#35: Leela Srinivasan (CMO at Checkout.com, former CMO at Momentive.ai aka SurveyMonkey)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more. This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from Organic Search and they help Terminus make Organic search their number one source of demos. Here's how it works. Number one is results. DemandWell is built for driving the outcomes that B2B marketers care about demand traffic, leads and revenue. Number two is ease and control. Junior team members can follow recommended steps right in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work. Number three is speed. With everything in one platform, DemandWell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours. SEO expert or not, you can give DemandWell a try and listeners of the Exit 5 podcast can get a free competitive SEO audit to see just how you're ranking relative to the competition. Go to demandwell.com FOMO that's F O M O. And you can get a free SEO consultation today right from demand. Well, that's demandwell.com FOMO FOMO. And you'll get a free SEO consultation today.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit. Exit. Exit.

Hey. On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, my guest is Leela Serena. Leela was CMO at Survey Monkey when.

We did this interview.

Today. She is CMO at a company called.

Checkout.Com so go and check her out on LinkedIn and checkout.com Leela gave one.

Of the best interviews we had on a prior podcast which was called B2B.

Marketing leaders actually got a message from.

Somebody who was like, I re listened to this interview recently. You got to play it for more people.

And so that's what gave me this idea to republish it.

So here's my conversation with Leela.

If you're in B2B marketing, this is one that you're going to take notes on.

Here we go.

Okay. Leila, you're one of my favorite cmos. I'm glad you're doing this. Thank you. For people that don't know just we start every show off with a quick explanation is what is your role? What's your job?

Well, there's a short answer and a long answer. I'll give you the medium answer.

So I run marketing at SurveyMonkey.

I describe myself as a steward of the brand. We're out changing hearts and minds, Dave. That's what we do.

But also very much on the hook.

For growth at SurveyMonkey.

Change the hearts and minds and growth, yes.

Open wallets. Also, when you think about the job of cmo, I view my job as being the steward of a team of about 100 people and my job is to inspire them to do their best work.

So I don't get to do as.

Much marketing directly hands on as I would like to these days. But my job is to inspire them to do great work and to help them feel included and part of something.

Have you had to retrain your brain as a person being responsible for a team of 100 people? I mean, I don't mean responsible. Your team is for sure wildly capable. But at some point, and I know your background, at some point years ago you were doing the work, right? And so like have you had to rewire your brain? Because I find myself struggling with this today. I just had like I had a meeting yesterday that I over engineered and I did too much I was doing too much of the team's job. Like, have you rewired yourself or is that natural?

It is not always natural, I will say. So there's been a little bit of rewiring for sure. And to be clear, you know, 100 sounds like a lot, but there are parts of our business within SurveyMonkey that function more like startups. So you find yourself diving in and sometimes rolling up your sleeves. And we refreshed five web pages yesterday in line with the launch. We did. And I was in there looking at copy. Right. So it's not always super hands off, but by and large, yes, you have to trust your team. That's one of our company values actually, is trust the team and you got to convey enough of the what matters and give enough direction, but also enable your people to do the work. So yeah, it has taken some rewiring for sure.

So you hopped in on web copy. Other things that you don't hop in on. Like, because if that was me, I'm like, oh, I love copy, I love web, I'm going to hop in on this. But if it's something else, I'm not going to hop in. Like, do you pick and choose not.

Based on your personal preference. You pick and choose based on where you are needed most. So if project is stuck and you hate project management, you still got to hop in and help sort it out. That's just part of the job.

So oftentimes if it goes well, you're not in the loop on it.

I like to think I'm in the loop, but not necessarily making the decisions. Again, you try and enable the team or empower the team to do that.

Trust the team. Okay, I have more team questions, but we'll get there. But I always do this. I just love talking about marketing and now we're off track already, so that's okay. Welcome to this podcast. How do you articulate SurveyMonkey's marketing strategy? This is the question where like board level, straight up, what is the role that marketing plays as a business function at SurveyMonkey?

