On Video Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at ViralGains and how you got here

I am the CEO and Chairman of ViralGains. Dan Levin, President and Co-Founder of ViralGains and I shared a common vision of building a world where brands and consumers can build authentic connections through the power of video storytelling.

MTS: Given how quickly video marketing strategies have been accepted, how do you see this market evolving over the next few years?

There will be a sea change in thinking focused on the power of video to deliver true engagement. Today’s metrics of frequency and reach will fade, and be replaced by far more sophisticated metrics around genuine engagement and movement toward purchase.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Artificial intelligence for predicting engagement will replace crude ad networks and price-based buying of ad inventory. Old models and companies will fail, replaced by better accountability and better results.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate a video marketing and distribution platform into their stack?

The biggest challenge is being clear about what you are trying to accomplish. Muddled thinking leads to muddled technology implementation and subpar results. If you have clear goals for your marketing programs, which move the needle strategically, then the next two biggest challenges are data quality and creative quality.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

Anyone who is focused on engagement rather than reach is focused on the right things. One of my favorites is Moat, which was just bought by Oracle. They really understand the need for different metrics for evaluating video.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

We currently use a combination of Marketo, Salesforce, Engagio, Yesware, Sprout Social, WordPress, Wix, Winmo and Google Analytics.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)

We just completed story.tech—our first in-person, custom event in Boston. At the outset, we hoped to attract 50 attendees from major Boston brands and agencies, with the combined goal of generating brand awareness in our community, as well as driving meaningful conversations for our sales team.

Through a combination of strategically segmented email campaigns, social promotion and precise, geofenced audience targeting that enabled us to invite only the highest-quality individuals, we were able to register more than 150 people — the majority of whom were in a position to directly influence digital ad budgets. Not only that, but as a result of the conversations we had throughout the evening, we were able to close a significant amount of both new and returning business. It was an unquestionable success, and we hope to repeat the digital campaign to support future events across the country.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?

I’ve been involved in AI my entire career … even taught the subject at Harvard for eight years.  The key to thriving in an AI-centric world is to focus on racing forward alongside machines; to focus on areas where the combination of human creativity and machine pattern recognition are greater than the sum of the parts. I like to think of this as human+machine learning, which is far more powerful than machine learning alone.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Passionately

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

Waze, which harnesses the power of the crowd to get me around traffic. Airbnb, which lets me experience new places like a native. Uber, which takes me everywhere on the road. Amazon, which is pretty much the only place I buy things. Insight Squared, which helps manage our growth with a data-centered strategic view of the business. Keynote, which provides tools for real storytelling. And of course, ViralGains, which is ushering in a world of deeply felt and authentic connections between advertisers and consumers.

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

Practicing love and respect in the workplace by not accepting substandard work, pushing it back until it’s done at 110 percent with pride and excellence.

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

I read and consume online video voraciously. A recent thought-provoking favorite – Scott Galloway on How Amazon is Dismantling Retail

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

Do what you love and the rest will follow.

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

I genuinely care about people– their lives, their stories, and what motivates them to achieve their personal visions of themselves.

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

Jeff Bezos.

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your journey as a marketing leader

I founded Marketsmith, Inc. in 1999 and the agency is now a leader in data-driven direct marketing strategy.  Marketsmith was ranked by Inc. Magazine as the #1 Woman-Led Company in the New York metropolitan area and #5 nationwide. In August 2015, Marketsmith was ranked #97 in the Inc. 5000.

Recognizing that my agency and its clients needed a faster, more efficient way to churn and analyze vast amounts of data, I founded i.Predictus, a predictive analytics-based platform in 2011, which currently is the definitive leader in marketing and media automation. On average, our users see 30 percent increase in ROI. In 2015, I purchased Brushfire, an industry-leading creative agency. Today, all three companies allow for unfettered collaboration and innovation.

For three straight years, I have driven over $1.5 billion in retail sales annually and am responsible for the management of $200 million of media spend annually (about 10% of all DRTV inventory), and am one of only a few women who has successfully raised capital in the tech arena. I was also a finalist for the 2014 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

MTS: Tell us about your journey as an investor:

For the most part, I have invested in technologies that would take my business to a new level.

MTS: What is the inspiration behind starting i.Predictus?

