The CMO Who Never Becomes Obsolete

0:00Going through all these different revolutions, are there any mindsets that you can think of? of like, this is how you stay relevant. I'm a tinkerer by heart. I love figuring out how things work and learning about new things. So I think curiosity is huge. What I've always really liked about the world of tech is that it changes so much and you're always learning about stuff. Sometimes people fear in the space that if you are out of it for a year or two, you become irrelevant. It just keeps changing. I think rolling up your sleeves and just volunteering to do stuff or people would say, hey, could you take this on?

0:35You're like, sure, let's just do it. I'll figure it out. Especially today in this world where everyone's always talking AI, I see people leaning in, learning, experimenting, trying new things. It's great because then you kind of have these experiences that you can continue to take with you for each role. Then being relevant on the company side is trying to have that balance of not just being too trendy for trendy sake. If you're going to stay relevant, there's showing people the path. You have to be innovative enough so you can take your customers on that journey with you.

1:07Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO and founder of mission.org. And today I'm really excited because we have Michelle Huff joining the show. She's the chief marketing officer of Alteryx. Michelle, welcome to Marketing Trends. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so this one's gonna be a good one because I can't think of many guests who've been through as many tech revolutions that you have. And so I want to just start with that of like a bit about your background. So our audience can hear about like how many shifts you've been through, because it's going to paint the picture for the whole conversation.

1:44Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, since I started my career in tech in the late 90s, and my first major job was actually in the early days where we were all creating websites. And believe it or not, I remember, so our technology would take Word documents and automatically convert it to websites. And I remember being at trade shows and people would say, why would I want to read documentation on a monitor? And it's kind of mind blowing a little bit now, right? Like when you think about it. But it was really those early days where the creation of the technologies and people were moving off of things like front page or hand coding everything.

2:25thing. And, and so, you know, it was kind of like this new world of, wow, we could really digitize so many different things. And, and so I was at this small startup that grew and was acquired by Oracle. And then at Oracle, it was really about continuing with the websites, but people were building a lot more web applications and portals and e-commerce and, you know, starting to collaborate more digitally. And so those were all kind of the, the technology sets that I worked with at Oracle and then went from there to Salesforce. And so, you know, it's, it's kind of like back in those days, I felt like I was more in the middleware, all the tools that people use to build things.

3:06And then at Salesforce, it was really moving to this new thing of cloud. And what does that mean? And then, you know, from the, the on-premise and from Salesforce, it was more of this end-to-end package kind of applications. And I worked in the world of data there as well. So I had that whole journey and then went to my first. So along those ways, it was all around doing product marketing, product management and those types of functions. And then at Salesforce was leading product marketing, product management, eventually was the GM for the data cloud. And then went to my first chief marketing officer role and went to a company called Acton, which is more marketing automation.

3:48and so the evolution around marketers and how tech-enabled we've become and what we do and all the apps that support it. And then I felt like Cherry on Top was going to user testing where it's kind of been like helping people build applications and tools to actually doing that in the cloud and then all the applications that people use. And then really user testing was about helping companies build and get feedback on everything that you've been building, everything that you're putting out there from customers to build these great experiences. And then since then, I've gone to Alteryx, kind of going back to my data roots.

4:30And so at Alteryx, it's CMO for that company. It's about all this world of messy data we all live in. And oftentimes people are trying, like it's amazing how manual it is to kind of get insights out of it and then really drive reports, dashboards. And so Alteryx is kind of really in that whole area. I love it. Yeah, I was looking into Alteryx. I'm like, man, you're like putting these superpowers into people's hands that only data scientists used to be able to have access to. Like when I think about my old days in finance, we'd have to go and be like, we're trying to query data and who owns the database and who can actually read this.

5:08And it was only the data scientists who could look at this housing data. And when I was looking at Alteryx, I'm like, whoa, this would have been very handy to have back in 2011. No, totally. It reminded me a little of the web days where I remember people would say, oh, well, you know, we're not going to let other people like there's people who know how to write code. And then marketers would be like, hey, you know, like there's an apostrophe. Can you go in and change these few words? And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, can you just, you know, so over time, you really kind of help, you know, empower all the business.

