 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. One of the biggest challenges that every business faces is how do I navigate these significant transformations that are taking place on a global scale as a consequence of digital opportunities? And then how do I utilize marketing as a basis for engaging my customers differently? It's a significant problem that affects virtually all businesses of all size and all segments. So to have that conversation, we've got a great guest here with us today. Alicia Tillman is the CMO of SAP. Alicia, welcome to theCUBE. Peter, thank you so much for having me here today. All right, so Alicia, I want to start with your perspective on some of the big changes that SAP sees occurring in the marketplace. And then we'll kind of talk about how that informs an evolving role for marketing. Well, I mean, look, everybody is transforming something, right, and we are very much in the thick of a digital transformation. I think we've gone past the point where it was education on what does it mean and why do I need to get on board? How is it affecting my business to now real application? And it comes in many forms. The definition of digital transformation is extremely broad and there's application of it across your entire business. One of the things that I will say that really is what companies need to solve for is the business of delivering exceptional customer experiences. Customer service has been taken to a whole new level of competition. A lot of it is because of choice that exists and because of how much digital has impacted on a positive level, our ability to do many things such as personalization as one option to really deliver an enhanced experience. And so that is, I think, the biggest focus in the marketplace today, that companies of all sizes are trying to figure out which is how do we win in the experience economy that we're living in right now? Now, the experience economy has a lot of different implications, but certainly one of them is your customers need to have a better experience and that's going to be a feature of your overall sustainable differentiation or not. But also it's the idea that I have expertise that you can use within your business so that you can be more competitive and more successful in dealing with your customers. I know that's been a major feature of SAP strategy over the last 20, 30 years is bringing that deep understanding of how a business should operate and the role that software should play in making businesses operate really well. Talk a bit about how overall the SAP approach in the experience economy informs how you think about marketing. Yeah, I mean, I think what companies are trying to solve for is how can I be an experienced company that thrives in this experience economy that we're living in? And SAP is about helping companies understand that outcome and understand the marketplace and where they need to compete, number one. And then secondly, we help companies learn and embrace how to succeed and be competitive and successful in the marketplace that we're in. And when you think about the how, we live also in an intelligence era. We've gone from big data and access to data and how do we derive the appropriate insights from data to now be able to apply it in a way that allows me as a company to run it my best so that I can succeed in the experience economy that we live in. And this is really the hallmark of SAP where a technology company, a 47 year old brand that has always been in the business of helping companies run at their best. And whether you're an HR professional to a head of marketing, to a head of sales, to a CIO, a CFO, having a very unified integrated technology to run your applications with the most embedded intelligence so that your operations are running at their best, that enables you to then deliver at your best for your customers which is very tied to overall the experience that you're ultimately delivering. So one of the challenges that we have here especially as we think about a company that's supplying the core operational capabilities to customers is what is it that marketing must do to help customers transform their business? There's a couple of things that I always like to talk about. Let me start with one. Increasingly, we think that marketing needs to take a more active role in demonstrating a company's expertise and thought leadership to help customers establish an agreement about how to move forward in periods of significant transformation. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. I mean, look, this is a marketer's dream. The environment that we live in right now and it is up to marketing to grab hold of it and really chart their destiny in terms of the leadership that they can bring to their company. This is an era where it's about intelligence. It's about insights and it's about experiences. And when you think about the role of the marketer and let's talk about the core role. No matter what company you ask, there's certain things that come to mind when they think about what the role of marketing should be. The one thing that you typically hear time and time again is marketing should be representative of the voice of the customer. And I don't think that there is any better function to serve the needs and to respond and to help inform the company on what's necessary, but also to help shape the story, to help our customers understand where they can best compete in this environment. And so I think that understanding those needs, combining it with insights of what's happening in the marketplace and then help to architect how our value proposition works in support, both of what the customer needs are together with what's happening in the marketplace. It's a beautiful role and not to mention the other piece of it, which is every company wanting to invest in some way in someone else that has a purpose that is focused on doing something good above and beyond what we contribute every day. And I also believe that there's no better function than marketing as well to help companies understand their purpose and to articulate the purpose of your own company so that your