On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at Onvia and how you got here?
I joined Onvia as Senior Vice President of Marketing in February 2016. I was attracted by the company’s unique position to resolve the friction in the vital yet complex business-to-government marketplace and, in turn, create mutual value for business, government, taxpayers, and society, at large. Onvia does this by equipping businesses of all sizes with sales intelligence and leads data to help them grow their sales in the public sector.

I’m in charge of accelerating brand awareness and demand pipeline for both new business and subscription renewals. I lead the team responsible for digital, social, and air cover communications, as well as vertical campaigns, content, market research, and customer engagement programs.

Prior to leading marketing at Onvia, I held marketing, product management and channel alliance roles in fast-growing technology companies in the areas of business intelligence, workflow automation, data infrastructure, systems integration, and collaboration platforms. My degrees are in industrial engineering (Politécnica, University of São Paolo) and marketing (Wharton MBA, UPenn).

MTS: What the main challenges in digital marketing, specific to the public sector?
I will answer from the points of view of both the vendors, selling goods and services to public sector, as well as the buyers in procurement teams of government agencies. These are the two sides of this vital business-to-government (B2G) ecosystem that Onvia serves.

On the vendor side, businesses of all sizes look for simplified ways to navigate the vast amount of data generated by the hundreds of thousands of agencies and data sources. Sales, marketing, and business development leaders are challenged to proactively reach target buyers, track projects awarded to competitors and distribute leads through their partner channels. Our flagship product, Onvia 8, helps them address these challenges and grow their pipelines by giving access to both current project leads in the form of published bids and RFPs, as well as the future leads identified in term contracts and spending plans. Onvia also provides profiles of agencies, including buyer and decision-maker contact information, to help companies create conquest and prospecting lists, helping marketers drive the equivalent of account based marketing (ABM) – which in the case of B2G could even be called ‘agency based marketing’.

On the buyer side, government procurement professionals are challenged to attract a greater number of well-suited bidders to their solicitations. They also want to increase procurement efficiency by improving their planning for the future, engaging the business community in pre-bid research, and finally just simply writing better bids and RFPs. They find answers to those challenges in our product for government, Onvia Exchange.

MTS: Could you give a brief overview of the Onvia 8 platform?
Onvia 8 is a sales intelligence platform that enables companies of all sizes to grow their business by selling more to the public sector. With Onvia 8, sales and marketing teams can discover more leads, pursue deals faster and plan strategically to get ahead of the bid.

For this major launch of Onvia 8, our team delivered innovations on these key fronts:

• New interface and mobile interactivity: Creates a more engaging, elegant and productive user experience – anywhere, on any device.
• Streamlined lead management features: Allows sales and marketing teams to work faster and more efficiently as they identify, qualify, track and share leads.
• Introduction of viewer licenses: Helps expand the reach of lead distribution across organizations and channel partners.
• Accessible future leads view: Scans expiring contracts and future spend in order to fill pipelines, influence bids and plan ahead.

Onvia 8 helps businesses wade through a fragmented, competitive and complex B2G contracting marketplace by equipping them with accessible data government bids and RFPs, agency and buyer profiles, award records, contact lists and competitive information. Sales and marketing teams can then track and share opportunities with their sales force, channel partners and distributors.

MTS: How does Onvia look to leverage marketing technology for its B2G clients?
Onvia 8 is in itself a sales intelligence and marketing technology. Our clients and users are professionals and leaders in sales, marketing and business development. They put Onvia 8 and our On Demand Reports – Contact Lists and Winning Proposals – to work in their companies in order to fulfill key marketing strategies and tactics:

• Discover more and more relevant leads
• Identify target agencies, their profiles and buyers contact information
• Create prospecting and conquest lists, for current and future opportunities
• Distribute and track leads to their sales field and channel partners
• Track competition, their bids and awards
• Make strategic decisions about geographic market expansion

MTS: How does Winning Proposals ease the burden of FOIA requests?
Let’s set the context for what FOIA requests are. The acronym stands for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Its relevance to B2G is that it allows companies to request that government agencies respond with details about contract awards, the winners and the decision criteria. That can be powerful information to refine pricing strategy and inform future bids. The problem is that companies will not always have time, resources or experience to trigger and follow up on such requests. They also hesitate to repeatedly contact agencies, assuming this could negatively impact their working relationship.

