SendGrid Announces the Grand Opening of New Office in Irvine, California

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March 26, 2018

SendGrid Triples Footprint and Relocates to the Heart of Southern California’s Growing Technology Hub

SendGrid, a leading digital communication platform that drives engagement and growth, announced the opening of its new Orange County office at 400 Spectrum Center Drive in Irvine, California. The new space nearly triples the footprint of the previous Orange County office and is located in the heart of the region’s rapidly growing technology centre. The new office, which has over 22,000 square feet of office space, is designed to hold more than two times the current employee base of 60 in Orange County to accommodate SendGrid’s plans for future growth. Designed to mirror the look and feel of SendGrid’s global headquarters in Denver, space features an open floor plan design, floor-to-ceiling windows, pairing rooms for engineers to code together and many collaborative workspaces.

Also Read: SendGrid Announces Closing of Initial Public Offering

“Recruiting is an essential component of a business like ours and Irvine’s strong pool of tech talent was a key factor in our decision to relocate. At the same time, our new space incorporates lots of input and feedback from our existing employees in Orange, or ‘Gridders’ as we like to call ourselves. With their input, we’ve designed an amazing workspace that we’ll look forward to coming to every day,” said Pattie Money, Chief People Officer, SendGrid.

The building, which is managed by the Irvine Company, features an on-site fitness center and on-site parking. It is conveniently located adjacent to the Spectrum Center shops, 160 apartment communities and Irvine Station, served by Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner route, multiple Metrolink commuter lines and the OC Transportation Authority bus routes.

Also Read: SendGrid Drives Customer Engagement Using Amazon Web Services

As part of its community involvement efforts in Irvine, SendGrid is a Corporate Visionary Partner of the University of California, Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. Mohammed Attar, senior director of engineering at SendGrid and the Irvine office site leader, is an active member of The Bren School’s Dean’s Leadership Council. The council has been established to raise community awareness of the Bren School students and faculty, to raise funds to support the Dean’s vision and fundraising priorities and to lend strategic advice to the Dean when called upon.

SendGrid’s Orange Country presence has continued to grow at a steady pace since its opening in 2009. The company currently has over 400 employees spread across its Denver, Redwood City, Orange County and London locations.

Panopto to Apple: “Let Us Live Stream Tuesday’s Event”

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PRNewswire

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March 26, 2018

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Panopto to Apple: "Let Us Live Stream Tuesday's Event"

Leading Enterprise Video Platform Panopto, Offers to Support Live Video for Apple’s Upcoming Event

Panopto, the leading video platform provider for businesses and universities, announced an offer to live stream Apple’s upcoming event, set to take place Tuesday, March 27 at Lane Tech High School in Chicago. Panopto’s offer follows Apple’s recent confirmation that the company would not live stream Tuesday’s event, a break from tradition.

“Live blogs are nice, but nothing comes close to video for reproducing the live event experience. Apple’s change of venue from its state-of-the-art Cupertino facilities to a Chicago high school shouldn’t prevent the company from live streaming. With Panopto, Apple could produce a professional, reliable broadcast that reaches a virtually unlimited audience online, all using commodity AV hardware,” said Sean Gorman, Chief Operating Officer, Panopto.

Also Read: Panopto Named One of Pittsburgh’s Best Places to Work

Panopto’s video platform provides businesses and universities with an easier, more cost-effective way to broadcast and record corporate events. Panopto enables users to live stream to any desktop or mobile web browser without the need for specialized software. And Panopto’s cloud infrastructure and content delivery networks (CDNs) ensure that online attendees have a great viewing experience, regardless of where they’re located and whether they number in the tens or tens of thousands.

Leading businesses like Mizuno, academic institutions like the University of Arizona, and hundreds of other organizations around the world rely on Panopto for live streaming internal and public events, including corporate town halls, campus community events, organizational announcements, and more.

Also Read: Panopto’s Video Platform Honored With Multiple Industry Awards

“Tuesday’s event will be Apple’s first education-focused event since 2012. As a leader in enterprise video and a company with deep roots in education, we’d love to assist in streaming to the broadest audience possible,” noted Gorman.

