In this episode, we speak to Denise Broady, the CMO of Appian, the leader in low-code application development about her journey from a refugee to the CMO suite and her #lowcode4all initiative.
In this episode, we speak to Denise Broady, the CMO of Appian, the leader in low-code application development about her journey from a refugee to the CMO suite and her #lowcode4all initiative.
Denise came to the United States with her mother as a refugee from Vietnam, and through hard work and the support of her family, she graduated from the University of Virginia and entered the consulting world where she was helping companies automate business processes with COBOL code.
After a successful career in enterprise software, including a 15 year stop at SAP, where she was the COO of the Industries and Business Line Group, Denise returned to her roots of business process improvement as the CMO of Appian. But this time, she was armed with the leading low code platform instead of COBOL.
As part of her marketing strategy, Denise launched the #lowcode4all initiative, a program focused on providing access to low-code education and certification to drive career advancement and opportunity for the next generation of low-code developers.
Appian is the only recognized global leader across multiple enterprise technology markets, including low-code application development, digital process automation (DPA), intelligent business process management systems (iBPMS), and dynamic case management (DCM).
Learn more about Denise Vu Broady
Learn more about Appian
Learn more about #lowcode4all
Follow Peter Mahoney on Twitter and LinkedIn
Learn more about Plannuh
Recommend a guest for The Next CMO podcast
Produced by PodForte
Kelsey: [00:00:00] Thank you so much, Denise, for joining the next CMO podcast. We're super excited to have you on the show this afternoon would love to learn a little bit more about you and what you do at.
Denise: well, first of all, calcium, Peter, thank you so much for having me. Why don't I just start by introducing myself and then I'll introduce Appian. So I have been a B2B CMOs. For the last or I should say a marketing for the last 25 years. Working in everything from startup came from a startup called top tier that got acquired into SAP was an SAP for 15 years after that at a private equity turnaround for five years.
And then came to Appian, but probably a fun nugget that is probably a very atypical of the CMO journey. I started my first five years in consulting programming. Yes. You heard it correctly programming and into what is called the above language or SAP. And I thought it was a perfect ending to my [00:01:00] career for 25 years to come to Appian because Appian is, you know, focused on low code.
And if you think that, I think about my journey 25 years ago, that got me into tech and this was all led by learning COBOL in college. I mean, talk about a crazy thing to learn. You know in the nineties getting your first job and attack and then coming to now and to Appian where our sole purpose is to take everything from, you know, helping people move from high co-development to dragging and dropping and literally creating code and expediting the development process for enterprise companies.
So what we're doing is not about. You know, creating Wordle or an app that a consumer would use, but really through the enterprise being able to come in and support whether it's a Santander or a city bank or, you know, Goldman, or even let's [00:02:00] say a marker Pfizer. So really large companies all around.
Peter: Well, it's an amazing background, Denise. And I, I think a couple of things really resonated with me. So one thing that gave me a little bit of a chuckle was the fact that you were using in consulting COBOL in the night. Nineties, because if people were watching the visual along with hearing the audio, they'd realize that I'm significantly older than Denise's.
And in, back in the 1980s, when I was going out and doing my first job, we were doing the same thing in, in the 1980s, eighties. I almost took a job at the time. What was called Anderson consulting,
Denise: yes. I remember Anderson.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, And they they'd had to do a rebrand for some interesting reasons.
And and of course back then they were saying, don't worry. We know COBOL is ancient. But there's all. Tech debt. That's sitting in enterprises around the globe [00:03:00] and and we're going to in retiring tech debt in, in writing code and automating elements of what's going on. And this was now you know, 35 plus years ago. so it's amazing how things have changed and yet they have. And it's incredible what you have all done it at Appian to go after that problem, because we know that even all these decades later, there's still a huge amount of business process. That is, unautomated. And it feels like it's just a massive market.
So give, give people a little. Sense of the scale of Appian. It's, it's a big successful company now. So help us understand for those who are not as close to your story when the company was founded, how big is it now? In things like that.