Yeah, well, I think that role has changed over the years, of course. Right. We've been around 20 years, 20 plus years now and rose to prominence as a self serve freemium tool that anybody could just pop down a credit card and buy online. And we have changed pretty dramatically in the last three, four years. Right. Last earnings cycle we disclosed 28% of our revenue is now through our sales team and our product line has diversified pretty massively. So we used to be this one trick Pony. Today we have a full suite of products. We have three different areas where we really add value. One is our core surveys business, then we've got our market research offerings and then we've got customer experience. And so my job and marketing's job is to raise awareness of that full suite of products, that set of products that we offer, while helping to, you know, so driving demand through the funnel, I guess, for those products. But it all starts with perception shift and helping the outside world understand that we are not the SurveyMonkey of 20 years ago.

In the past when I've talked to you, you've mentioned that too. How do you are using SurveyMonkey to actually then do you go and measure your own? Is a perception something that you have a core metric on?

Yeah, definitely. I know you're metrics minded, so we definitely track all the metrics that marketers would tend to. But we do keep a close eye on brand awareness relative to competition and people's preference throughout the funnel. And now we're starting to track perception. It takes me back to my days at LinkedIn 10 years ago where people knew LinkedIn, they knew the brand, but they didn't really understand the role that LinkedIn could play. And so what we had to embark on as a company then was just shifting people's understanding of the value that LinkedIn provided. And that's very similar to the SurveyMonkey situation today is just continuing to tell the stories and shift that perception. So our awareness numbers are still super high because we're a well known brand. But until we shift perception, I don't think we've done the job fully.

So that's cool. So you can actually go out and measure perception the same way you'd measure awareness?

Yeah, yeah. So I think what it starts with is understanding what you want to be known for, like what are the attributes that you want your brand to be known for. And just systematically and consistently over time surveying that, surveying on those particular attributes. And we tend to survey how we stack up on those attributes, how competitors stack up on those attributes. That's just part of our quarterly cadence, if you will, or our annual cadence.

Does that play a big role in your actual marketing strategy? I'm asking all these questions because I'm really interested in this topic of surveys because Bill Masaitis talked about in his episode, he even Talked about using SurveyMonkey. And so I'm gonna sign up because I feel like I could use that in my current job. I want to make sure it's actionable. Right. So I Don't want to go do a brand awareness survey because I want to stroke my ego and see that the company that I'm at has more awareness than it did a year ago. Right. I want to do it because I would want it to drive marketing strategies. Does that actually play out for you? Do you use that to then go dictate what you should go do?

Hugely. You think about all the ways in which marketing can use research basically to fuel great decisions. One of the misconceptions is that growth and driving demand generation and business results is very metrics driven and brand is not. I think that is an outdated misperception.

What can really happen?

So you can measure, you can measure anything. And so what I see is the best marketers thinking through as they develop messaging, for example, messaging positioning. So important to make sure you are saying the right thing that's going to resonate with your audience. So it starts with you knowing which audience you want to talk to, of course, so knowing your ideal customer profile, but then working on, you know, doing the rounds of work that you need to in house to develop that messaging and positioning and then going out and testing it with your target audiences to make sure that, that the words will resonate. And sometimes it's the difference of one word. There's all the difference between somebody saying yeah, that is believable, that's believable. Coming from privy. That's something that appeals to me versus saying yeah, that doesn't, you know, it doesn't really sit right. So I think you can take this sort of data driven approach to developing messaging and positioning, developing and testing campaigns and then later down the funnel, understanding why are you perceived now and thinking about again these attributes or dimensions that you want to be known for and then making sure that your subsequent marketing efforts are built around shifting people's understanding of your brand into those particular attributes and then measuring and continuing that cycle.

I would selfishly love to turn this into our pick your brain on surveys, but I'm not going to because it's not about me. It's about the people listening. It's about the listeners. We love you. This is for you listeners. The next question. You already did a fantastic job because you're a marketer and marketers usually can do good at talking. You said 28% of your revenue at SurveyMonkey came from sales in the last earnings call. Do you have a revenue plan as a marketer that's like I gotta feed 70% of this high volume freemium thing and I gotta feed 30% to the sales team. Is that how that works?

We have quarterly pipeline goals that we set across the business and there are different pipeline goals based on the different segments that we sell into. As is typical, marketing contributes a higher percentage to smaller segments and a lower percentage to larger segments. You know, we run toward those goals in partnership with sales. But I was going to say the. I saw the question around handoff. This might be cheesy. I don't know if you'll think it's cheesy or not. I think it's more of a handhold these days.

