CMO Confessions Ep. 18: SurveyMonkey's Leela Srinivasan

April 04, 2019 Joe Hyland

Episode link: 18: Leela Srinivasan of SurveyMonkey: The Real Value of Data, the Power of Personas and the Brand’s Path to the Enterprise.

Hello again. It’s been a wild and crazy trip after our annual user conference, Webinar World 2019. Didn’t make it? No worries. That’s why we have CMO Confessions.

This week on CMO Confessions, Leela Srinivasan, CMO of SurveyMonkey, shares how she got her start in marketing, why too much data is becoming a big problem for even the most data-centric company and how SurveyMonkey approaches customer satisfaction. It’s a really great episode that you can digest here or on podbean.

If you’re interested in diving into Leela’s perspectives on marketing you can find her Twitter profile here. If you’re interested in her background you can check out her LinkedIn profile here. As a special note: Leela is looking for fantastic SurveyMonkey stories to promote. If you happen to have one you’d like to share, please, please reach out to her at either of the above social media channels.

If you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean. Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes and Google Play stores.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat.

Transcript:

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO Confessions. Super excited to have my guest on today. I am joined by Leela Srinivasan, CMO of SurveyMonkey. Leela, how are you doing?

Leela S.:

I’m doing great, Joe. How are you?

Joe Hyland:

I am wonderful. I have a million topics I’m hoping we can cover today. We’ve got half an hour, so we’ll see if we even get through half of them. Before we dive into topics, tell me, or tell our audience what’s happening at survey monkey right now, you’re, I think, less than a year in. So I’d love to hear how the journey is going so far.

Leela S.:

That’s right. So I’m about eight months into my time here at SurveyMonkey and it has been a fast and furious journey so far and also really fun one. We completed our IPO — went public just over two months ago and so you can imagine a large chunk of the year has been devoted to getting ready for that. That was certainly an experience. And now we’re onto all the reasons I came here, which are really to help the company spread its wings. For our 19 years in business most of that time we’ve been perceived as a self-serve company that individuals buy a subscription and use online super easy to use, delivering a ton of value and there’s actually a much broader enterprise story to be told. So I’m very excited about that. So just gearing up for the new year and getting ready to hit the ground running.

How to Move a Well-Loved Brand Forward

Joe Hyland:

Okay, wonderful. I’m interested to talk about the brand that SurveyMonkey created before you got there and kind of how you’re evolving it. And before I give you a chance to answer that — just in the hallways, maybe 10 or 15 minutes ago I saw a colleague and said what I was about to do and how you were on the show — and she said, “Oh, love SurveyMonkey. I feel like I’ve been using them forever.” So this is, this is such an approachable, likable brand. What do you do with your brand as you, as you move it forward and move it in kind of these exciting directions?

Leela S.:

Yeah. Well, first of all, that’s very sweet, Joe. Thank you. Good to hear. And frankly it’s one of the things that drew me to the organization. I’ve been in B2B marketing for a number of years now and quite frankly, I almost didn’t take the interview because I couldn’t quite see the parallels between my journey and my value that I hope I deliver to organizations and where serving monkey was in my mind’s eye. So, as I said earlier, we were a self-serve platform, right? That’s the core of our business. But once I started talking to the organization, I realized that behind the scenes of the last couple of years or so, SurveyMonkey has been very quietly building this portfolio of enterprise grade solutions, building out the survey platform so that it is enterprise ready. It meets with all of your compliance and security needs and all that good stuff.

Leela S.:

And so there’s a huge story to be told here to your question of the brand. It is a conundrum. You know, we have this well known, well liked brands. Our mission is to power the curious and we talk about helping individuals and organizations measure, benchmark and act on the opinions of people who drive their success. But 2019 has to be the year in which we help, for example, marketers understand all the ways in which SurveyMonkey can add the value use of all its products. Or where we help the same thing for HR, right? These are two core communities where day in, day out, we’re answering 20 million questions on our platform. Two and a half million people a day are responding to a survey. And so the job ahead for us is to help those different audiences understand the value that we deliver day in, day out to organizations who are empowering the curious individuals within their organization to gather that feedback from the people who matter most. Whether that’s customers, employees, students, patients, you name the audience.