Panopto helps businesses and universities create searchable video libraries of their institutional knowledge. Since 2007, the company has been a pioneer in video capture software, video content management systems, and inside-video search technology.

Verve Study: Mobile Creative Powered by Location Drives 2X Consumer Engagement

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Sudipto Ghosh

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March 26, 2018

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Verve Study: Mobile Creative Powered by Location Drives 2X Consumer Engagement

New Verve Study Offers Insights to Ensure Advertisers Are Unlocking the Power of Various Data Sources, Including Location Insights, When Producing Their Ad Creative

Where people move tells marketers a lot about what they are, and what they prefer to see and buy. The data signals from mobile devices enable marketers to create unique marketing experiences. A critical research undertaken by Verve, a location-based mobile marketing platform finds that consumers are twice as likely to interact with mobile ads informed by location insights compared to generic ads.

The findings also reveal that a mobile ad related to consumers’ hobbies and interests drives more than twice as much engagement than with a generic ad on their mobile. In addition to this, of those who engaged with mobile ads over a third (33%) said they would interact with an ad related to where they plan to be in the future.

At the time of this announcement, Ian James, GM International at Verve, commented, “It is evident that more needs to be done to ensure advertisers are making full use of the data sources available to create exciting ad experiences on mobile. The key is to begin any campaign plan with a strong and robust objective, followed by a smart understanding of creative executions to build the best possible experience.”

Still, advertisers must ensure they are using data effectively to inform their creative campaigns for the mobile screen. Findings suggest this is not currently the case: over half of consumers (56%) think most ads they see on their mobile are boring or dull and just one in ten (11%) find them helpful.

As a result, the average person in the UK ignores over seven mobile ads each day. When looking at the national population, this figure translates to a massive 20 million ads ignored every hour and 5,500 every second.

“Too often people are either ignoring ads because they are simply not relevant or they find it difficult to see creative on their mobile devices.” – Ian James, GM Internation, Verve

When it comes to being fit for purpose, ads must be created in the right format for mobile – almost 8 in 10 Brits (78%) have seen ads that are simply too small to read or contain too much text.

“We worked with Verve to create a rich-media game on behalf of Goodwill®. The game was geo-targeted and highly engaging for our audiences,” said Lisa Sherman, President and CEO, the Ad Council.

Lisa added, “We drove a record-breaking number of people to learn more about Goodwill’s mission of providing job opportunities, training and placement, and how they can support those efforts. We were blown away by the results.”

There are various methods, creative formats, and datasets brands can use to improve engagement, and drive their campaign results and advertising sustainability. For example, people are likely to interact with an ad that —

They can play with on their phone through mechanics such as tilt, tap, zoom, change point of view (20%)
Is like a game or encourages them to navigate through it (19%)
Asks a question and expects a response (21%)

Ian James added, “As an industry, we need to be working together. Firstly, to ensure advertisers are unlocking the power of various data sources, including location insights, when producing their ad creative. Secondly, to make brands aware of how to identify data that is both accurate and precise to make sure ads are as relevant as possible. Finally, to educate brands on the multitude of creative formats that work specifically for mobile.”

Ian added, “The expectation of personalization from today’s consumer is on the rise, bringing to the fore the sheer importance of using smart datasets to power creative experiences.”

Currently, Verve provides industry-recognized mobile expertise and technology that deliver maximum profitability by generating demand and improving ad performance.

Calabrio Study: C-Level Execs Rely on Limited Data to Drive Business Change

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Sudipto Ghosh

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March 26, 2018

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Calabrio Study: C-Level Execs Rely on Limited Data to Drive Business Change

New Findings by a Calabrio Report Show Organizations Ignore Crucial Sources of Customer Feedback, Thus Missing out on Opportunities to Meet Customer Expectations

Companies know they must adapt to change to compete, but often don’t rely on a wide enough lens into data to drive change. A new study announced by Calabrio last week, titled, “Business Transformation and Analytics: Driving Change in a Customer-Centric World,” revealed that 85 percent of executives know that data and analytics are critical to informing sales and marketing changes within the business. Yet, 39 percent admit to relying too heavily on one data point. What’s more troubling, 68 percent of executives admit to avoiding a major change initiative unless there is a problem.

