Sprinklr's New CMO: Why I'm More than "OK"

Many of my friends and colleagues saw the announcement that Sprinklr has hired a new CMO.

They have asked me, "are you ok with this?"

I certainly am touched and appreciate the concern, but I wanted to share that not only am I ok with it, I am ecstatic about it.

Here's why.

When I joined Sprinklr in January 2012, the company was valued at just about $20 million. I was employee #30.

I WAS the marketing department.

At the time, Sprinklr was one of 30 contenders (if not more) in the burgeoning social media management space. We had no brand awareness and certainly weren't considered the leader (how could we be? No one knew us).

From that time, until the moment when I handed over the reins to my new boss, we grew to a company with 900 employees, valued at $1.5 billion.

In those 3.5 years, we finished #1 in 7 different analyst reports from places like Forrester and IDC.

We grew from a handful of brands as clients to over 1,000. Now, we have offices in 10 countries. We executed hundreds of campaigns and built out a scalable engine for generating and measuring demand.

The marketing team of one grew to a marketing team of more than 30. Everyone in the industry knows who Sprinklr is and everyone knows we are the Leader.

Now, I certainly did not do it alone.

In fact, I often say that "if people want to confuse causation and correlation, that's fine with me." Still, I'm proud of the work we did and much of what I did.  I also know that I put in a ton of effort.

But I also know that the skill set required to lead a marketing team as a company grows in valuation from $20mm to $1.5bn in 3 years is VERY different from the skill set that is required to lead a marketing team as a company grows in valuation from $1.5bn to $10bn+.

Not better or worse. Just different.

I also know that at the young age of 42, there's a TON about marketing that I still need to learn. A TON.

Most people don't work at companies that grow at 300% per year (for 3 years in a row), so it's not easy to understand the rate of change that Sprinklr has undergone.

What Sprinklr needs now for us to realize our destiny is someone who has the requisite skill set to get us there.  I don't have that...at the moment and there's no shame in admitting that.

That's not to say that I don't have any value that I can meaningfully contribute to the organization. I believe I do.

Even better...I get to learn at the side of someone who has more experience and a different skill set. It's like going to business school, but you're getting paid instead. A much better deal.

And we get to continue to lead Sprinklr to its next level of evolution.

So, you see, that's why I'm not only "OK" with having a new boss, I'm pumped up about it.

Plus, now, when someone says to me, "hey, I think Marketing should do X...", I get to say, "great, go tell Tom."