When I first invested in i.Predictus, it was because I was looking for a way to have the people on my team use their time to make decisions from information rather than having them use it to create information.  You see, we were spending an extraordinary amount of time trying to find answers in large meta-data sets. It was an untenable situation because we were going through data line by line but still couldn’t guarantee our clients a better outcome on next week’s spend. I knew I had to find a better way.

That said, I invested in the development of a product that would leverage my own business model and give me the ability to use my human capital more efficiently. What I realized later was that I was looking to automate the marketing function before marketing automation technology existed.

MTS: How much time did it take for i.Predictus to realize Jules as a tangible platform for marketers?

All told, it took three years from concept through development and trial for us to realize the final product. The issue we struggled the most with was attribution.

MTS: Help us understand the difference between Audience Data, Device Data, and Identity Management. How is analytics different for each of these?

In terms of audience data, the consumer is one of many, but there are similarities between them. There are similar personas in each group with like preferences and traits, so they are grouped by the similarities. Device data looks at individual devices and focuses primarily on micro data such as key stroking, geo-location, and other factors such as the number of apps that they may have and what those apps are, how they’re used, etc. Finally, identity management collects information about individual consumers. We focus on all three, but we look at them differently depending on the analysis we are trying to get to. As a direct marketing agency, we hyper focus on individuals, and we score against many audiences. We also use outside data sources to understand a particular person or cohort and what they are actually reacting to.

MTS: There is a lot of ambiguity around data privacy from a consumer POV, as well as from a marketer’s POV. Could you help with a benchmark definition?

I don’t believe there is a benchmark definition because currently there is no absolute on data privacy. You could say that privacy is in the eye of the beholder. There is a myriad of privacy statements that are constantly undergoing revision, and there is no one aggregated source. You’ll always be at the mercy of the last statement you read.

MTS: Do you think the B2B market is ready for customized audience data? If yes, why so?

The B2B market is clearly ready for customized audience data, and it is available for analysis and actionable insights in this space – but the challenge is in communicating with CMOs. The CMO position has a fluidity now, more than ever before – so the longer-term commitment needed for true data analysis has become much more elusive.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

According to Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey the technology spend of the CMO is on track to eclipse that of the CIO this year with the average CMO’s tech budget representing 27% of their overall budget.  This is no surprise with digital advertising budgets rising significantly and the Martech and Adtech explosion.

On the marketing side, this highly competitive, fast-paced, data-driven digital world forces the CMO to remain on top of a myriad of technologies.  Technologies like predictive analytics, big data, behavioral targeting and the Internet of things are just a few of the technologies a modern CMO requires to survive.  This puts a strain on enterprise IT departments that tend to move at a slower, more deliberate pace and focus on things like security and scalability.

To bridge this chasm between marketing and IT, a new type of leader is emerging in many companies, the chief marketing technologist (CMT).  Like the ancient Roman God Janus, the CMT is simultaneously looking in two directions. Part IT and part marketing, the CMT is the fulcrum, and with a mission and vision to drive marketing’s agenda while embracing IT’s processes and controls.

I believe another trend will be the continuous reduction of costs in terms of data warehousing. We will soon be able to access more data faster and cheaper than ever before.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?

I’d like to direct you to our case study for Ninja Coffee Bar.  We directly went after people that were spending significant amounts of money at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. We were able to create a $100 million business model within 90 days.

MTS: How do you see data visualization transforming B2B commerce in 2017?

Data visualization has replaced ADTECH and SaaS as the most important marketing economy. I predict that ADTECH business models will fall by the wayside as data visualization gives B2B marketers the ability to create the way they want to see and report with complete control and understanding of their data. Visualization is here to stay and will get more competitive and innovative with time.

MTS: Do you think mobile-first brands have to find better ways to tackle data privacy issues related to the consumer?

Absolutely!

MTS: What are the possible action plans for such marketers?

Interestingly, we find that younger consumers don’t have the same expectations of privacy as do the boomers. I think these marketers should be researching Gen X, Gen Y and Millennial data sets with go-to-market tactics to explore the issue.

MTS: What was your opinion on our recent piece: Modern Marketers Awry About Turning Into Data Scientists?

Clearly, today’s CMOs find the amount of available data to be overwhelming. This is why we’ve invested so heavily in a visualization platform that allows marketers to quickly and easily understand the value of their data. We believe it eliminates the pain of “analysis paralysis” and gets you to your insights faster than ever before.