Onvia’s Winning Proposals solve these problems by removing the mystery around winning or losing public sector bids. Each time a new or existing Onvia client requests a Winning Proposals package on a given government solicitation, Onvia will identify agency contacts and policies, initiate requests under the agency’s defined procedures and follow up accordingly in order to obtain the proposal materials and related documents. Onvia’s years of expertise requesting such information from agencies, coupled with established agency relationships, ensures a high success rate and makes it easy for companies to execute on these often complex requests. Essentially, Onvia does the heavy lifting while vendors gain a competitive advantage.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
There are two main categories that I track: a) the sales intelligence and martech space (especially where AI is being introduced); b) software and services that help facilitate go-to-market execution in B2G.

The sales intelligence and martech space is hot and growing. Established players and startups are devising practical ways to apply AI and predictive analytics. There has been a huge proliferation of offers and players, but they are still focused on horizontal processes or functionality. Here at Onvia, our platform delivers on the fronts of sales intelligence, martech and innovations in data science – all helping companies in the wide variety of industries that sell to government.

The other front that I monitor actively is companies that focus on helping businesses execute their go-to-market in the public sector. In particular there are services, consultants and marketplaces providing help to companies after the point when they find leads in Onvia and move on to actually pursue government contracts. Our clients appreciate working with our partners with the capabilities of helping write and manage their proposals.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Across our mix of marketing programs and go-to-market approaches, we prioritize and get the best ROMI on content marketing and email marketing. In turn, our MarTech stack is optimized for those programs.

Here’s our stack, including our own Onvia platform:

• Sales Intelligence: Data from Onvia platform (yes, we use the same platform our clients use to leverage the millions of records and identify companies to market to and grow our own business)
• CRM: SFDC
• Marketing automation: Marketo, Ringlead, Tout
• Email: Marketo, Clickback, Siftrock, ZoomInfo
• Web, SEO: Drupal, SEM Rush, Google Analytics, Alexa, Google Optimize
• Video: Wistia
• Social: Hootsuite
• PR: MuckRack
• Collaboration: Trello, Basecamp, Slack

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?
I will call out our content marketing engine that feeds our promotions via email, traditional and social media, SEO and digital advertising. Having the data that we have – bids and RFPs, future spending, awards results and agency contacts – puts us in an excellent position to create data-driven content to help our demand gen in every stage of the funnel. We have data analysts publishing periodic market research reports. They include industry hotspots, growth trends, our contractor confidence index and even surveys of government procurement professionals. We use those reports to engage our core audiences in sales, marketing and business development, in all levels of their organizations, from individual contributors to mid-management to senior executives.

Our database also helps us identify clients with accelerated growth and ROI, which we turn into conversion types of materials. When we crunched the numbers about government contract awards to businesses, we compared the results achieved by our own clients and by the overall market. The data revealed that Onvia clients average 69% higher sales to the government, the median cost per lead for our clients is just $49 (and can be even less than $20 per lead), and that our clients are accelerating their sales up to 8x faster than the rest of the market.

Another example of a stand-out campaign is actually now in progress. I’m excited about the ongoing campaigns promoting the recent Onvia 8 launch, including our 10-city roadshow called “Onvia On Tour“. We are hosting great sessions featuring our clients and their success connecting with government. The real highlight of the events has been the panels with government officials and procurement leaders. They advise businesses about better connecting with government by engaging early ahead of the bids. They also talk about the civic impact and motivation behind their projects and their goals to engage small and minority owned businesses.

With regards to how we measure the impact of all these great campaigns, we are accountable to our bookings numbers. Of course we also measure activity, campaign performance, digital engagement and top-of-funnel lead volume, but the ultimate goal is our commitment to bookings and the bottom line. Our internal marketing dashboards have demonstrated our success in terms of increased contribution to bookings, while managing our cost of acquisition.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
Curious story – I have an engineering and computing background and even coded an AI app in the ‘80s. In those days, programming AI meant predicting as many possible outputs and linking some response or action to each. It was not all that intelligence-like.

Nowadays the paradigm has shifted to programming of neural networks, where the machine learns over time through the exposure to data, patterns and events. But how to prepare for this and apply it to marketing?

I’ve been reading and attending seminars to hear about the most practical applications of AI, but my best source of insight has been from our own engineers at Onvia. We are ourselves applying machine learning to improve how we match how vendors search for leads to how governments describe their solicitations. It turns out to be an interesting and important natural language search problem to solve. Vendors want to see only the most relevant leads appear in their searches, so we help reduce noise, increase relevance and drive more matching of opportunities.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
“Curiosity.” That is the foundation to finding new solutions, innovating products, improving processes, applying analytics and improving a team’s overall performance. It’s much easier to achieve success when your teams are driven by curiosity. And if I’m allowed to pick another word, that would be “accountability.” Teams that can work inspired by curiosity and are driven by accountability end up succeeding by becoming teams that “get it and get it done.”

