Marc Holmes, CMO at HashiCorp catches up with MarTechSeries to chat about the most common B2B marketing myths while sharing tips and insights on what it takes to improve marketing lifecycles in B2B SaaS:

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Hi Marc, tell us about yourself and more about your marketing journey so far…what’s it like as HashiCorp’s CMO?

At HashiCorp, I serve as both our Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Business Operations Officer. On the marketing side, I oversee all aspects of marketing which for our organization means product marketing, demand generation, brand, communications, and developer relations. For operations, I oversee the rhythms of our business: planning and review cycles, scorecards and analytics, and contribute to overall long term business planning. So I suppose the summary is… it is relentless!

The CMO role I always think is best defined through the truths of the business model. For HashiCorp, that means that there are some well understood patterns, for instance, we run an enterprise B2B motion as our primary commercial motion. HashiCorp layers in some uniqueness owing to our developer roots, the nature of our products which are valuable to enterprises and developers alike, and the sheer surface area and utility of those products, which is a lot for a company of our size. Day to day then, it is about continuing to maintain our position and strategies connected to those truths, and then continuously improving. The flip side to the relentless nature of the work is that it is also very rewarding – there is always more to learn.

Prior to HashiCorp, I’ve worked at many similar companies and teams from a business model perspective. I tend to be drawn to more complex environments, and so if you look at those notions of Enterprise B2B, OSS, Tools & Platforms, Multiple Audiences, then you’ll see that reflected in other places I’ve worked: from Microsoft through Hortonworks, Docker, etc.

Prior to marketing roles I was an engineer and architect amongst other things. So in the spirit of the value propositions, if I’m in a room full of marketers then perhaps I’m the best engineer, and in a room full of engineers I’m perhaps the best marketer which I think summarizes the core skills needed for companies like HashiCorp.

As a CMO with an extensive background across industries: what are the biggest marketing myths you’ve collected over the years that you’d like to dispel through those various perspectives?

I think context is very important for truths and myths: the answer to most ‘does it work?’ questions is of course ‘maybe’. On balance I think there are a few core challenges that are generally true in any context and these represent the source of many myths.

Firstly, innovation moves faster than people. This has a variety of effects. For an obvious example, within teams we may all want to use the latest technology or channel, but it turns out that the audience isn’t there. We can forget that sometimes the simplest, most obvious things can continue to be effective as we delight in imagining something new. Put another way, email continues to work, but it must have craft and purpose associated with it and not relegated to the bottom of the pile because it is boring. For our audiences, education – whether at a business or technical level – is crucial, and so workshops, and peer learning work for us.

Secondly, marketing is often misunderstood whether willingly or unwillingly as providing supporting activities to the business, versus being fundamental for the business.

And so too many marketing teams end up playing into that to maintain relevance, but what is really happening is the business is missing out on more holistic strategy and the benefits of that in pursuit of the next slide deck, or event, or ad campaign. And as a result, the internal marketing capabilities of critical judgment and market insight can wither which is an unfortunate reinforcing cycle.

Thirdly, and somewhat related to the other points, is that the current generation of marketers are some of the most skilled technologists within their organization – particularly at startups – owing to the complexity of data and workflows that marketing must work with. I have seen how frustrated marketers can get at being told supposed practice from those who just believe marketers are essentially only providing creative or production capabilities.

In each organization I work, my aim is positioning marketing as a nexus or catalyst for overall go-to-market strategy, and to substantiate that by fashioning a team that values impact over activity. And I believe that is how you enable your counterparts in Product teams, and Sales teams be successful in the long run.

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Seeing how B2B marketing is becoming more complex and challenging: how would you say marketing leaders need to strengthen their positions in a typical B2B organization with better processes, data exchange and insights?

I think it’s obvious that data literacy and expertise is vital, but also table stakes, to build credibility within an organization. So every CMO should figure out how to incorporate tangible, relevant, and easy-to-digest data sets into their conversations with key stakeholders. Marketing data is always somewhat compromised versus Sales data and so part of the skillset for leaders is to be confident interpreters of incomplete data which means an associated set of data principles on consistency, trends and so on.

Often, the biggest challenge is figuring out where to begin. The best way to do that is just to start. If you tune your business for impact, then teams will aim to figure out how to demonstrate that impact. From there, leaders can coach on the fine-tuning of those insights to drive repeatability and trust over time.

Amongst my leaders, I prize synthesis of data the most. Anyone who can appropriately simplify the often complex and detailed individual indicators we have is able to more confidently communicate strategy and therefore drive direction and success more easily. My preference is for ‘Low-fi information and insights, and high-fi data backup’ to keep the story clear and comprehensible.

What can modern B2B tech CMOs do to add more value to their sales counterparts and create better pipelines and experiences?

Fundamentally, it is a partnership, so the truth is we must all celebrate the same success.

We have a saying “The strategic narrative is the business, the rest is a video game”. What this means is that the most important thing we can do is ensure the core positioning and messaging is correct and enduring. And then connect and align programs to that.

For B2B tech, this is about identifying the secular trend that the portfolio supports: for HashiCorp this means ‘cloud adoption’ and then identifying the specific enduring value proposition within that: automation. If one is able to define that enduring proposition, then the benefits are significant because it positions the company as a more trusted partner to their technology program strategies.

In other words, a customer may say “I don’t want to buy your product” for some reason, but they are highly unlikely to say “I don’t believe in your perspective”.