MTS: Will ID management ever become part of marketing automation like LinkedIn is trying to do? Or, will it continue to be a stand-alone category for CMOs to choose and invest in? 

ID management is 110% specific to strategic business models. CMOs have to look at it individually in terms of where their company is headed.

MTS: Do you think regulatory policies prove a restrictive barrier for marketers in providing hyper-personalized experiences to customers owing to adherence of data privacy?

I feel it is necessary, but not restrictive. I don’t believe they are overreaching. In fact, this is where a creative marketing agency like ours has the ability to shine. We are able to source and comprehend the data that is legally available, to create and execute personalized programs that impact our clients’ businesses.

TRENDS, CHALLENGES, AND INSIGHTS

MTS: How do you see account based marketing evolving with the proliferation of AI?

There’s a lot of talk right now about AI, but AI is what direct marketers have been using since the beginning of time, but didn’t have a name for. Simply put, AI uses and maintains data that has value and the ability to solve marketing challenges. It’s nothing we haven’t done before; we’ve just automated it.

AI and data go hand in hand because we are now able to aggregate data at the speed of light. We just did a project where we collapsed to three years of data and produced a modeling report in 48 hours. Back in the day, such a project would’ve taken four months.

MTS: What’s the message to B2B enterprises that neither use PA nor ABM in their stack?

Get with the program or prepare to face extinction! What many B2B enterprises fail to realize is that predictive analytics is less expensive than they think it is, and it’s also more accessible and noncommittal, so there’s really no risk.

MTS: How can marketers use PA (Predictive Analytics) for CRM data cleansing and data standardization? What’s the ideal roadmap for CRM users to do it effectively?

All of this language is really direct marketing 2.0. Data cleansing is where most companies seem to get it wrong. They are just not focused on it because of the sheer amount of human error is so high. We are better because we spent so long building up data cleansing and error management algorithms. Marketers need to realize that you don’t need to spend a large amount of money to get your data clean.

The roadmap is to start with comprehensive data discovery and, as we like to say, find the dead bodies and eliminate them. You have to assess the situation and determine where your data is, what it looks like, and where is the highest risk for errors. This is usually a result of where the data is or how it was acquired.

MTS: What is the biggest challenge for startups that are yet to integrate an automated marketing analytics platform like i.Predictus?

What we see most often is that startups seem to be frozen because they are unsure about what to do with their data and they mistakenly believe the solution requires an enormous budget. I think they find it overwhelming because they tend to look at enterprise solutions that are far too large, when, in fact, a scalable solution like i.Predictus — combined with marketing support services — would be a much better fit.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

We rely on our proprietary technology like error management, warehousing tools, and machine learning/AI.

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

AI is clearly a faster way to process data, but it is not a foreign concept to us as marketing leaders. That said, we’ve already prepared…our challenge now lies in educating and preparing others.

THIS IS HOW I WORK

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Fierce.

MTS: What applications or software tools can’t you live without?

Waze

MTS: What is your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Our Collective.  I have two leaders from each area within the agency that I bring together to help me solve challenges.

MTS: What are you currently reading, and how do you consume information?

I am a voracious reader. I’m currently reading a book titled Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.

MTS: What is the best advice you have ever received?

Read.

MTS: What is something you do better than others, the secret of your success?

I’m an excellent coach. I know how to create great teams and nurture each player to bring out the best of what’s inside them so they can rise to their full potential.

MTS: The one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Jeff Bezos

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Social Native and how you got here.

I am the CEO at Social Native. My primary role is to ensure everyone on our team loves their job. We all have good and bad days, but when I think about every job I’ve had in my life, this is by far the best. That blessing carries with it the responsibility to ensure my team, investors, and clients, all love their experience with Social Native.

How? Relentless tenacity and commitment.

Since we launched in early 2015, we recruited industry experts Jeff Ragovin, Co-Founder of Buddy Media, acquired by Salesforce for $745M, and Eytan Elbaz, Co-Creator of AdSense, acquired by Google for $104M. We grew from 5 employees at the start of 2016 to 30 at the end of the year. We partnered with the leaders in digital marketing including Facebook, Instagram, and Salesforce. And we’ve enabled brands like Walgreens, Coca-Cola, and Polaroid to create over 700 images in 24 hours, create 500 short-form videos in 72 hours and increase the performance of paid ads by 4x.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?

