Michael King is the Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at VMware, where he works to elevate VMware’s market presence and drive demand for their cloud offerings. He oversees the VMware Cloud Marketing team, which includes the demand and growth teams, scale teams, technology platform teams (including web, marketing automation, and full martech stack), and partner marketing teams. In the past 18 months, this team has launched an entirely new web presence, marketing stack, and messaging platform, ultimately driving growth for 23 newly-launched cloud services.
This episode features an interview with Michael King, Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at VMware. Inside the $64 billion cloud computing and virtualization software giant, Michael is responsible for the VMware Cloud Marketing team and is tasked with transforming the customer perception of VMware’s cloud services and products.
In this episode, Michael expands on the demand gen strategy that he calls “the relentless pursuit of whatever works,” illustrates his audience-action-measurement playbook, discusses the importance of a consistent customer experience, and explains why your channels must reflect your audience.
“Demand gen strategy at VMware is the relentless pursuit of whatever works. I tend not to be dogmatic about these things. I work with a team that is always challenging me, always pushing me to think differently.”
“No matter what, things are always changing. You may come at it thinking, ‘I know the audience, I know the market, I know the benefits, here's the play I'm going to run.’ But things change…Anytime you go into any demand gen or any other marketing situation thinking that you have it cooked, you're probably cooked.”
“The longer the time frame is from hand raising activity to benefit achievement, the fewer customers you're going to convert, and then you'll just see leaky funnel left and right...reduction in speed is what kills all good demand gen programs.”
“There's a lot of things that you can measure…but when it comes down to it, marketing should measure itself on one thing and one thing only: revenue through the door."
“As marketers, as product people, we spend 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours a day thinking about our product. The average customer spends 20 minutes a quarter thinking about your product. So you have a very limited amount of time to earn that ear.”