Interview with Biju Muduli from LinkSquares

1. Legal tech buyers might not be highly resistant to change, but they’re one of the compliance-driven personas in the market because they have to be. When you can’t sell “AI-driven” as the headline, how do you design defensible positioning- to get through to risk-averse champions? What groundwork must CMOs lay down?

Legal tech buyers aren’t necessarily resistant to innovation; they’re resistant to introducing risk without a clear and defensible business benefit.

That means positioning has to start with the problem we are solving and the outcome we are creating for our customers. For example, at LinkSquares we are focused on helping the legal and business teams accelerate deals, reduce contractual risk, give the business greater visibility into obligations and eliminate hours of manual work.

Beyond that, it’s about building trust and providing proof points. The more transformational the technology, the more evidence buyers need. Customer stories with measurable outcomes, third-party review sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, security and governance practices, and transparency around how the technology works – all become part of the positioning.

I’ve also learned that you develop the best positioning by working cross functionally across the company. At LinkSquares, we’ve used win/loss insights, customer feedback, sales conversations, and market intelligence to continually refine our ideal customer profile (ICP), value proposition, messaging and positioning. My philosophy is that the strongest positioning sits at the intersection of what customers care about, what your solution uniquely delivers and what you can credibly prove.

When those three things are aligned, AI doesn’t have to be the headline. The business outcome is the headline, and AI becomes the reason you can deliver that outcome better and more efficiently.

2. There’s a massive wave of AI-washing where almost every AI tool or software can claim to revolutionize legal. In such a scenario, what would be your non-negotiables to build a trust framework that acknowledges the multi-threaded nature of legal tech buying and targets the spectrum- from CLO and DPO to CFO?

Trust has become one of the most important currencies in enterprise technology, particularly with AI. And I think one of the biggest mistakes companies make is treating trust as a marketing message. Trust isn’t something you claim; it’s something you demonstrate repeatedly throughout the customer journey.

My first non-negotiable is specificity. Explain what the AI actually does, what problem it solves, what level of control the customer retains and what measurable outcome it produces.

The second is proof over promise. Customers should be able to see evidence through real use cases, references, independent reviews, measurable outcomes and product experiences. Customer advocacy has always been an important component of my marketing strategy. At LinkSquares, we’ve invested heavily in customer advocacy and independent review programs because buyers increasingly trust the experiences of their peers more than vendor claims. This has helped us elevate our company to the #1 customer-rated contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform across leading review sites.

The third is understanding that trust means something different to each member of the buying committee. A Chief Legal Officer or General Council may care about legal risk and control. A Data Protection Officer or security leader will care about data governance, privacy and how information is handled. A Chief Finance Officer will ask about the return on investment (ROI), productivity and business impact. The underlying platform is the same but the proof points have to connect to the different priorities of each stakeholder.

Ultimately, the strongest AI brands will be the companies that can most consistently prove that their technology creates value while giving customers the transparency, governance and control they expect.

3. As a CMO, your strategic mandate has always been to fill the cavity between marketing, product, sales, and customer success. How’ve your basics for cross-functional alignment evolved across different industries? Is it more rewarding to always start from scratch?

One thing I’ve learned across very different companies and markets is that go-to-market (GTM) alignment comes from creating shared accountability around the same business outcomes. True alignment starts with the ICP, customer problem, value proposition, growth model and business outcomes the company is trying to achieve.

Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Experience teams should have the same version of the customer. You need a common understanding of who you’re targeting, why they buy, what value they expect and how you’ll measure whether you’re delivering it.

I’ve had the opportunity to build and transform these systems in very different environments. At Securonix, we built a scalable GTM engine that contributed to 40% year-over-year (YoY) annual recurring revenue growth in new business. At LinkSquares, we’ve re-architected the GTM engine across marketing, sales, sales development representative, and revenue operations that contributed to doubling our new business win rate YoY.

Sometimes the bigger leadership challenge is determining what not to change. The goal isn’t to put your fingerprint on everything. It’s to understand what’s working, identify the constraints preventing the business from growing and focus the organization on fixing those constraints.

4. Managing global marketing operations and analytics engines at companies like Dassault Systèmes, you’ve had a front-row seat to the debate over the dramatically shifting nature of marketing attribution for years. Now that MQLs are presumed dead or a vanity metric at most, which metrics do you believe hold weight now and will continue to for the next few eras of marketing?

The metrics that matter increasingly sit much closer to revenue and business outcomes: qualified pipeline, pipeline coverage to meet new business goals, deal velocity, conversion rates, win rates, sales-cycle, customer acquisition efficiency, expansion, retention and ultimately revenue.

At Dassault Systèmes, I was focused on standardizing funnel definitions globally and using data and ROI analysis to improve campaign performance. Today, as a CMO, I’m focused on understanding how the entire revenue engine performs for the company.

Attribution itself has evolved over time. B2B buying journeys are simply too complex to pretend that one campaign or one touch created a multimillion-dollar buying decision. Marketing needs to understand and showcase how it impacts revenue through new logo acquisition, upsell/cross sell and improved retention.

One metric I’m particularly interested in is velocity. How quickly are accounts moving from awareness to engagement to opportunity to revenue. If your ICP is right, your positioning resonates, your brand has credibility and your GTM organization is aligned, you should see that reflected in conversion and speed. At LinkSquares, we’ve seen a 2X increase in new-business win rates YoY and a 30% reduction in the new-business sales cycle.

One metric I’m particularly interested in is velocity. How quickly are accounts moving from awareness to engagement to opportunity to revenue. If your ICP is right, your positioning resonates, your brand has credibility and your GTM organization is aligned, you should see that reflected in conversion and speed. At LinkSquares, we’ve seen a 2X increase in new-business win rates YoY and a 30% reduction in the new-business sales cycle.

The future of marketing measurement isn’t about proving marketing gets credit. It’s about proving that marketing makes the entire business perform better.

5. As a marketing leader, Biju, you have mentored and built high-performance marketing teams- which demands active listening, empathy, and trust in long-term potential. What’s the one philosophy you actively follow to instill an environment of experimentation and continuous learning in an age where marketing teams are finding themselves on the verge of creative burnout?

My philosophy is: create clarity on the outcome and give team members freedom in how they get there.

High-performing teams need accountability, but they also need psychological safety. If every experiment has to succeed, people eventually stop experimenting. They choose the safest idea because failure has become too expensive. That’s exactly the opposite of what you want in marketing – especially right now, when AI is changing how quickly we can create, test, analyze, and iterate.

As a leader, my responsibility is to be very clear about business results we’re trying to achieve, the priorities that matter and the boundaries we’re operating within. I want my team to have room to challenge assumptions and try different ways of getting there.

More activity isn’t the same as more innovation, and experimentation also needs discipline. Burnout often comes from asking teams to do everything rather than making deliberate choices about what matters. Leaders need to create space by stopping lower-value work, using AI and automation to remove repetitive tasks and protecting the work that genuinely requires human creativity, judgment and empathy.

I’ve built teams across multiple industries and stages of growth, and I’ve found that the best people don’t need leaders constantly telling them what to do. They need context, trust, honest feedback and autonomy to execute.