Denise: Yeah, so Appian is, believe it or not a 23 year old company. I always love to describe Appian is we're not. You know, have 20 people sitting in a garage. We're not a large company like ours to say mature company, like an [00:04:00] SAP, Oracle. But we're in what I call a scale up. And in this scale, I always like to describe us as organized chaos.
So if you love the agility of being in a startup type profile, right. In a scale up, but at the same time, you're also okay to not have every single process defined, not having. You're scheduled set so that you're coming in to do a, to do list every day for us. I really look at it, work blind, the plane, we're fueling the plane and we're completely okay to take a pit stop in Florida and not announce it.
So it is a lot of fun, but you have to be okay that we're in scale-up mode. So not everything is defined. And that's why I like organized. But it is at a, sorry. It is an a, you know, growth mode as well. Right? So for us, we're growing our SAS anywhere from, you know, 30 to 40% on an annual base. [00:05:00]
Peter: Yeah. And I've seen, I actually went through some of your investor material before the call to get a sense, because of course it's a public company now, and there's a, there there's a lot of interesting stuff in when you laser in on. On that SAS business, it's obviously grown a great deal, but it's of course quite different from the 15 years that you spent at at the behemoth that is SAP.
And you had a very interesting role there where, where you were sort of the, the COO for the industry group, if I said that correctly. So tell us a little bit about what that meant and how that informed your role as a COO later in your.
Denise: sure. So SAP was very different in the aspect. I came through a tiny little acquisition, a startup you know, I've talked to her worth 300 people. When I came into SAP where 32,000 people. And by the time I left, we were a hundred thousand people. And the 15 years, and the journey was so much fun because there was an opportunity to help launch [00:06:00] lots of new products.
Start new business areas was like working with them, you know, the startups. But at the very end, and by the way, I would say that through my journey and probably a little bit of misnomer was that I have a seal title for industry cloud, which was about a 10 billion service as well as software revenue.
But I also had marketing communications responsibilities and that was a little bit through my career. Was that having the mix of the two? So I think, you know, when I was working. Co had as well and doing everything from operational excellence to strategy, it really helps you kind of think about the overall growth.
Right? And I think that the biggest job we have as marketers is not just purely brand or demand or coms, it's really thinking about how do we view the growth of the.
Peter: Yeah. And that strategy piece is really critical. And the idea of connecting the. strategic [00:07:00] world to operational execution. It's something that is a skill that most marketing leaders really struggle to fill within the organization. And having that background as an operational executive that you can.
Combined with your expertise and marketing is really powerful. In fact, it reminded me that you asked me to ask you about this question, so I'll bring it up now about talent. So in, in this world, obviously you're growing very fast. You're scaling up more than 30% a year at a pretty big base of a company.
So it's growing quite quickly. How do you fill key talent roles inside a company like Appian right now? As the. The market for talent has gotten so tight these days with with things booming all around the planet.
Denise: think the, you know, more traditional mindset as marketers is to hire people that have spent their entire career in marketing. And I think, you know, maybe I'm a little bit biased given my backgrounds, right. I think [00:08:00] that part of the impact and being able to think of, you know, us as growth marketers is having the ability to work other aspects of the business.
You know, as I mentioned, I started my journey in development, doing business development where actually carried a quota or a period of time doing partner management. I ran support at some point. And I think sometimes it's also good to hire good athletes, people that may want to shift their careers. Right.
You get a great pre-sales person that is very product centric that may want to come be part of product strategy, or you get a good strategy person that may want to come to AR or you get a great person that is coming from industry, but they've never worked in tech or even, you know, Great paid media person that has done B-to-C and then your, our job is to shift them and teach them B2B as part of it.
And I think sometimes it's, you know, depending on the [00:09:00] profile, it's good to hire diverse backgrounds because it gives the team to be, you know, the ability to really be more impactful and to have different perspectives. You know, I, one of my favorite stories was when I was in the private equity side, where.
I may not have the, you know, brand to go recruit somebody like when I was at SAP or even here, because we're publicly traded company. I remember, you know, offering somebody an internship that just graduated out of Chicago as an Englishman. And didn't know anything around tech. I said, come be an intern, learn the tech piece, see if you like it.