I think it is. I don't think it's cheesy. I think. I think it is a handhold. I think the handoff, when it's a handoff, that's where most of the challenges happen.

Right, exactly. So I think about the ways in which we partner with sales today. So clearly we're driving a ton of inbound demand and we partner super closely with our SDR counterparts to make sure that we understand the conversion rates and that we're holding one another accountable for quality and conversion, basically. But in addition to that, as we've continued moving up market and selling higher value products into our different audiences, we're partnering very closely on account based marketing. And so we're often supporting the outbound motions of our BDR team and our AE team. Even there's that outbound partnership that's happening. And then even I think this year, especially what a nuts year, we haven't even talked about that yet. But for pipe acceleration, I've seen us get involved in different ways to continue the conversation with open opportunities in a way that we maybe didn't do as much of before because this has been such an extraordinary year. The next frontier is cross sell upsell. So these are all opportunities to hold hands, if you like, with sales.

What does that mean? Get involved in a way that you hadn't before. Like just way more hands on.

Running more specific programs that are geared toward open opportunities as opposed to just generating opportunities. There's always been an element of that, but I think it's been more overt in the last six months or so. So case in point, yesterday we hosted our first what's called the CX Impact Summit. So big online event basically for the community of people that care about customer experience. One of the metrics that we were looking at is just how much open pipeline can we have in the conversation. It's as much as the event is about generating new pipeline and new opportunities, there's also a lot of benefit that Comes from appealing to people that you're already in conversation with and just helping them understand your brand, your direction, giving them confidence you're the right partner for them.

How do you have the team split with that? It's not that like they're tests, but you have all these different motions. You have the core motion which is free trial. You have sales led, you have expansion, you have cross sell. How have you staffed your team to fit that? Is it a handhold also like what's the actual breakdown of the hundred?

Yeah. This is such an interesting company to work for because we do have this hybrid business model. Right. We still. Our self serve surveys business is still, you know, revenue generating machine and still the first place that most many of our customers encounter us first. Right. So one of the bigger teams that I run is our growth marketing team which includes paid marketing, it includes lifecycle marketing, SEO and also web marketing. And this is the team that works super closely with on our surveys business in general. Driving growth there, but also fueling growth across the organization. I think one of the fascinating things about our business model is that many of our ultimate enterprise customers come through our self serve ranks. Right. They or someone on their team is using self surveymonkey for some self serve purpose and we can introduce them to other products and services that they can take advantage of. So growth is definitely a huge part of the machine.

Growth is one team. They do SEO and paid SEO.

Paid web lifecycle marketing is our email kind of machine to. Yeah, all of that stuff.

Okay, what are the other teams?

Yep. So next up I would say is our product marketing team. They're organized by pillar. So I mentioned we've got these three different sort of distinct product areas. So some of them are mapped more closer to our self serve products but often to our more integrated bias grade products.

So you basically have product expertise. If I'm in product marketing on the survey product, that's different than the. I don't know all your products but you have them organized by to become product experts. Basically.

Yeah. There are product marketers that map to surveys, to market research and to customer experience.

Yeah.

So that's team two, third team, demand gen marketing ops. So I heard Bill's podcast a little while back. I believe demand gen is still very much a thing. It's more a nomenclature. You can call them campaigns or something else. But demand gen is a really important part of our team and they also also map to these different pillars. We have a team in Europe as well as here in the Americas. That's the third component Fourth brand marketing. Very important. All of our folks in content and design and also video are part of this brand team along with a small consumer insights team that are involved in the research that helps fuel some of our decisions. So that's team four, fifth team, Comms and social. So feel really fortunate to have comms be part of the marketing organization and social is part of that team as well. They maybe are structured a little bit differently from the other teams, but provide a ton of value and also are a very strong conduit into our HR and people team because internal comms is part of that mix.

You have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Okay, I got it. Six team is what?

Yeah, so this is my sixth direct. This one's a little more specific to our situation. So I have a VP of customer experience and advocacy that sits on my team. She has been part of the marketing organization for a while and does a lot of great work to help us build community among the CX folks and also has under her wing is the storytelling arm of our business on the customer story side.

