Julie Liegl
DEMAND GEN VISIONARIES
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EPISODE
10
12M Users and Beyond: Designing a Marketing Team for Slack's Parabolic Growth
Julie Liegl unveils some of the plays that have made her so successful across her career and how she's driving growth as CMO of Slack
Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.
INDUSTRY
High Tech
FOUNDED
2009
WEBSITE
www.slack.com

Julie Liegl is the Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for all aspects of Slack’s marketing, including product marketing, customer acquisition, demand generation, brand, brand design, events, and content marketing.

Julie has more than 18 years of technology industry experience. Prior to Slack, Julie spent 13 years at Salesforce, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Global Marketing, where she and her teams were responsible for the success of Dreamforce, driving demand generation and the market positioning of Salesforce’s cloud products.

Julie received her BA and MA in English from Stanford University and her MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.


Episode Summary

Julie Liegl is used to being a part of big things. As EVP of Global Marketing at Salesforce, she helped create and oversee the world-class corporate event that is known as Dreamforce, and she’s currently overseeing a complete transformation in the way that businesses communicate as CMO of Slack.

On this episode, Julie shares with Ian Faison some of the plays that have made her so successful across her career. She talks about corporate events and how they can maintain relevance as digital events in the time of COVID, how to create a demand gen team from scratch, and much more.

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Key Takeaways

  • Demand Gen needs to be integrated. Every aspect of it needs to be thought of as a part of one single function, rather than separate one-off activities.
  • In order for an event to be successful, you need to help prepare your attendees to make the most of it before they ever arrive.
  • Brand marketing can work hand-in-hand with demand gen. The top of the funnel is still a part of the funnel.

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Quotes

"You have to think of demand gen as a program rather than a set of tactics and how they're going to go along the way. We used to call it lead gen and that very much reflected what it was, which was marketing, throwing leads over the wall, and demand gen is really about being smarter about the entire thing."
"I see events as an amplifying effect to demand gen and as a point in the demand gen journey."
"Brand is funny because there definitely are ways to measure it. We do a lot of brand studies. We do research on consideration awareness sentiment, and we try to measure it quarterly."
"I still think that flashy things can work, but they need to work in a way that makes sense with your product beyond just a clever marketing tagline."

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Episode Transcript