Leela S.:

So yeah, it’s also really fun brand. So, I like fun brands who doesn’t like fun? But the balance between what … and I think this is something we’ve seen evolve over the last five, 10 years, right? You think about brands like Slack and I was actually talking to Kelly Watkins here, so it goes on site to do a fireside chat at our marketing all-hands and we were just shooting the breeze on brands and I think Slack has done an excellent job of nailing sort of that intersection between approachability and fun and the right home while still — we’re very clear that they serve a business purpose. And so you look around the landscape of B2B organizations and a lot of them have been trying to kind of get there, right? They, they’re trying to ditch the sort of white papers and blue suits and buildings, iconography and trying to go for something more human and approachable.

Leela S.:

SurveyMonkey kind of in a different position where we’ve got almost a consumer-esque brand and so, and that’s very powerful for us. We’ve been able to get a lot of benefit from that, but how do we steer into something that’s a little bit more business message-y? How do we talk about the value for marketers, for example?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. Well, one person’s opinion — and I think you do a nice job of that by highlighting the benefits that your customers are seeing. Right? So I’m just, my perception is you guys tell pretty powerful stories from your customers’ perspectives. Ultimately the underlying point is that they’re doing it and it’s powered by SurveyMonkey, but I think you’re doing a nice job of telling the customer story versus saying, “Hey, we want to tell you why SurveyMonkey is so great and you have to listen.”

Leela S.:

That’s good to hear. That’s great to hear actually. I have always tried to be customer centric and the way we think about marketing, whether it’s here or elsewhere. I do think there’s so much opportunity though for us to continue down that path and when I say that we have something like 16 million active users using our platform and there are so many stories in that base and I could almost — sort of tempted to use this podcast as an open casting call for marketers that are driving value. I’m not kidding, actually. I want to tell your story in 2019. So if you have a really good story about how you’re leveraging SurveyMonkey to measure, benchmark and act on customer feedback or get your arms around your target audience and be more effective as a marketer — I want to hear that story and I’m on Twitter, I’m on LinkedIn, you can hit me up in any direction you desire. I will take the call. I will get my team involved and we’d love to just showcase more of you.

How SurveyMonkey Approaches Focus

Joe Hyland:

Alright, I love it. We’ll put your Twitter handle and your LinkedIn profile in the notes for this so that people can take you up on that. I love that. It’s interesting. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in the market, but I’m curious about your perspective on this. Focus can be a beautiful thing and the strength that you guys have, which I think a lot of other companies have is it’s a very versatile solution. So, you referenced just a couple of different audiences. I’m sure there are dozens and dozens of use cases for the product. How do you look at prioritizing where you put your marketing team’s focus because there’s so much you could do, which is good, but it’s also dangerous.

Leela S.:

Yeah, it’s a great question. And I, if I’m honest, I think it is something that’s been a challenge for SurveyMonkey over the years because to your point, it’s a horizontal platform and there are almost limitless use cases for our technology. So since I arrived about eight months ago, one of the things we have been focusing on is really coming back to the customer, of course, thinking in a more persona-based way because if we can really put our finger on the challenges that the different audiences are facing and talk to them in very real terms and empathize with them and then talk about how we can help them solve those challenges, then I think we’re just in a fundamentally better place.

The Power of Persona

Leela S.:

And so, one of the changes that I made to the team and coming in was to organize around the persona a little bit more in product marketing and demand generation so that we have people in this building who obsess about the, the HR practitioner, for example, their worlds. How difficult it is for them to retain employees in an economic environment where there is more demand than supply of talent, right? I mean an average retention cycles are going down and down and down as people continue to get tapped on the shoulder for new opportunities. And so for employers that just creates this need to create ever more engaging employee experiences. And how do you do that? Well, one of the ways is by listening to your employees and listening to them when they’re a candidate, listening to them when they onboard to figure out if they got what they need, how can you make the next onboarding experience better? Listening to them all the way through their engagement cycle, gathering feedback on them, helping them grow all the way through to offboarding as well and taking the exit interview and learning constantly along the way. How can you create a better workplace? How can you make the workplace more inclusive? How can you help them grow at your organization rather than finding another opportunity?