And by the way, we brought the person and as a content editor and contributors as part of that, and that English skill can be used across so much of, you know, tech as part of it. So I really think many times it's not necessarily having that CS background or that tech background, it's also taking chances.
You know, for the talent pool and making sure [00:10:00] that we hire that diversity because that diversity sometimes will create opportunities. Not only to do things differently, but shift the team as far as skill sets as well.
Peter: So if you have that kind of talent, and I think it's a great strategy, Denise, to bring in sort of raw competencies. And so these raw skills that you can develop over time, but there there's this extra layer of requirement you have as a marketing leader. To provide a roadmap for people for what they're actually supposed to do.
So if you come in and and I remember spending times at larger companies when I was bringing in people on my staff as an example, and I always wanted to hire people who are super experienced in a domain because. Let that go and let them completely run that on the other side of the coin, there's the kind of people development that you're talking about, which is really important because it takes people who have raw talent, [00:11:00] Ross skill, but you need to tell them a little bit more about how to do that.
So do you structure the marketing organization in a way that can actually support these people who may not be. Specific functional experts, but they've got the core set of skills that you need to develop over time. So how do you deal with that?
Denise: Yeah, absolutely. I know at Appian, we actually developed a boarding track uniquely. My first year here just to onboard marketers. So we have our own track to supplement the standard onboarding process. And I agree with you, Peter. I don't think that you can go hire a hundred percent of every team where you get, you know, I have only athletes.
You need the mix of experience and what I always ask the managers when they're hiring as part of this is not only is the person a cultural fit, but. Do they have, do they have the time to coach, right. And to mentor the individual and bring them in as part of this you know what I've [00:12:00] also seen as part of just the recruiting process during the great resignation.
And I've been pretty adamant with the team. I meet every person that goes through the interview process. And a lot of that is just to make sure one there's a cultural. Two there's potential as part of, you know, depending on the person's background or am I interviewing for their domain expertise as part of this, you know, last year it took us about nine months to find the lead of digital, but there were lots of folks that hired that never did the full sec digital.
And we were not in a situation where I have the capacity to go and mentor and coach somebody that only had one sub domain of digital. We held out and spent the time and search for somebody that had the full stack of the digital experience. So I think you really have to kind of weigh in where you are in the cycle, from my higher perspective, what you, the mix of the team.
And then of course, you know, I always tell people like when it comes to careers, right, [00:13:00] it's you gotta find people in order to, you know, have a thriving career. You need two components for me is very. You need to figure out what you're good at and what you're passionate about, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're passionate about it.
And if everybody applied that you S you see people's passions as you're working with them. And I think that's the question that every manager and leader has to ask is, you know, do I have the time and this person had the passion and the potential to do that particular.
Peter: Yeah, amazing in you're absolutely right. That combination is incredibly important to have. And it's, it's sometimes frustrating when you see people who have incredible talent, but just. And Intuit. I know it's one of my daughters is an amazing artist and she, she just doesn't want to lean in. She doesn't want to do anything with it, which is kind of funny in, in it's free.
I feel like, oh my God, If I could have, [00:14:00] I percent of that talent, it's amazing what you'd be able to do, but you really need those combination those combination of factors to to make things work, which is great. So I was going to ask you another thing too, Denise, and it was about again, I'm kind of a nerd like this.
So I went through your, your last full annual report, which was your 20, 20 fiscal year. And in one of the things that I think founder and CEO is Matt Caulkins.
Denise: that's correct.
Peter: Yeah. And one, that's amazing that he's here 23 years later. I mean, leading for almost a quarter century, he probably doesn't like when I say that that it's been a quarter century, but a long time in, in one of the things he talked about was this amazing shift that's going on in the world.
And. I'm sure it was written sort of in the, in the heart of the heat of the pandemic. But one of the things he talked about was the importance of explaining the benefits of the low code promise to the industry and the public. And, and that was right around the time that I think you joined the company.