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
On the personal productivity front, I have a pretty good system using Outlook and OneNote. Excel still plays a key role in analytics. Then when it comes to collaborating across teams I rely on a variety of project management and BI tools. I used to prefer the homogeneous use of those types of apps but got used to so many of those – it ultimately depends on what makes the project owners and information analysts more productive and successful. I also use a variety of traffic and commuter apps to save time on the road.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
The hours I choose to be awake during the day, and how I use those hours. I used to be a night owl, but I’ve switched my “inner time zone.” I start my day early, tackling projects requiring quiet concentration. I rarely check emails during the day and dedicate the core of the day to meetings, as long as they have purpose, mainly to align key stakeholders, accelerate decisions and coach teams. Then I try to use the last few hours in the office to address emails, provide reviews and address approvals requiring my attention. It gives me the evening to dedicate quality time with family. Work life balance, done with intensity.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I’m now reading this book “El Método Monchi.”  Monchi is a sports director with a successful stint at Sevilla. The soccer club achieved success at the level of continental tournaments having to compete against clubs with much deeper pockets, like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, Chelsea and Manchester United. Monchi’s method was to predict, attract and manage talent before they called attention of the big brands. That was an engine for competitiveness and profitability, as he would later sell his players at much higher values to those bigger teams. Great lessons about leadership in the process of managing talent and when it’s time to refresh your team’s talents, either because they are aiming for a new career level they can’t achieve in their current team or simply because the team needs new skills for new circumstances.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Always ask for and act towards what you want. You increase your chances to get what you want. As a matter of fact those chances go from near zero (by not asking or acting) to something just dramatically higher than that. Do it. Don’t settle, don’t rely on just luck.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Can I answer “parallel parking”?  I’m really good at it, but I recognize that skill might become obsolete soon with the evolution of autonomous cars. Ok, with my hat of SVP of Marketing on, I will mention one thing that has consistently led to success is to praise my team members. Sharing credit, acting as their talent agent, shedding light on their accomplishments. That will not become obsolete. Most people will appreciate their managers doing that rather than themselves. It will contribute to their motivation, curiosity and accountability – there are those two words again!

MTS: Tag the one person (from the Martech space) whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
I would like to tag Michael King, from King Recruiting. Michael has been placing top CMOs and demand gen leaders in hot innovative companies in Greater Seattle and Bay Area. He can share his perspectives about desired marketers’ skills, how much of AI is already reality or still buzz, and the most popular martech vendors in the radar of his client companies and placed leaders.

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

Also Read:  Interview with Jim Kaskade, CEO, Janrain

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a MarTech company?
In 2016, I joined Invoca as CEO. After working in product management for over nine years at Salesforce, a company that disrupted the enterprise software industry, I wanted the opportunity to join a smaller company and try to have a similar transformational impact. At Invoca, we are not only leading a new category in MarTech, we are transforming how marketers think about their jobs and helping brands radically improve customer experience.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with online customers, how do you see call intelligence technology integrating with marketing automation platforms by 2020?
With the massive rise of mobile, which is driving 85 billion calls to businesses globally and influencing more than $1 Trillion in U.S. consumer spending, it’s becoming even more important for marketers to integrate call intelligence with their marketing automation solutions.

As consumers increasingly combine their digital interactions with voice interactions, live conversation has become the new competitive battleground for customer experience. Call intelligence allows marketers to connect digital consumer interactions (clicking on paid search ads, browsing websites, etc.) to the voice experience (talking to a human), to have a holistic profile of the customer.

The Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud integrates with Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Hubspot to help marketers bridge the gap between digital and voice interactions and create a personalized customer experience across all channels and device types. Marketers can use insights from voice conversations to automatically trigger the next best online engagement, like retargeting a consumer with ads for a product mentioned but not purchased during the conversation, or automatically suppressing ads because the customer purchased over the phone.

MTS: Tell us about Invoca’s native reporting capabilities that measure audience attention and conversion analytics to deliver better omnichannel experience?
Invoca provides insights into which campaigns are driving the types of calls marketers want, including call volume, call duration, top campaigns, signals met, and call conversion rates. Within the Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud real-time dashboard, marketers can also automatically capture custom, actionable insights from hundreds of data points on each phone call, such as whether someone is an active shopper, a hot prospect, or mentioned a specific product but did not purchase. Marketers can use these insights to optimize their marketing performance, personalize the caller experience, automate the omnichannel journey, and expand their audiences with both digital and voice interactions.

