Arun Lal

Architecting the global marketing engine for the world’s most widely adopted Continuous Quality platform. Scaling GTM strategy for Fortune 2000 enterprises and cementing Sauce Labs as the definitive category leader in AI-driven testing and QA automation.

Series A startup providing AI Sales Engineer and AI Seller Agents to Enterprises Positioned, rebranded and launched the company as an AI revenue platform for modern enterprises built on the Sales Knowledge Lake™ that won the 2024 Gartner Cool Vendor in AI for Sales within four months of launch and multiple category awards. Beat pipeline and ARR targets by 145% and built a highly advanced AI agent led demand gen and GTM engine that delivers predictable revenue and very high efficiency. Built advanced AI agents for product marketing, performance marketing and social media and led a team of 10+ AI-first marketers, GTM engineers that beat GTM targets consistently and scaled operations highly efficiently.

Series F startup providing SaaS products for AI-driven workforce analytics and insights for leaders-of-leaders. Repositioned the company from an employee experience platform to an AI and People Science-based leadership insights and impact platform while supporting a hundred million+ in ARR customer base with strong growth. Drove Culture Amp’s GTM strategy/planning, market positioning & messaging, pricing & packaging, ICP definition, competitive intelligence, product launches, AR/PR, and sales enablement. Full team management.

Series C startup providing AI-driven SaaS management, finance, and procurement workflow automation platform. Grew company ARR 3.5x in 5 quarters as the head of product marketing, content marketing, and sales enablement. Partnered closely with C-Suite executives, Product Management, Sales, and Engineering leadership. Built a world-class product marketing and content strategy team of 6. Recruited talented directors, managers and ICs, from Google, Marketo, ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday, Slack, Salesforce, VMware and top startups. Coined and launched the #SaaSIntelligence customer marketing movement which differentiated Productiv as the thought leader and #1 in the enterprise SaaS management category in a crowded space of ~20 vendors. Created company’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy, identified market positioning, value props, pricing and packaging. Managed analyst relations with Gartner and Forrester and conducted competitive market research. Won Company Marketer of the Year Award and was recognized by Marketing 2.0 for#SaasIntelligence movement.

Founded and led Contiq, a Series A ML/NLP-based B2B content search & recommendation platform Led investor pitch and financials, raising $6M+ in seed funding from top VCs like DNX, xGoogle Ventures and more. Hired and grew the team to 40 people, including key leadership roles. Directly managed Chief Revenue Officer, 15 Sales & Business Development and 3 Marketers while partnering closely with CTO, Head of Product and Engineering. Acquired 130+ customers, and doubled ARR every quarter, including VMware, Deloitte, and Informatica by building a bottom-up direct customer acquisition model. Created and drove the entire go-to-market and pricing strategy from identifying customer segment and persona, value props and messaging, running email campaigns, paid ads, and leading A/B testing and iteration. Drove sales and sales enablement, stepped into land major client deals with VP of Sales. Implemented ROI-driven, value-selling sales methodology and trained business development to lead with value.

A Series C deep-tech startup that built ML models for climate modeling, got acquired by Bayer as a unicorn. Grew revenue 4x to ~$110M in less than 8 quarters while integrating the business into Bayer. Hired as the first marketer and built out the product marketing function to a team of 12 top-performing directors, managers, and IC PMMs. Created and scaled a massively successful upsell strategy, embedding software products as a soft bundle to enterprise customers (farmers in Bayer’s customer base), achieving an almost 100% attach rate. Hired 250 trainers that trained 7,000 salespeople and incentivized them through SPIFF programs. Designed and optimized the buyer's journey, improving product adoption and engagement through partnering with a team of ~300 customer success agents.

Led global launch across product marketing and go-to-market strategy for VMware's Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) and vCloud Suite and drove revenue from $0 to $1B+ in 2 years. Created business strategy for SDDC by conducting customer research to understand needs and value props, bundling existing and acquisition products serving as an alternative to AWS, writing the positioning and messaging, and pitching to C-suite, including now CEO Raghu Raghuram. Drove go-to-market, sales enablement, field, and partner programs for 7300 sellers, 55K ISVs, and MSPs. Created partnership enablement strategy and trained 55 partners. Spoke as VMware’s SDDC spokesperson and led multiple AR/PR engagements, and industry speaking engagements globally (VMworld, EMC events, etc.).

Led global product marketing and P&L for Office 365 enterprise. Grew customers by 300%+ in 6 months by leading research into enterprise services and IT operational needs for cloud technologies with CTO/CIOs of global corporations and competitors (e.g. Google, Oracle, Salesforce.com).

Led global launch across product marketing and go-to-market strategy of Dynamics CRM, #2 CRM after Salesforce that became a $1B business in 4 years with over 1500 customers across enterprise and SMB. Wrote initial Business Requirements (BRD) document and pitched it to Satya Nadella, now CEO. Identified value props and developed competitive advantage through integration with Office suite (e.g. Outlook and Excel). Hired, mentored, and developed a core team of 50+ PMs, PMMs, and Developers across the US and India, managing end-to-end product P&L.

Shipped Office Small Business Applications Suite 2007. Acquired 30 million users worldwide in 1st year of launch. Developed product business requirements for Office Accounting (OA) for India and China, managed the India team of 14 and a budget of $2.4 million as the end to end program lead.

Shipped Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (v1 product). Grew to 6M users in 11 months.

Developed AskMe.com core portal and community feature areas. Grow users from 10K to 3 million in 9 months.