AiThority Interview with Snyk’s CMO Jonaki Egenolf

Hi, Jonaki. Welcome to the Interview Series at AiThority.com. Please tell us a bit about your role at Snyk.

I’ve watched Snyk’s leadership in developer security for the past few years and have seen first-hand how important Snyk’s solutions are for developing and deploying secure applications. It’s a company I have admired for a long time and I am happy to be here.

Since August, I’ve led the marketing organization at Snyk primarily to build and scale go-to-market functions across demand, brand, and strategy for growth. Immediately prior, I was the CMO at Riverbed Technology, but I’ve also spent more than a decade in the cybersecurity industry at organizations like Threat Stack and Veracode, focusing on providing solutions to enterprise customers. It’s exciting to be able to help build on Snyk’s developer-first strategy, supporting our growth.

How has the CMO’s role evolved in the post-pandemic era? What kind of disruptions have you identified in your industry that impact a CMO’s journey in 2023?

The biggest change is we are all working from everywhere– and can work all the time. This has a huge impact on a CMO’s team that the CMO needs to be mindful of. While focus can be challenging when you are in back-to-back zooms, the steeper challenge to overcome is finding the time and collaboration needed for creative thinking.

Collaboration tools are everywhere and these certainly help but sometimes they too are distracting and detract from the focus of a creative process.

Please tell us how your Marketing Technology budget has evolved in the post-pandemic era. How are you planning to consolidate your martech investments around AI and automation capabilities?

Marketing technology became a critical investment during the pandemic and opened our eyes to new methods of leveraging Automation and AI to support the customer lifecycle.

In the post-pandemic, we continue to evaluate and consolidate tools that drive actionable outcomes for our marketers and our sellers in the field.

We are focusing our investments on tools that can also help us aggregate data from comprehensive programs and then transform the data into actionable insights for our demand gen and field marketing organizations. We are also consolidating around tools that better inform us of the user experience of our customers beginning in the pre-sales cycle to the post-sales and renewal period.

What are your marketing goals for 2024 at Synk?

This year I’m looking forward to building on Snyk’s strong business momentum.

Coming on board with leaders like Myke Lyons, David Morris, and Michael Durso, and in the wake of market-impacting moves such as the company’s acquisition of Enso Security, Snyk is in an exciting position to extend its developer security leadership.

Could you please let us know how you leverage marketing automation and customer data platforms to deliver personalization?

Marketing solutions deployed at Snyk allow us to better connect with customers and prospects by understanding their specific developer security journeys. We leverage account-based marketing platforms in conjunction with our CRM and marketing automation platforms to drive more targeted communications to our audiences. They don’t want to be fatigued with irrelevant content.

At Snyk, we provide voluminous content online to support security practitioners and developers as they understand how to make the application development process secure. By analyzing content consumption data, as one example, we can better understand what’s keeping practitioners and IT decision-makers up at night. And subsequently, better tailor future content to help them with their DevSec journey.

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We hear a lot of buzz around generative AI impacting a CMO’s annual marketing budget. Could you please share your thoughts on AI adoption at Snyk?

Snyk has been leveraging AI models in our technology for several years now. In fact, over 100,000 organizations and more than 1,700 customers are currently leveraging Snyk’s DeepCode AI and several machine learning methods. We are also investing in generative AI approaches.

We’ve also further refined our internal policies to address the inevitable day-to-day AI use by Snyk employees. As with any innovation, we’re aiming to strike a balance between benefits (increased code production and developer productivity) with very real risks (genAI-created code with increased security vulnerabilities).

We have only begun to investigate how generative AI can make marketing more efficient. For example, today we are leveraging AI in some of our creative processes as we experiment with campaign concepts.

The possibilities are there for more usage of AI but we want to be thoughtful and responsible.

Your tips for all CMOs and Chief Digital Officers who are at an early adoption stage with generative AI for their marketing campaigns?

It’s clear that generative AI can make our lives more efficient, but it must be used in ways that guard your company’s proprietary information and deliver accurate results. I would read up on the mistakes that certain leaders have made- especially those that inadvertently released proprietary info to AI engines. Generative AI accelerates processes but, like any tool, we need to remain aware of and resilient to the risks that it adds.

At the same time, I would certainly try out generative AI tools, once you’ve cleared it with your IT teams, to see how they can make certain day-to-day tasks more efficient.

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Thank you, Jonaki! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]