Leela is CMO of SurveyMonkey where she leads all marketing functions, including brand strategy, growth marketing, product marketing, and communications. Previously, she served as CMO at Lever and VP of Marketing at OpenTable. While at the latter, she built product marketing from scratch and established the foundations of a B2B marketing team. Additionally, Leela was director of marketing at LinkedIn within the Talent Solutions business, where she co-founded the Talent Connect conference.
This episode features an interview with Leela Srinivasan, CMO of SurveyMonkey. Leela joined SurveyMonkey in April 2018 to lead all marketing functions including brand strategy, growth marketing, product marketing, and communications. Previously, she served as Chief Marketing Officer at Lever, VP of Marketing at OpenTable, and Director of Marketing at LinkedIn. On this episode, Leela dives deep into the key components of her strategy, including how to truly understand and add value for your prospects, put your customers at the forefront of your marketing, optimize your channels and tactics, build community, and much more.
(2:10) Leela’s Career Path
- First job generating demand was at a consumer products company, selling through radio commercials
- First crack at demand gen in the B2B environment was at LinkedIn
- She started her career with 5 years in sales
(3:20) An Overview of Leela’s CMO role at SurveyMonkey
- Many people know the SurveyMonkey brand, but they should know what SurveyMonkey is in 2021, which has expanded
- They have different business areas, which includes the surveys business but also fast-growing business areas focused on customer experience and market research
- She runs those 3 pillars, including demand gen, product marketing, social, comms and growth
(4:40) What Leela’s Demand Gen Strategy Looks Like
- The first thing that comes to mind is knowing your prospect really well and understanding how you can add value to them
- To drive demand you really need to know what you bring to them that offers unique value since there are many things competing for their attention
- It’s also important to identify the customers that you have who will influence your next customers, and then finding ways to put them in the spotlight
- The third thing she focuses on is making sure that you are joined at the hip with your sales partners, getting fully aligned and accountable with your strategy
- She also thinks it’s critical to experiment, optimize and measure; demand gen is a portfolio of approaches and tactics that are in different stages of maturation.
- Scale the tactics that work, keep experimenting with the tactics that aren’t yet mature
(7:23) SurveyMonkey’s Target Market Has Expanded
- They work with 98% of the Fortune 500
- They help organizations capture and operationalize feedback, which is a very horizontal strategy, across HR, IT and Marketing
- Over the years, the use cases for SurveyMonkey have really exploded
- They are starting to move into Customer Experience as well, which can even extend to product design
- They’ve found that there are tight ties between Customer Experience and Employee Experience; if you can bring your employees closer to the experience of customers, they are more likely to stay with your organization
(13:45) What is SurveyMonkey’s Category?
- SurveyMonkey doesn’t quite fit in a single category, with a broad base set of solutions, so she has the team focus on categories where they provide the most value
- Experience management is a major use case, where they are the most agile player in the space, helping companies roll products out much more quickly than before
(15:42) Leela’s Uncuttable Budget Items
- For Leela it’s less about 3 specific channels, but more about an idea, a campaign that you feed in to different channels and tactics
- So one of those ideas is research and data-backed thought leadership content that you can package and leverage across all of your channels
- An example of a thought leadership asset she developed was around hiring trends as LinkedIn was building their talent solution, which became the “meat” of campaigns across additional channels and formats
- With video content the same approach applies, she thinks about what the 6 second version should be, and the 30 second version, to get engagement in different contexts
- Much more is coming on the brand campaign front to help drive the perception shift of how SurveyMonkey adds value and who they serve
(22:54) What Will Happen to Events?
- She is excited for physical events to return in the later half of the year, and believes they will continue to have a place for awareness, brand loyalty and community
- However, she wonders about the future of large scale events and if their importance will fade away
- She personally doesn’t believe she will be going to as many events in the future
- Her marketing org will invest less in big events, as she thinks that with fewer target personas attending, such as herself, there will be less ROI for being present there
- New approaches may be needed to solve for gaining interaction with senior execs going forward
(25:59) Best Learning Experiences of 2020
- Her team did a great job of responding and pivoting because of the pandemic
- A highlight was evolving solutions to help organizations keep in touch with workers newly working from home
- Another highlight is what she’s seen come from the conversations around racial equity
- They partnered with a group called The Justice Collective to launch a robust set of survey templates for organizations to gauge how their employees felt about the conversations around racial equity
- SurveyMonkey has launched a vendor diversity template, an effort made together with 20 other companies to evaluate the collective buying power they have and hold their suppliers accountable to be thinking about diversity and inclusion
- She is looking forward to invest more in podcasts going forward
(31:58) One Company, Two Websites
- They have two websites to manage, SurveyMonkey.com and GetFeedback.com
- There are slightly different teams focused on each website area, with the experience management team more focused on GetFeedback
- They have a growth team that thinks about the overall ecosystem, and how they route a visitor from one website to another when necessary
(36:42) Leela’s View on NPS
- Marketers more than ever need to be closer to the customer experience
- She sees a lot of companies that are measuring NPS, but people to know why they are measuring this and developing a plan to act on what they learn
- Her recommendation for charting a path forward to improve NPS is to know that you can’t tackle everything at once
(40:45) Quick Hits: Getting to Know Leela
- If she wasn’t in marketing, she’d be homeschooling her kids
- Her plans for 2021 include going back to Scotland, where she is from
- If visiting Scotland, she recommends visitors go to Edinburgh, where she is from
- She also recommends renting a car, driving up to Skye and having dinner at Three Chimneys
- Her New Year’s resolution is to train for a marathon
(42:05) Advice to a New CMO
- Be joined at the hip with sales
Check out this open Demand Gen Leadership role at SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey Future of Work Resources