3253: Rethinking the Future of Work with Zoom's New CMO

[00:00:04] What's it take to reintroduce a household name like Zoom to the world? Not as the video conferencing tool that we've all relied on during a global crisis, but as a full-scale communications and collaboration platform.

[00:00:19] Well, today I'm joined by Kim Storn, Zoom's newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer. And just days into her role, she's already setting a bold tone, not just for Zoom's brand evolution, but for how marketing itself must adapt to an era of AI-powered engagement, rising customer expectations and shifting digital behaviours.

[00:00:43] And Kim brings with her decades of experience, transforming complex stories into clear customer-centric narratives. And in our conversation today, she's going to talk candidly about the changing shape of the CMO role.

[00:00:59] The tension between digital self-service and meaningful human interaction, and how brands need to be in the right place at the right time with the right message, or risk getting overlooked altogether.

[00:01:14] And yes, we will also touch on the evolving role of generative AI in marketing, the rise of prompt engineering as a must-have skill, and how the next phase of digital transformation is as much about cultural change as it is about technology.

[00:01:32] So whether you are leading a team, shaping a brand, or just curious about where digital engagement is heading, not only this year, but beyond, well, this conversation is going to offer you practical insight and plenty of food for thought. But enough from me. Time to officially introduce you to Kim, and we'll get this conversation started. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:01] Kim Storen Sure. I'm Kim Storen, and I'm the CMO at Zoom, day number two today. And I'm responsible for how Zoom shows up in the world, from brand to product marketing to engaging our customers in meaningful ways. But who I am is, at my core, I'm a builder. I really love creating clarity from complexity.

[00:02:25] And right now, that's why I'm drawn to Zoom. And right now, I'm helping Zoom define what's next. So Zoom is not just about meetings anymore, but it really is the future of communications and collaboration. And so I think we've got a unique opportunity to take a more complex story than people automatically think about, and reposition the brand in people's minds.

[00:02:50] So I think as a transformation leader, this is a dream job. Yeah, I can well imagine an incredibly cool job you have there. And one of the things, because you've got such fantastic experience in the industry, and you must have seen so many big changes over the years. So I'm curious, what does the digitally engaged customer, what does that look like here in 2025? Because just going back three, five years alone, it's completely different. But what does it look like now? What's changed?

[00:03:20] So a lot has changed. I mean, think about it. When was the last time that you personally wanted to provide your information, whether that's your email address, your cell phone number, any sort of contact information to a third party that you do not know and that you do not trust? And so I think we went through this era of what I call the sassification of marketing, where we over-indexed on performance marketing or demand gen,

[00:03:49] and we kind of lost sight of what actually drives prospects to want to buy you. And that is the fact that ultimately you've got a strong brand. They know who you are. They respect that brand. They understand how you're positioning your products. And then at the bottom of the funnel, you've got great product marketing that can answer all their questions, really address their pain points, and take away any hesitation or roadblock.

[00:04:18] And where we've ended up is that people want to do 85% of the research on their own. And that means brands have to have great marketing and be in the right place at the right time to really make that magical moment with a customer that is either about to be in the market for a new solution or in the market for a new solution. And so that timing just becomes really critical.

[00:04:45] And it has to be self-service because people don't want to engage with the brand until they're ready. And so how do you ensure that during that 85% of the time that they want to be digitally engaged before they want to talk to a human, that you're providing them with the right information and you're answering their questions and you're getting to the heart of what's keeping them up at night. So I think that's the challenge that we as marketers really face.

[00:05:13] Prospects and customers want relevance. They want to understand how you are going to make them the hero of the story. And that requires unified messaging across every touchpoint. So when you think about digital engagement today, it means that we're showing up where the customers are with context, being part of those moments that matter, whether that's on the right message, on the right channel, at the right time.

[00:05:43] And so that's really critical. I think the other thing that's really critical to think about is while customers and prospects would like to have a digital self-service experience, there's a lot of research that shows when they do have a digital self-service experience, that that experience is not great. And it could be a reason that either they churn or they end up not selecting you.

