Interview with Sara Gonzalez,Chief Marketing Officer, Simple

Interview with Sara Gonzalez, Chief Marketing Officer, Simple

Sudipto Ghosh

May 25, 2018

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Tell us about your role and how you got here?

Prior to Simple, I worked in sales and marketing roles within the Digital Conferencing and Event space. I’ve always loved the fast-paced nature of start-up environments and had a bit of a fascination with the way that marketing and technology have become so closely aligned.

I am fortunate that my role at Simple allows me to not only be at the forefront of MarTech trends and solutions, but also allows me to help marketers remove the complexity and work more effectively.

At the ON24 Webinar World 2018 Sydney, how do you intend to foster authentic engagement between your customers and the brand?

We will be launching the results from our latest research report – The State of Marketing Resource Management in the Age of Intelligence. The report delves into brand consistency, budgeting, planning and compliance and it’s clear that many marketing teams are struggling with the complexity that they now face. I am always genuinely interested in uncovering the pain points that we all face on a daily basis.

What are your expectations and likely key takeaways from the ON24 Webinar World 2018? Who are you huddling with at the event?

I always say that if I walk away with three key take-aways then an event has been worthwhile.

Webinars are key to our overall marketing strategy, especially when it comes to thought leadership. So as well as discovering the latest trends, I’m looking forward to having some insightful conversations and will definitely be on the lookout for some passionate marketers who have a great story to tell and who might want to appear in our educational webinar series.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Mark Bornstein – he is so enthusiastic and infectious, and I’ve been watching him for years!

How does Simple fit into a modern CMO’s tech stack?

Today’s marketer has such a broad range of execution tools and Simple is the upstream planning solution that allows teams to easily plan, review and optimize all of them. It’s about providing marketing teams with a central workplace and one view across all channels.

The most exciting part? Marketing Resource Management has been around for 15+ years, and we’re reinventing it. Our new Intelligent Marketing Platform is built atop the Microsoft Business Applications Platform and will transform how brands use artificial intelligence to create exceptional customer experiences – it’s a very exciting time for us!

How do you leverage webinar marketing tools to engage with your online audience? How does it help you build a strong sales pipeline?

With webinars, I’ve always been a big believer in utilizing the technology to suit your objectives. We reap the benefits of webinars on two levels. Firstly, they serve as a great lead generation tool and help complement our content marketing strategy; and secondly, we utilise our on-demand content library to host evergreen training materials and other short videos.

Of course, none of this means anything unless you’ve got seamless integration that helps to tell a story. From engagement scores to downloadable resources and simple lead scoring – we’ve made sure that our engine is always on as our webinars can be accessed at any time.

AR/VR/Webinars and Event Automation – What are your predictions for the B2B marketing community promoting these contemporary technologies?

I’ve always thought there is such huge potential with the streaming of physical events – either live or on-demand. I think the power of AR and VR has the ability to accelerate the acceptance of these technologies and therefore allow marketers to generate a much higher ROI on any physical events they hold.

While you can never replace face to face interaction, I think we need to start embracing these contemporary of technologies and start blending them into what we’re currently doing.

How do you measure your Sales Fitness? What tools would recommend to CEOs and CMOs as a Sales Hack in 2018?

Not so much a hack but moreso advice to Keep It Simple (pardon the pun). There’s a lot of ‘shiny tools’ out there I believe that your CRM should always be your King and that your data never lies.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Joe Hyland – CMO, on24

Thank you Sara! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

About Sara
About Simple

About Sara

It all started with the Four P’s. During Sara’s time at university she was fascinated with the way that the marketing world worked and couldn’t wait to put her knowledge to practice.

It was then that she was offered an opportunity to be employee number six in an exciting start-up. It was then that she was requested to become the company’s Marketing Manager and commit to informing, educating and inspiring the marketplace.

From the rise of MarTech to the importance of Customer Experiences, Sara has spent the past ten years turning knowledge into practice and the what-if’s into reality. Her pragmatic approach and ability to get work done allows her to thrive within fast paced start-up environments. My role at Simple allows me to put this into practice each and every day.

About Simple

The world of Marketing is changing. Today, Marketing leaders are creating campaigns that span an exploding number of touchpoints, are confronted with an abundance of technology and are at the forefront of the customer experience. While these changes have presented us with unique opportunities, they’ve also been overwhelming and in some cases, have increased complexity, inconsistency and confusion. Sure, we have access to state-of-the-art technologies and yes, we know more about our customers than ever before – but how is this all managed? Where is our central workplace that gives us visibility into what’s happening and how effective it is? At Simple we get it, and we’ve taken it one step further. We’re creating a world where marketers have one single source of truth that provides complete visibility into planning, creation and reporting. A world that gives organisations one holistic view into how we work and recognises the impact we’re making.

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The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.