Leela S.:

So, that’s sort of the team on the product marketing demand gen side is focused around that employer or sorry, the HR persona, they have a counterpart in creative that aligns with that. And then the same is true of marketers of course. So, the marketing faces all kinds of challenges and opportunities, many of which we can help by helping them better understand customer loyalty and identify champions, for example, and package together, proof points really quick with that and in turn, help other customers discover the through the testimonials of customers. We can help organizations to run really quick market research on the fly, which you can use for content marketing, for example. So all sorts of different ways that we can help marketers get closer to the customer. But it starts by just having that focus, that obsession almost with your target audience; what matters to them, what their challenges are and how you can help them to be meaningfully better.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. I think you’ve said that very, very well. You need to be. I feel marketers need to be obsessive on personas and that needs to be the driving force for how we go to market. It’s really natural that talk about all the ways that we as companies are great and no one wakes up in the morning and says, I can’t wait to hear from ON24 or SurveyMonkey or Slack, right? Like, we have challenges, but that is a slippery slope that it’s easy to kind of slide down.

Leela S.:

I just had a sad moment there for all the marketers that actually communicate. It doesn’t. I’ll be looking for your next email, Joe though. I promise.

Joe Hyland:

That’s fair. Well said. I think it’s very easy to forget that because we all have goals and milestones and objectives that we’re trying to hit and it’s easy to lose sight of it. I think it’s interesting that you organize the team around personas. I personally think that that’s quite smart in part because we’re going through a reorganization or a reshuffling of the deck on our own marketing team and we’re doing just that. We’re organizing content, product marketing and demand generation around key personas and use cases. I find that if something is a hobby, it tends to not go that well. So we were trying to do this over the past year, but without having any vertical or use case owners. And I finally decided that really wasn’t serving us well.

Leela S.:

Here’s the other thing as well, when you go in that more customer-centric persona-centric direction. We’ve — this may not come as a surprise to you, but we, we occasionally run some research here at SurveyMonkey. We have a fantastic in house research team. Yeah. And they know a thing or two about conducting research. But they recently, we recently ran a study to better understand the connection between customer experience and employee experience. And learned was that if you ask employees who believes that their companies place a great deal of importance on customer satisfaction. If you ask those employees how likely they are to be at the organization two years later, they are significantly likelier to be at the organization two years later than employees who don’t think their companies care about customer satisfaction. And so it’s not just, I think a better way to market, but it also just creating that connectivity between your team and the customer so that they understand that what they’re doing matters that actually reaps dividends in terms of you being able to retain people, which as we talked about earlier, is kind of difficult in this market.

Purpose Over Profits

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. I think that’s brilliant. It’s also so intuitive and logical. People want to feel like they’re what they’re doing matters, that they belonged to something that serves a purpose. And it’s pretty easy in any B2B environment, if you’re not careful, have employees, they — “What are we really doing here? Like what is, what is the point of this?” And if it’s just about profits, I find that is quite unmotivating.

Leela S.:

Again, I think we’ve seen this, I credit the millennials with just articulating things that many of us older folks have been thinking all along, but this notion of providing impact. What does it really mean to have impact? One form of impact is definitely delivering on financial goals, but really if you can, if you can look in the mirror every day and say, “You know what, we’re delivering impact for our end users, for the customers that are leveraging our solutions, our technologies, whatever it is.” That’s a very different feeling from something from just a revenue goal, let’s say.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. And I think it’s important that is in the ethos of a company. I think it’s, it’s easy for the executive management to say, “No, no, no, this is just about profits. That’s why business exists.” And that is that, that will not resonate with the masses at the employee level.

SurveyMonkey Becomes EnterpriseMonkey

Joe Hyland:

So anyway, that’s super interesting research. So let’s go back to brand and brand perception. I think you referenced this just a few moments ago, there are so many B2B organizations who have typically played quite well and successfully in the enterprise space who are trying to become more approachable and relatable and humanize their brand. Then there are brands like Slack and SurveyMonkey and Zendesk who I think have kind of always been cool and pretty relatable. How do you see this evolution going specifically at SurveyMonkey and what you’re trying to do given that? I bet you serve the enterprise market pretty well. There’s probably a lot of growth there for you. You’re now a publicly traded company, so how do you balance relate-ability and likability with “We’re serious trusted brand that you should rely on.”?

Leela S.:

Yeah, it’s a work in progress. So I don’t have perfect answer just yet. And it’s sort of like, how do you make sure you don’t throw out all the goodness, right? Because we really are tremendously blessed to have a brand with the strength of SurveyMonkey as our foundation. But I think this comes back to customer storytelling in some ways, right? So, I mentioned earlier, 60 million active users. You said somebody in the hallway, “Oh, I love SurveyMonkey,” that’s all great. But the stories that you’ll see us surfacing more and more frequently will look more like the story of Box.

