designing your campaigns, you're bringing in these strategies so that you continue to identify and get closer and closer and closer to your customer and your user. It's very important.

>> Sorry, I'm writing all this stuff down. We are very lean, mean team here. We're going to think about these tools and a lot of marketers are thinking, okay, I want to reset, but I have my existing data set and data stacks or mar-tech stacks as you mentioned, or I got to bring in new ones. What strategies do I take? So all these questions are great, so thanks for sharing. I guess my next question would be structurally organizations are changing. You mentioned your engineering focus guides you, which by the way, I think is really relevant. This market, you have to engineer this. It's not like the software's going to do all the work. I really like how you're thinking about the engineering side of it because market engineering is a concept that you have to engineer your execution. And so I love that. That's your superpower. How should CMOs leverage? Everyone has their own superpower. So what are some of the archetypes that you see in CMOs out there in your peer group around their approach? Some people are more performance marketing, some are more metrics, some are more mar-tech, some are more data-driven or data-specific, like yourself. What are the archetypes in marketing? And then how should they leverage that archetype to one think holistically?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, a hundred percent. I think what I've seen is my peers coming in the CMO journey, either they were always marketeers doing something very passionate from a marketing standpoint, whether they were doing brand or creative or coming from performance marketing standpoint, my career path was more from engineering to product and then product marketing. I'm truly passionate about thinking through the customer first. Customer first is so important to me because having worked in sales as my first job, I feel like if I don't understand what need I'm solving for, there is no need to create a product just for the heck of it. And then how do you message it in a way that in 20 words, that you can explain the value prop of your product. I think that's where the magic is. Something that I really am proud of is a golden triangle that on one hand is product marketing, one is brand and then demand gen, and in the center is content because none of them can actually independently function by themselves. And all of this has to spit very well within the strategy of the company.

>> So golden triangle at the top is what, the brand?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Product marketing.

>> Product marketing.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Brand. And then the last corner is demand gen.

>> And unpack that. Product marketing you mean the value proposition, features, or-

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Product marketing is somebody who is understanding like-

>> Or persona, not content. Oh, the content is in the middle.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Content is in middle. So they understand the customer, they understand the customer needs, they define products, they launch products, they define not just the feature set. I think coming from a hardware background myself, I know there's a lot more about speeds and feeds, but it's about what is the value? Why is company A product better than the other? There's so many me too products out there and more so with AI, in fact, not just in the marketing world, but think about consumers who are bombarded with tons of products every day. How is it different? And that is where the value lies. How can you do that extra pricing? How would you define your pricing? That's product marketing. How would you get that extra pricing? Is it premium price product? Is it a free product? Is it PLG growth? How do you define those strategies is product marketing?

>> So you're saying that Dolan triangle is the people that need to be stakeholders-

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, the subject.

>> And the content has to hit all three of the corners?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Exactly. The content is the base of it because the content that goes out, like we've been talking about top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, it's important to flow through, but different formats of content. We got to middle of the funnel and the bottom you have more direct sales contact, sales enablement contact, and all of that is also automated and so forth. I think the only piece I would like to say to the CMOs out there is as they're thinking through their organizational structure and thinking about technology that they're adopting, don't just do it blindly because whenever there is data, we started talking about garbage and garbage out, these products, AI products, are built on LLMs like models, and now what we are seeing is there's some bias also in there. They are hallucinating. There are biases. So don't just blindly adopt what you're adopting,. Test it out. Look at the data sources, think through the output. Just because the output looks like, okay, this is the-

>> It reads well, yeah, but is it real?

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah. So many companies I have heard, they would just generate their content using ChatGPT, like write blogs and push 700 blogs a quarter to game the Google search engine optimization. That doesn't work. You have to write for your audience, for their eyes. Who is reading, not the Google algorithm. And I think that's where many small, small startups fail because they think, let's replace humans. Let's just get an AI agent to start writing content for us, and that's it. But that's not where your secret sauce is. I'm a big proponent of not starting with a blank sheet. I'm not saying that, okay, just do not use any technology. What I'm saying is for content creation, start with something and then pivot in a way, add onto it, amplify it in a way that you're adding your secret sauce, you're adding value, which is material to your company and make a differentiation. Differentiation is very key, and that's where I feel like my secret weapon is product marketing, because I always think about how to differentiate my organization, the way we are approaching things, how we are measuring things and so forth.

>> Well, it's really smart because you're actually understanding what you want to do and where you want to be, and then optimizing for that versus optimizing for, hey, we don't have to pay for these staff. We replace blogs. Instead of a blogger or a podcaster we're doing our own stuff now, but it's missing the mark. Objective failed. So the optimist is the wrong thing. Performance marketing, we've seen a lot of that too. That's come up a lot in the past couple of days, which is people get over-rotated on performance marketing and actually don't know what they're trying to perform for.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> That's a big problem.

>> To your point.

Surbhi Agarwal

>> Yeah, that's a big problem, and that's where having a strong product marketeer is very, very important on your team because that sets the direction and strategy. Performance marketing comes more as an execution strategy, and then brand is the overall air cover, which you should have in terms of how you're performing because it's not just about a product launch. A company can have 10 different products, but how do they all work together? What journey they are in, what stage they're in, how does it capture the customer value, all of that has to work together, and that's why the Golden Triangle is very important.

>> And digital is such a power source for all this. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. CMO Leaders program. Getting all the nuggets of value, the masterclass techniques, strategies, the golden triangle. Of course, theCUBE is bringing it to you here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.