Got it. This is awesome. This is why I love doing this podcast. People are going to love this. I don't know why I wrote about it this morning. People love marketing orgs, marketing org charts, where people sit and whoever. So this is good to get this level of detail. I have a bunch of questions based on this. Now you have six direct reports. What are your rhythms as a team and what are your rhythms as a manager with your direct reports?

Yeah, so I have weekly one on ones with all of my directs and then we have a weekly direct meeting. So all of us get together once a week. Then every other week I have what's called marketing leads, which is basically the director plus crew. So it's the next level down basically across marketing so that I can maintain that contact with our director plus population. I can help cascade important stuff from the exec team and just, you know, there's just a certain level of discussion that needs to happen amongst that group. We have a marketing monthly. I actually just had one this morning which is a chance to showcase some of the great work and make sure that we give shout outs to folks doing incredible things. We welcome new team members. We have typically a couple of spotlight presentations to help people keep up to date on some of the bigger developments. So those are kind of the main marketing mechanisms. Now that my leadership team is fully staffed, I'm starting to think more about skip level meetings with the direct reports of my direct reports. This is something that is a common practice at SurveyMonkey. In fact, under our CEO, he has a quarterly or semiannual meeting with all of my directs, but not me to find out how things are going, which is a little freaky.

Wait, all of them together?

Yes. They all sit in a room and they talk about how things are going without me with my CEO.

I kind of love that though, you.

Know, it's a little unnerving. But bear in mind, we're a feedback company. We definitely walk the talk. And I think the transparency is good. And quite honestly, for Xander, it's a great way for him to just keep a pulse on, across all the different functions. Right. So I don't plan to do that, but I am going to probably have more consistent one on ones with the next level down.

Basically I just felt like I was good on the one to one people level, but wasn't really in the mix on what's going on in teams. And I think one of the values that the marketing leader has to play is kind of be the person that can see across all the different teams because they're not always talking. And so well, oh, product marketing is actually doing this. Hold on, let me go tell you about that. And so I just asked to do like monthly reviews. I have a tenth of the size of team that you do, so it's easier. But I'm looking forward to that, to being like, hey, let's just talk about, we have, we have this amount of time. Let's just talk about demand gen. You know, this is not about people career. This is very like specific to this business unit within marketing and I'm hoping that that will be helpful.

Yeah. And I think as your organization grows in complexity, you're absolutely right that they're just, there's just so much great work going on and part of the role that you play at the leadership level is connecting the dots. It's really about helping expose one team to another team's great efforts so that they can appreciate them, but also because there's a ton of learning embedded in that. So you've got teams that are off doing different things and if they can just learn from one another, then that accelerates their progress.

How do you set goals as a company? Very data driven culture. Survey driven culture. I'm assuming you have a unique process for how you set goals, but I'm really interested in how you set goals for each team of marketing. How do you take the marketing goals and then say this is what product marketing is responsible for. This is what the brand team's responsible for.

Yeah, so we're probably due a reset on some of this, Dave. So in full transparency.

But no, wait, wait. Can you pause on that for a second? That's actually really important because I just had this, I had this feeling like two weeks ago and just was like, ah, these goals aren't right, but we haven't reset them and that's okay. Do you think that's okay?

Every now and then I think it's fine. I mean, you want to have goals that are aggressive but attainable. This is not a surveymonkey story, but I've worked in places previously where the demand gen goals or the business aspirations were lofty and we were nowhere close to meeting those. And it was just demoralizing to have such a massive gap that there was no hope of closing. So we had to think about how do you motivate your people? I mean, that's really what you want to do with your goals, is have them be motivational so that people have very clear understanding of what's expected of them. So when I say reset, I mean more. This actually ties in with your. What we were just discussing around different teams having, you know, doing great work. But what you wrestle with as a marketing leader is how do you make sure that it doesn't become a siloed effort? Right? You want teams working together in partnership.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy, and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks. You can even understand how much your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24, 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs, it's really a marketer's Dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI Search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like Chat, GPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a href r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

I think one of the things we've come to realize in recent months is we need to have more sort of joint goals across marketing. So that in the case of, for example, pipeline, pipeline is not just a demand gen goal. There's actually a small army of people that it takes to hit that pipeline goal, including great work from paid marketing and from design and from content and you know, all the pieces of the machine. Right. This is, this is what makes marketing so glorious. Yeah. So the question is, how do you make sure that those are shared goals that the group is driving toward together, even if they, you know, they report up into different bosses.

