You might be surprised to learn that you don’t need more strategy, just more belief
Welcome to the CMO Council / Wise Marketer Interview Series. This series features high-impact people from every corner of the marketing world: founders, C-suite executives, and influential voices in the community.
The series focuses on how marketing leadership works in practice, beyond isolated trends. Its core themes include the evolving CMO role, storytelling, execution beyond campaigns, and AI readiness.
We produce the series with our partner, the CMO Council - a peer-powered network of more than 16,000 chief marketing executives at 10,000 companies across 120 countries. Together, its members control roughly $1 trillion in annual marketing spend.
The Council is a hub for high-level networking, thought leadership, and knowledge exchange among senior marketers worldwide.
Our partnership with CMO Council leverages that community's research, content, and education to explore how marketing leadership works in practice and to unpack solutions for the challenges CMOs face today.
Today’s guest is Gary Lyng. Gary has spent more than two decades in enterprise technology marketing, including CMO roles at Aparavi and Violin Systems and senior leadership roles at Hitachi Vantara, SanDisk, EMC and NetApp.
Gary has launched and repositioned billion-dollar product lines, built new market categories, and led turnarounds. Today he’s here to talk about an idea he believes most enterprises are missing: strategy isn’t the problem, belief is.
Time Stamps for the Time Starved
6:16 Every Enterprise has a Strategy, Not Enough have Belief
8:56 Compliance vs. Conviction - the False Alignment Trap
13:06 Belief and Customer Trust
17:15 The CMO as Chief Belief Officer
20:35 Believing in the Vision Before it Exists
25:00 Belief and Customer Loyalty
29:01 Advice for a New CMO
33:36 Wrapping Up
Bio
Gary Lyng grew up in Bletchley, England, where Alan Turing's codebreakers found structure inside the chaos of Enigma. The instinct stayed with him.
Across 25+ years at Hitachi Vantara, SanDisk, Dell EMC, NetApp, HP, and Veritas, and at the challengers built to unseat them, it became a working belief: the rarest skill in technology isn't building great products. It's creating belief in what's possible, before the market knows it needs it.
His method is the Belief Loop. Elevate the what to the why. Align product, narrative, and sales behind it as one motion. Hold it to pipeline, revenue, and retention.
He does different, not better: moving SanDisk from components into the enterprise with a new category, shifting Hitachi Vantara from feature-led to outcome-led selling, and rebuilding stalled businesses from the ground up.
Operating as CMO, product leader, or advisor, Gary works alongside CEOs and teams at the moments that define a company's direction, takes good ideas from anywhere, and counts it a win when they leave believing they can do more.
Functions can be managed. Growth has to be built.