[00:06:08] And so how do you also think about, obviously there's a PLG motion, right? Product-led growth that we think about, which is 100% self-service. But when it comes to enterprise, we really have to find that right balance of self-service and human interaction. And that's why the partnership between sales and marketing is so critical in this new era of digital everywhere.

[00:06:36] The other thing I think we're really starting to think about is what's the role that generative AI plays in all of this? I'm not going to be as bold as to say search is dead, because I think my friends that live and breathe search will come and kill me. But I do think the question is like, how is search evolving? As people start to use ChatGPT or Claude, etc. for search, getting recommendations,

[00:07:03] understanding how platforms stack up against each other, and less on the Google side of the house in terms of searching for the products that they're looking for, how does that play into our digital marketing strategy? And I think there's still a lot that we as marketers have to understand about how generative AI is continuing to be used in that purpose, and whether we can trust the quality of those results,

[00:07:31] and how are we optimizing our own website and content for those generative AI platforms. So there's a lot to really unpack when you think about what does a digitally engaged customer look like today? Because we're all 100% digitally enabled. We are all, in a way now, it's AI everywhere. And that wasn't the case 10 years ago, right?

[00:07:58] When I started working in AI and building GPU-accelerated servers, I was talking to data scientists and really deep, technical, almost high-performance computing experts within organizations. Now when you talk AI, it is truly democratized, and everyone is using AI, whether you're a high school student or, and in some cases, elementary school student, all the way through my parents.

[00:08:28] So every generation is now touching AI on a regular basis, which has really changed digital for how marketers need to be thinking about it. Yeah, and I think you raised such an important point about search there. The present method or the legacy method seems somewhat dated, a little out of touch. It doesn't get you the results quick enough. My son told me a story recently. He was in a location that he wasn't too familiar with. He was looking for a bit of urgent help.

[00:08:56] He said, Dad, Google, the front page, it was just full of sponsored pages and results that were completely irrelevant. But with a mixture of perplexity and chat GPT and backed-up sources, he was able to get the information he needed immediately. So that is only going to continue to evolve. And I recently had a DM on LinkedIn of somebody wanting to work with me that they didn't find me on Google. They find me when they asked chat GPT for somebody, which just completely blew my mind because I thought it would remove my work,

[00:09:26] not give people my details for additional work. So when it comes to marketing, anything you can share on how you see or how to make it easier in implementing AI in marketing or any use cases you see there? I've been working with my teams to implement AI quite a bit. So I don't see it as a replacement right now. I really see it as augmentation. I think it's a superpower.

[00:09:52] I do think ultimately if you're not learning AI and you're not learning how to adapt it into your role, you will be outpaced in the market. You may be replaced, but you're not going to necessarily be replaced by a robot or by AI. You'll be replaced by someone who understands how to leverage AI. So I find that it's really powerful. And I think some of the use cases in marketing that have been proven out, right, content is that easy first use case.

[00:10:22] Writing content, writing first drafts, refining content, it's not an end-to-end solution, nor should it be, because ultimately there's still some hallucinations. You can be penalized for an AI, you know, 100% AI written piece of content, but it can superpower your team. It can help you build a summary or an outline quickly. It can help you refine and improve the grammar, better match to your brand voice.

[00:10:51] So there's a ton of opportunity on the content side. There's a ton of opportunity on the competitive analysis side with product marketing to be able to leverage generative AI to really help you understand where the market is heading and kind of push forward on that. There's a big opportunity in automation, and we're seeing it really pull into some of the automation efforts, whether that's the chatbots or whether that's automating some tasks

[00:11:19] that, you know, are more routine, that you can have that standard automation process pulling into your standard workflows. And then the piece that I'm most excited about is the strategic support. So using one of my favorite AI prompts is to use, you know, use the AI as a thought partner, strategic thought partner,

[00:11:45] and helping you by interviewing you, getting more context from you as the strategy leader, and then helping you refine some ideas or strategic thinking that you may not have come up with because, you know, we're on calls all day and don't have the time to really have that creative brainstorming. And so I think that's one of the places that I, as a leader, I'm most excited about it as is that strategic thought partner.

