Recently, Steve Lucas sat down with me to discuss his career path and the MarTech space. Prior to Marketo’s IPO and eventual sale to Vista Equity Partners for $1.79Bn, they raised over $100m in VC funding from the likes of Battery Ventures, IVP, Mayfield, and Lead Edge Capital. As for Steve, prior to joining Marketo, he served in many leadership positions at SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, BusinessObjects, and Crystal Decisions. If that wasn’t enough Steve also sits on the board of Tivo, SendGrid, and The American Diabetes Society.

In This Episode You Will Learn:

How did Steve make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be CEO at Marketo?

Why does Steve describe his experience at Salesforce to be life-changing? What were the core takeaways for Steve? How has that impacted how he operates today with Marketo? What does Steve mean when he says Marc Benioff is a “master of relevance”?

Why does Steve believe the key to success as a CEO is accessibility? How can CEOs be both vulnerable and strong in today’s SaaS world? What are the 2 different types of CEOs and how they engage with their CMOs? What do the best do? What do the worst do?

Why does Steve believe that the “CRM” term is incomplete? How does Steve fundamentally believe the way that customers want to be engaged with has changed? How can marketers enact this level of personalization and engagement with such large customer bases? How does the role of artificial intelligence fit into this mass scale personalization?

How does Steve view the broader MarTech landscape? Why does Steve strongly believe that we will be entering a period of consolidation in MarTech? How does Steve view the emergence of new categories such as ABM? How does this impact his overarching view on the next wave for MarTech?

To get all of these answers and more, check out the SaaStr podcast here.