Pipeline Visionaries Stay Agile, Stand Out: Accelerating Pipeline to Achieve a $30B Market Cap with Len Fischer, SVP of Demand Gen at Okta
This episode features an interview with Len Fischer, Senior Vice President of Demand Generation at Okta.
Len leads the team responsible for creating and accelerating Okta’s pipeline through campaign management, field marketing, partner marketing, and digital marketing efforts. Prior to Okta, Len was Executive VP of Marketing at BDNA, and held key leadership roles in marketing and sales at Informatica. He holds an MBA from Pepperdine University.
On this episode, Len shares how he and his team at Okta strive to be different, how his demand gen strategy changes over time, the person who he says can get him fired the quickest, and some of the most clever and interesting demand gen initiatives he’s seen.
Key Takeaways
- Push the envelope on innovation with campaigns and demand gen initiatives
- In SAAS, if you’re not focusing on customer marketing, customer success, and customer programs, you’re not going to be in business for long
- Remember that sales is marketing’s customer, and in demand gen, the Head of Sales can probably get you fired faster than anyone else can
Quotes
“There's a big portion of my demand strategy that will change over time as the company evolves and changes. You have to be able to partner with not only sales, but the other functions within marketing in order to be effective. Think about demand over personalization, digitalization, and integration, and if those three themes carry through, you'll have a successful demand motion.”
“The person that can get me fired the quickest is the Head of Sales. So if the Head of Sales does not think I'm doing the job, regardless of if [the CMO] thinks I'm doing the job, that's the quickest way for me to get fired.”
“Not everything in marketing will work. That's the other thing that I've learned over the years. And what doesn't work typically will teach you more lessons than what does work. So as long as you're willing to think about why it didn't work and what kind of changes you would do next time, I think there's value in it, regardless of how much pipeline you get.”
“I'm a big believer that these experiential things really work, but I would rather do a few of them and go to the big events–go to the Final Four, go to The Masters…We want to be different, so if everybody has access to a Laker game or a Warriors game or a Giants game, then what difference is it? But if we're going to the World Series, then sure, let's talk about it.”
“Fight for your team because they'll fight for you…Bring the right people in and set them up for success. This is a very collaborative position and you have to work with a lot of different people, but ultimately I think if you bring the right people in and you set them up properly, [and] you fight for them with the rest of the organization on what we can do and what we can't do, it typically will work in your favor.”
Sponsor
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