432: How to Successfully Transition into the CMO Role with Sun Lee, CMO of BigPanda

Marketing Today with Alan Hart

Sun Lee is a seasoned marketing leader with over a decade of proven business success. She started her career on the agency side, working with small start-ups as a brand and digital designer in Silicon Valley during the e-commerce boom. She went on to get her Masters Degree, then reenter the workforce on the client side, heading up marketing and communications for big-name companies like Sisu Data, SurveyMonkey, and Pure Storage, before joining BigPanda as the CMO in April 2023.

BigPanda brings AI to IT operations in order to proactively identify and resolve incidents before they become costly problems. They work with large brands like Autodesk and Zayo, as well as large banks and airlines, to ensure seamless technology operations. BigPanda is a start-up and challenger brand competing with giants in the industry, meaning Sun and her team are operating with a relatively small budget, allowing them to move faster and position themselves as an innovator in the sector.

On the show today, Alan and Sun talk about her experience of coming to the US alone at 15, learning to speak English, and how being a nonnative speaker has given her one of her marketing superpowers. They also talk about how she navigated career transitions from specialized roles in design to broader roles in marketing and how that varied experience has contributed to her success as a CMO. Sun outlines with us her approach to digital marketing, the importance of understanding content journeys, and the marketing benefits of being a startup challenger brand. She also tells how she and her team have been implementing AI and how she foresees it shifting the ways marketing teams work as well as the characteristics of who she is looking to hire.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How and why to drive alignment between marketing and sales
• Marketing benefits and strategies for startup challenger brands
• How AI is causing a shift in expectations of marketers hires

Key Highlights:

• [01:50] Coming to the US alone at 15
• [03:30] Benefits of English as a Second Language in Marketing
• [04:15] Sun’s career path
• [07:20] How her experience shapes her approach to marketing
• [12:00] Finding alignment between marketing and sales
• [13:00] BigPanda: what they do and who they serve
• [15:05] Marketing benefits of being a startup challenger brand
• [17:10] Thoughts on digital marketing
• [19:45] Starting with the content journey
• [20:35] How AI is shifting Sun’s thoughts on marketing and productivity
• [22:35] From specialization marketing to the CMO role
• [25:30] The most embarrassing professional moment of Sun’s career
• [28:20] No dumb questions, only dumb questions.
• [29:00] Soft skills are the way of the future.
• [30:25] The evolution of word-of-mouth marketing
• [31:50] The biggest opportunity facing marketers today

Looking for more?

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