Personalization. Technology limitations of the early advertising space required a one-size-fits-all strategy. Imagine a world where no two people receive the same ad experience. A world where a female who loves surfing, gets an ad of a female surfing, drinking a Coca-Cola and a father who loves building, gets an ad of a father in a workshop, drinking a Coca-Cola.

Today this breakthrough in advertising is seemingly impossible. How could Coca-Cola possibly create content for every target segment? How would this content be tagged and communicated to advertising distribution partners like Facebook or Google?

We’re closer than you think. With the proliferation of gig economies, consumers’ ability to create content, the wealth of data on consumer behavior/demographic, and advertisers’ ability to distribute content in real time, we are on the cusp of redefining every step of the advertising funnel.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Mobile’s impact on marketplaces. The online marketplace has transformed nearly every industry, think Uber for transportation and Airbnb for hospitality, there’s a long list of other industries ripe for transformation. The unparalleled access and abilities unlocked by empowering consumers to become service providers will turn antiquated businesses upside down.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?

The biggest challenge CMOs are currently up against is how to maintain relevance within their target audiences. People are ultra-connected. Markets constantly shift. New trends emerge. Competitors enter and shake things up. Customers expect more from the brands they buy from. It’s not about just being the most convenient option or the cheapest option.

With a world of data available to consumers at their fingertips, and all products available with the click of a button, brands will win this game by building relationships with consumers – cutting through the noise to connect with consumers through authentic, personalized and relevant marketing.

MTS: What would be your advice to CMOs when they start planning to invest in Marketing Technologies?

Who are you investing with? Marketing technologies can be like shiny toys, it looks fun and exciting but are they built to last? Think about the manufacturer – are they reliable? Is the senior team focused on margin or value add? Regardless of what technology we’re evaluating – the right partners always drive value.

MTS: What Start-ups are you watching/keen on right now?

I’m watching/keen on a lot of startups right now – actually I’m pretty much obsessed with learning about new and more mature startups – how they evolved, where they are headed, pain points, successes/failures etc… I’m most interested in LA based startups, specifically folks who managed to earn the unicorn title. Personal favorites: Robinhood, DollarShaveClub & Scopely.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

We currently invest heavily in CRM, email marketing, and analytics. Going into 2017 we’re looking into program management, ABM, content management, and additional inbound and advertising technologies. We use Social Native for content creation.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

Polaroid needed to increase the volume of content they ran on paid to minimize the impact of content fatigue and as a result, decreased performance.

The brand partnered with Social Native, a technology company for cost-efficient, high-quality authentic brand content that’s paired with rich performance data.

Instead of running white backdrop product images in Facebook ads, Polaroid leveraged Social Native to create custom, personalized content for every consumer segment. By running personalized and leveraging the Social Native Optimization Engine to adjust for performance in real-time, Polaroid achieved:

– 213% higher click through rate

– 200% higher return on ad spend when using Social Native content

– 180% lift in sales

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

Recognize that almost all processes are going to change and embrace it. The most successful marketing leaders are those who can adapt and evolve with the changing market landscape. Social Native has built machine learning into our matching technology and is focused on ensuring that AI plays a role in future evolutions of our product. We’ll never know what tomorrow holds, so the best preparation is to a create a frame of mind where you’re ready for whatever is thrown your way.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work. 

Relentless

MTS: What apps/software/tools you love using for your daily life? 

GTFO, Envoy, Today History

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

Weekly review. Simply, but profound. Where did I allocate my hours this week? Write it down. What could have been delegated? What could only be completed by me? Learn, Repeat, Learn, Repeat.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read/watch, and how do you consume information?) 

Currently reading — The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.

I consume most information from people in the industry. Our category is running faster than publications can type and distribute – if you want to consume relevant information, surround yourself with relevant people.

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

“Don’t chase success. Recognize that you are already successful.”

Believe, more than anything else, that you will figure it out. When the times get tough – and they always do – remember you were made for this challenge and that how you handle this challenge defines you. With time, endless hard work and that unbreakable commitment, the unimaginable will be accomplished and even bigger dreams will keep you up at night.

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

Commitment. Both myself and my team have an unwavering commitment to being number one. If you’re committed, you’ll find a way.