So what I'd love to understand has [00:15:00] that maintained as a priority for the company, if it has, how specifically have you tried to address that particular objective?
Denise: yeah, by the way, when we're collecting our customer stories and I really feel that the heart of everything. The market. If you're going to drive the growth, you have to have the customer stories and the customers should advocate on your behalf and spread that where there'd be, what media with, you know, the endless community or corners and the overall market.
And when we look at every customer story, it's all around the low-code promise. Do we deliver the app or the automation or the process optimization 10 times faster than traditional develop. Do we come in and have a 50% ROI as part of the overall low-code promise or whatever part of the suite the customers adopting.
And then the last part is, do we offer superior functionality? Right? So we just had our [00:16:00] Appian world and I love what, you know, one of our customers, which you wouldn't think is a traditional one. Like. They are coming in there managing unions as part of this. And when they started the journey with us 12 years ago, what I loved is they said they could create all sorts of, you know, apps to. of the different 300 regional representatives, do their jobs better. And think about the end user experience. They had everything from spreadsheets to Excel, to legacy. Also they were tying and then, you know, as they continue their journey for the 12 years, they will coming in and leveraging everything that we acquire.
And part of our strategies also a little bit different because when we acquire companies, we don't lead them into. We actually fully integrate them into the Appian platform as part of it. So if you want to leverage automation whether it's RPA or IDP or process optimization or discovery with [00:17:00] process mining, we acquire companies and we fully integrate it.
And as like, who has gone through the journey they have started to leverage the automation. They have started to. Come in and they started to, they're one of our biggest beta customers and they joke about it that, you know, if we're w we have a beta, they will beta anything from Appia. And as part of this, they put their portal solution.
And then they said, wow, just the ability to do the B to C. They have. Now they're able to move beyond communicating to just 300 regions. You know, office directors to now all 150,000 of the folks that are part of any unions up there supporting as part of this. So it's quite amazing to see that. And when I think about the impact, right, if you're creating superior functionality and you think about, Hey, you just went from 300 years.
To potentially impacting 400,000 users by just adding one feature and functionality. That just says [00:18:00] that. All right. Cause it's, it's putting really the, the users and the user experience in the middle of everything that we do the customer first.
Kelsey: So Denise, one thing that I, that really stood out to me is as a CMO, you have this, you know, strategic drive to bring the company to the next level, whether it's a new product or at least it's new, you know, new branding, if it's new messaging, if it's a new target audience, whatever it is, you're trying to bring the company to new growth.
So what are some of those challenges that you have faced as a CMO that you can help, you know, our listeners over.
Denise: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to think about. How do you tell the brand story and humanize it? Right. Apprehend is a very technical product as part of this. But one of the things that we're really working to do is to humanize the brand. So last week, as part of the Appian world launch, we just launched the hashtag low code for all, with the number four on it.
And [00:19:00] this is where like very close to my heart because when I think about my own background and being a refugee and. I just think about, wow, what the ch what were the chances of going to college, getting some coal the COBOL background, and then getting entry into tech. So we launched the local overall to provide scholarships to anyone that has financial barriers that want to learn bow code.
We will pay for the certification as part of that. And when I think about humanizing the brand, whether you're triangulating that with like a CA CSR initiative, like local for all. It's so important to think about, you know, what we give back as part of the community. And I think that these ideas and the stories only come to life, if you really care about them.
And so I think as a CMO, anyone that is part of marketing, you have to do the stuff that you care about your, you shouldn't just do the check marks, right? If you're coming in advertiser and let's say, [00:20:00] Maybe a journal that, or a feature that you may not care about. It may have a different outcome, like them doing something like local bra as part of this, because we're us.
And for me personally, I don't look at the launches, the end, it's a start. And the question is how many people do we place into tech jobs, where we change our social economic outcome? Right? So somebody's coming into low code and the U S alone their first year with a certification will make 70,000 USD. If we can change the lives of veterans, of college students, of people that have been displaced during the pandemic, it just took the entire CSR initiative and then turned that into for us something meaningful and then humanizing the brand on top of that.