Do you have an example of like how a designer would have a goal that ties to demand gen?

Yeah. So let's say you're producing big rock content. We just actually published a whole series of signature research reports. So one for cx, one for market research, one for across our business. And so you want to make sure that the team involved in producing that those assets takes pride in and has a sense of what the business impact of that work is. It might start with number of downloads or an appreciation for all the places in which that content is being surfaced so they understand the Leverage that you get from producing a big asset like that and sinking the time into it, but continuing to hold that same unit of people that produced it responsible for and celebrating their accomplishments. As you start to build pipeline and see results and tell the stories, that's I think what teams can get really excited about and rally around this common goal of making sure that asset delivers on its business potential. Basically, the demand gen person in that pod is always going to have that goal in mind. But other parts of that pod may feel less close to that goal unless you make them feel part of it.

Yeah, it's got to be like the demand gen person might run the campaign and have the number, but there is no campaign unless the landing page and the creative and the video looks amazing. It's not quantifiable like that this video did X, but you have the tangible asset without the work of the creative team. And so it's got to be like celebrating the hey, wow. That new ad creative that we did actually brought us an X lift in conversion over. Wow. Okay. That gets me fired up. Now I want to go back and create more. I think it's that type of rhythm. It's cool to hear you say that.

That's right. And then I think even beyond that. Right. So that's the best case scenario where the asset is just like off the charts and it's really driving the results. When you really need that cross team pod coming together is when it's not yet humming or it's not firing on cylinders and you need all the best ideas in the room to figure out okay, what are we going to do to lift the performance of this? Right. And that's where especially your creative team can be really, really helpful in planting new seeds or off the wall ideas on how do you just get more airtime or more eyeballs on that piece of content.

So at SurveyMonkey, do you all have any particular goal setting process like okrs or any tool that you use to do it?

We use company level OKRs. I have had OKRs in place at other organizations as well. We are not yet best practice I would say on okr. Let's just put it that way. I think LinkedIn was really strong on this dimension. Everything sort of cascaded. So this year I'm very hopeful that this will be our breakout year for OKRs. But yes, we use those at the company level like what we're driving toward together and then we will have different levels of those at least one level down, I think at the pillar level to explore to help Just orient the organization to what we're driving for.

If I was an individual contributor, product marketer on your team, do I have quarterly goals, annual goals? Like what about me as an individual performer who's going to come to you in a year and want to get a promotion? What's the process for that?

Yeah, it's a little bit more individualized. So I think different teams have different approaches to that, even within marketing. So on the promotion path. Yes, we have a quarterly, what's called our gig process. So growth, impact and goals where individuals get together with their managers and just talk through what they've accomplished, where they could have done better, what they're looking to do next quarter, what kind of help they need in getting there. We have a process established for people to be able to really focus their efforts to make sure they're focusing on the most needle moving things. Then there's a semiannual more performance review type cycle that we do. I think what we'd look to do is make sure that managers and their direct reports are having ongoing dialogue about careers. If you're on the team and you're looking to go from manager to senior manager, we should have identified the specific areas where you need to focus in order to get to that next level. And some of them will be performance gold, some of them will be more about how you work or the way you show up in meetings, the level of autonomy that you have. So there are different, obviously different components that go into promotion. Just a little bit separate from the kind of the goal set.

No, it's actually good to hear you say that because you are the CMO of 100 person company and the individual goals are individualized. That's important.

They have to be.

Nobody just mean like I've fallen in the trap of like it's got to all fall from the big company goal and then each team and then each person. It's never going to be this perfect harmonized thing, you know, especially when you're on a team of like think about your team. You have a paid person who's going to be different than the product marketing person, who's going to be different than the designer than the customer experience person. They're all so unique in that sense. How can you set the same goals? You can't.

I think that's right. What you do want to do is wherever it's possible to ladder into the highest level goals.

That's great. You want to encourage that connection into what matters most. It's not always possible. You have to find goals that are meaningful on an individual level and where somebody can really understand whether or not they're making progress. So there's a little bit of give and take there.