5:39And really, I feel like there's a very similar thing with with Alteryx, where instead of requiring everyone to be the data scientists and IT, it's really the business users who have more power to build all of that. So, yeah, there's somewhere I was like, oh, I can't believe I didn't know about Alteryx before joining. I could have used that before as well. Yes. So going through all these different revolutions, are there any mindsets that you can think of of like how, you know, you're like, this is how you stay relevant. And I'm sure you saw a lot of people get left behind through all these different periods.

6:11And so what do you think that is unique to you or the way that your mindset, your thinking that really kept you relevant through all these big changes that you got to see firsthand? Yeah, I mean, I guess there's, well, there's a little thinking about as a company versus your own personal career. I think maybe if we talk career first, I'm a tinkerer by heart. I love figuring out how things work and learning about new things. And, and so I think curiosity is huge. And, you know, what I've, I've always really liked about the world of tech is that it changes so much and you're always learning about stuff.

6:50And I know sometimes people fear in this space that if you are out of it for like a year or two, you're like, you become irrelevant. And, but in some sense, it just, it just keeps changing. So as long as you kind of roll up sleeves and decide to like engage and read and learn and try and tinker, like, like you, you can quickly become the expert on something in technology, because it's always these new kind of uncharted paths. And so, you know, it's, you know, I feel like back in those days, you know, marketing worked so different than it works today. businesses worked very different and you know I think rolling up your sleeves and just volunteering to do stuff was always how I grew my career where people would say hey like could you take this on and and there's this moment where you're like sure let's just do it like I'll figure it out and so you know I think especially today in this world where everyone's always talking AI and that's like a huge part of the disruption, you know, where I see people leaning in, learning, experimenting, trying new things.

7:57It's great because then you kind of have these experiences that you can continue to take with you for each role, each job that you have. And, you know, then being relevant on the company side is, you know, is trying to have that balance of not just being too, you know, trendy for trendy sake, you know, and just putting things out there. Because I do feel like if you're going to stay relevant, there's kind of showing people the path, right? It's you have to be innovative enough so you can take your customers on that journey with you. But I think it's always being really staying grounded in your customers.

8:31It's really that's kind of the whole reason why you're building your company. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, it feels like it's hard to know which things to tinker in. How do you know when you, especially as a CMO, where you're like, I want to get my hands dirty in something. I want to try and be curious. Let's just say vibe coding or something like that. Where you're like, this looks cool versus knowing like, okay, there's too many things. I need to actually delegate my team to do it versus no, this isn't something we should be even trying right now. Like that still needs to stay with tech IT product.

9:02Like how do you find a balance when things I feel like are so rapidly coming at everyone right now? Like so many new things, So many new tools. Oh, my gosh. Now everyone can do everything. You can't. You can't do it all. I mean, that's why I'm a big fan of, obviously, this part of my career, having a whole organization because I want the whole org to tinker. So, you know, part of it is driving a culture where people feel like they can, right? And providing them with the tools and access to do it. Actually, just even on the all hands, we were having, you know, someone was showcasing, you know, how they went to an Adobe conference and was learning about all the AI features in Firefly and then thinking about how they're going to apply that within their own role.

9:38And so really just highlighting and showing how people are starting to experiment and explore. And I think it's also celebrating because it's sometimes the tinkering and the doing, it's not you don't hit success every single time, but you learn a lot. Right. Like you learn like either how it was done and all the blockers. And then I feel like sometimes you start with things where you're almost doing it for doing it's sake, but not for like a real business reason or real productivity. Like there's and so you learn it kind of flops because there's not enough like pull there. Um, and so I, I think, um, but I don't think it's, it's useless effort because, you know, you, you learn quite a bit through each step.

