Hritika: Hello everyone, welcome to the second episode of the GTM Rapid Fire, where we talk to GTM leaders from across the globe about their journey and learnings. The format is simple - five questions, keeping it straightforward, focused, and of course with a little bit of banter. Our guest today is really special - welcome Julien.

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Julien comes with over 15 years of experience in tech, including working with the biggest marketing teams, leading marketing teams at Salesforce, Gong, Clari, and now he is the Chief Marketing Officer at Cordial. I'd like to let Julien introduce himself. Julien, can you give us a brief overview of your journey, how you found your way into product marketing, and how you're liking your new role?

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Julien: Thank you, and thanks for having me. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody, wherever you are.

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My background is actually technical - I'm French and studied in France. I started as a data scientist back in the days before AI was all the rage it has become now. I moved into consulting, and then mid-career, I realized I was really interested in doing something once and amplifying it across all channels, which is the definition of marketing. Since I was technical and product-minded, product marketing was just a natural fit for me. I moved to the U.S. in 2012, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to come here to San Francisco, where I live, and it's been a joy. Now I'm CMO at Cordial, it's been a few weeks now.

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Hritika: That's lovely! I hope you kill it in your next job. I love your LinkedIn posts, by the way. I read somewhere that you mentioned you love turning customers into raving fans. In your experience, how do you do that when you're a very young team? When you don't have the resources, it's quite easy to do when you have the resources and money, but what happens when the team is small?

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Julien: Good question. I'll start by saying I believe that product differentiation is becoming thinner and thinner every day with AI and other factors. SaaS is really going through a big shift, and ultimately, people don't want you to tell them, they want you to show them. With that in mind, I really believe that customer validation is everything - it's paramount. Every piece of content you put out there as a marketer, every blog post, every activation, every event has to feature a customer.

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I think customer marketing as a function is probably one of the most well-kept secrets of marketing. I don't love that - I think it deserves better understanding in the market and higher visibility. It still feels like PMM maybe 10 years ago. I hope customer marketing continues to get the awareness and exposure it needs because it's really the secret weapon of everything you do, both from an amplification standpoint with customer content and from a listening standpoint through customer advisory boards and call analysis.

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As for how to do it when your team is small - there are always ways, even if you don't have a full-time customer marketer. I'm lucky to have one full-time customer marketer at Cordial, but if that's not your case, then you as a marketer need to get closer to your Customer Success team. Listen to calls, find these little nuggets of customer evidence. Even if you don't have a call recorder, you can use Zoom. There are always creative ways to get closer to the customer's voice.

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Hritika: That's lovely advice. I really like that because a lot of marketers are talking about how marketing is changing in 2025 due to AI and content flooding, but we need to make those personalized connections.

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On a different note, I think you've also mentioned that you're a mentor and you've mentored many people. In that experience, what are the common mistakes that you see marketers make? It doesn't necessarily have to be young marketers in general, since trends are changing rapidly.

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Julien: There are many mistakes, and it's a spectrum based on the person's function, seniority, and culture. If you ask a young French marketer versus an experienced tenured head of CS in the Bay, you'll get completely different answers.

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Focusing on marketing, I think people continue to separate brand and demand in their heads. I know thousands of articles have been published on the topic, but I still see it all the time. Sometimes it's like "this is a brand awareness play" or "this is a pipeline generation play." I don't like that separation.

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If you do things well, it's the same thing - the brand program or campaign of today ultimately turns into pipeline tomorrow. Brand is demand; it's just a matter of timeline. If you want more short-term results, you'll index more on demand programs. If you want bigger impact but longer timeline, you'll go for that big category or brand campaign.

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Hritika: How would you measure brand value? This is something all marketers struggle with, right? Even with PMM sometimes, because you do certain campaigns where it's difficult to put a number to it.

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Julien: I have my brand/category scorecard where I track all sets of metrics, and it's pretty detailed. You can't have just one metric to track the power of the brand - that doesn't do justice to it. You need multiple metrics across all channels to better assess how your brand is resonating.

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Examples would be tracking if the words in your narrative are actually being used by your buyers in recorded calls. There's word-of-mouth metrics, branded search metrics - so many ways to track how you're doing on the brand and, as a consequence, how you're doing at the demand level.

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Hritika: Let's switch gears. Because you write a lot about your hot takes on LinkedIn, I want to hear your hot take on recent trends or upcoming trends in PMM or marketing in general.

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Julien: PMM is fascinating - potentially the most impactful function in marketing, but also the hardest. No one fully understands it or knows how to measure it. It's unique because it's both deep and broad - you need deep market and product knowledge, but you also need broad coverage of functions and KPIs.

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My hot take is: pick the one metric you own. You can influence many KPIs and business metrics, but that's the trap because then you become too spread thin, and no one really understands what you're doing. As a PMM, it's frustrating because you want to own multiple things and show impact across the business, but start with one, or no one will ever truly understand your scope and impact.

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PMMs love frameworks, and I actually like frameworks too. Sometimes I'm harsh on them, but frameworks should never be an excuse for laziness. They should help you, not replace your brain. I see all these PMM frameworks with lagging indicators, leading indicators, sales-led, product-led - it becomes this multi-dimensional matrix of metrics, and people's heads explode. We're doing a disservice to the function by over-complicating what metrics PMM owns.

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Hritika: Now I want to hear about your walk across Spain. I read a LinkedIn post about that. What was that about, and how was the experience?

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Julien: I did it back in October when I was between jobs and took a mini sabbatical. I've always liked walking and writing - not just LinkedIn posts, but also fiction. I walked for two or three weeks in Spain on the Camino de Santiago, which is a religious pilgrimage, although I'm not religious myself. Anyone can do it - you walk five to six hours a day for multiple weeks. It's exhausting but a beautiful meditative, self-reflective experience that I'm very grateful for.

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I was leaving Clari in September, and Cordial was waiting. I was in Europe anyway for family reasons, so it played out well. Being French, everyone there has heard of the Camino de Santiago - it's a big thing. It was exhausting, hard on the joints, body, and shoulders. You carry your backpack, your feet get destroyed - I had to get my nails removed last week! But it was a transformational, life-changing experience.

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Hritika: That's lovely! Did you write a detailed blog about it?

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Julien: I wrote a book about it - shameless plug - it's going to be self-published in a few weeks. If anyone's interested, just DM me. It will be promoted on Instagram. It's a different side of me, but still me. I wrote it in French, but had it translated to English. It's going to be short, more like poetry.

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Hritika: For my last question, any advice you want to leave for the audience? It could be about PMM or something you learned from your walk in Spain.

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Julien: I think there's randomness in life and in any journey. Sometimes I see people on LinkedIn saying they went from this to CMO in X amount of years, and it was all planned out - I think that's a lie. There's a lot of random stuff that happens, good and bad, including the randomness of the people you meet, because those shape your lives. Life is just a succession of encounters and experiences, but you need the right mindset to be open to that.

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Everybody gets the same level of randomness in their lives. The people who end up stronger or happier are the ones who have an open mind towards that randomness. You welcome random meetings, random flow of ideas, random events - you go with the punches if they're bad, you go with the joy if they're good. If you're open to that aspect of life, good things will follow.

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Hritika: Thank you so much for your time. It was lovely talking to you, and thank you for coming to the show.

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Julien: Thanks for having me.