So that's just an example. And I think that, like my advice is, think about some stuff that you really care about and bigger how to tell that with the integrated story, but.
Peter: Let's say it's amazing. And it's amazing how we didn't go into that detail of [00:21:00] your, of your personal story, which is of course pretty amazing. So tell us a little bit about how you got here. I mean, the fact that that you, you, you started your, your journey as a refugee. How, how did you get from that?
To the CMO of a large successful public company.
Denise: Yeah. So in 1979, my mother and brother escaped from Vietnam. By the way I actually had two other siblings that I didn't meet until I was 21. And if you follow anything in the Vietnam war, The borders shut and told 1983. So the only way to get out as soon as they escaped. So for me personally today, when I'm looking at the refugee situation going on in the world is very close to my heart.
Right? Cause I feel very fortunate to have gotten out of Vietnam. My mother had an eighth grade education. So had I stayed in Vietnam, I probably would have grew up in the countryside probably be selling some food on the side, making, you know, probably $300 a year as part of [00:22:00] it and no opportunity to go to school, especially as a girl.
And then just coming to the U S the ability to learn, go to school, create, you know, your own independence as part of that. So much bond and rewarding. And you know, that literally I see life in the U S is really endless opportunities. I think the only thing that stops us is our you know, mindset.
Right. And I say that because, you know, I grew up on the welfare system. And I just remember. My journey with my mother and brother and told she remarried we lived below poverty, but we had a lot of, you know, family around us and a lot of support as part of that. And I just think that you know, there's just the opportunity sometimes are just untapped and maybe.
Also the luck of not knowing what was part of the bigger world. Right. And so for me, I really didn't know that there was any failure because I didn't have very much growing up. [00:23:00]
Peter: Well, it's, it's an incredible story. And in a great illustration. The potential, that's all over the place. If you think about it and the potential that you're trying to unleash with this low code for all that I say that
Denise: Yes. Yes.
Peter: initiative which is amazing. And and it's, you know, again, going back to the compelling connection to your brand story, obviously, you know, low code has lots of benefits and it's exciting from its productivity, but the idea that you can think about lifting.
People from, from poverty, from a difficult situation and to to sort of a new level is, is just amazing and a great way to, to really talk about sort of the, the really, the much bigger impact that you can potentially have with, with your brand promise. Which is, which is pretty amazing though.
So thanks for sharing your your background there. And I'm excited to see how this, how this program goes. And I know you, you also have [00:24:00] a so there's, there's of course a free tier of, of your platform, right? So people can start Develop low code apps independently. So do you have like a whole network of people all around the globe who, who are Appian you know, developers and experts who, who can then sort of be unleashed as this mighty army to go automate all those awful COBOL coded applications all around.
Denise: Yeah, absolutely. The fun part is our community investment has been something that we have heavily focused on in the last year. And we've had over 130% growth as part of the community. And by the way, we have one. Free forever as part of the ACE or the Appian community edition. So you can come in and set up a trial environment.
And any time that we release incremental features of our company, we are committed to making that available as part of the free forever environment. And in the last I would say what six months since [00:25:00] we launched it, w besides the members we've had over 15,000. Trials that have been set up or a partner is round with the customers.
And you know, the amazing part is not only can you build that app, but you can decide that, Hey, once you finish the trial, And let's say in two months, you actually want to become a move from a prospect to the customer. We can come in and export all of the information and code quote unquote, and help you go productive as part of it.
So I think that for many of our customers, this is the new way, right? They're no longer. There's somebody had to sit in it and wait six to nine months before they can turn around to a business user and say, Hey, let me show you what a prototype could look like. You could probably come up with a prototype in a couple of.
Peter: So it's, it's really interesting that you've applied this strategy of leveraging and building a community for your marketing, because I'd [00:26:00] imagine that it can be fairly complex to actually find in target the right individuals for. Product like Appian that of. course can be maybe someone in it. Maybe it's a business user and I'm using air quotes for those people who don't see me.