Let's talk about marketing budget. You can't share what your marketing budget is. Understandably, no one has even told me that. Which is what's the budget process at your company? And. And I guess I'm interested in two things. Number one, how do you get to the budget as a cmo? And then number two, how do you figure out across those six teams where you're going to spread that? Because I'm sure you got six leaders on each of those team who's always hungry for more budget.

You think it's that time of year? Dave, this is a very top of mind.

I'm looking in my Bookmarks tab in my browser right now and I have the Privy 2021 marketing plan V3 already. It's October 14th and we haven't even. There's not even a model yet. That's just words in that document.

Yeah, good for you. But the point is there are words there because you already have a sense of the bigger things that you want to accomplish next year.

Right in our organization. So bear in mind we're a publicly traded company. There's some aspect of the goals that clearly are set tops down because we have a long range financial plan that we're hooked into and so we have a shared understanding at the exact team level of where we're headed as a business. And marketing of course supports those goals. So that drives a fair chunk of the conversation in terms of the how much the how you allocate, I think is where marketing really comes into its own. I've had this sense the last couple of years that the healthiest thing you can do if not doing zero based budgeting absolutely. Is to come in with that objective sense that while I'm sure you drove a lot of success last year, there were definitely things that you did that were not successful. And so part of the I think the upfront conversation is around, okay, where do we want to double down? Where are we not going to invest? Because the more things you can take off the table and say, you know what, we tried this, it succeeded to some degree or it was unsuccessful. It's not something we plan to repeat next year that frees up budget that you can reinvest into the things that matter most. So I think that's just having really healthy dialogue around your puts and takes, if you will. I try and have that conversation with my leaders so that I get input across that team.

I've had a change in mindset on budget and you have done this gig. You've been at LinkedIn OpenTable. But what I'm realizing now, it's so much of a game of betting the budget is an asset and you're trying to place bets on, okay, I'm going to move some of these chips here. And oh, this budget came free from this channel. And so I've always kind of rolled my. When I was a just individual, individual contributor marketer, I'd always roll my eyes at the, you know, the manager, whoever who has the budget because I'm like, why can't we have, you know, why can't we do this or this money? And it's so much of an asset that you want to be able to have free and say, yeah, you do want five grand here to be able to go try that thing. And it's such a tool that I think I'm just starting to learn as a marketing leader. But it's just interesting to hear you be able to articulate that way.

And I think you raised an important point, Dave. If we've learned anything this year, is that we don't have a clue what is going to be happening nine to 12 months from now. Right. It's just, who knows? So both in planning cycles and then also in budgeting cycles, you want to try and retain some flexibility because experimentation is super important because the unknown will happen and you need to be ready and able to pivot. So I think that's actually what is keeping marketing leaders on their toes the last few years. And it's come really into fruition this year where the landscape's just been changing around us by the minute sometimes and we just have to be more flexible.

Is there budget shifts that you've made since March that you could talk about? Like, I don't know if you all did events. Well, no, you did, because I spoke at it was going to. Was that event going to be in person?

So that event was never going to be in person. We had a virtual summit already rolling. But this, we did have designs on SurveyMonkey hosted events this year and in addition to showing up at other events. So events have long been part of our strategy. So yeah, so that obviously changed overnight. I think what we've seen on the event side, there's still a place for virtual events. Of course we can continue to do some of our own and investing selectively in others virtual events, although I think it's just really hard to replicate the benefit that you get from a large conference or trade show, the virtual foot traffic is nowhere near the same impact. Right.

The last time I did an interview with you was at Drift's Hypergrowth event and there was a thousand people seated next to each other in an amazing venue. And just you made a joke, people laugh, you know, you feel the buzz in a room. It's like the same thing that's missing. Like, I'm sure you felt this. I can't imagine a team of 100 people, but presenting to your team on a 100 person Zoom call and it just feels like the black hole. So that is a huge piece of it.

Yeah.