[00:12:12] That can help me, you know, really push the limits and get more creative. So I think that's a place that requires, well, all of it, really, if you think about it, requires a strength in prompt engineering and understanding how to interact and interface with the AI tool that you're using, whether that's to create imagery or to create content

[00:12:38] or to drive more analytics for your marketing operations team. But there's a ton of opportunity that I think we're just starting to really scratch the surface on. And it's really going to take people who are comfortable culturally with adopting the new technology, people who recognize that it is ultimately a superpower and think of it in that way,

[00:13:02] and who are also comfortable testing it and paying attention that ultimately you still need the human interaction. You still need the human oversight. So playing around with it and having a little bit of that curiosity and playfulness to help take it to the next level. So I think there's a lot to uncover. And ultimately, I think for us as marketers, there's an opportunity to use AI to remove the friction, right?

[00:13:32] Whether that's friction on our side or friction on the customer journey side, and ensure that our team is really focusing on what truly matters, which is the connection to the customer and the prospects, the storytelling and the insights. And so the more that we can unburden ourselves from some of the day-to-day routine tasks or the things that bog us down, the more that we can really up-level our skill set.

[00:13:57] And as you said there, as digitally engaged customers, we're all evolving. Our habits are evolving. We're seeing AI everywhere in our smartphones, tablets and computers and everywhere we turn. I'm curious, what about the role of the CMO? How is that role evolving to keep up to the pace with these changes too? So, I mean, I think CMO is an interesting role right now.

[00:14:24] It's part technologist, part storyteller, part growth strategist. And we're basically expected to own the customer journey and the business outcome. And so I think the role has really continued to evolve. And I think that we're at this really interesting point where we're not just a steward of the brand, like we may have been years ago. Now we're truly business drivers.

[00:14:50] And we're seeing kind of the integration of everything go-to-market come through the CMO. And that's a really exciting place to be. So ultimately, as we think about our roles as CMOs, I think the best thing that we can do for ourselves is really understand how to move beyond the tactics. It's very easy to get caught up in all of the things that are in your toolbox.

[00:15:17] Social media, content, demand gen. You can just name marketing function here, right? It rolls up to us. And marketing is the only function that has that ING in the title, which is really interesting. So it becomes a very tactically oriented just because you've got the ing, right? There's no chief producting officer. There's no chief selling officer.

[00:15:41] But in marketing, we've kind of adopted this ING, which means that we are ultimately being pulled in more to the tactics. So the best things that CMOs can really do is step out of the tactics to think more holistically about how we drive the business and let the tactics follow, right? The tactics are where our teams really excel.

[00:16:08] And so by working diligently on the strategy and the growth drivers and the alignment across the organization, we can then go empower our teams to figure out how the tactics match to those priorities that are shared across the entire organization.

[00:16:26] But if we continue to go down the path of tactic, I think you're going to end up seeing that the CMO in the view that it's supposed to be, right? We're supposed to be the voice of the customer and the voice to the customer.

[00:16:44] And the further we get into the tactics, like sometimes the further we get away from being that business driver or the voice of and to the market. And in my former life in IT, I've seen so many different tech projects go over the line, but ultimately they failed not because of the technology. The technology promised great things, but because of failure to think about the company culture. How is that technology going to impact every single person along the workforce?

[00:17:14] And of course, now we're implementing AI at scale, which is going to massively impact a culture. So on terms of cultural transformation, increasing adoption and team building and removing fear or resistance to change around things like AI, anything you can add there? Any advice around cultural transformation and have to do it the right way? Yeah, absolutely. And I think every culture is different.