Like what in the world is a business user that always cracks me up. It's anyone. So how, how do you do that? So we understand how you engage with the community and you create this sort of groundswell of expertise which is amazing. In fact, we've had a lot of success. We, we built. The next CMO community, which is a current and aspiring CMO community that, so people should check it out.
And we have a link in our show notes for that too. And, and that's one of the ways that we get people who are excited about these kinds of operational markets. Topics that we advocate as the company planet. Right? So that's, that's why we, we focus on that. But tell me beyond that. What are the strategies that you're using to target a very diverse audience to to become ultimately [00:27:00] prospects or customers of.
Denise: Yeah. So I think traditionally, when you think about, you know, building on a platform, right, there is this preconceived notion that you need to have purely a stem background. I would actually say that it's more only seen background. Even the, a in there you look at books that. You know, have backgrounds of music philosophy, by the way, if they're logical, they can come in and learn.
You know, the low code platform is part of it and what we love and what we have packaged as part of the community is you're not going to come in and just play with the trial, but we have guided training as part of this, we have certification. We are spending, you know, time to get, you know consultants and anyone that is interested.
And learning to the different tiers as part of the certification. So they may come in and learn low code ready, which is the first start. And they know nothing around. Right versus becoming project ready. So how do you get onto a [00:28:00] project as part of that? And I think it's that nurturing of the community that is so critical.
As you know Kelsey, Peter, you know, this, and, and on the marketing front, new applying all the marketing tactics that you would in a B to B. So for us having interesting paid media tactics where we are going after developer marketing, we're going after, you know outlets where you're getting to the developers, you're getting into the media or to the books that may have this team background.
As part of this recruiting off universities, there's so many outlets and channels, and we've been, you know, started to experiment with micro influencers that are going through, you know, tech talk Instagram. So the interesting part is typically when you think about B2B. People were thinking, oh, I need to go through Winton or I need to go through the Twitter to do the, to execute the payment plan.
But now there are so many, you know, [00:29:00] influencers, developers, business, people that are on other platforms as part of it. So I think the sky's the limit. And I would, you know, our goal really said double Even further, the number of books that we have in the community, but it's all nurturing. You know, we run everything from hackathons to live, build challenges.
We just had a live build challenge last week where we asked some, you know, six contestants to come in and build off of an ESG scenario. And by the way, they wouldn't $10,000 and they can't take the money. We would love them to donate it as part of it. So there's just so many ways to engage the committee.
And in order to grow, you have to have the engagement. If you don't have the engagement, you need to treat each one of the community members as if you're creating theater.
Peter: So connect the dots for me then, because you've got this amazing set of campaigns that are designed to engage the developer community. At the same time, I know looking at [00:30:00] your latest investor presentation, you've seen huge growth in the number of million dollar. Clients which is pretty incredible. And so how, how do you do both?
Because you're engaging sort of this groundswell of developers in a community, which I think is really important, but then how do you support the marketing for very large enterprise sales at the same time?
Denise: Yeah, don't forget the folks that are part of the community that may be developers, business technology. Users of the platform. They're also part of the customer base. And in order to do that, you need to execute well on Atlanta and experience. Right? I loved it. Last year, we had an a bank in APJ where they started as a prospect.
They come into our website, they download a white paper on cloud security. It wasn't like they're downloading, you know, a buyer's guide or something. They went after a very technical piece. And then within 12 hours, They became a [00:31:00] qualified opportunity as part of it. And then we take them through the cycle.
So first six months we do where we do about a 200 K deal by the end of the year, they're over a million dollars with us as part of the land and expand and just like anything else when you're you know, part of the land expand, it's a bigger, how do you show value? How do you create that value selling so that the customers can. You know, for the app that I deployed, I got a 50% return. And how does that impact the user? And then how does that expansion happen as part of that? And it can be everything from, you know, landing expanding within an organization to acquisitions, to thinking about the profiles that we go after, as.
