On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to join a technology innovation company?
I am the CMO at EverString. Our SaaS platform is purpose built for growth-oriented B2B organizations looking to accelerate sales velocity with AI. Our intuitive user interface lets everyone on the team, marketing managers, SDRs and AEs, level up their game through the creation of ideal customer profiles, identifying the universe of high-potential targets and providing current, actionable insights about each company and decision makers for relevant communication.

My small, and mighty, marketing team and I look after all aspects of marketing, brand and messaging, customer/user insights, product marketing, and the website experience, as well as all the acquisition and nurture programs needed for cost-efficient pipeline generation.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers, how do you see marketing automation and the analytics market evolving in the years to come?
Customers are demanding relevance. Each touch, whether online, an SDR call or a marketing email, needs to be relevant to that individual. And, newsflash, “Dear [first name] with your role as [title] at [company]” is not relevance.

True relevance comes from a synthesis of all the obvious and non-obvious data about a company including firmographics, tech stack, hiring, social, website, news, and more. And, as everyone on a B2B sales and marketing team knows intimately, it’s a mission impossible for any one person to keep up with it all. This is where AI can provide an assist.

B2B sales and marketing teams don’t “need” more data. Rather, we need actionable insights, integrated into our existing workflow. Powerful AI platforms like EverString can acquire and synthesize all of this always-changing company data, but that’s not enough. Given the speed of change, your team needs always-on, continuous access to the freshest, most current actionable insights — so it’s imperative that it be SaaS.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage predictive platforms to scale the challenges in finding the ‘right’ audience and customize their marketing outreach?
To fuel growth, your go-to-market teams must align around a common universe of companies that fit your desired customer profile. So, how do you describe your ‘desired’ customer profile and, then, how do you find those companies who fit that description?

Using basic firmographics to describe a customer profile will fall always short. Rather, it is the many unique, sometimes hidden elements about each company – their technology, their growth trajectory, their specific products and services – which truly separate those companies who are a “high-fit” to your desired profile from those who are not.

Without this nuanced insight into each company’s fit to your desired profile, you will waste valuable time, budget and resources. EverString was purpose built for B2B teams so we are able to ingest and quickly synthesize large quantities of disparate information about every company to both better describe your ideal customer profile and to help you identify all the other companies with the highest fit to your desired audience.

MTS: Is it actually possible for marketers to accurately measure the accuracy of their predictive analytics and attribution models while in the middle of a marketing campaign?
Absolutely, yes!

Growth focused organizations are data driven – they have to be in order to know where to focus and optimize. Plus, growth organizations tend to have strong marketing ops and sales ops alignment (personally, I always advocate for these functions to be combined, but that’s another topic!)

Once you’ve identified the universe of companies who are a strong fit to your ideal profile, your ops teams can easily set up the tracking and reporting, to allow you to see how quickly the companies with the highest fit accounts progress down the funnel compared with companies with less similarity.  Many of our customers see the benefits faster in their outbound efforts (sales and demand gen) as that can be more controllable than inbound lead flow.

MTS: How should CMOs plan their stack integrations to benefit from predictive analytics and AI-assisted sales development?
For maximum benefit in the shortest term, you want the seamless inclusion of AI-driven insights into the team’s existing workflow. The most important functionality is the identification of net new companies with the highest fit to your ideal profile and current insights about the company and its decision makers needed for relevant outreach.

You want the power of AI in everyone’s hands, not locked up within your operations teams. At EverString we’ve focused on masking the complexity of our AI with an intuitive user interface so it’s used by everyone across the sales and marketing teams in their day-to-day workflows. When that happens, organizations quickly see pipeline and sales acceleration.

In B2B sales and marketing, the only constant is change. You need to be agile, so you need a self-service SaaS solution and not a managed service. The team needs to be able to respond to early signals of sales momentum versus having to wait weeks, or worse, months for new models to be built.