And if you're a sponsor of something like, you know, Hypergrowth. Right. You benefit because there's that buzz, because people are there to connect and engage. And when you try and move that effort online, the event itself is so valuable for the attendee, but just the interaction with attendees is so different. And so I found as a sponsor, those events have rarely come through on our expectations. So we've moved away from kind of larger scale. Hey, we'll sponsor this massive virtual event. We've done more of our own virtual events and I think we have had the chance to lean into digital more. It's been a super interesting year on the digital side, but we've actually put more money behind our paid marketing efforts and seen pretty good yield from those.

Do you see yourself doing an in person event again soon? Couple years. It's got to come back.

I mean, it will, but will it come back in the same way is the question.

Right. I can't imagine people rushing to, like go to an event, you know, for that purpose, like as much as we would like. Yeah, I'm going to go network. It's like, I think the need for that is gone.

We're all going to be questioning our travel.

Right to anywhere.

Yeah. Doing things that we think really add value. I think that's one thing that occurred to me. So I am confident that physical events will be part of our mix. But this cycle we've seen firsthand just how much more engaged people are when you offer up smaller, more intimate settings, the chance to really connect and talk. You know, we've all been putting on roundtables and bringing together smaller audiences, so there's real conversation. I imagine that we will continue to see more intimate gatherings be quite successful. And then bigger ones are probably going to take longer to come back.

And I just think you get so much more leverage. I mean, you didn't mention it, but like to read between the lines, it seems like you sponsored some virtual events and the return wasn't there. And I've seen that. I've heard that from people across the board, by the way, because all we're doing is the old webinar play, which is like, hey, you sponsor our thing, you'll get our list. Well now if you have a ton of other vendors hitting the same list, it just becomes noise and you're just going to get unsubscribed. Right. Nobody's going to see your stuff. I love the idea of taking that same. Let's say it's 10 grand, right? For something. 10 grand, 20 grand. Taking that same investment and putting it on your own event, creating a roundtable with someone amazing in your space and saying, hey, we're going to do an invite only zoom call with some amazing chief customer experience officer at some Fortune 100 company and you make that invite only for your top customers. You record all the content. I just think you get so much more leverage from that. But it does require changing in thinking from a demand gen perspective where we're not just going to get a list and create pipeline. This is a longer term asset that we're going to create for the brand.

Yeah, definitely the game of quality, not quantity. And then back to what we were saying earlier around, just different ways in which marketing and sales are partnering. Right. Those are especially valuable for acceleration of deals. So continuing to build that relationship that's already there to some degree. I think I'm seeing a lot of companies follow that kind of strategy.

What are the big marketing challenges that you have as SurveyMonkey that are unique to your business? Right. So let's say I sell cybersecurity software. People will never give me their email address. Do you have a couple things that are unique to your business, you think?

I mean, one is being called Survey Monkey.

In what way?

It is a blessing and also sometimes a little bit of a curse. So we're very fortunate to have the levels of awareness we have. But back to the earlier conversation, people think they know SurveyMonkey. They don't really know what to do and how mission critical work is that we're doing.

Right.

So I think in some ways having this big brand but having that brand not necessarily be fully understood just yet is a marketing challenge. It's a fun challenge to be clear, because the brand definitely opens the doors. But that's an ongoing sort of work in progress for my team is making sure we get the stories out there that paint a very different picture of what SurveyMonkey is capable of.

If you're selling to the enterprise and you gotta go, you got a big six figure deal and you're trying to sell to the CIO and you're like, yeah, we're bringing this tool, SurveyMonkey. It's like, well, what's that? But it's interesting because everybody has a different problem. You have. There's brands that would kill to have awareness. You're on the other side of saying, hey, we have great awareness. However, they don't actually know the full story. We're a multi product company, we're enterprise ready, we can do all these things. Right. And that's the marketing challenge.

Yeah, but I mean, talk about a fun challenge. Because the types of company we work with are extraordinary. And when you talk to that cio, you know, the first thing you're often able to say is, do you know that 3,000 people at your organization are already using circuitry monkeys?

You better sign this contract for security. Security just. Yeah, on its own. This is going to be worth it. Do you work with any outside agencies? Don't really care so much about the names. If you can name them, that's cool. But more just like to give your team some superpowers outside of who you have.

Yeah, we do. So we have a digital agency that we work with closely. We have a PR agency, an agency.

Of record, digital meaning like ad buying and managing ad accounts.