Commissioned through VI.GA Consulting, the study of more than 1,000 C-suite executives in the US and the UK was carried out in February 2018.

Commissioned by Calabrio, a leading provider of customer engagement and analytics software, the study surveyed more than 1,000 C-level business executives in the US and the UK to explore the factors that compel change and identify the data sources they use to inform decisions.

Business leaders know transformation is certain as 60 percent of respondents have made a significant sales or marketing change in the past twelve to eighteen months, citing fluctuations in revenue (49 percent) and direct feedback from customers (39 percent) as the top initiators of those changes.

However, executives are informing decisions based on a limited set of data points that are often the easiest to derive. While revenue figures (36 percent) and social media (20 percent) are the most influential sources, companies lack the full insight to confidently and effectively drive change.

Despite the heightened focus on customer experience, businesses still ignore sources that deliver the voice of the customer. Instead, executives draw opinions from biased sources such as ratings and reviews (49 percent) and social media (40 percent), while democratized sources such as the contact center remain relatively untapped (12 percent).

At the time of this announcement, Tom Goodmanson, President and CEO at Calabrio, said, “Executives recognize the value of analytics but it’s alarming that so many are underutilizing this powerful tool.”

Tom added, “When companies have a narrow view of what’s actually happening in the business, they may be skewing decisions and, even worse, making changes that don’t deliver what customers want. Often overlooked, the contact center provides reliable, balanced information that can ensure change initiatives reflect the true needs of the customer and the way to get this information is through analytics.

Calabrio is a customer engagement software company that provides analytic insights to catalyze growth through customer service contact centers. The Calabrio ONE® software suite empowers everyone in an organization, from contact center agents to the CEO, with easy-to-use tools that provide a better understanding of the customer.

CleverTouch Unveils ‘Momentum’ for Email; Becomes a Marketo Accelerate Partner

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Sudipto Ghosh

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March 26, 2018

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CleverTouch Unveils 'Momentum' for Email; Becomes Marketo Accelerate Partner

Created by CleverTouch DevLab, Momentum Revolutionizes the Email Creation Process for Regional and Central Marketers Using Marketo®

CleverTouch, a leading Marketing Automation consultancy and service provider, announced their latest product offering, Momentum. Momentum by CleverTouch is a marketing technology platform that revolutionizes the email creation process in Marketo Engagement Platform®. The company also announced that they are now a Marketo Accelerate Partner. Using Momentum by CleverTouch, marketers can build their own emails with minimal training and zero HTML knowledge, freeing Marketo specialists to develop new campaigns and strategic initiatives and not build emails on behalf of regional marketers.

Contextual Content and AI: The New Wingmen for Email Marketing Campaigns

Momentum manages a streamlined development request process, where all email build requests are received through a single system and format.

At the time of this announcement, Adam Sharp, Co-founder at CleverTouch, said, “An increasing number of large enterprises are using Marketo as an integral part of their digital and email strategy. Momentum is designed to make the email build process as easy, efficient, and effective as possible. By reducing email build time, Momentum’s technology allows marketers to focus on their core marketing strategy instead.”

Momentum’s mission is to make email creation easy for the entire marketing department but still provide quality and control for the central marketing teams who launch campaigns. Its groundbreaking technology enables rapid Marketo adoption by reducing time spent on the cross-team liaison, email creation, and approval process by up to 8X.

“We are delighted to welcome CleverTouch Momentum to the Marketo Accelerate partner program,” said Shai Alfandary, VP global head of ISVs & LaunchPoint® ecosystem, Marketo. Shai added, “CleverTouch has been a long-time consultancy partner and we’re thrilled that they have launched Momentum to help drive the adoption and usage of Marketo within our largest customers.”

Momentum’s powerful email editor allows users to easily create fully responsive emails that are aligned with the brand’s messaging and color palette. Each template is context-aware, and the email editor is customizable to each organization and brand.