Leela S.:

So Box is an enterprise client of SurveyMonkey. They leverage SurveyMonkey’s enterprise platform along with our integrations to key systems of record, like Salesforce. And when you think about what we enable for a company like Salesforce, you know they have pockets of customer — sorry, I’m sorry, for Box, rather — they’re customer obsessed, right? They care deeply about the customer experience. And for them what we were able to provide was being able to pipe that real time survey information from their customers directly into the systems where their front lines are interfacing with customers.

How to Build a Better Customer Story

Leela S.:

So, I’m sure you, along with other marketing leaders, our inboxes are bombarded by requests from BDRs who are selling data enrichment tools of some shape or form. And typically that means they’re providing a data around firmographic information or something like that. I’ve come to think of survey information as the ultimate form of data enrichment in some ways because if you stop and think about, if you ask — and we do this with our integration with Marketo actually — after somebody filled out a lead-gen form, there are auto response email goes back to them and asks them a few more questions so that we can be more prepared for the demo. So it’s almost like we’ve always wished that we knew what was on our customers’ minds…

Joe Hyland:

But with a survey…

Leela S.:

You can ask what’s on their minds and then you can funnel that information into the systems where your teams are interfacing with them. And what it leads to is just that tighter connection, a much more personalized experience and hopefully a better resolution, which I think is just a win for everyone involved. And so we’re basically powering that across Box as they get really serious about customer experience. Customer Journey, how can they help their front lines be as effective as possible in helping their customers to be successful? So you’ll hear us start to tell more of those stories where it surveys… It’s almost like when we were talking before the show about how a webinar feels constraining, right? Surveys always feels a little constraining, right? Because really what we’re talking about is this feed of immensely valuable data that you’re able to connect to your operational data and deliver better decisions at the end point.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. And that kind of goes back to the versatility of the offering, which is tremendous strength. But if you’re not careful, you’re right, like a webinar, like a survey, that can kind of be commoditized and if you’re not talking about the why and why you’re doing this and how powerful it is and it’s just the what, it’s like, “Oh, it’s a survey and we can do that. Like, right, who cares how the data is structured is like.” That actually matters quite a bit if you’re really doing it at massive scale. We have this thing on our team in some ways it’s a bit of a running joke because I talk about it with such passion and I think I get made fun of it. Its codename is the grid, which is every, it’s the intersection of personas and use cases and ultimately how our customers use our product — use webinars and the stories that we want told. And so the grid kind of utopia, what are all the permutations that we want there in the market. And, as you said, the Box story is really powerful one for you. Well, how can we have two or three customers in each kind of, in each Box, if you will?

Leela S.:

Yes. I call that case study bingo is how I refer to it. Because you have to overlay geographies and industries and company size. And it’s this sort of never-ending grid, right?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, hence the grid nickname here. And it can get a little overwhelming, too. Going back to what we said about focus. Okay. So you guys have a similar method at SurveyMonkey?

Leela S.:

Yeah. I think it’s definitely how we’re thinking about the world going forward is: if you put yourself in the shoes of a customer who’s evaluating solutions, at some point in that journey, you’re probably thinking, does anyone like me use this? Or you know, what are the stories that relate back to my business model that I can take to the c-suite to get sign off on this new investment that maybe I hadn’t quite thought about at the beginning of the year? And so the more that we can help to eliminate for potential customers, how we can specifically help them — and that often comes in the shape of exposing them to different stories that might resonate — then I think the more, the more successful we’ll be in getting that message across. So you can’t cover — and you know this as well when you have virtually limitless problems that you solve are virtually limitless use cases — you have to be specific and you have to prioritize. So we can of course use our own data in doing that and understanding how our current users use survey technology to ask and answer the biggest questions in their minds. So we can use that as I said, to just sort of steer our team and make sure that we are going down the stack ranked list of opportunities and finding customers that can really tell the stories.

Data Rich and Insight Poor

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. I love that you just mentioned data there. I’d love to get a few minutes of your perspective on what it’s like being a marketer today and, speaking of problems that are good problems to have, and all this data that we have coming in versus 15 or 20 years ago when you and I were beginning in this.

Leela S.:

Yeah. Good Lord. Will the data ever end? I mean, it’s just, to your point, it just comes at you from all sides. And in some ways we’ve potentially created some of this problem ourselves in that. I think back in 2012, it was Gartner — blame Gartner for this — Gartner said that by 2017, the CMO would be outspending the CIO in technology.