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

Jeff Ragovin – Co-founder Buddy Media, former Chief Strategy Officer Salesforce, Founder at Ragovin Ventures

MTS: Thank you, David! 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 Looker and how you got here.

After experiencing the wild amazing journey of growing Box from 30 employees to almost 1,000 employees, I was looking for another company with similar potential. When I found Looker, not only did they have a product that customers loved, they had a great leadership team with an authentic and friendly culture that I wanted to be a part of.  I’m now the CMO here, and I oversee all things marketing – Demand Gen, Brand, Corp Comm, Product Marketing, Field and Sales Acceleration as well as our SDRs (Sales Development Reps).

MTS: Give the plethora of sales and marketing analytic tools available today, how does Looker (as a platform) distinguish itself from the rest?

Looker is a data platform that can serve every department so that’s much broader than any sales or marketing specific tool. Imagine if you could combine your advertising data with your product and support data. If you could say which keywords produced the most engaged users and which clicks garnered the customers that churn. Connecting these different data silos together and allowing a business to analyze across all this customer data can seem difficult, but that is what we do that is different from any of the siloed tools available for marketers today.

Instead of walking into a meeting with Sales and arguing over whose data is right, you both have the same data, same definitions and metrics, and can talk about strategies to take the business forward.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

We have been living in data silos for a long long time and that has caused tremendous stress between the sales and marketing teams. Without a clear, shared view of the data and metrics of the business, Sales and Marketing leaders have been set against each other, fighting to prove their worth with different silos of data.

Having a single source of truth for the company gives us a new opportunity to work together with our sales counterparts and actually focus on the business and solving real problems. It seems like such a small change, but when you’re working with incomplete data, decisions on what to do next to become politically charged and emotionally draining. For me, getting back to the real goal of building a business and doing it as a team, is a huge step forward for everyone.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate an analytics platform like Looker into their stack?

The first step is to actually collect accurate data. Very often you set up your Salesforce or other CRM at the early stages of a start-up and you don’t have the conversation about the future. What data do you want to collect today – and what might you be asking in the future? The more time you spend on the data strategy early on, the faster you can scale your understanding of what’s happening in your business. Even if you know you won’t have time today to do the analysis, collect the data for the future. The second step is when you’re ready to pull all that data together and let Looker clean it up and join it together for analysis.

If you’ve already been collecting the data you need for the questions you have, you’ll be in better shape to pull it all together from all the marketing and sales tools now available and get it centralized. Once you’ve done those two things, the rest is fairly easy. With a data platform, you can then figure out what each department needs, create dashboards, and push data into everyone’s existing workflow – Slack or Salesforce – to make it as easy as possible to make better, more informed, decisions.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

G2 Crowd is my current favorite start-up. They have hit upon a key moment of the buying cycle where people want a neutral comparison. And what better way to compare products than to get customer reviews, compile them and find where each of tools does well and where they are weak. Their content has been very effective for us in capturing people who are in the later stages of the buying cycle.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017

Salesforce and Marketo are the biggies. Infer for lead scoring, Clearbit for data augmentation, Bizible for online tracking / attribution, Influitive for brand advocacy, On24 for webinars, Optimizely for website testing, Google Analytics to track the website, Drift for website chat, Uberflip to manage our website content, DocSend to cleanly get it in sales hands, Outreach.io to help with sales engagement, and Bizzabo for all our events. We also love Buffer for our social media and Dynamic Signal for our employee advocacy.

Of course, all the data is pulled into Looker where we have company-wide and department specific KPI dashboards, we track progress against goals throughout the funnel and do all our ad-hoc analysis.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (what was your target audience and how did you measure success)

Our best campaign was with the launch of G2 Crowd’s report comparing BI tools where we did very well against the competition. Our target audience is data analysts so our focus was on that persona.  For the top of the funnel, we pushed the content through PPC channels (Google, Linkedin, Bing, Facebook) and third party sites (Tech Target, DBTA, and other Data Analyst focused content websites).

We had employees posting on all the socials sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and encourage this through VoiceStorm/Dynamic Signal’s app that notifies employees when interesting content is ready for them to post about. We also put it on our homepage and in our Learn Center to capture website traffic on our site. We then worked the middle of the funnel, using it to nurture our database of leads, including an email that our SDRs and Sales Reps could easily use to re-engage a prospect.