MTS: What startups in MarTech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
Terminus is one I’m excited about – their account based display ad delivery approach is disintermediating traditional media buying and allows truly targeted messaging to just the people you want. Plus, companies like PFL and Sendoso who are bringing automation to direct mail and helping marketers round out the customer experience. And I’ll include SalesLoft — I include them here because I see the martech and salestech spaces truly converging

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
With such a small team we are heavily dependent upon our sales and marketing stack, including, CRM, Automation, ABM, Sales Productivity, Analytics, social scheduling, video creation, website.

MTS: Tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
We call it our “air cover” campaign. As an account progresses into an opportunity, we execute a number of relevant touches via email, online, and sometimes direct mail targeting the relevant influencers and decision makers in that account. This ABM approach increases the velocity to closed won across all our segments.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
My advice to all marketing leaders: don’t be afraid of it, embrace it. You don’t need to have the most sophisticated stack, or be spending millions or be implementing bleeding edge programs to see ROI value from an AI-assist.

No matter your organization’s size or stage, if you are B2B and your ASP is at least $2,500 you need to invest in a SaaS solution that will focus and align your entire go-to-market team on the universe of companies which best fit your desired customer profile. It is this focus on your company’s unique set of high-fit accounts which will measurably increase your sales velocity.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Deliberate. I keep a singular focus on what needs to be achieved, aligning the team and resources to pull all the levers necessary to get us there.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Google apps, Evernote, Slack

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
My productivity hack is to wake up and workout first thing. For me, it’s impossible to break away during the day or to ‘decide’ to go to the gym after work.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I read voraciously. Daily, I use Feedly for all the industry, marketing, sales, SaaS, AI, and tech news. To relax, I read fiction, biographies and business/leadership books. Overdrive, the library app, helps me maintain my reading addiction without going broke.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever — your secret sauce?
Always have a Plan B. If a campaign doesn’t perform as planned, you can quickly put your Plan B into action. If things are going well, your Plan B a great “back pocket” idea for when there is extra budget.

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to be part of an online advertising fraud detection company?
I’ve been working in the online space since the late 90s. Previously, I owned a company that sold digital products through affiliates and marketing partners and we were hit with online fraud. It turned out that some of our marketing partners were unscrupulous. They were creating fake transactions using stolen credit card data. We almost went out of business when the real card owners started reporting fraudulent charges. We were paying the affiliates a commission for each transaction so not only did we have to refund fraudulent sales, but we lost the commissions too.

By the time we figured out what was going on, these bogus affiliates disappeared along with the commissions. That’s when we developed a solution to stop it. It was a classic case of “necessity is the mother of invention”. At that point, we realized we had a solution for a problem many others in the space were experiencing. That was around 2009 and after we launched Fraudlogix – originally in the affiliate space, we expanded into programmatic ad fraud. Our solutions always have our clients’ business model in mind because we’ve been there and know all too well how devastating fraud can be from the advertiser all the way up to the network and publisher.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of programmatic advertising, how should brands build a unified adtech stack for measurement, verification and brand safety?
There are so many different solutions for marketers right now, but at the end of the day, I think it’s important that if a company is telling you that you should block certain traffic, they need to tell you why they think that. I understand that verification companies can’t give away proprietary information– but I think advertisers and marketers should be asking more and expecting more information from verification vendors before blindly trusting them to optimize their campaigns. It’s frustrating for everyone in the space to have multiple vendors give multiple results on traffic quality so it makes sense that if I tell you to block something I should tell you why – what did I see to make me flag that certain traffic? Marketers should also be looking at their KPIs, not how much traffic was or wasn’t blocked with a certain solution.

MTS: How should brands determine the baseline for their ad traffic patterns and audience behavior?
There are some simple things that a brand can do when looking at traffic patterns and audience behavior, such as looking to see if all their impressions came from the same IP address or all their installs came from one device operating system – that’s not normal. However, fraudsters have become more sophisticated when it comes to hiding fraudulent patterns, including spoofing IP addresses, geo location, devices, etc. I would say that if ever there are unexplained spikes in traffic that result in no conversions, be wary, and don’t get hung up on vanity metrics (clicks and page views) because they can be gamed very easily.