[00:17:39] And so the first thing, you know, as I'm on day two at my journey with Zoom, I'm recognizing I've really got to listen and learn and understand the culture as it's built. And then I have to think about my special sauce and how I bring that to the table within the architecture of the culture that the company has built over the past decade plus.

[00:18:02] And so I really think about the culture that I want to embrace within the marketing team is a culture that celebrates progress over perfection and looking at speed as the new strategy. And we're always we should always be learning fast and understanding when things work and when they don't.

[00:18:23] And so I'm hoping to bring that that curiosity and agility and calculated risk taking to the organization and building some cross-functional rituals that promote both speed and reflection so that we can continue to get better, test and learn and and ultimately truly be an agile marketing function.

[00:18:49] And over the last few years, I think we've seen many organizations just go headfirst into AI. They've invested heavily, many for the sake of being in AI, just to be part of that narrative rather than focusing on the problems that they were solving. As a result, now they're starting to question the ROI and businesses that are just hopping on or coming at it from an ROI point of view first. And of course, the secret behind that is measuring success. So how or where and how do you measure success? Anything you can share around them?

[00:19:20] So I think, again, every company is a little bit different. What I try to really focus on is finding the right business drivers to measure. I think it's really easy to get caught up, just like we do get caught up in the tactics, to get caught up in the KPIs. And so when you look at the vanity metrics, the teams need those vanity metrics because that's how they do a better job at optimizing their functions, right?

[00:19:45] They're very those vanity metrics are really tied to the ability to execute and tactically execute. But as the the CMO, my my thinking and KPIs have to be around growth. And so ultimately, I don't believe that marketing can ever be green when the business is red. And our ultimate KPI is the health of the business overall.

[00:20:12] And and then how we kind of build out the the business driver metrics from there depends on what's the most important thing for the business that we're talking about. So, for example, there's organizations where velocity really matters and marketing can play a huge role in ensuring that deals move faster from pipeline to closed one.

[00:20:35] In some organizations, there's a real emphasis on the quality of the new acquisition leads and opportunities. And so ensuring that you're able to to cast a wider net and that you're measuring the right business drivers that are able to showcase to leadership how you're driving new acquisition. Right. In certain organizations, marketing plays a really big role around retention of clients.

[00:21:05] And so looking at those churn numbers and being able to slice and dice them and be able to showcase where the customers stick with your company longer because they engage with marketing. And so when I think about those business drivers, like I want to get away from things like traffic and engagement and impressions and all of those like really, really vanity metrics.

[00:21:31] And instead, I want to start talking about how marketing is helping open doors for sales that may have never been open before, helping them move deals through the funnel faster and and helping to ensure that we retain our customers and and that they they believe that we are a brand worth continuing to invest in.

[00:21:52] And if we go back just five years in time, I think Zoom was trusting to headlines as a solution, helping to keep people connected as they were almost forced to remotely work at scale almost overnight and online meetings, online quizzes, etc. We all remember that. And as you said, at the very beginning of our conversation today, Zoom is no longer just about online meetings. It's itself has grown and evolved into so much more than that.

[00:22:20] So I know you're only in your first week in your role. So but anything you can share around how you see Zoom now and how you see it evolving in the future? Yes, absolutely. So I think there's a couple of things. I think the first thing for for us to think about as part of Zoom's evolution is that Zoom is so much more than just meetings now. And most people don't know that they don't know that Zoom has a world class event platform for webinars.

[00:22:48] Obviously, some people know that, but they don't necessarily know that they can that Zoom competes against on 24 and can do a series of webinars and have all of the the bells and whistles around that or that Zoom does hybrid events, including the in-person aspect, as well as the online aspect. Most people don't know that Zoom has a contact center solution or a employee engagement solution.

[00:23:14] So I think there is a lot more to Zoom than what meets the eye and that people often don't realize that Zoom has so much more in the portfolio than than just the meetings. On the meetings side, I think there is there's so many features and functions. Everyone knows that Zoom is hands down the best platform for collaboration. It just is right.

