With an impressive resume that includes Chief Marketing Officer positions at Red Hat, AppNexus, Sprinklr, and SignalFX, Tom Butta isn’t just any CMO. According to Rahul Sachdev, host of Fortella’s CMO Stories podcast, Butta is “the granddaddy of Growth CMOs,” having led marketing efforts in numerous companies that received multi-billion-dollar valuations. Growth CMOs possess the unique combination of business acumen and marketing expertise that can help fledgling companies become highly successful operations, and Butta definitely fits the bill.

“It wasn’t that long ago that I was the youngest guy in the room,” Butta recently told Sachdev. “But now I find myself having a bit of experience.” That might be understating it just a smidge; his last company, SignalFx, was acquired by Splunk for $1.1 billion, while Sprinklr recently received a $2.7 billion valuation. Also worth noting is that enterprise software biz Red Hat went public as the second-highest IPO in NASDAQ history under Butta’s watch.

In August 2020, Butta joined Kyriba, a pioneer in the cloud treasury and fintech space. Kyriba helps organizations balance growth and risk to achieve better financial outcomes using its interconnected cloud platform and SaaS solutions. Always willing to pass on his knowledge to the Growth CMOs of tomorrow, Butta stopped by CMO Stories to share some valuable insights.

Marketing is evolving — and so are expectations 

According to Butta, the creation of new marketing tools gives CMOs a much better picture of what’s working and what’s not. “There’s no doubt that with the sophistication of marketing technologies and sales technologies, much like the system that you all have developed at Fortella, we’re able to track a lot more of the performance,” he said.

The flip side is that these enhanced technologies also come with rising expectations from venture capitalists and board members. Butta and his team are expected to have “the data to support the programs and work that [they’re] driving.” Thankfully, the rising prominence of revenue driven marketing tools are making it possible for Growth CMOs like Butta to meet their goals.

Expectations also run high when companies go public, in Butta’s experience. “There are a lot more eyes on us now than there were before,” he told the CEO of Red Hat before their IPO. Others saw the company as “this challenger brand competing with the way things had been done… forever.” When all of those eyes are on you, “you better have something to say.” In that case, Butta and his team clearly had the goods: IBM acquired Red Hat in 2018 for $34 billion.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Butta emphasized the importance of having people around him that he really trusts. He says that teamwork is critical, particularly the relationship between marketing and sales. “You need to make sure you’re aligned strategically with the head of sales,” Butta told Sachdev. In both large-scale and growth-oriented companies, “marketing has to start from within.” In other words, both teams are ultimately working towards the same goal — increasing revenue for the company — and should work together to achieve that goal, even if their day-to-day tasks are different.

“Marketing sits between sales and product… between the company and the customer,” Butta explained. “If you skew marketing from a product perspective, it tends to kind of be an inside-out approach. If you skew marketing from a sales perspective, it tends to be fairly reactive and tactical.” He feels it’s important to bridge those gaps and offer perspective “that makes everybody feel good.”

When that trust among teammates isn’t there, Butta says he gets anxious because he has to spend more time “inside all of our work.” Having to step in and manage tasks like copy editing takes him away from his own work. The key to forming that bond with teammates is surrounding yourself with people who know their areas — like product marketing, for example — better than he does. Another big part of being a successful Growth CMO is being able to lead by example.

The first 100 days as a Growth CMO are critical

As an incoming CMO at Kyriba, Butta had a lot of long days working with remote employees across multiple time zones, with some of those time differences being nine to 12 hours. His first order of business was analyzing the company to find opportunities for success. Butta said he wanted to “understand the capabilities of the team, look at what’s in front of us to see what’s the most important thing that I can affect immediately.”

In this case, it was the Kyriba Global Summit, a customized virtual event taking place in November, 2020. At the summit, finance and IT executives were scheduled to share stories of success and transformation while managing “the volatility that now defines our world.”

“I just dove right into that,” Butta explained, because he felt it was the biggest pipeline-creating opportunity for the company in the near future. He developed a marketing plan for the event and then worked to allocate and align the resources to bring that plan to life.

The next phase of his newest role was execution and continuous learning. That meant studying the market, listening to analysts, and spending a lot of time with the product team, executing and refining while moving forward.

“The job requires you to operate consistently on two tracks,” Butta said. The first track is looking at immediate growth: how can you affect the next quarter, and the quarter after that, and the quarter after that? But at the same time, being a Growth CMO means thinking beyond the near future and figuring out how to affect the business over the next 18 months. “If you sacrifice one for the other, you will not drive the type of change that you need to drive or create the enterprise value that you need to create.”

Those are just a few words of wisdom from Kyriba CMO Tom Butta on Episode 2 of the CMO Stories podcast.

Click here to listen to the full podcast to get more tips and tricks from the Growth CMO’s playbook, and be sure to subscribe to the series to be updated when new episodes are posted.