MTS: How does the growing prominence of programmatic capabilities in AdTech impact the norms in affiliate fraud and transparency?
Programmatic can be very powerful in targeting the right audience at the right time, often in niche environments. With that said, transparency needs to become the norm so that marketers know where their ads are being served and to what type of traffic. If my ads are served to organic traffic, that’s much more valuable to me than paid.

MTS: What steps should AdTech innovation companies take to bridge the ‘Grand Canyon’ between technology adoption and their expected ROI?
I think ad tech companies need to begin by clearly defining how their offerings will positively affect their client’s bottom line, outlining the KPIs that will be affected and to what degree. I can tell a company that we’ll block x percentage of fraud, but that doesn’t mean much. What our clients are really interested in is how our solutions affect their partner retention, average CPMs, or even discrepancy and claw-back rates.

MTS: How should advertisers and publishers leverage mobile data and social media platforms to drive their digital transformation with a greater authority?
From our perspective, mobile data is like any other data: you must hone in on your target audience and look at the KPIs to be sure what you’re looking at is real. For instance, have the geo locations been forged? Fraud tends to perform very well if you’re looking at the wrong data (e.g., click through rates, low CPMS, etc.). Same rules as any other kind of traffic.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Blippar – it’s essentially using facial recognition to create personalized digital billboards. I’m interested to see how advertising will be woven into augmented reality.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use mainly use Hubspot, AdWords, AdRoll.

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
Our clients use our data regularly to optimize their digital campaigns. We did a study with one of our client DSPs (demand-side platforms) who buy media across different exchanges in the programmatic environment on behalf of different brands. Their goal is to optimize traffic quality for their clients and deliver the maximum amount of conversions (sales and leads) at the lowest cost per action. We monitored five separate campaigns from five different advertisers. They found that 98 percent of the conversions occurred on websites that we had designated as low risk for fraud. I think this was a great success and it gave our client a lot of clarity of where they should or should not be buying digitally.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
With AI, the focus shouldn’t be on limiting its progress –  it’s going to happen and there’s no sense trying to stop it. What I think is important are the mechanisms we can develop to make sure there are proper checks and balances.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Open-minded: I’m not going to automatically shut down an idea – if there’s a possibility that it might work, we’ll test it out.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Skype – sometimes it’s with a person in the next room.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Work with smart people – because if you don’t surround yourself with great talent no productivity hack is going to help.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Whatever’s relevant to the challenge we’re currently facing. I’m reading whatever content is available that helps me understand the current challenge or goal – whatever online source that gives the most granular, detailed information is what I’m going to read. I’m not married to any individual publication or source.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
From my dad: If you really want something, latch on to it like a bulldog and don’t let go.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Richard Branson – he’s a marketing wizard. I’d love to sit with him and pick his brain.

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? (What inspired you to be a part of a content management company?)
I’m the VP of Marketing at LookBookHQ and my background is in demand generation. In my heart, I’m a big marketing nerd and I really love working in marketing tech because it allows me to stay really close to the problems we’re solving for our customers first hand. I was working in demand generation roles at marketing technology companies (first at Eloqua and then at Lattice Engines) when I met the founders of LookBookHQ, and I was blown away by the elegant simplicity of the solution.

The LookBookHQ Intelligent Content Platform solved a problem that I had struggled with as a marketer for years. As someone who has bought and been disappointed by a lot of marketing technology, I was really impressed by the depth of functionality that this early stage company had developed. A lot of martech companies are out there selling dreams, but LookBookHQ was a company with so much integrity and they were building products that actually did what they said they were supposed to do. I knew this was a company I wanted to be a part of.

