S3E3 - Lara Shackelford, xCMO Datastax, Looker - B2B Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, AI

Lara Shackelford is a veteran Chief Marketing Officer many times over, and has led marketing teams to create impact at companies such as Oracle, IBM, Intel, Datastax, Qlik, Looker (both before and after the acquisition by Google), and has also led global demand generation at Microsoft. She is currently senior vice president of marketing at iCapital.

Key Highlights:

In this episode, Lara talks about how the B2B buying experience has changed, what is a good blueprint for sales training, coming up with a good ROI analysis, how to assess the ROI of AI, and what does a good partnership between product marketing, product and sales teams looks like, and much more.

01:10 - Three types of CMOs

05:57 - How the B2B buying experience has changed

10:07 - The role of marketing in pre-product-market-fit startups

12:18 - How great product marketers build their technical chops and be credible

16:30 - What makes product marketing a good partner with product and sales teams

20:21 - A good blueprint for sales training

22:30 - How to come up with ROI analysis for customers

25:28 - A framework for assessing ROI of AI

27:08 - Why marketing qualified leads (MQL) break the relationship between marketing and sales

Connect with Lara Shackelford:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/larashackelford/

Connect with Rahul Abhyankar:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulabhyankar/

Referenced in this episode: 

* People: Maya Angelou, American author, poet, civil rights activist
* People: Nelson Mandela, first President of South Africa, statesman, anti-apartheid activist
* Book: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
* Book: Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela