Coworking with Jim Freeze

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Jim Freeze is the chief marketing officer of Anaplan, a scenario planning and analysis software platform. Prior to joining Anaplan, he was the chief commercial officer of Vetro FiberMap, and he’s also been CMO of companies including Interactions LLC, Aspect Software, and Crossbeam Systems.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I’m a math major and lawyer who ended up in the CMO chair. This may sound counterintuitive, but marketing isn’t just about the flashy imagery or provocative messages that make users look at a brand: it’s about intuitive storytelling, logic, and compelling arguments. I’d describe my job as building a “chain of logic” where every piece of messaging flows into the next to tell a story. Because I’m obsessed with numbers and metrics, I see data as the narrator that gives you the insight to find the right story to tell. A huge part of my job is taking incredibly complex technology and simplifying it so the market and larger enterprise can actually digest it. I lead with an algorithmic approach to ensure that every dollar we spend draws a direct line and correlates with the ultimate goals of the company.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? When I started at Anaplan, we were spending a significant amount of money on our “Connect” events, and while we all felt they were impactful, we needed to see the proof in numbers. Using our own platform, we built a sophisticated dashboard to track how these events influenced our existing pipeline. We didn’t just look at new opportunities that were created; we looked at improvements in win rate and deal velocity, and this data we pulled told a compelling story. We found that for customers who attended, pipeline velocity accelerated by 50%, and our win rate jumped by four percentage points. For a business of our size, that’s huge. The data was there, but being able to pull it together to tell a story allowed us to demonstrate the value these events bring. Now we can directly tie the events to acceleration: deals come in faster, and we win more as a result of it.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: Some have described me as an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. I actually started my career as a programmer, right after getting an undergrad and graduate degree in math. My shift into marketing was a total accident—I was fresh out of college and got tapped to handle a room of investment bankers who had millions of product questions for a developer. Apparently, I handled the hot seat well enough that our VP of sales told my boss I was wasting my time in development and needed to be moved to marketing immediately. The other curveball is that I’m also a lawyer. I went to law school because I wanted to differentiate myself. Even though a professor told me my math brain would make law school a struggle, it was actually my secret weapon. Thinking logically is the core of being a great lawyer, and it’s the same logic I use today to understand complex products and build better stories.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m actually going to give you the same answer for both: AI. Whether it is an opportunity or a threat entirely depends on whether you choose to embrace it or resist it. I’m incredibly optimistic about the productivity gains we are seeing. We are already using it to “transcreate” content into different languages, and turning transcripts from our events into polished blogs. It frees up our team to reduce the mundane tasks and lean into bigger-picture strategy. On the flip side, I’m wary of anyone ignoring the AI-driven shift in search. Traditional SEO is dying; within a few years, AI search will be the primary way people find information. If you aren’t optimizing for that now, you’re already behind. I think as a marketer, I’d focus on AI search and understanding it better.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I’m biased, but I’d have to point people toward Right Decisions, Right Now, Anaplan’s podcast series that I host, where we skip the marketing jargon and talk about the high-stakes choices leaders made that shaped their careers. As a math guy, I also think that all marketers need to stop looking at just marketing content and start studying finance. It is so important to understand how your spend actually flows through an income statement. If you can speak the language of the CFO, you’ll have a much easier time getting your next big idea funded.