For Chief Marketer’s monthly Marketers on Fire series, we interviewed Cisco SVP and CMO Carrie Palin to discuss the company’s recent Cisco Live conference, the brand’s involvement with women’s sports, AI use cases, B2B thought leadership and more.

Before joining Cisco in 2021, Palin was the CMO of cybersecurity and analytics company Splunk, which was acquired by Cisco last year. Prior to that she served as CMO at SendGrid, which was acquired by Twilio, and she was the first CMO at Box. She was also Vice President of Marketing at IBM’s Cloud Data Services and Analytics division and began her career at the marketing team at Dell.

We got a chance to pick Palin’s brain about her best advice for aspiring CMOs as well. And she had this to say:

“Here’s the thing that took me way too long in my career to figure out: have courage,” she said. “Don’t play small ball. Literally work your butt off and go and be a great teammate, but go educate yourself and be the one that works the hardest. Outwork people and have the courage to jump into things you’re not 100% ready for but you know you will work to figure out.

“It sounds so simple. It’s not simple. You’re going to fail and it’s going to hurt and it’s going to feel awful but you can get back up and keep grinding, and that’s where real growth occurs,” she said. Enjoy a video clip of the conversation and the full transcript of our chat as well.

Until next week,