MTS: How should marketers leverage call intelligence for personalized campaigns?
Voice conversations provide rich insights for marketers as they seek to understand, meet, and even predict the subtlest of consumer needs and intents. Data gathered and leveraged from conversations can help marketers improve the customer experience, such as delivering a personalized email or display ad in real time, based on buyer intent or preference conveyed during a phone call.

For example, marketers using Adobe Target can extend the personalized web experience they serve to their customers to a phone conversation using Invoca. For instance, a customer is greeted with a product specific landing page based on past engagements. When that customer calls, Invoca Signal can identify the website experience being served and route the caller to the representative best equipped to discuss/sell that particular product. Marketers can also use voice insights such as what was said during the call to trigger the next best engagement to create a consistent and personalized experience across channels.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their attribution models work with any search marketing platform?
One of the biggest challenges in attribution is in understanding the impact of online channels’,  – especially search – ability to drive offline revenue. Most analytics platforms and their attribution models are only providing a partial solution by looking at the digital conversions and revenue, not including the online impact to offline sales/leads/in-store visits. Once marketers include offline data in their attribution they can get the full picture of how search is performing to better optimize their search marketing.

Looking forward, voice search is the future and will be a challenge for search marketing attribution. With the rise of artificial intelligence, voice is rapidly becoming the new interface for computing. As speech recognition technology is improving and people seek easier ways to get the information they need, voice search usage will continue to grow.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m currently watching Vicarious. The scope and nature of the artificial intelligence they are trying to build is quite astounding.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use our own technology, the Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud. Our core stack for attribution, analytics and execution also includes Salesforce, Marketo, Brightfunnel, Vidyard, LeanData, InsideView, LookbookHQ, PFL and Sigstr. We use Terminus and AdRoll for our digital advertising.

MTS: Would you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
Our standout campaigns are usually not just limited to digital. We see the most success when we combine both the online and offline experience for prospects, and focus on providing educational value and a truly personalized experience. A recent example would be an end to end prospect experience in conjunction with a major tradeshow. With sales support we handpicked a list of enterprise accounts that we knew would be attending. The goal, and measure of success, was to have meaningful in person meetings with senior level marketers at this event, and create pipeline. Prior to the event we combined account-targeted display advertising, direct mail pieces, email and an interactive series of web content. The goal of these campaigns was to educate the prospect on the challenge we solve for, and offer an in-person consultation with a subject matter expert. The meetings themselves included a customized demo, relationship building thank you gift, and more personalized digital content as follow-up. It drove meaningful engagements with a high number of our target accounts, and surpassed our pipeline goals.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
The goal of personalizing experiences and communication with customers has been around for a long time. Now, marketers can use artificial intelligence to gain insights from large volumes of data, such as unstructured voice data, to better serve their customers. Marketers can create products and services that learn from the behavior of their users and then tailor their experiences. Marketers need to think about how they can leverage AI to differentiate themselves by customizing all of their advertising, products, and services for their individual customers.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Collaborative. I believe that great leaders empower teams with deep context on the business goals they are trying to achieve. An executive that I respected tremendously in my time at Salesforce, Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, called this approach “go slow to go fast.” It’s the concept of investing time to explain the goal you are trying to accomplish in great detail, with as much context as you can provide, upfront. I’ve seen it be very successful in unleashing a massive amount of creativity and energy from employees on how to accomplish audacious goals with ideas and approaches that our leadership team would never have conceived.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Most used apps on my phone – Gmail, Slack, Spotify, Salesforce, Wunderlist and LinkedIn. I monitor what’s going on in our business constantly using Slack and Salesforce.

Until the past year, I wasn’t particularly organized on a day-to-day basis. But I found as a CEO, I need to be really deliberate about how I use my time. So I am now addicted to Wunderlist as a means of focusing my day and keeping track of what needs to get done.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I have tried to put more emphasis on setting clear goals for myself on a monthly or quarterly basis, and then working backwards from those to set my day-to-day and week to week priorities. It’s hard for me as a CEO to accomplish things that can strategically benefit the company within a day, or even a week. But it is critical that I help our company move the needle strategically quarter to quarter. So I like to think of my time in quarterly chunks, set explicit goals of I want to achieve, and then use those as guideposts to organize my daily and weekly activities.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
In terms of current affairs and technology news, I read content online and listen to podcasts during my commute. For mainstream news, I read a combination of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to get a variety of perspectives. I get my technology updates primarily through Twitter and LinkedIn, rather than reading any dedicated publication day to day. I am a big fan of SaaStr podcasts, and lately have really enjoyed Reid Hoffman’s new “Masters of Scale” of series.