To prevent mistakes, assets are approved systematically by central Marketo specialists. Approved emails are automatically published into Marketo, improving efficiencies. The amends process is also simplified significantly, as users can highlight amends directly on the email itself with a fully integrated commentary system for cross-team collaboration. To accelerate the sign-off process between field marketers and central Marketing Automation specialists, instant notifications are sent when new messages are posted.

In its current form, Momentum’s purpose is to help rid marketers of an extensive email creation process and ensure that marketing teams see a significant increase in their Marketo adoption and usage.

Interview with Haresh Gangwani, CEO and Co-Founder, Bolstra

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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March 26, 2018

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[vc_wp_text]“When up to 90% of a customer’s value comes after the initial sale, retention isn’t something you want to just pay lip service to.”[/vc_wp_text]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/gangwani” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/haresh-gangwani-844240/”]

Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to start a B2B SaaS Customer Success company?

When I was the Chief Revenue Officer at a SaaS company, we were excelling at acquiring new business, but we weren’t garnering the renewals we wanted. You might say, we had a leaky bucket. We could point our fingers at a slow (poor) implementation process, but I knew this wasn’t a software problem. It really was about not being able to provide a continuous value to our customers. When I looked for a solution to help us, I really didn’t see anyone out there tackling the work management “blocking and tackling” approach to helping delivery (implementation) teams do their jobs better. So, I decided (along with my partners) to take on this challenge from the ground up.

How do you see companies leveraging Customer Success technologies for better overall financial returns (What impact does a good CS practice have on ARR?)?

Any B2B business in the subscription economy (not just SaaS companies) knows that their business is going to make it or break it based on recurring revenues. When up to 90% of a customer’s value comes after the initial sale, retention isn’t something you want to just pay lip service to. Everyone in this economy is clamoring for a way to operationalize their customer success approach. I talk to businesses daily who are looking to incorporate technology to enable and support their customer engagement efforts. They want a single view of their customers, a way to manage their work stream in support of their revenue goals, and a way to collaborate across their enterprise so that it’s not just a customer success team that’s responsible for retention and growth.

What are your predictions for B2B CX technology? How should CMOs plan to utilize/implement these technologies in 2018?

CMOs who have traditionally been focused on the top of the funnel are now working in tandem with customer success teams to garner loyalty. Where Sales and Marketing were once tied at the hip, it’s now Marketing and Customer Success that are focused on existing customers and cultivating their advocacy. Since your best prospect is your last customer, CMOs are as invested in technologies that help them align their efforts with the rest of the enterprise. As the marketing journey transcends the customer lifecycles, Marketing becomes a partner in expansion efforts by helping form customer advocates. They, like the rest of the organization, will only benefit from a technology which helps them collaborate with one another through a single view of their customers.

What marketing and sales technologies and automation tools do you use to achieve better ROI?

We use SFDC to track the sales pipeline and Pardot to manage our marketing campaigns. And we use our own Bolstra platform to link the two. It’s the heart of our Customer Engagement and is used to connect our customer success approach with our expansion and renewal efforts.

What startups in the martech/sales intelligence industries are you watching right now?

I’m interested in martech companies that are finding creative and productive ways to use social media data points to inform us about our existing (and prospective) customers. While it’s not a start-up, I am watching Sprinklr as a leader in this vital space of helping inform and shape marketing plans based upon the real-time data that comes from social media.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader? How do you leverage AI capabilities at Bolstra?

AI-centricity is really powerful in the B2C world because of the volume of data available. While some of the Customer Success technologies out there are incorporating AI, I think the application of AI technology in a B2B world is still relatively young. Enterprise Customer Success is a high-touch, Human-to-Human, “authenticity in action” discipline. AI isn’t really the key to our industry, in my opinion.

How do you inspire your people to work with leading technologies at Bolstra?

I start by hiring the best of the best people. If you surround yourself with innovative people who bring great ideas to the table, you never lack for inspiration. We also align ourselves around a grand vision – of creating a culture of advocacy both within our organization and for our customers.

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

We drink our own champagne! We can’t live without Bolstra! It aligns all of our work around a single view of our customers and is a prerequisite for knowing them and delivering to them what they need.

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

Having the best and brightest people on my team is my best hack. Spend the time up front to build your team and they increase your productivity tenfold.