Joe Hyland:

I was just referencing this yesterday to someone.

Leela S.:

I don’t think we ever quite got there, but we sure as heck did buy a lot of tools in that five year period. And some of them talked to each other, but many of them didn’t. And therein lies the problem, right? You’ve got these disconnected, disparate data silos and so the result is, I find, many organizations are data rich, but insight is poor. They have more access to more data than they’ve ever had before, but can they make sense out of that data? Probably not.

Leela S.:

And in fact, I was reading another study by IDC that says that by the end of 2025, only 50 percent, sorry, 15 percent of global data will be tagged. Of that only 20 percent will be analyzed and only 6 percent will be useful. So we’ve created a 94 percent problem for ourselves in some ways. And so I think that’s sort of the reality of the world that we face. And this is not unique to marketing. Many parts of the organization are drowning in data. They’re data rich and insight poor, as I said. And you have to be thinking about how your tools talk to one another. I recently was talking to a journalist about and they were looking for a prediction for tools for 2019. Like, “What’s the one tool you’re thinking about? And the answer is no, that’s the wrong way.” We don’t need more tools. We need more connectivity between our tools so that we can make sense of that data. And whether we do that in one of those tools, we funnel everything into tableau. Whatever the story is, we have to begin to focus on creative insight from that data rather than just having it languish in these silos.

Joe Hyland:

I think that that was very, very, very well said I love this phrase, “Data rich and insight poor.” I had a conference, this was maybe six or seven months ago. I didn’t think that this would be super controversial. Onstage, I said that marketers don’t need more data. We have, we’re swimming in too much data and it’s problematic. So anything that gives marketers more data without insights is actually defeating the purpose. And the next speaker got up on stage and really challenged me. I’m a data driven marketer and I love data. And I was like, perhaps the point was lost or it wasn’t well articulated, but…

Leela S.:

I think you need the right data. Data for data’s sake is definitely not the answer. I’m with you, Joe. I’m with you.

The MarTech Stack Conundrum

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. And your other point that you touched upon — I couldn’t agree with you anymore — and this is nowhere worse than were you and I live out in the Bay Area now, there’s so many technologists and specifically marketing technology, that assuming you’re having a marketing tech stack of 20, 30, 40 pieces of technology will solve your problems is really silly. And so many of these technologies don’t speak to one another.

And if you’re going to, you’re going to have either a) unstructured data or b) siloed data, then you have no data. So what’s the point?

Leela S.:

Our team here at SurveyMonkey has been focusing on that for quite some time. So I think we have 100 or more integrations into virtually all the systems I use. And so we never set out to be the system of record. I think we’re losing conscious for a long time that people don’t need another system of record. But they do want to bring that data to the place where they’re working so that they can have that insight and make those better decisions.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree any more. And for most marketers, that’s within, you mentioned Marketo before. That’s, that’s very likely within their marketing automation system, within sales, within the CRM. But yeah, if you’re fighting for screen time with your user persona, you’re probably violating the principle that you and I talked about at the start, that it’s all about them and should never be about you, right?

Leela’s Path to CMO

Joe Hyland:

Okay. Well, let’s close on this. So, a lot of our listeners are not in fact heads of marketing or chief marketing officers. They’re aspiring to, one day, get there and no one comes out of the womb or comes right out of university and is heading an organization. You’ve had an interesting path where you’ve done a lot of things. I did a little research on you before you started in sales. You went over to management consulting, which I always find fascinating. And then you get into marketing. So, spend a few moments, if you will, on your path and if this can be replicated or if it was dumb luck and had nothing to do with the master plan that you hatched up 20 years ago.

Leela S.:

There was no master plan. Oh, actually the master plan was very different, let’s just say. I’m not sure if it’s a path that … I love my path. I’m not sure it’s a path which you should purposely set out to emulate. But what I will say is I didn’t expect to be in sales. I took my first. Really the only sales job I had was five years at a company called BusinessWire, which is commercial newswire service, a part of Berkshire Hathaway.