The effort was one of the most expansive and integrated efforts lead by our Demand Gen team and it produced great results driving more than 20% of our total meetings for the sales team.

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

I don’t think AI is going to make anything we’re doing now obsolete so there’s not much to do to prepare. We already have small forms of AI in some of the technology that Infer and other lead scoring tools offer. They are looking at the profile of leads that turned into deals in the past and then scoring new news based on the predictive algorithms they built.

When lead scoring became real, the main issue that we as marketers struggled with was getting the rest of the non-marketing leadership to chill out. I had VPs coming to me and telling me that lead scoring was going to change our marketing so fundamentally that we would have to raise our targets.

While lead scoring is an excellent tool in any B2B marketers’ arsenal – it has not had a step function impact that would cause such an enormous shift. AI will likely be the same. Everyone will get excited (overexcited) about the impact, and then it will settle into tools that we integrate into our stack. There could be some technologies that go by the wayside, but it won’t happen overnight.

How I work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Efficient.

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

Looker. Gmail. Google Calendar, Zoom Conferencing. Accompany.

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

Subscribe to The Skimm. It gets you all the world news in a non-biased but entertaining format so you can know what’s happening in the world in 5 mins without actually doing the work of reading all the various news sources.

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

My favorite writers are Tomasz Tungus from RedPoint, Simon Sinek’s books and talks, and my non-work reading which is currently Sarah Beth Durst, who writes YA fantasy. I can usually bond with any teenager who likes fantasy because I’ve read them all from Harry Potter to Rick Riordan and now Sarah Beth Durst.  As for daily news, I usually get my business news from Accompany and my world news from The Skimm.

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

Lean back, listen and ask questions. This is especially helpful when someone is criticizing or offering unwelcome advice.

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

I have four kids (7-year-old step-son, Two 10-year-old daughters, and a 13-year-old son) and a blended family, everyone is constantly going in different directions, different schools, schedules, different activities, homework – it’s a wild wild ride. Even with all the chaos and the seriousness of my job as CMO at Looker, I have made it work.

Every second of the day I am looking for how to be more efficient: groceries online, Amazon subscriptions, a blackboard with the dinner menu for the week, a calendar on the wall, bill pay all online and automated… It has made me exceptionally efficient and a multi-tasking wizard.

I have at least 5 – usually more – projects in my head at all times – thinking about my son’s volleyball game, our next big marketing idea, how to keep the team motivated and happy –  and I can zero in on the one I focus on when I need to. I’m constantly looking for how we could do things faster and more automated – and as the CMO of Looker this means how we can scale – can we do this the same way when we have 10x the users, 10x the businesses, 10x the leads coming in? – that’s the only way to scale and grow a business. It’s a combination of “more more more” all while massively increasing efficiency.

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

Menaka Shroff, former CMO at Betterworks.

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

On Predictive Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at CaliberMind and how you got here.

Raviv: I’m the Co-Founder & CEO of CaliberMind. Our customers such as Citrix, Gusto, Datavail and others use us to integrate, measure and optimize the entire B2B customer journey. Think of us as the system of buyer intelligence that sits between your CRM & systems of engagement (i.e marketing automation, content marketing, video marketing, chat etc’); we map the buyers in each account to graph and orchestrates complex buying journeys. My personal background is in SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) and product design,

Nic: As VP, of Marketing and Sales Technology; I oversee CaliberMind’s marketing, product, and customer success functions. My background is in marketing automation, demand generation, and revenue operations. As with previous roles, I’m extremely hands-on — learning to code SQL and JavaScript has been a godsend. Also, drawing experience from both consulting and client-side work has been an asset. Most of the best marketing and sales technology pros I’ve come across draw empathy from client-side work and divergent thinking from consulting. Also, since there’s 5,000 MarTech tools now, I’ve always found it helpful to at least evaluate 1-2 tools/week for possible partnerships.

MTS: Given how quickly machine learning influenced predictive marketing strategies have been accepted, how do you see this segment evolving over the next few years?

Nic: When most B2B marketers use the word “predictive”, they’re usually referring to identifying ideal customers profiles and trying to predict which companies would/could be their future customers. There are some deeper applications for customer modeling — such as predictive personas. What if you would not only predict companies that are a fit, but also predict why an individual would be motivated to buy, be an advocate, etc. Also, sequence and content predictions will become possible, such as having your marketing automation tool automatically pick what should happen next.

