SaaStr 182: Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas on What Makes A Truly Great SaaS CEO Today, The Top Considerations You Must make Before Going To Enterprise & Why The Way We Sell Has To Fundamentally Change

Steve Lucas is the CEO @ Marketo, the world leader in marketing automation for companies of any size. Prior to their 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 Today's Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Steve make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be CEO @ 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 personalisation and engagement with such large customer bases? How does the role of artificial intelligence fit into this mass scale personalisation?
• 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?

Steve's 60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Steve know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Management upgrade is the most important role of CEO, agree?
3. What keeps Steve up at night? How does that influence his running and operations of Marketo?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Steve Lucas