Got it, yeah. So we have a small but mighty in house paid marketing team that leverages our agency for and their tech stack as well. Actually is a huge part of value that we get from partnering with an outside firm to do that. And then we have a brand agency that we're working with on a few different things as well. So those are the three main agencies that we have on the books.

What's one marketing problem that you could solve that you haven't been able to solve in your career? So if you could like for me, I want to get emails from every podcast subscriber. Or you could have perfect attribution on brand dollars. What's the big marketing mystery that hasn't been solved that you want solved?

Most CMOs would say attribution. It remains a biggie.

Not Bill. Not Bill would not tell you that. Go listen to that episode. Bill said you can multi touch attribution from here to the moon. It's not an issue. That's the first thing you got to do. I love you Bill, but yeah, I.

Mean, so we actually we've pretty strong hold on multi touch attribution for self serve driven part of our business and it is incredibly powerful. So I agree with this point for sure. We're working on that on the sales assistant side as well. Attribution, I think remains a big one because I don't think you can ever have perfect. Perfect is the enemy of the good, as we all know. But I think just making sure you have a good read on that, I don't know, I think for me it's a little different. And this is, I think this is a work in progress for a lot of CMOs I've talked to this year because again, this year has been a doozy and marketing, I think has been stretched as thin as any department out there. So the problem to solve is making sure that we reposition marketing as a scarce resource within the building because the pace of our planning cycles have accelerated, shit is hitting the fan, marketing is pulled in. So we have to be agile and back to the conversation around planning. And do you really know what's happening nine to 12 months from now? Of course not. You can plan all you like. Things are going to come up. So you need to have some slack capacity in the system to handle the things that will come up. But historically, and I don't know if this is painting too broad a brush, but marketing has a hard time saying no. Our eyes can be bigger than our stomachs. And so I think one of the things that some of my peers have successfully done that we're working on at SurveyMonkey is making sure that the rest of the executive team understands that just like engineers are scarce resources and we can't just take on limitless work, we have to prioritize, we have to say no. And I think that's a really important aspect of marketing today, is making sure that we are that scarce resource.

That's the best thing anybody said on this podcast. It's the one that I resonate with the most. I've been saying this for years. It drives me insane how people think they can just go to the marketing team, like write a blog about it, make a video about it. Oh, we need to get better at recruiting, make a landing page marketing, make a video marketing. It's the same as engineers. You don't go walk over to that section where all the lights are turned off and it's much quieter over there. It's a way different. It's the same thing. Dang, I'm making that for a clip. I'm glad you said that. It's very true. However, I do think that a lot of it is self inflicted. Where, like, I'm a big culprit of this. Where I see. I do want to help. Yeah, we could make a sick recruiting video. I want to do that. And then, you know, like you said, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, so pretty good. Okay. Leela, you're awesome. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. My last question before we go. Give me one other marketing leader that hasn't been on yet. You know, I could only ask you for one. Who would it be?

Who should I have just one. Dave, Come on.

All right, fine. Seven.

Well, so the curious part of me. And bear in mind our mission is to power the curious. So I'm super curious. I would love you to interview Janine Pelosi from Zoom, because I want to know exactly how nuts her year has been. If we've all been having a nuts year. Okay, that's one that might be a wish list. I don't know if she's open for that. Robert Chatwani at Atlassian. It's definitely worth a conversation. I really admire his work.

These are two good ones. I don't know. Janine, if you're listening, I'm gonna ask for an intro. I'm sitting on a favor to somebody. I'm gonna go out. I'm gonna go call it in and try to get Janine on. If not, we'll keep shouting her out until she comes. Leela, you're awesome. I appreciate you. If you like the show at all, leave us a review. Say hi to Leela on Social and me, and otherwise, we'll listen. We'll talk to you later. Go, listen, do whatever you're gonna do. Bye, Leila.

Good to see you too.

See ya.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros.

Whether you're deep in your career and.

Want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get Smart smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company, Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community.

There's 4,000 marketers in the community.

We have a job board, we're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to.

My friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work.

That they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out.

It's Hatch FM Foreign Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramar Mark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers and right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is gonna help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you gotta grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check em out out, go to Paramark. Com. Office hours. That's paramark. Com. Office hours.