Raviv: We’ve seen predictive B2B marketing fail in the past due to data quality issues. CRMs and marketing automation systems were never built to track buying signals. 80% of customer behavior data is unstructured, it sits in email communication, recorded sales calls, sales notes, and social feeds, you won’t find it in your CRM. Our customers come to us to map data between systems and make sense of it.  Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing can help marketing and sales teams make sense of all that data to dynamically model buyer personas and map the customer journey.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Nic: I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of the ‘Operations’ function at high-growth B2B organizations. MarketingOps inevitably hits an innovation ceiling due to red tape. A common example is key technical team members in large organizations not having appropriate system access. If you have a Salesforce Admin Certified member of the MarketingOps team, they need full administrator privileges in Salesforce, or else you’re disabling some of their capacity. By creating one consolidated RevenueOps team, organizational culture and data silos can be avoided. For this reason, the most innovative organizations are combining various Ops functions for synergy. At CaliberMind, we believe this evolution will continue and fold in Customer Success Operations. We’re calling this organizational structure “CustomerOps”. We’re already seeing some top practitioners and leaders have titles such as “GTM Strategy & Operations”– this synonymous with CustomerOps.

Raviv: AI is going to automate most technical tasks performed by marketing and sales such as: lead qualification, initial chat conversations/ discovery (bots), data analysis, content optimization etc’ but the business logic will always remain human, there will always be a marketers or sales rep in the loop to guide the machine and drive the creative, strategic and human aspects of the business.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate a platform like CaliberMind into their stack?

Raviv: There are two challenges we address: quality of data and talent – we generate buying signals from your unstructured data and work with our data partners to enrich the data you don’t have in your CRM. The talent challenge is most marketing teams don’t have or can’t afford data engineers or data scientists. To address this challenge we designed a Customer Data Platform that is driven by marketers. We also provide professional marketing data science services.

Nic: Again, I think the biggest to challenge to innovation and agility within an organization’s culture. Organizations that only evaluate the technology budget annually are their own worst enemy. Think of your tech portfolio like an investment portfolio. You have your “blue chips”, such as CRM and Marketing Automation, and Customer Support. But you should always aim to diversify and place some bets on emerging technology. Mergers happen, new features come out, and sometimes you learn about a vendor that existed for years that can cure some of your pain. Most good these days will let you do a pilot or ‘proof of concept’ before committing to an annual deal.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

Raviv: We love AI of course, I think AI has many more applications, some more mission/ life critical than marketing, of course. For example, I like how Aldoc brings AI to medical imaging analysis. In the marketing & sales space, Persado is leading the way in emotional intelligence and text analysis.

Nic: As a first-time product manager, I’m a big fan of non-relational database technology and DevOps at the moment. I have my eyes on companies like SlamData that allow you to access NoSQL databases.  In the next few years, we’re going to see a lot more applications for this technology. Also, I see the companies like Segment leading the way to help B2B companies organize and wrangle all the web event data so as to make a tool like ours even more powerful.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Raviv: We have a lean but powerful stack that consists of a CRM (Salesforce), MAP (Autopilot), CMS (Hubspot). We use Terminus for ABM, Clearbit for enrichment and Outreach.io for outbound. Our platform is built on top of Amazon Redshift and MongoDB using microservices. We also obviously drink our champagne, using our own platform for journey analytics and segmentation.

Nic: I’d add too that our marketing, sales, customer success and product team are extremely aligned. For example, we log customer tasks as well and marketing projects in Jira if there’s a technical component. We prioritize CustomerOps stories in the sprint just as we would a new product feature.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?

We are huge proponents of using podcasts to grow our business, it helps us to develop strategic business relationships, creates strong content and brands our customers as thought leaders in their industry. We recorded close to 30 podcasts so far with B2B marketing and sales teams all leaders in their space, 20+ resulted in product discussions of using CaliberMind.

MTS: (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success) How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing and business leaders?

We manage the machines so they won’t manage us 🙂

How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Agility

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

Slack, Asana, Chili Piper, and of course, CaliberMind!

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

Our inbound leads show up fully enriched in Slack for the sales team to respond immediately.

MTS: What are you currently reading?

Play Bigger

MTS: (What do you read, and how do you consume information?) What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Your network is your networth

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

Hustle and persistence

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