MTS: How does an intelligent content platform improve conversion rates and scale engagement with automated sequencing across digital channels?
Our job as marketers should be to educate buyers, and help them buy products or services they actually need. That’s really what it’s all about. But at some point, buyer education became secondary to getting people to click on things in an effort to hit lead targets.

The problem with that is this: buyers who aren’t educated aren’t really buyers. Someone who clicks but never reads the thing they clicked on isn’t a buyer at all. They’re an unqualified prospect. If we pass them to sales and expect them to convert, we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t. Our standards for what a qualified lead is, needs to be higher.

Intelligent content does two things to improve conversion:

1. It helps engaged buyers find all the relevant information they need to make a purchase decision.
2. It identifies when a buyer is really engaged by tracking not just the click, but what happens after it: how much time someone spends consuming content. In this way, marketers can fast track the best buyers and take action on them when they demonstrate real intent.

MTS: On what factors should marketers rate their content marketing strategies for sales readiness?
We need to move past the metrics we’ve relied on in the past, and require buyer readiness and qualification to mean more. Marketing automation platforms can’t tell the difference between two people that click on or download and consume the same asset. One person may spend 20 minutes deeply reading that eBook, while the other never even opens it. Yet, to the marketing automation platform, both behaviors are identical and are treated the same way. We need to value the quality of the behavior, not the quantity

Lead scoring today tends to be a simple summing up of activities. A few points for this, plus a few points for that, and when you hit the magic number, you are instantly qualified. What is missing from this magic qualification threshold is what happens beyond the click, download, or form fill. By tracking the time spent with content and whether someone consumed multiple pieces of content in a single session, marketers can separate the casual clicks from the serious content consumers.

MTS: How should marketers plan adoption of content personalization and analytics platforms for Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing tools that can personalize offers and assets are a great way to engage target accounts, but this is only part of the equation. Getting someone to click on something and walk through the door is a great first step. However, combining ABM tools with intelligent content delivery is the best way to maintain buyer attention and efficiently move them through the buying process as quickly as possible. Getting your buyer’s attention is incredibly difficult – ABM tools can help you to attract their attention and intelligent content platforms make it easier to hang on to their attention once you’ve got it.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle while consolidating all formats of content into a central repository for sales enablement?
Consolidation does not equal enablement. Just because you put information in one place, it does not mean that sales will be any more empowered to use it. Knowledge management solutions need to be paired with organizational discipline around rep training and enablement to ensure that sales tools and content have functional uses. Marketing can’t just check the box to say they have put all the content in a place where sales can find it.

MTS: What startups within MarTech are you watching/keen on right now?
One tool my team is loving is Sigstr for email signature management. Such a simple concept but one that is a headache for marketers. It gives us such elegant control and another piece of real estate for promotion.

They’re not a startup, but I’m a big fan of Full Circle Insights for response management and attribution. I have been a customer for several years and it’s a tool I have come to really depend on.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
The two I just mentioned, Sigstr and Full Circle Insights, plus Marketo and salesforce.com. LookBookHQ is really the brains of our operation. We also use Engagio for ABM and PFL for some really cool automated direct mail programs. We love the targeting we get with Linkedin Ads and we use Datanyze for building Ideal Customer Profile models.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
We just built a hyper-targeted campaign that was designed for a very specific funnel stage. It gets delivered to people who schedule a meeting with us and the goal is to ensure they are properly educated before they show up and meet with a sales person.

It just launched, so the verdict is still out, but there are few ways we will measure success:

1. SQL to SQO conversion: Does it improve?
2. Age of SQOs: Do we have fewer SQOs that sit around for long periods of time?

