David Chamberlin, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, SonicWall

“The role of the CMO is critical to a business especially in driving lead generation activities, awareness and consideration and strategically integrating with a number of functions. It also plays a very active role in shaping the public and internal perceptions of enterprise. The role has broadened tremendously in the last 10-15 years to include digital marketing, social media and in some cases, public relations, government relations, employee communications, etc.

SonicWall has really been in the process of transforming itself since late 2016, when Bill Conner, our CEO, joined the company. Since that time, we have been in the process of rebuilding much of the company. In the last year or so that I have been here, we have focused on significantly increasing our lead generation, integrating more and more with the sales function, improving our digital marketing results and efficiency globally, and drastically improving our public relations function.

Alignment around things like social media, digital marketing, the website, lead generation technology, back-end systems like Sales Force etc. are critical to align. We spend a great deal of time not just with IT but working closely from an analytics perspective to better understand not just the new age technology but also what is the cost of each lead as it relates to the marketing funnel.”