10:24As long, I guess, as long as you take a moment to reflect on why it's not working and so you can get the learnings, um, then I don't think it's a lost cause. So, I mean, this is a good segue into team building. And I mean, you mentioned, you know, the all hands, but how do you set up a, an environment for experiments? And I mean, I hear, you know, you had someone presenting what they were experimenting with, But how do you really make this part of the culture of getting your job done and doing it well, but also being in this curious experimentation mindset? Yeah, I mean, the nice thing is I feel like with my leadership team, number one, I think everyone on the team has a very growth experimenting mindset, which is super helpful, right?

11:05And so it's not just me. It's them and how they're working across their teams and some of the things that they'll be working with their organization is, is when they're planning, um, planning time for some of the experiments, right? Cause marketing, I feel like we, we always have the endless checklist. There's always more that we can do. There's always more, always more, more, more. And so it's really easy to just not feel like you have time. And so I think a part of the culture is making sure it's leadership team that we can work with the teams to help carve out some time. For me, I was like little forcing functions, whether they be, you know, like, like at all hands, always having a little section where people get to highlight what they're doing.

11:52So there's kind of this timeline forcing function where people say, Ooh, maybe by this date, I'll present this. And so then there's, there's a little urgency to drive that. There's also where, you know, if people are experimenting, someone will say, hey, let's combine what you're already trying to do. So instead of it's an experiment for experiment's sake, it's tying it to something that you're already trying to drive. And then that way, you can see some of the results. And then continually, like highlighting the wins and build it in. And one of the things that we're doing right now is we're actually just going to hire someone, so if you're a job post stuff, if anyone listens, to be an AI lead that's going to be in the ops team.

12:34And so it's like, I want someone who's just going to wake up every day thinking about how we are going to be transforming the marketing organization and working with each of the different teams. You know, it just feels like for the, you know, we all, everyone has their job to do, right? Like they're trying to generate leads or trying to drive the brand. They're trying to actually, you know, do messaging for the field. And so like, you know, it can feel sometimes like a hard job to try to also come up with the whole system process, you know, technology to even if it's going to ultimately make your job easier.

13:12It also feels hard, you know, because you've got the results you're trying to drive. And so I just wanted someone who's going to go through each of the different roles and kind of imagine with those users and help kind of be that continuous driving force. and so that we kind of don't lose momentum, right? When kind of other projects come up, so. So for this role, is it, yeah, I'd love to hear more about this because I could see a lot of companies wanting roles like this to come in. Outsider perspective, you're not in the weeds in the projects, but how, like, are they working individually with a whole team, a certain member, and like, what kind of skills does this person have to think outside the box?

13:55that's, you know, they're probably not maybe a product manager or product marketing manager, because then they're too in the weeds, or they need to be thinking more holistically, maybe at the higher level of marketing. But yeah, tell me how you're thinking about hiring this person and skill sets they need to have. Yeah, well, my head of marketing strategy and ops is the one that's hiring into his org. And so we're, we're, we're going to put into marketing ops. And so we we've been talking a lot about the role. And obviously, it's a new one. You know, I think industries are kind of experimenting and tinkering.

14:23And so, you know, it does feel like, you know, sometimes I'm like, am I looking for a unicorn? But what I want is, you know, you do need someone who's going to be almost like startup mindset, right? Like thinking scrappy and know how to take, you know, I do feel like there's a lot of skill sets of people and there's people who can take something from zero to one. and um and then there's people who can have something that's already built and like grow it and then there's people who can like really optimize that and it's hard to find someone who does all of that but i i feel like for this role being able to take something from zero to one is a really big um uh because you're really trying to you know walk into a world where there's not a lot of existing templates, a lot of existing best practices, right?

15:18Like you have to just kind of create it. And so I want creators, you know, you need to be someone who has a little of a product management mindset where, you know, like the people who can actually go and talk to users and, you know, other team members and ask about what their job's like and what are the pain points and what are the things, you know? And, you know, like how I think about AI is, you know, I think so much of it's about automation, right? Like what people are starting to dream up is like, wow, we've lived in this world for years, right? Over the last few decades where lots of manual things, we've been able to actually automate it through workflows, right?