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
I’m not sure I need to prepare. AI is like any other innovation; it’s not a panacea for poor or neglected processes, nor it is a solution for everything. Directed at the right problems, it can be very effective, but it’s a layer on top of things you’re already doing, not a “thing” unto itself. Marketers need to find the places where AI can be useful. Content recommendations, for example. In the same way that Netflix or Amazon can make content recommendations, marketers can use similar AI-powered technology to drive content recommendations that will make it easier for their buyers to find the information they need. AI needs to be fit for a specific purpose in order to be useful.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Frenzied

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

• Slack
• Excel
• PPT
• Gmail
• Zoom

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Don’t be the bottleneck. Clearing the path for your team to make progress can sometimes slow you down, but ultimately, it makes everything move a lot faster.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I pretty much exclusively read fiction for my own pleasure and I read every night before bed. I do consume a lot of news on my phone throughout the day, but after I put my kids to bed, my brain needs a break from the frenzied pace of my day. I love tucking into a novel that can transport me somewhere else. I typically go for historical fiction and particularly like turn of the century British literature.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received—your secret sauce?
Don’t be a jerk. You never know when you might need someone’s help.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
45 things at once…with a fairly high level of quality.

MTS: Tag the one person in the MarTech/AI industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Jim Williams

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to start a customer-experience company?
I think it’s true to say that my entire career in SaaS has prepared me for this experience, in that I’ve seen firsthand the struggle to prioritize new features and then to know if they are really working for users. But more than that, I really love building innovative products that move the needle on how businesses operate. I was planning to retire after Marketo, but knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t take the idea to fruition.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with B2B customers, how do you see the audience segmentation and the behavioral analytics market evolving by 2020?
What we are building is going to fundamentally change how software (SaaS) companies take their product to market. At Aptrinsic, we have carefully curated into one platform the ability to track, monitor, engage and experiment with users — in-product. For a long time at Marketo, I believed that for software companies, a new go-to-market model was needed and was starting to manifest itself. One that was less about gated content, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). One that was more about leading with your product and harvesting product-qualified leads (PQLs) that are ultimately more relevant and effective.

To answer your question more directly, tracking behavior analytics will require an increase in real-time capabilities—initially fostered through rule-based segmentation—that will, after enough data points are achieved, automatically convert to AI/predictive. This notion of rule-assisted AI has a chance to become the more prevalent predictive training model. As we all know, to make AI really work well, you need lots of data, and that until that happens, the focus must be on the art of crafting the right rules and experimenting to get traction.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage a customer experience management platform to drive their omnichannel marketing campaigns with greater authority?
For the first time, marketers can really leverage their product as a primary marketing channel. They can now drive more compelling in-product experiences that showcase the value of the product through context-optimized messages. Since Aptrinsic operates inside the customer website, webapp, mobile app, and email—and since we know precisely where the customer is—we can create one campaign that will engage the customer, at the right time, in the right channel, and with the right message. Other benefits include generating better leads for sales by focusing on product-qualified prospects and helping to increase conversions by discovering which behaviors drive increased trial conversions, retention, and cross-sell opportunities.

Why is this better?
For example, at Marketo we saw people sending blanket email campaigns to their users for upsell/cross-sell, even when the customer had barely realized the initial value of the product. This causes massive fatigue in your customer base and actually just becomes noise. Instead, you need to send the right message to your customers at the right time. But when is the right time? By watching how your users are behaving while using your product, you can send the right message when they are ready for it, in-product. This will yield a much higher conversion while reducing “promotion fatigue” and associated noise levels.

MTS: What are the emerging ad formats and bidding technologies that a CMO should look out for?
One obvious change is how do we better target mobile devices with ads, without negatively affecting the entire user experience.This blog post is an excellent summary of what people are wrestling with.

I believe this will usher in several changes in formats and bidding. I also see traditional banner and related ads falling by the wayside in favor of more vertically formatted ads. In addition, we’re seeing two types of mobile ad changes. Those that are in native apps, which will become more drawer-like and full screen depending on the ad and those that target mobile web prospects, which will likely include vertical/in-line ad formats with richer media such as video, animation, and the like.

MTS: How is the definition of unified customer view evolving with newer audience analytics and personalization?
This is at the root of why Aptrinsic was started. Having a 360-degree view of your customer is typically void of two key things. First, these views lack the product behavioral and production data needed. Second, even if some customers have this data, for software (SaaS) products, they probably lack the ability to engage with prospects and customers based on this data, in real time.