On the weekends, I prefer to unplug and read books unrelated to business. I was really affected by Paul Kalanithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air”; and when it comes to fiction, I love Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s series about a bookseller in Barcelona – Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven and The Rose of Fire.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I’ve received wasn’t explicit per se, but was simply observing the example set by my father. He was an entrepreneur and built a business in mechanical engineering – but more importantly, treated his employees, his customers, and his partners with fairness, respect, and empathy. That engendered a tremendous amount of loyalty that far outlasted his time at the company. And he has been very involved in his local community, investing time and money to help those less fortunate than he and his family. He set a great example of business leadership and community service at that local level.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Being able to understand different perspectives, synthesize those opinions and supporting data into a cohesive point of view, and then communicate that to a larger audience in a clear and motivational way. A lot of those skills stem from the time I spent in management consulting, a profession that trains you to process data and understand complex issues so thoroughly that you can break down and simplify them. I like to joke that I can see “five sides of a square” — which at times can be a fault as well as an asset. So I’m mindful of how much data our teams and I need in order to make decisions in a time-effective manner.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn. I’ve never met Jeff, but I respect the way he conducts himself and communicates, and have heard tremendous things about his leadership style from friends and colleagues at LinkedIn. I appreciate his low-key style and collaborative approach to management.

MTS: Thank you Gregg! 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 VigLink and how you got here. (what inspired you to start an affiliate marketing company)
Oliver: I was looking for a business to start and became interested in affiliate marketing, but after logging in to an affiliate marketing platform, the process as it existed seemed remarkably complex. I reasoned that, even with two CS degrees, if I still had a hard time figuring it out, the average blogger and content publisher would struggle as well.  In 2008, I wrote a crawler that looked for links to Amazon to see how many websites and content publishers were effectively using affiliate links, and I found that less than half of the commercial links were affiliated. At that moment, I knew there was a real opportunity to help both publishers and merchants gain the ability to effectively and profitably execute affiliate marketing strategies. In 2009, I founded VigLink, and have been running the company ever since.

MTS: Given how quickly automated affiliate marketing strategies have been accepted, how do you see this market evolving over the next few years?
Oliver: Over the next few years, the techniques used in programmatic display advertising will be applied to affiliate in a big way. From both display and search, most advertisers are familiar with a demand curve, where if you pay more, you’ll drive more traffic to your intended destination. Affiliate has this characteristic only weakly. Whereas in search you can change your bids and see the effects immediately, changes in affiliate pricing usually take months and a trip to Affiliate Summit before seeing a change in traffic flow (particularly from content). This delay, comparative to other marketing and advertising technologies, is changing.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
Oliver: Content-driven commerce is flying the same curve that display advertising flew over the last few decades. Hard-coded creative yielded to ad servers and on to the auction driven demand-side, supply-side and data management platform eco-system are pushing the landscape to where it is today. Affiliate marketing is just starting to make the leap from hard-coded links to a render-time decision, and the ability to utilize data to drive performance is going to have a huge impact.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge for startups to integrate with a platform like VigLink into their stack?
Oliver: At VigLink, we initially pitched ourselves as a “lights out” operation – install it once and forget about it, and just wait for the revenue to roll in. We focused on ease of installation and, if you want, you can still use VigLink that way. To really crank out the revenue, though, publishers and merchants both need to be watching their dashboards for what products are selling and trending via VigLink’s Trends Explorer. The challenge there can be that, to have the bandwidth and know-how to do so, it requires training and in some cases an editorial team incentivizing them to drive revenue.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Oliver: I’m a huge fan of Cloudflare. It was started by some classmates of mine and has grown tremendously – at this stage, they proxy about 10% of all web traffic. They have an amazing platform to give publishers a menu of services they can add.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Oliver: Intercom, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Looker

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
Oliver: You prepare by being first. The lesson isn’t just that jobs can be automated into nonexistence, it’s that well trained computer systems can typically do the job substantially better than humans. Tesla’s relatively crude Autopilot system already decreases accidents per road mile by 10%, relative to the baseline. Functions such as ad operations and media buying seem highly prone to not just automation, but automation whose performance dramatically exceeds the performance of the humans it replaces.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Oliver: Single-threaded.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Oliver: Gmail. 25 years later, email is still the core of how I communicate on the Internet.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Oliver: Tripit is a great simple tool for managing travel. I simply forward my emails to their platform and they curate a master itinerary for all my travel.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Oliver: The Creator’s Code. It’s a smart book on what differentiates highly productive founders.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Oliver: Never list your cell phone number on documents you file with the SEC. This tip has saved me from countless unsolicited phone calls.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Oliver: Having an engineering background helps a lot. It lends credibility when recruiting engineers and gives me a sense of what’s possible on certain projects and in certain contexts.