Joe Hyland:

And I became a sales BusinessWire because I had my very first job in the states after I moved over was this is not an oxymoron, a fast-growing startup in Jacksonville, Florida. And I started on reception actually for six weeks. And then they — because they didn’t know where … they couldn’t find Edinburgh on the map and that’s where I grew up in Scotland. I was just pleased that I got interviewed six weeks in I moved actually into a marketing coordinator role and then I did some special projects stuff and then I was the PR manager for six or eight months. So I had four different jobs in my first job in the year and a half. And when I was in that PR manager stint, I used Businesswire and it got so much volume at the time.

Leela S.:

And they just seem to — meaning the organization. So they asked me if I wanted to come over to the quote unquote dark side and be a sales rep and I would never have thought of saying yes to a sales job in my early twenties. But I just really liked the organization and the value they deliver to their customers. And, true enough, I actually ended up being a pretty decent sales rep for them. And then I ended up being a sales manager because I had walked in — I’d been the customer. I knew their challenges, their pain points. You see we’re coming full circle here. And I worked out really well for me. When I became a sales manager actually moved up to Boston to run their New England region and at that point I realized that I was thirsting for more knowledge.

Leela S.:

So if SurveyMonkey’s mission is to power the curious and SurveyMonkey’s where the curious come to grow back in the early two thousands — I needed to, I realized I was curious. I needed to grow. So I went to business school at Dartmouth. I came that in management consulting, as you said, which I think was the best place to extend and practice skill I might use. I know there’s a lot of debates out in the world about whether MBAs are worth it or not. I’m here in San Mateo running marketing at SurveyMonkey if not for my MBA. And I went to Tuck Business School at Dartmouth and it was transformational for me. It really changed my trajectory and just the course of my career. So did three years in management consulting with Bain and Company. Really fantastic learnings, but I actually missed going deep on a subject, having subject matter expertise as opposed to being a generalist and flying by the seat of my pants on a regular basis.

Leela S.:

Didn’t realize I’d be flying by the seat of my pants on the other side as well, but a different way. And a connection — a former Bain colleague who moved LinkedIn, who as to this day, runs their talent solutions business globally. We stayed in touch when he moved over and every few months he pinged me and say, “Are you’re ready to leave Bain yet this things come up. I know you like LinkedIn.” And this continued over the months. And I finally, he put an opportunity in front of me and I said, “Well, it looks fantastic but I don’t think I’m qualified to be a senior product marketer.” And then it turns out I didn’t actually know what product marketing was at the time. And Lo and behold find that a lot of the management consulting skills were directly applicable to product marketing.

Leela S.:

So that was my start at LinkedIn and I joined when it was 500 people was there for four and a half years, got to do a bunch of different things. It was a huge privilege left to join open table as a VP and that was also different and valuable experience. But after that ended up at Lever and a CMO role. And I think what I’ve done over the course of that, that sort of journey before coming to SurveyMonkey and that and now as well is I realize I do my best work when I am very passionate about the problems that we solve for our customers. And that was true at LinkedIn. It was true to some degree OpenTable, but it wasn’t true enough. Which is actually why I moved on more quickly than I otherwise thought I would. It was true at Lever and it is absolutely true at SurveyMonkey today. So for me that’s been a sort of a north star is finding the thing that gets me passionate because of the problems that we’re solving for our customers. And, like I said, we’ve come full circle, I think, in this conversation.

Joe Hyland:

I think that’s one: that’s brilliant to hear and two: I just love it and couldn’t agree with it anymore. There’s nothing more boring and mundane in life than not being challenged and not being passionate. It’s just personal life work life, that is, for me, that is what life is all about and I often get asked about work kind of work home balance, which I think is very important, but it becomes much easier if you love what you do and if you can be passionate about the company you belong to and the problem is you’re solving. I think that’s what we’re doing as marketers is where problem solving and it’s probably why management consulting was a great training ground for you for product marketing and you didn’t even know what product marketing was.

Leela S.:

I can say that now of course, but at the time I was doing my best.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, hindsight is always helpful. Well, listen, this has just been wonderful. I appreciate the time. I hope people the audience has really enjoyed this. And again, thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of your schedule for this.

Leela S.:

Of course. And before I go, I was not kidding about that open casting call. So one more time. You have a fantastic SurveyMonkey story. Please hit me up on social. I would love to hear more. I really would.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, we’ll get that in the description. Leela, thank you so much.

Leela S.:

Thank you, Joe. Pleasure’s all mine.

Joe Hyland:

Okay. Alright, thanks.

CMO Confessions Ep. 18: SurveyMonkey’s Leela Srinivasan

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