So, to personalize a customer experience, you need to be able to speak to customers as individuals, know where each of them are in their individual journeys, and guide them to really know, love and use your product.

Moreover, you need to be able to treat specific cohorts of users differently. What you say to and how you guide an administrator of the product is very different from how you engage with a practitioner or executive. This combination of being able to speak to cohorts and individuals is what’s needed to really drive personalized customer experiences.

MTS: What is the influence of account-based marketing and sales on customer journeys and interactions for product personalization?
Account-based selling is nothing new and has it’s merits, however, I believe for software it’s more important to speak to individuals while they are actually using the product. Here at Aptrinsic, we see individual user-based-marketing as key, because customers buy and experience products as individuals, not accounts.

MTS: What startups in the technology innovation ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
We’re monitoring the marketplace and we see companies like Intercom, Drift and others address part of the solution. Understanding behavior, driving experimentation, and gaining product insights to make more informed decisions is going to be critical—we have that with the Aptrinsic platform. I love the way Expensify, Slack, Gusto and the like are embracing product-led approaches similar to what Aptrinsic powers for its customers. We are simply eliminating all the engineering and customization that make this style of go-to-market precision difficult for many software companies to achieve at scale.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
I think the marketing stack for software companies needs to change. In a product-led GTM strategy you must embrace a single call to action: to drive sign-ups. Therefore, most of the engagement should happen in-product. As a result, while we’ll still rely on email-cannon vendors and ad networks to generate awareness, the rest of our new marketing stack should leverage the Aptrinsic’s Product Experience Platform, which tracks website sign-ups all the way through to upsell/cross-sell opportunities.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
There are two things you need to do. First, you need to make sure that you have enough clean data based on what you want to predict. And second, make sure you have run enough experiments to understand if the AI is better or worse than your own creative understanding.

Also, keep in mind that AI by itself is not a solution; it needs to be used in the context of a vertical solution. Understanding customer behavior is a use case that could be enhanced with AI; engagement experiments do benefit from AI for better engagement prediction for content. Sport team prediction analysis (gambling) is a good use of AI and probably one of the oldest in use today.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Relentless

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Chrome browser, Slack, email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Invision, and Myfitnesspal

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
I block 8:30-10a.m. on my calendar every day. I try not to use that time for anything other than completing tasks, research, etc.unless I absolutely must. I wake up early and exercise 6 days a week and go to bed early to rest, unless there is an emergency. Sounds counter-intuitive, but I would be tired all the time if I didn’t.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I’ve been reading all sorts of books and online material regarding GTM. I just read Red Thread Thinking, which is a good read for any product entrepreneur.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Try not to lose! (I think this is the glass-half-empty version of “be a winner”)

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Tomasz Tunguz, David Skok, Tae HeaNahm

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a bit about your role at Infusionsoft and how you got here? (What inspired you to co-found a martech company?)
I was working for About.com in the early 2000s and had just finished my MBA and JD at Brigham Young University. I had already made the decision in my mind to leave the company and begin a career as a lawyer, but then September 11^th happened. My world, along with everyone else’s, was turned upside down. No one was hiring, and my plans changed. Looking back now, I’m grateful I didn’t pursue a law career because it led me to co-found Infusionsoft with Scott and Eric Martineau in 2002.

We started as a custom software company for small businesses. The original idea for what Infusionsoft is today didn’t come about until 2003 when one of our custom software clients called us in a panic. He accidentally sent an email offer to his entire contact list, upsetting those who earlier received and acted on a less appealing offer. This was the lightbulb moment where I realized not only him but all small businesses, need the ability to automate and segment contacts based on their specific needs and wants. Fast forward nearly 15 years, and we now have the most powerful and versatile sales and marketing automation platform for small businesses.