Peter: So it makes a lot of sense. And I mean, that's an amazing story going from a, a white paper to a million dollars of recurring revenue is, is, is pretty incredible. The, the big question [00:32:00] though, is that you've got to make it something. You go from you. You've created this very, very low hurdle for people to jump over the. You make it really easy for people to go and say, oh, I'm going to download. I'm going to experiment with that. I'm going to build a little app. I'm going to enable education to make sure all this stuff happens. There's a very little step. At some point, maybe you have people developing a little app or two for something sorely sort of simple.
And then you've got to get to this point where you get someone to make a pretty broad business decision that says, Hey, I've got some success in this thing. How do I take this and translate that into maybe a broader company strategy? Because ultimately I assume to get a million dollar customer as an example, it has to be a really important part of their it strategy that they're going to use this no code low code platform to, to enable lots of different applications over time that [00:33:00] that's, I suspect how it grows.
So how do you, as. the chief marketer enable that transition?
Denise: Yeah. And I think we're very fortunate because our product offering is not just on building apps, right. It's a complete integrated suite. So as a customer is starting their journey, they may start out by building the app, but they may have other things. So for example, in the, my Yuna example that I talk about.
The ability now to move from 300 users to 450,000 users with something like a portal solution where it's B to C and automating any event registration, or, you know, if you think about even. So if you go into, let's say the IRS. You may come in and check your, oh, how much estimated taxes did I pay? But once you have a dispute, you can upload a lot of documentation and we have a way to process all of that unstructured documents as well.
So I think that because the breadth of our offering is more [00:34:00] than just building apps. Building apps may just be the entry. And then the question is how do we automate the rest of the enterprise workflow? How do we help them? You know, come in and leverage their legacy apps, our legacy systems without replacing them and using like something like Loco data as part of it.
So we have to market to not only it, but the business and balance that as part of the land and expand. And as mentioned, you know, nobody comes in and implement software for the sake of it. They're looking at solving a business problem. They are thinking about the business outcome and thinking about how did they solve those problems?
And that's what we're going after. We're going after, you know, do you have the, the need to ingest tons of documents and process through that through a workflow. And those use cases are what we're working with customers around for as part of the landmarks.
Peter: Great. That's amazing. So believe it or not, we're, we're just about at the [00:35:00] end of our time and it's been a really great conversation, Denise, it's been it's been really insightful to, to hear about your strategies. Inspirational to hear about your personal story. And and I think before we go, we have one last question that Kelsey will bring up.
And so taking away Kelsey.
Kelsey: Yes, Denise. You're the perfect person for this question, obviously being in the COC. So. Nice. Would you give to those that are CMOs are aspiring to be one.
Denise: Yeah. If you're aspiring to be a CMO work outside of the marketing department and see what other areas are. Focusing around this. Well, right. There was an opportunity through my career and by the way, I'd never ran support, but I was as a, I was wearing a dual hat in my last role and I had the opportunity to run support or what a year and a half.
And I thought it was so interesting when I was getting the support tickets. I wanted to figure out are there problems that we are solving that through our messaging and [00:36:00] positioning. And I would ask the marketers, go read the support tickets and see as part of this. And I would encourage them to spend half a day with somebody sitting and support and seeing what their day in life is because it's going to make you a better marketer.
I think if you have the opportunity to work anywhere, costs the business outside of pure core marketing, it will make you stronger as part of. You know, being able to think about the growth of the company, thinking about the strategy, thinking about how you would even experiment. Because I think many times as marketers, we get a set budget and we're coming in and we're applying it to the tactics.
But then about how often you actually put a set of budget over for experimentation. I always try to keep at least five to 10% of the budget around experimentation or ad hoc projects. So sometimes we'll want something for three months of bail miserably, but it's fine. It's okay to fail. And I think that experience of working in other [00:37:00] areas of the business and having that growth mindset just has enabled me to really apply things differently.
And I would really give anyone advice that wants to sit in the CMS. To really think through, like, how do you create that opportunity for yourself?
Kelsey: well, I love that. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Denise, make sure to follow the next Simo and plan out on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email us@thenexttmoatplanet.com. Have a great day.
Peter: Thanks Denise.