MarTech Interview with Siamak Haschemi, CEO, Ingenious Technologies

Tell us about your role and journey to Ingenious Technologies.

My passion is all around thinking and building software products end-to-end. This goes from details like hardware and networking to technical architecture, UI/UX, the customer and the problems software tries to solve. I studied computer science and did my Ph.D. in that area. During that time, I founded my first venture, which I sold in 2016 to the Ingenious Group, and I joined them. I quickly took over the role of the CTO and initiated a technological transformation within the organization. After that, I was asked to lead the company as CEO, which I have been doing since the beginning of 2018. Today, I am the CEO and visionary of Ingenious.

What makes the current marketing scenario so exciting?

As my background is not in marketing, and I joined this industry rather late (2016), I still have a “fresh eye“ on it. From my perspective, digital marketing done right makes it possible to bring predictability into the game. As more and more consumers join the digital world and consent to share their data, brands have the chance to understand and assist their customers in their digital journey. Furthermore, brands have a very challenging task of building trust and sustainable relationships with their customers.

As compared to B2C, how does a CEO’s role differ in the B2B Tech industry?

I never worked for a B2C company, so my experience is limited.

What is a customer 360-degree view for you? How does Ingenious Technologies deliver these insights to customers?

Partner Marketing is an activity which is not limited to a certain channel. It isn’t just affiliate marketing. All brands nowadays have to manage partners on different channels, with different demands. Traditionally, channels are separated into segregated teams within a company. As this might have good reasons, the operational and C-level layers still need insights into each other’s activities.

Only if all partner marketing activities are consolidated in a central system, synergies, efficiency, and effectiveness of gaining sales can be increased. A 360-degree view enables brands to judge clearly on numbers and knows where to invest the next dollar. It allows brands to become independent from custom, undocumented, and people-driven processes — by introducing standard-workflows and non-siloed data.

Ingenious allows brands to model all online and offline channels in one platform. It helps to measure the activities on those channels with a sophisticated tracking solution. Next, our Multi-Channel Customer Journey approach allows brands to understand, change, and improve their partner marketing strategy. Finally, our platform helps to assign a real money value to activities through its multi-country and multi-currency banking layer.

What goes into creating a frictionless experience for tech buyers through automation and data analytics?

As a SaaS provider for Partner Marketing, we first have to understand the current situation of our customer in-depth. We usually assess our clients with a gap analysis of what they currently do, and what they want to do in the future. Including C-level and operational people in that stage is very important, as they often have different perspectives. With our integration team, we then plan and execute the migration of the current partner basis, and also set up a seamless CRM Automation. After the migration, our account managers synchronize with the customer regularly to optimize the usage of the platform.

What startups in the technology industry are you watching keenly right now?

We constantly exchange with startups from the Machine Learning and FinTech area.

What Marketing and Sales Automation tools and technologies do you currently use?

We use our own platform (“Eat your own dogfood”) and a handful of other tools.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?

We see several trends going on, not only AI. Our vision here is that data quality and availability is most important as a prerequisite. That’s why we invested a lot into our data strategy. Our AI pipelines will rely on well-structured, real-time available data from all our internal components. Our vision is to help brands with their first steps into AI.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

As an engineer, I know that in the future there are people who can understand and change their digital surroundings, and others who will just consume. I encourage my people to fight hard to be part of the right group.

One word that best describes how you work.

Selfless

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

My toothbrush and Google Suite

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

I never shut down my Macbook, but just close and open it from hibernation. Continue where I left.

What are you currently reading?

I use the blog aggregator feedly.com on my iPhone to daily read articles from sites such as Medium, Forbes, confluent.io, and PerformanceIN.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t stick to technology only. Get the commercial and business view on top of technology, and you become unstoppable.

Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

I was told that I solve problem areas I never experienced in a frightening quality.

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

I would love to read the answers of my friend Peter Jaeger, Founder of haalo.io.

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