MTS: What makes Infusionsoft uniquely qualified to serve small businesses?
Our software was built from the ground up to solve the biggest sales and marketing challenges in small business. Infusionsoft’s purpose is to help small businesses succeed. Not mid-market businesses, not enterprise businesses. There are no other solutions on the market specifically developed with small businesses in mind that offer the breadth of capabilities that Infusionsoft does.

In a nutshell, we are totally focused on small business, offer a complete sales and marketing platform, and our automation capabilities are second to none.

MTS: What payment platforms are you integrated with?
We have our own great payment processing solution called Infusionsoft Payments that natively integrates with our sales and marketing automation capabilities. The power of Infusionsoft Payments and automation is magic for small businesses.

We also integrate with merchant accounts like PowerPay, FirstData, Moneris, WorldPay, Easy Pay Direct. We also have Payment Gateway options like Easy Pay Direct, Beanstream, Internet Secure, DPS, Network Merchants, PayPal Payflow Pro, Authorize.net, SagePay, USA ePay, eWAY, and CartConnect.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
How we connect today has, and will continue to have, far reaching effects in our opportunity to reach and enhance experiences with customers in the moment. Being accessible on any device, anywhere and anytime is changing what consumers expect from companies they do business with. Small businesses will need to meet their growing expectations to stay relevant and competitive.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use a variety of tools throughout our marketing organization – everything from our own software to enterprise solutions that are designed specifically for a company of our size and scope. Slack is our new big thing.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
I’m focused on making sure we have the right team in place to help us prepare for an AI-centric world. With the right talent in place, I work with them to ensure we have the best systems and processes in place in order to leverage the vast amounts of data we collect. Without the right people, systems, and processes, the data is useless. Making sense of it all to find patterns is what empowers AI solutions to help our users and their customers. It’s my team’s and my responsibility to make sure we put all the information to use to help small businesses succeed.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work
Tenaciously.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Health and fitness are very important to me, which is why I use MyFitnessPal’s calorie counter to keep track of everything I eat. It’s a great way to not lose sight of the calories I’m consuming and the calories I’m burning.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Speed reading.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I’m currently reading Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. My recent favorite is The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick M. Lencioni. As a trained speed reader, I can easily get through two books a month. I make it a goal to read six a quarter.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I’ve ever received was from my father when he told me to choose faith over fear.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I focus on the positive.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Jeff Bezos

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at ArcTouch and how you got here?
Well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I practiced improv in college. Because even eight years after we started ArcTouch, rarely a day goes by when there’s not some kind of surprise that requires some creative and original thinking. That’s part of life working in mobile and the IoT. Officially, I’m the founder and chief experience officer at ArcTouch. My business partner (Eric N. Shapiro) and I first conceived of ArcTouch after the iPhone and original App Store launched. We’ve since grown a team that has designed and developed more than 400 commercial apps for mobile and connected devices, and more recently we’ve been creating smart things like chatbots and voice applications. We’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of world-class brands and disruptive startups to create some pretty amazing connected experiences.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
Well, it’s certainly going to get smarter. We have tools that are collecting an incredible amount of data, but there’s still a long way to go for our industry to actually leverage that data, to make it meaningful for consumers and useful for marketing practitioners. And we’ll probably be saying that “we’re only at the beginning” for a few more years. Part of the challenge is to get out of an individual tool mindset and begin to create more cohesive experiences across mediums. In other words, we need to stop thinking in terms of the web, apps, social, bots, assistants and any other emerging platforms. We need to create an experience layer above those platforms — because after all, our goal is to serve and reach people, not just build a bunch things. That means there’ll need to be a lot of emphasis on creating links and data flow between platforms.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important marketing technology trend or development that’s going to impact the industry?
The evolution of AI. I don’t know if it’s possible for an acronym to be so vastly overblown and yet so crucial to where we’re headed. Based on the literal definition of “artificial intelligence” our industry has undoubtedly overused and overloaded the term. But whatever you want to call it, AI and our ability to transform data into smart, personalized experiences — well above and beyond the web sites, apps and bots we make today — is going to dramatically change how we work and how we live.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
Finding good people. The landscape of martech services and vendors has very quickly become enormous. CMOs need to surround themselves with experts in the categories to understand the different categories of technologies, and how best to take advantage of those capabilities. Whether through agency experts (like our team at ArcTouch for mobile) or through in-house teams, you’ll need good people around you with the collective insight that’ll help you define your bigger marketing strategy.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a mobile marketing leader?
First and foremost, it’s crucial to think about all the places you might be capturing customer data and make sure your data stores are in order. AI is only going to be as good as the data that powers it. In parallel, you should be thinking about the kinds of business and user problems that you can solve with AI. Can you improve your sales response time with a bot on your website? Can your product experience benefit by proactively making decisions based on your user data rather than relying on direct user input? Can AI help improve your ad targeting based on behavior? One way to stimulate ideation among your teams is via a hackathon. We run hackathons for some of our clients to help their internal teams come up with new ways to take advantage emerging technologies and AI. We believe that product innovation can help capture hearts and minds of consumers more effectively that marketing campaigns. A quality product that’s both useful and delightful product sells itself.