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

MTS: Thank you Oliver! 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 and how you got here? What inspired you to start a martech company?
Prior to starting Button, I had the opportunity to work under one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, Hiroshi Mikitani – or Mickey as his friends call him. In that position, I was able to learn from a leader who had built his company from a few people in a small room to one of the world’s largest internet companies.  Following Rakuten’s acquisition of a startup that I was helping run in Boston, I was able to gain insights into the global economy and witness firsthand how mobile was changing everything across the digital landscape.

In my capacity at Rakuten, I was helping lead some of their investment strategy – looking at all types of businesses and investing in some (we led a $100 Million investment in Pinterest back in 2012), and what stuck out to me most was the explosion in growth and speed of the mobile economy. That growth wasn’t being driven by Apple or Google – but by companies that were inventing new marketplaces based on the trends and behaviors mobile was introducing – an always-on connection, payment credentials loaded persistently, and a vibrant economy of new services that satisfied daily needs. Watching these trends emerge, I had confidence that a company like Button needed to exist – a platform designed to make connecting to these amazing new services easier for businesses big and small.

More technically, when viewing there was a lack of consistent linking protocol that allowed businesses to partner, collaborate, and share in the joint success. I knew that businesses needed this – and frankly, as a consumer – I wanted it, too! The ease of hopping in an Uber from a mapping app, or booking a table through a local app, or booking a hotel from a flight app – all these connections gave users what they want – while providing businesses a powerful new revenue stream.

That’s where the idea of “buttons” came to mind. Conceptually, I loved the concept of giving users what they want, when they want it, with the touch of a single button. With brands placing more and more emphasis on mobile, I felt like our timing was right. Fast forward to today, and we’re 45 people and are powering connections on behalf of some of the world’s most respected brands. And, although we have a lot left to prove, I’m proud to say we’ve introduced a model to one of the fastest growing economies that looks like it’s here to stay.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
I think the general trend is that mobile is changing how brands and marketers think about their spend. For the first time in history, spending can be truly “quantifiable”. Whether it is using a platform like Button to drive commerce and commissions, or Ibotta to verify and attribute offline spending, or Pinterest to measure retail purchases from social – the device and all of the associated data and sensors and location access provide marketers the opportunity to be smarter about the dollars they spend.

As Chase showed earlier this year with reducing the number of sites they showed ads on from 400,000 to 5,000 properties with no dip in performance, I think mobile will only further that evolution in thought and strategy. We think that content must match the commerce or ads you’re trying to drive to, and I think the greatest areas of growth will be centered on this very theme, giving consumers a better experience: more of what they want, and recalibrating around models that enable the consumer to win. Because, in mobile – as consumers have shown us – that’s more important than any other area of focus.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
In the marketing tech world, I still think that mobile is a tremendously underserved category.

As the gap between time and money spent on mobile continues to close, I believe we’ll see transactional revenue streams emerge as more and more important than the traditional advertising models we’ve been used to. I think the natural progression is for advertisers to move to a more CPA-oriented mindset, as this typically yields the highest measurable ROI for brands.

You’re seeing this trend already with companies like Yelp acquiring Eat24, Facebook introducing the monetization of places, The New York Times acquiring WireCutter, TripAdvisor’s efforts with Instant Booking, and the story about Buzzfeed’s commerce-specific team.

If you want to look at the breakdown of channels in desktop and try to compare those to mobile, you’ll quickly recognize that the most significant gap in mobile today is the performance marketing category. Over time, we believe this will actually surpass the 20% seen in desktop because of the transactional nature of the mobile device. There is a marketing mix that exists in desktop that will be fully replicated in mobile.

If you break that down it looks like this:

• Search: 32%
• Email: 18%
• Organic: 15%
• Display/Advertising: 15%
• Performance Marketing: 20%

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
As companies increasingly focus on their digital and mobile strategies, engineering talent is becoming inundated. CMOs will need to find solutions that are scalable and capable of being managed beyond engineering teams past the initial integration.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Startups:
I love the businesses that are smartly solving problems with user interest in mind.

I have been a fan of Zergnet – partially because I think their founder is an amazing guy – but also because I think they have a cooler take on the content remarketing channel than other companies.

Big Companies:
I don’t know if you could consider Criteo a startup, but I’ve always marveled at their speed and execution.

Slice, which Rakuten bought, is one of the smartest models I’ve seen – and one of the few businesses in that category that truly scaled.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?
One merchant we’ve worked with on multiple global partnerships is Groupon, integrating the app into the recently launched Hotels.com Mobile Concierge, leading loyalty app Ibotta, local discovery platform Foursquare, The Weather Channel, among others. In only six months, Button’s platform has driven millions of dollars through our marketplace to Groupon. We’ve become a popular channel used by Groupon for driving mobile acquisition and a go-to path for mobile partnerships.

