Session: Lessons Learned from an Engineer turned CMO
Before becoming the Chief Marketing Officer at Cloudinary – the media experience cloud company that top brands rely on to create the most engaging visual experiences – Saranya Babu first started her career as a software engineer. As an engineer, Saranya wanted to understand what was driving business decisions in the products she was building, so she made the shift from product development to marketing. She learned what it takes to bring products to market which helped jumpstart her career to lead marketing teams at high-growth enterprise tech firms like NetApp, Dell Technologies, BDNA, Chargepoint, Instapage and Wrike. Despite the pivot to marketing, Saranya’s technical knowledge and engineering skills continued to serve her as she worked her way up to becoming a CMO.
In this session, Saranya will discuss her journey as a woman in tech, and the lessons learned along the way to becoming a CMO in a male-dominated industry. She will discuss how bringing an engineering approach to marketing helped propel her career to becoming a standout, data-driven leader with a proven track record of achieving 2X-10X revenue and valuation growth for her companies. Saranya can share more on how her engineering skills helped her understand the products she was marketing and the pain points of her customers who were mostly engineers, which in turn made her a better leader in being able to speak the language of the business, while also empathizing with her organization’s engineering teams and customers.
Bio
Saranya Babu is the Chief Marketing Officer for Cloudinary, the media experience cloud company for many of the world’s top brands. With more than 50 billion assets under management and 10,000 customers worldwide (Nike, Tesla, Peloton, Neiman Marcus, StitchFix and others), Cloudinary is the industry standard for developers, creators and marketers looking to create engaging visual experiences online for their customers. Saranya is a seasoned B2B marketing leader previously leading the marketing team at Wrike (acquired by Citrix in 2021) and Instapage, where she implemented, built and scaled sophisticated cross-functional marketing strategies. She has experience working in bootstrapped, VC funded, Private Equity owned, and public companies with proven success achieving 2X - 10X growth in revenue and valuation. She is a recipient of the 2021 Silicon Valley Women of Influence award and shortlisted in the 2020 B&T Women in Media award.