MTS: What role do you expect mobile and connected devices to play as part of bigger integrated marketing strategies?
We’re now spending more time on our phones than on our computers, and it’s safe to say that our phones are at arm’s length when not being used. The intimate relationship created by the ubiquity and mobility of smartphones have made them incredibly valuable for brands working to engage more deeply with customers. Because of this, phones will continue to grow in importance, with wearables, home assistants like Alexa and Google Home, and other connected devices to follow as among the most valuable, personal ways for brands to connect with consumers.

MTS: What do marketers need to consider when it comes to mobile apps and connected devices?
We’re in the midst of a big shift when it comes to applications. Apps that used to live in silos on mobile phones are fast becoming the center of experiences that transcend platforms. Mobile voice assistants like Siri and the Google Assistant are pulling information from apps (if the apps support them, which they should) to give people glanceable information at the moment they need it. Messaging platforms like Facebook’s Messenger, Kik and Slack have AI driven bots that serve as brand concierges, and offer up a slice of information then usher people to deeper, more engaging experiences through deep linking to apps and the web. As Forrester recently put it, marketers and product strategists need to consider an “App+” strategy to engage more deeply with their customers — you need to get out of that tool mindset and consider experiences that span across mediums.

MTS: Where are the biggest missed opportunities for mobile marketers today?
We’re incredibly bullish on the potential of augmented reality, especially with Apple’s recent unveiling of ARKit. The hardware technology in phones today, with the right app, is perfectly capable of delivering engaging augmented experiences that bridge the digital and physical worlds we live in. But adoption has been slow, in part because there’s market confusion about virtual reality. Virtual reality can be fantastically immersive, but it needs additional hardware. There are plenty of real-world problems we can solve today with augmented reality — from trying to visualize what a sofa would look like in your living room to adding new dimensions to 2D textbooks.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Grounded. I try not to get too up or too down with business wins and losses.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Spotify and Sonos for music (we run it in our office all day). Flowdock for our enterprise chat client.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I always try to identify one hard thing I want to get done each day, and I do that first, in the morning, when I’m fresh and my focus is optimal.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I just finished Disrupted, a great read for anyone thinking about company culture and transparency. I’m more of an online magazine/enewsletter person than a book person. I’m a big fan of Dave Pell’s NextDraft newsletter.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
It’s better to be decisive and wrong than it is to take too much time evaluating options. Things move quickly in our industry; you need to make hard decisions when sometimes you’d like more information.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Diplomacy. Running a mobile and digital agency means I have lots of audiences I need to consider: Clients, employees, business partners, and users of our apps. You have to be able to have empathy for each person’s unique point of view and know how to negotiate a path forward despite varying interests.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read
Sir Martin Sorrell, a true innovator and visionary in marketing.

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