[00:23:37] I mean, you talk to people who are very loyal to the other platforms and they will even say Zoom is heads and shoulders above in terms of product performance. And so we continue to add more features and functionality, including the AI companion and other elements of the Zoom experience that people don't necessarily know that we are adding all of those features and functionalities.

[00:24:04] So now you really see that Zoom is kind of a one stop shop, I should say, in terms of mail, calendar, scheduler, docs, etc. And the Zoom workplace solution, again, is so much more than meetings.

[00:24:24] So there's a real opportunity as a marketing function to to position Zoom as more than meetings and to ensure that the the buying groups outside of the IT decision maker understand the value of Zoom, whether that is contact center or employee engagement or the marketing and events platforms as well.

[00:24:48] And so I think that's going to be our biggest challenge is sharing more with the world around what we do and and continuing to to leverage the strength of of the workplace platform and in particular, the strength of the video collaboration tools. But we've got to share more with the world around what we're doing to make collaboration and communication more seamless, no matter how you're collaborating and communicating.

[00:25:17] Right. Whether that's talking through your contact center or engaging with customers at events, etc. And so I think that's the huge opportunity ahead of us. And that's why I'm really excited as a customer for a very long time of Zoom on the enterprise side, on the marketing side from an events platform and as a personal user as well. The the tools and the products that that Zoom offers have have helped supercharge my life and my teams.

[00:25:45] But we just we need to share more about what we're doing to to ultimately make the customer the hero of the story. What problems are we solving for them? And how do we share how we're solving those problems outside of just meetings? And for anybody listening that they're hearing you tick all those different things off that maybe they didn't know about. There was a few that I'd not heard about as well. And as you said, you need to get better at maybe sharing that with the world for people listening.

[00:26:16] Maybe they want to dig a little bit deeper, find out more about these features, keep up to speed with new features as they arrive. Is there anywhere in particular you would point everyone listening to check out? So definitely get engaged on we have a LinkedIn newsletter that people can follow. And then obviously exploring our website. There's so much there that is at the fingertips and we will continue to evolve the website and make it easier to find content.

[00:26:41] But right now, that's the the the one stop that I would say can help you understand all of these different products and the portfolio of work that we're we're providing to clients. Well, I'll add a link to the website and also the LinkedIn page you mentioned there as well. So people listening can find you nice and easy. And as we've said a couple of times, this is your first week in the job. I'd love to stay connected with you and maybe in six months time. Let's see how things are evolving for you and work.

[00:27:09] And we'll have another good chat there. But just thank you for joining me today. Yes, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So a huge thank you to Kim for joining me during her very first week as Zoom CMO. And I think what stood out to me in our conversation wasn't just her sharp strategic thinking. It was also her clarity, her energy and her refreshingly human approach to what could have been a very techie discussion around marketing and AI.

[00:27:35] And I think, as Kim reminded us, the most powerful use of AI isn't about replacing people. It's amplifying them. And in a world where 85% of a customer's decision making happens before they even speak to a sales team, showing up with relevance, empathy and clear value. I think those things have never mattered more. And as for Zoom, as we heard today, it's no longer just about online meetings.

[00:28:01] Whether it be contact centers to event platforms to workplace collaboration to employee engagement tools. It's redefining itself. And Kim is helping to lead that transformation. So best of luck, Kim, if you are listening to this. And for everybody listening, if today's conversation resonated with you and you're just curious to learn more about what Zoom is building, I'll include links in the show notes to their website, LinkedIn newsletter, as Kim mentioned there.

[00:28:28] And of course, if you've got any questions or thoughts of your own on the evolution of the CMO role, digital engagement, or just how AI is reshaping your work, you know where to find me by now. Let me know what stood out for you. And if you're using Zoom in new ways, I'd love to hear about that too. Techblogwriteroutlook.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. But it's time for me to go now. I'll be back again very soon with another episode. And hopefully I get to talk with you again. Bye for now.