16:06Business processes and apps, all of these things. And so we all have this mindset of how to scale something through automation. I think what the biggest unlock for AI is suddenly there's all these parts of the process that requires a lot of manual data entry, a lot of times where it needs to stop and someone needs to make a judgment call and kind of put it in. And so what AI starts to unlock is like, wow, this is kind of automating human judgment. is there ways where I can actually put that as a part of the process and now I can actually automate something more end-to-end and then if you're actually able to to have AI semi-autonomously you know autonomously start running some of these processes doing some of that using judgment to understand which one to run and when I mean this is kind of a hole in lock but I think what the difference is, is you're now starting to think about organizational management.

17:05I think the roles of people in marketing will change where, you know, I almost feel like it's almost like asking every person who owns a function on the team, you know, like if I hired you five more people, what would you do? And no one would say I would have the person come in and I would have them just read everything on the intranet and I'd give them access to Salesforce and just have them like Peru Salesforce for a while and then like do good things. Try like you would say, okay, well actually I want them to help. Like I'm going to break down like this role, like into these different functions.

17:44And I'm going to have my intern, like this person's going to run this and this person's going to do this. And then I'm going to tell them what I need them to know what I expect them to do. And then I'm going to inspect like that they actually understand and they're doing things the way that makes sense and provide feedback, right, and manage the process and that individual. And so I think AI agents is this shift of mindset of trying to think, you know, are there parts like of a role that you carve out that you start to allow like an agent to do, but then the person who's running it has to train, has to actually carve out the role, train, be able to inspect what's actually being done, but at the beginning guide what needs to be done.

18:35And so in that spirit, I want that AI lead to work with each of these function owners, help dream up with what those roles need to be, what tasks could actually be safely automated today because neither thing is going to be. And create these like AI agents. It's almost like I think I've read how Satya Nadella had everyone, Microsoft, start to create org charts and be like, where would you put them? And I think that's an interesting mindset to say like, where would you put them? I think, you know, like sometimes there's just even like my marketing team, one of the ones I just want to help fix is they come back from all these marketing events and you get like all these like spreadsheets and then they're having to do all this manual work of like figuring out you know mapping to any notes that were taken from the event and then being able to there's missing data like help figure out if there's missing or if there's interesting titles and then getting that uploaded into systems and it's just a lot of like manual work that you can really automate um and make it a lot of an easy uh you And it might not be something that we'd be able to hire for, like all these kind of functions, but yet it's a part of their job.

19:51And if they could hire someone, they probably would create that role. And so that's where we're starting to think of like, what would an agent kind of look like? Yeah. Yeah. So is there any areas of judgment that you have automated that maybe even your team was like, I don't think you can. And you're like, look, we did it. Or is it still very early days? Early days. I mean, there's ones where, you know, you actually see it in different applications today. So one I think you and I were talking about is we have with our SDR team. And so what that process tends to look like is where they're looking for potential prospects, right, to outbound.

20:35They'll look for all these different systems, right? You first go in and you find someone on LinkedIn and then you go to Zoom Info and then you go into Salesforce to see if they're already in there. You're constantly checking all these different places. And then you end up using all of that insight to craft an email, which is kind of the human judgment part. And so what we ended up doing was creating a workflow that takes the lead. So basically, the rep actually finds leads, and then the workflow triggers off and actually looks across all of those different systems, fills in anything that's missing, but now has all that context.

21:19And then we have a few policies and rules around GDPR and around different kind of checks. And then the other part that's automated within that workflow is the step to actually use the generative AI to actually create that email. And then it sticks and puts it within their application and they use Sales Loft. And so what they do is every day they wake up and they look within their queue and they can, they basically have someone who's kind of in a really nice contextual way, like written the email for them and they can either automate that or they, you know, make little changes or they can just, you know, have it go as is.

21:58And so, you know, these are just, you know, it's like, I think about things that we do, there's some things that are great to have that automated judgment part. And then there's other parts where it's like, you know, you don't want AI to come up with a GDPR, like you have a policy in your company you need to follow. And right, like, so there's certain things that are really specific that you need to maintain. And then there's other ones where you want to use the generative AI. And so I think, you know, obviously the content creation is one that we use so often in marketing, but that's always a human judgment part that's been great.