This Is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
There are quite a few, and I’m probably going to miss a few here. To rattle off some top-of-mind: Uber for getting anywhere, United for flying me places, Viber for communicating, Amazon for basically anything, my iPad for reading, and the iRing you’ll find on the back of my phone to save me from dropping it.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Kelsey Steadman (my EA)

MTS: What are you currently reading?
Shoe Dog

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Outwork everyone in the room, and you’ll win.  – Mike Bloomberg

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Trying to feel what others feel.

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

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

Also Read: Attribution has always been a challenge given the sales data is held by the retailers: Jonathan Opdyke, President, Brand Solutions, Criteo

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Allego and how you got here? What inspired you to join a sales enablement and coaching platform?
I co-founded Allego in 2013 with my business partner Yuchun Lee. The idea behind the platform was something I came up with as new technologies, such as tablets and smartphones, grew quickly in popularity. As a veteran sales trainer with more than 15 years of experience, I noticed that despite these technological advances, sales training had remained stagnant. Corporations spend millions on classroom training and sales kick-offs that prove to be less than effective while ignoring the powerful recording capabilities, flexibility and mobility of smart devices that have the power to transform the training industry.

I knew Yuchun Lee through our participation in the EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and I thought he was the perfect person with whom to share my idea. I wanted to build a mobile-enabled sales training platform that would allow reps to record their sales pitches and share them with managers and peers for coaching, feedback, and certification. I knew the idea was powerful, but I did not have a background in software design or development.

After I shared it with Yuchun, we spent some time talking about it over a period of months, and he finally asked me, “Have you thought about building a software company that supports better sales training rather than trying to hire someone to build a software application for your training company?”

I said, “That sounds great but I don’t know anything about building a software company.” He said, “Well, I do.”

Shortly thereafter, Yuchun decided to leave his role at IBM and become the co-founder and CEO of Allego.

MTS: How does Allego identify and design contextually aligned sales content as an incremental revenue stream?
We don’t create sales content for our customers – we give them the tools to easily record and share their own powerful videos, created by peers for peers, as well as to receive point-in time feedback from managers on their pitches. This was by deliberate design, as over 65% of sales reps agree that sales pitch advice from peers is more effective than training from the corporation.

The result is that sales organizations create a sort of “corporate YouTube” library of best practices and insights for all the most common challenges specific to their individual company, in addition to the most relevant product and corporate content. This is essentially a self-updating sales playbook filled with distilled, highly relevant content coming straight from the field.

For example, after giving a sales pitch, reps can immediately record a recap of what they learned, the objections they faced, and what responses worked or didn’t work, and share this info with the rest of their team.

Of course, not all content can be peer-generated, so Allego has also partnered with leading sales training companies in the tech, medical devices, and financial services industries to help our customers to develop tailored corporate training materials that supplement peer-generated content.

MTS: How do you see Account-based “Everything” influencing sales enablement platforms?
The biggest element of “Account-based Everything” from our perspective is the importance of personalized content from the beginning of the sales cycle all the way through to the adoption of our software. This includes helping our customers use content they generate for their outbound marketing efforts. We believe there have been three distinct phases leading up to this transformation.

The first was the “just in case” era.

During this time period, which ended around 2010, you needed to learn something just in case you might ever need to know it. Think of it like learning calculus. You had to pass the course, but you may never have a reason to use it in your work. With the advent of the iPad and the beginning of the smartphone revolution, we saw the next phase – “just in time” learning, which Allego helped pioneer. In this model, salespeople could learn what they wanted to learn, when they needed to learn it. This brings us to 2017, where we are just at the beginning of the next phase, which we call “just for me” and which will help personalize a specific learning path for each salesperson based on their unique experiences, learning style and the results of assessments of their current knowledge.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that brands need to address to make their sales acceleration decisions work effectively using video platforms?
Allego currently has about 50,000 end users, so we’ve had a lot of experience getting sales reps on board with a video-based platform. The part that’s most challenging for end users is getting used to recording themselves – while platforms like YouTube, SnapChat, and Facebook have made video “selfies” common in our personal lives, recording yourself in a professional setting can take some getting used to.

Of course, that’s part of the value of video as a training tool – as sales reps, we might not realize what we actually look like when we’re delivering our pitch – what our body language is saying, if we’re making eye contact, whether we’re saying “umm” and “err.” Video turns the lens back on the sales rep, and the result is that pitches are far more persuasive and polished than they would otherwise be.

