MarTech Interview with Jill Ransome, CMO at Jitterbit

Jill Ransome, CMO at Jitterbit talks about a few new-age marketing principles that brand marketers should make a priority:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jill, tell us more about your B2B marketing journey and your time as CMO at Jitterbit…

I have been in marketing my entire career—over 25 years (ouch!)—since graduating from Penn State with a degree in global marketing. That’s almost unheard of. Fresh out of college I started my career as an editor. Digital marketing was almost nonexistent. Websites were just coming about back then so I was forced to teach myself how to write HTML to build a website. It was then that I was struck by the digital bug. I got super excited about the blossoming digital world and quickly began building my expertise over the years in all sorts of digital marketing roles—from email marketing to advertising and paid media and branding. I worked for startups and for 85 year old enterprise giants, but my passion kept leading me to smaller, fast-growing companies like Jitterbit.

I joined Jitterbit, in the role of CMO, last November (just about a year ago!) to help revive the brand and take a pivotal seat in the company’s next stage of growth. Jitterbit is growing fast across four core markets—North America, EMEA, APAC and Latin America. My team is working cross-regionally to drive that momentum and build the foundation of our future as a leader in hyper automation.

When it comes to CX must haves and principles in the B2B market today, what are some of the biggest misses you see in this segment?

The biggest miss is a lack of alignment. CX can be driven from different functions within an organization, but without alignment at the top—from sales, to customer success, to marketing and communications—it will never be a fully integrated experience.

CX begins with mapping the customer journey—from buyer to close, from onboarding to execution and growth. Understanding the entire lifecycle is critical to mapping a cohesive CX strategy.

Once you have the strategy, then you can start to build the program. Oftentimes I see organizations doing pieces or parts of this, but without alignment and understanding of how one area affects the other.

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What are some of the ways that you feel marketers/CMOs can enhance the overall buying journey and digital CX with simple adjustments in their everyday practices?

There are lots of ways but, it begins with mapping the buyer/customer lifecycle and understanding what those touchpoints are and where marketing has influence.

Understanding the channels of engagement at the buyer stage is obviously marketing—conveying the tone, the value prop, the culture and the outcomes a buyer might expect from your brand. So communicate those effectively. Social media is a great place to do that.

In terms of the buying stage, marketing can work with sales to develop a strong proposal, highlighting the same values, tone and expectations so the messaging is aligned and restated to the buyer.

Once the buyer becomes a customer, marketers need to work with internal onboarding and implementation teams to carry that messaging—the very things that helped us win the deal—though every touch point.

We don’t buy coffee from a high-end coffee shop because it is inherently better coffee. We do it (mostly) because of how we feel and the experiences we associate with that coffee shop. Bringing that same level of thinking to B2B experience works the same way.

We’d love to hear more about your own marketing processes closer home at Jitterbit and the martech that helps drive it?

We are still building here at Jitterbit. We are modernizing our approach to marketing, creating demand through an integrated marketing strategy across all the channels that our prospects and customers play in. From LinkedIn to review sites like TrustRadius and G2, we are building a digital footprint while leveraging conversational marketing, ABM and automaton tools.

Social media is huge for us right now, and we are looking at bringing on additional martech in that area to help us support and drive our reach. A slew of different technologies support our ability to be everywhere our customers are looking for information and the data it provides gives us guidance on how Jitterbit can best solve their business problems.

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A few thoughts on what you feel the future of the B2B tech market is set to look like?

The future of the B2B tech market is going to be a busy one, crowded with more and more tools. It will be up to the vendors to clearly articulate the power of their offering.

Marketers today are faced with budget restrictions and we don’t always have the luxury of signing every piece of software we would like. So we need to choose wisely—understanding which software integrates with others, how this brings value to our fingertips and, ultimately, how it will help us improve the outcomes for our particular business.

Some last thoughts martech best practices for B2B marketers?

Start small. Don’t think you need to have every shiny new technology immediately. Understand your business, devise a strategy that supports your company’s unique goals and then look for the right technology to support your business and your marketing goals.