With that in place, then the video game is aligning the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, with the right experience. That is a more rational process driven by previous experience and results, combined with experimentation.

And finally… listen. The signals that sales people project in their feedback is as important as the intent signals we capture in the market. The trick is translation. Sales are driven by 90-day performance horizons and so they may apply the concern level in a way marketing can’t understand or can’t adapt to in the horizon, but they’re probably not wrong.

Only by establishing and reinforcing close partnerships with sales can marketing leaders create seamless and meaningfully curated product narratives that resonate with customers and prospects—ultimately driving sales goals forward.

Take us through some of the marketing strategies you often rely on to drive goals at HashiCorp?

Again, inspecting the truths of our business means you come to some specific conclusions about the things that really matter. It turns out in a developer-focused platform and tools environment that this typically means that community is vital, partnerships are vital, and long term relationships and enablement for customers are vital.

And, it tends to work in that order to drive a flywheel of growth: build a successful community, and partners want to work with that, meaning customers are naturally taking advantage of that broad ecosystem, which drives demand for further community, and so on.

We therefore break down our marketing system to match this.

For community, we need a value exchange that makes our community desirable. At the heart of this is education and skills – you can see this at developer.hashicorp.com – and that extends to our conferences such as HashiConf and HashiDays where we can bring together shared perspectives. Our developer relations team is fundamental to marketing, rather than being a side concern or a program and that offers us real strength.

For partners, we run programs that they understand with the usual intent to offer shared value. Fundamentally, our products rely on integrations across the vast ecosystem of cloud technologies and so we work to ensure readiness on the partner side, and availability on the user side. We also have a more traditional focus on systems integrators to ensure the market has the necessary resources to succeed with our products.

For customers, we run many traditional programs: from events, through content, peer learning, workshops, webinars etc. and of course overlay the amount and type of programs depending on segment. Infrastructure products are often a deeply considered purchase, and so our programs are tuned to long term relationships.

Having everyone – HashiCorp, customers, users, and partners – in one place for a few days, across our regions, is incredibly rewarding and a thoughtful, useful driver of GTM efforts.  This year we’ll be in Boston in October for HashiConf, and I know the team can’t wait.

We’d also like to hear about the martech that helps power these experiences? And the martech that serves as your go-to tools?

As an ex-engineer, I definitely have opinions on MarTech, but I can’t always have what I want.

I think the smart way to build a marketing stack is via a data fabric as it offers a number of benefits. So, for our vertical that means a CDP. I was a very early adopter of Segment and I tend to take that product to each company I work at. At the time it was the only option, but there are now several options, and some ‘next generation’ CDPs such as Common Room that are also offering additional capabilities – so we’re always re-evaluating. But the point is: use a CDP first.

The CDP means you’re disintermediating the rest of the systems and standardizing the approach to data flows, so you’re getting consistency of approach to data, and the flexibility to more easily swap out tools later. Our teams can be more flexible in tool evaluations through more rapid experimentation, and we are no longer at the mercy of ‘tool x’ methods of doing business.

On actual systems, as you can imagine we are underpinned by the standard bigger systems that have been around for a while. We have the MSG stack as a starting point: Marketo, Salesforce, Gainsight. Thanks to the underlying CDP though, we’re not as locked into any data source as we once were.

Around that we have many satellite systems doing specialist work: ABM, Ads, Social, Analytics etc. etc. but I’d say the team would tell me if we could only keep one system it would be Asana simply because that productivity system sets the pace at which we work – it’s our operational heartbeat.

How have you and your team been using AI to drive martech and marketing experiences?

It turns out that many of the natural LLM capabilities are very useful, assuming appropriateness of use, but it remains to be seen if the verticalized solutions are really worthwhile. In other words, vanilla ChatGPT is giving the same impact as some hyper-specialized marketing copywriting tool, or at least, it doesn’t seem to offer appreciable advantage at this time.

But the potential is very real. In our environment, I have to optimize what I want marketers to do. For instance, do I want my demand generation team to be good at messaging and experience, or do I want them to be brilliant at experience? I choose the latter so I need to support their essential messaging skills and AI can help there. The reverse is true for supporting process skills for the creative teams.

With AI, CMOs need to be more strategic and thoughtful about how AI actually impacts their brand’s value proposition, and then incorporate AI into their messaging and invest in AI accordingly. I see some of the larger organizations beginning to get this right: an extended or augmented value proposition, vs AI-washing. As I see it, the fight for the underlying infrastructure – the LLMs and their core functionality – will be in the hands of the few, while everyone can play a part in the integration concerns – workflows, governance, compliance, and so on – which will be of high value to enterprises. ‘AI Lifecycle Management’, if you will.

If you could comment on the future of marketing and martech before we wrap up, that would be great! And, the most insightful martech quote or learning you’d like to leave us with.

I think the same patterns apply to marketing and martech as we see in other industries: Digital Transformation offers so much opportunity that in the first instance, there is a relentless need for speed to innovate, but in the next instance there is need to standardize and measure with precision. And so we see the explosion in tools for marketing gradually being backed up by connected, integrated automation (whether structured automation or AI-driven). I think that is an enduring reality and so we need to be relentless learners, willing to experiment, conclude, accept and reject.

At the same time, I am reminded of the phrase: “Art is making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange”, and so I find that even in the avalanche of innovation our role is the same – unlocking that truth for our customers meaningfully.

To be good at both of those things at the same time is all of our marketing teams’ work.

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