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I’m re-reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

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

I know I’m repeating myself, but the best advice I’ve ever received is to surround myself with A players. Even if it takes time to find them, don’t waste your time on B players.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Haresh” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46d712-3b68e372-114c”]

Haresh is an experienced B2B and SaaS industry executive having served in key roles with an emphasis on product strategy, sales and marketing.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Bolstra” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46d712-3b68e372-114c”]

Bolstra

Bolstra. Delivering better. Together. Bolstra is a Customer Success Management solution company that organizes and optimizes workflow and work management through an agile framework enabling companies to prescriptively deliver a superior experience to their customers.

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[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

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.

TechBytes with Trae Clevenger, EVP Analytics and Chief Strategy Officer, Ansira

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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March 26, 2018

0

Trae Clevenger
EVP Analytics and Chief Strategy Officer, Ansira

What is one way to achieve business success in 2018? Most CMOs feel companies that are leveraging intelligence at every interaction to acquire, grow and retain best customers would be at the to. Data intelligence ensures channel partner empowerment, delivering long-term profitability to B2B clients. Ansira offers cutting-edge marketing solutions, making every customer interaction count. To better understand the core tenets of Ansira’s Business Strategy services and their study of the inflection points along the customer engagement journeys, we spoke to their EVP Analytics and Chief Strategy Officer, Trae Clevenger.

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Tell us about your role at Ansira and the team you handle.

I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Ansira where I lead and assist the Analytics and Strategy teams. Our strategy team works to develop our services to effectively solve clients’ business challenges, providing data-driven solutions that enable them to get closer to their customers. Our analytics team works to dive deep into customer data and decipher what is and isn’t working for our clients, enabling us to provide insight and solve business challenges in the most productive way possible.

What are the core tenets of Ansira’s Business Strategy services that help business leaders in developing future-ready marketing programs?

Everything we do at Ansira begins with the customer journey. We work, using data, to truly understand the customer and how a brand can support each customer in their journey over time. We focus on helping our clients acquire an understanding of their customers and exactly how customer-centric they are as a brand. We analyze the client’s goals and address what challenges must be solved to reach them so that our clients can achieve maximum business performance.

How do you bring together different sets of data into building marketing technology services?

Again, for Ansira, it’s all about using data to understand the brand’s customer and their journey. We gather 2^nd and 3^rd party data in the marketplace and connect it to the client’s own 1^st party data. By doing this, we can truly enrich the data and ensure that we are delivering the best insight possible.

We then use analytics to create profiles and segmentation to understand how, when, and where customers need to be served, and we apply the perfect solutions to meet these needs. We use the right data to inform customer strategy, technology, content and experiences — Everything is data driven.

How have customer intelligence metrics evolved over the past two years with new- age engagement and commerce touchpoints?

When digital first came about, it came with the promise that more c onsumer metrics could be measured. These digitally enabled metrics focused on behavioral measurements, such as clicks and views. Now, there is a demand for connecting these metrics to sales in order to prove that this communication with consumers is bringing in dollars. Today’s metrics are focused on displaying the overall business impact and less about delivering simple engagement metrics.

Tell us about the inflection points along the customer engagement journeys that marketers need to act for better business returns?

Inflection points change depending on the segment and the brand. For example, the inflection points for a customer looking to buy a car will be vastly different from a customer who is simply going to the grocery store. Each customer journey is very unique, so we must use data and intel to better understand these inflections points and better understand what the customer needs at each point along their journey.

How deep is Ansira into AI/ML technologies? How do you see customer engagement journeys disrupted with the incoming of AI-driven marketing platforms?

Ansira is very involved in AI/ML technologies. We have several data science experts who speak at conferences on this technology, and we use these advanced technologies to help support the customer journey. We have our own algorithm, which we built and operate for many clients. Commonly referred to as “Annie,” this algorithm tracks how customers are behaving, when they are buying, and what they’re buying to help uncover who they are. This allows us to create a detailed customer journey, and based on this insight, Annie helps us identify the next best action for each individual. This technology gives us the opportunity to better understand the customer journey and in turn help brands achieve their overall goals using data.

Thanks for chatting with us, Trae.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com