customer sees values, shared value and common purpose that you share with each other. So it sounds so that it's important that marketing become an overall advocate for engaging across the entire customer journey, helping the customer understand the problem and hopefully biasing them towards your solutions, of course, but even after the sale, helping the customer envision what the outcome is, helping the customer comprehend and establish approaches to change and the way the business operates and embed things and working with those many, many, that multitude of actual users out there that are ultimately going to dictate whether or not a solution succeeds or is abandoned within the business. Do you see marketing play a more active role across the entire life cycle? I have to, I have to. I mean, marketing obviously plays a significant role in driving awareness around a company's brand and then driving increased understanding to lead to purchase decisions in a company, but now even more when you think of the second half of that life cycle that focuses on retention and implementation and engagement, which ultimately leads to a desire and an ability for you to keep customers for life, that has got to be an inherent part of the role that marketing plays because even if you think about it in comparison to something like social media, we've gone from a platform that allowed you to share your opinion and frankly have a voice to now measuring the effectiveness based on how much engagement you get from the voice and the opinions that you're sharing. I mean, that is really the evolution that we also need to think about in terms of marketing's role as it relates to the customer journey. There's been so much effort that has put in the front half of the journey, which is to get the customer to buy, but now it's equally as important, especially in this economy that we live in right now, that you have to focus on renewal, you have to focus on retention and the way to do that is in helping through the implementation and the engagement process and one such opportunity for marketing to play that role is find those use cases, showcase those customers who are using the products, engaging with the products, make it relevant, make it relevant so that the customer can really optimize how they're engaging with your brand, how they're engaging with your products and I don't think that there's any better department in an organization than marketing to leave that effort for their organization. Yeah, Alicia, I was at Sapphire recently and one of the things that I really enjoyed about the way you presented SAP there is that you actually celebrated customer success. You didn't just talk about it and reveal it, you actually celebrated it and I totally agree with you. I think that's a crucially important part of the evolving marketing experience as customers take increasingly center stage in determining success or failure. So let me ask you one more question here, Alicia. We've just described a changed and evolved role for marketing that's made possible in part because we now can engage customers through data without ever losing the sight that data is not the person, is not the brand, but that suggests a different set of a different mission, but also a different role for the CMO. How do you think the CMO's job is gonna evolve over the course of the next couple of years in light of what we're talking about? So I think it's about balance. I think that we live in a world today that also everybody wants to be heard. They want to embrace brands that are relevant to them, that care about them, that are creating services and products and solutions that really help them solve problems or make them better at what they're trying to accomplish. And there's a fair bit of data that helps you gain that understanding, understand that sentiment and that we use that data so that we know what products and services we need to build to support customer needs. On the other half of though of that equation is always this notion of empathy. And oftentimes the data isn't going to give you that empathy that is such a big part of connecting at a human level, how you create that story, how you respond to the needs of the customer. So there has to be a balance. And I think that where marketers can once believe that we've lived in a world where data didn't exist and we had to operate purely on instinct and empathy, we live in a world now where we have more data than ever that can help inform what we're creating but how we deliver it and how it creates relevancy to the customer, that's where the empathy and the intuition and your understanding of the customer really needs to go hand in hand. I think that that's a beautiful role for marketing to play. And so CMOs increasingly have to be able to lead the organization on the data-oriented activities but also sustain a clear company focus, empathetic focus on customer needs and outcomes. That's exactly right. And you said a very key word, Peter. It's about outcomes. We as marketers have to transition from being representatives of products and more leaders of experiences. It's how do the products that we create help to enhance an experience which is the ultimate outcome that we're working to support. We want to deliver memorable experiences through each and every engagement that we have with our brand. We have to create a sense of community. And so if we can start to think about how we market, how we tell our story, how we support the customer journey end to end from awareness to retention, think about it in terms of the ultimate outcome that we are working to deliver to our customers. And what I have found is when you focus more there and you focus less on the product itself and more about the outcome and the experience it creates, that is really where you increase the value overall of marketing because you're increasing the relevancy with your customer. Excellent. Alicia Tillman, CMO of SAP. Thank you very much for being on theCUBE. Peter, thank you so much for having me today. I really enjoyed it. And once again, I'm Peter Burris. You've been watching a CUBE conversation. Until next time.