22:32Yeah. Well, amazing. Yeah. I mean, it seems like what one person, I mean, I'm hearing about all the workflows that, you know, one person used to have to do. It just seems like a very different world we're entering into where now your sales rep wakes up with crafted emails that they can just approve and tweak a little bit. And I'm just imagining like every part of the org having that that they get to look at and having the person from the outside looking in being like, let's look at your whole workflow now and see all the steps that, you know, can be automated to then help you focus on the more creative pieces and the more human connection pieces of this process and not having to move things between different systems and, you know, checking boxes and whatnot.

23:17It seems like a fun time and a time also when you just maybe don't need as many people doing the same job like that sales. It's almost like I think of it as like, for example, I talk with my head of FP &A and he was describing how they have been doing some automations where, you know, he remembers when he started like five years ago, he had to do like revenue forecast. And if you think about that, revenue forecast is always going to download all these things from different systems and then you pull everything and then you have to like make a little call, right? You kind of look at it and you like understand the context of the company, you understand like market context, what's going on, if there's tariffs, if there's different things, then you make, you kind of make a judgment there.

24:03and he said like five years ago he had to have five analysts all prepare on a weekly basis that that forecast and he's like now we've been able to automate pulling all these things together right and those are more standard like workflows like analytic workflows um but then the very tail end they've started to automate where you know he's like he goes you know even if you take an analyst and say you're supposed to every week go look and understand if there's tariffs or market Like you might not fully, but like the AI will actually go and consistently look at all of these indicators and then provide a recommendation of where they think the forecast.

24:45And then the person still makes the forecast like call. But he's like those five analysts that now we just have one. It's not like we don't need less people in FP &A. They're just now focused on things beyond this every week, pulling the data. So like it's, I think in my mind, it's the roles just evolve and shift and you take on different kinds of workloads. I do feel like the marketers over time will end up feeling like they're managing, right? Like I think today people own applications, right? Like their job, they own a problem set and a function. And they also like they own the Marketo engine or they own right like different parts.

25:28And I think that they'll they'll say, oh, yeah, and my team is made up. Right. Like I own this and then I have, you know, this job that I do, but I also have some agents helping. There'll be a combination. I don't think everything ever gets kind of fully automated away. I don't think that kind of a world that that I see happening. Yeah. OK. So then that would require a lot of upskilling, I guess, to be able to take someone who was just used to, I'll go to your FP &A example, because I used to do that kind of stuff. Like, I used to pull all the different data together, and it'd be in Excel and adding different formulas, like all that's gone.

26:03And so then to accelerate in a different role, it would probably take a lot of, you know, training to be like, okay, here's a new world that you're used to doing a lot of these things. And now it's more of a managing role, managing workflows, agents, automations, plus leaning into something very different that you're not used to. So I'm guessing there's quite a bit of upstealing for every role. Like, you know, in that world, we still need the analyst role. It just shifted to another problem set that, you know, constantly finding, you know, audits or things like that within the system. And so I think there's always problem sets that you can have the same skill set just applied into new things we've never been able to get to.

26:41And now we can, and we can improve that. And then there is for the people who want to kind of expand. And I think there's people who, you know, in marketing are always wanting to kind of grow in their careers. And I think it's an interesting way to kind of grow with that always because it's what you do, right? And the more strategic you can be instead of having to be doing just kind of like the, because most people over time reach a point in their career, they don't want to do that anymore. And this allows them to kind of grow. Yep. So are there any examples where you all were like, an agent can fix this or AI can fix this?

27:18And then you're like, oh, never mind, either too soon or bad idea that failed for now. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much, right? I mean, just even like with the content creation stuff, like we have with our team, we have a lot of little GPTs that we've been creating to help like create solution briefs, you know, know, automatically or help, you know, do some of the ideation kind of work for for blogs or take like the first pass at certain things. And so it's, it's, I feel like it's done a lot of the productivity where it cuts out some of that work time. But you know, you you look at some of the times of what's output and, and you're like, you know, you got to still kind of work.