Our Customer Success team has come up with several innovative strategies to help end users feel comfortable with Allego to make roll out a success and to maximize adoption of the platform. This often includes assigning a simple first video recording, having top execs record videos using the platform, as well as incorporating humor into those initial videos.

Seeing their colleagues using Allego to share company culture and jokes can help reduce the intimidation factor and get other employees to say “Okay, I want to be a part of this, too.”

MTS: Is social selling the next frontier for sales professionals? How do you see Just-in-Time learning methodology benefit social selling strategies for B2B companies?
I truly believe that social selling has changed everything. Sales reps are no longer just order takers – with the wealth of information available to prospective buyers, sales reps need to be knowledgeable not only about the industry they are selling to but about the company and even the prospect they are meeting with, prior to picking up the phone or sending off an email.

Unfortunately, in today’s selling landscape, there is such thing as a bad question — it’s no longer acceptable to walk into a meeting and ask a prospect what they do. Instead, sales reps need to come armed with info from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the company’s website, etc. so that they can ask great questions and set the tone for the meeting from the very start.

Of course, with a sales rep’s busy schedule, a lot of this research takes place just-in-time – i.e. right before a rep walks into a meeting. This is where Allego delivers real and immediate ROI — sales reps can get the latest industry knowledge right at “go time” and can stay up to date on how peers are handling objections on a day-to-day basis. Effective selling is a moving target, and the only way to hit the mark is to arm sales reps with the most timely and relevant information – it’s also the best path to develop those meaningful relationships with customers that are so important to closing the deal.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
We focus most of our energy on helping our customers grow their business but do keep tabs on the latest developments in our sales-learning platform space as well as some of the adjacent markets.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use Marketo for marketing automation including email marketing and landing pages, as well as Salesforce for automation and managing our customer/prospect database.

We also use Yesware to automate our sales team’s prospecting efforts, as well as WordPress and Google Analytics to maintain our website and measure web traffic.

Lastly, video is a central component of our marketing efforts, so we use our own platform to share videos, such as customer testimonials and highlights from presentations at conferences. The public sharing feature within Allego allows us to generate shareable links to content created in our platform for use in emails, on websites and in social campaigns.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
We interviewed an Allego customer and former New England Patriots defensive tackle named Bob Kuberski on the Thursday before the 2017 Super Bowl. In this short video, he provided some interesting football insights that most fans would not know, as well as lessons that sales professionals can learn about training from professional athletes. That video was turned around in less than 24 hours and was one of the most opened, clicked and viewed email campaigns in our company’s history. It was a great reminder of the power of generating content that is relevant and timely and being able to execute quickly.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
I think that the changes to the selling landscape as a result of AI will, in many ways, be similar to the ways that social selling has altered the role of the sales rep. What I mean here is that AI will continue to push sales reps into a more consultative role, where they have more access to the customer experience and can add considerable value to the relationship.

Business leaders should understand that AI and other analytical tools will be a way of improving efficiencies, but sales management skills, including strategic planning, coaching and supervision, are still very much in the human purview. AI may be able to surface relevant content and information faster than we currently can, but it will still be the job of the sales rep to consult with confidence and understand the subject area of their prospects. Putting the tools in place to help reps continue to hone these skills will be the best way for business leaders to prepare for an AI-centric world, where the key distinction is hyper-personalization.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
I don’t think I can fit this into one word, but my motto has always been to work smarter, not longer. I guess if I had to choose just one word, I’d say “efficiently.” Efficiency is at the heart of Allego’s value proposition. The tools we develop and refine are designed to make the most of the time, resources and shared knowledge of an organization’s sales force. All of this is done with an eye toward maximizing the value of our customers’ time.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Besides Allego, I use Waze every day, even when I am traveling to places that I know how to get to. I find it helps me to stay focused and alert and I appreciate the crowd sourcing of real time knowledge.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Keep an eye on your personal “redline.” An engine that revs high all the time doesn’t last long. People aren’t so different. I encourage our team not to overwork themselves. If you burn out, that’s not going to help anybody. As I mentioned above, I’m a huge proponent of working smarter and more efficiently, not harder or longer. For me, this means being very structured about how I get work done. I divide up my days into three different categories or types, and I know that in any given week or month, I need a mix of all three to be most productive. These are: buffer days, which include meeting prep/research as well as travel time; focus days, which consists of in-person meetings and calls; and free days, which are weekend or relaxation days where I spend time with my family.

For me personally, there’s a sweet spot comprised of all three that makes me the most productive. Too many focus days in a row and I’m not adequately prepped for my next meeting, or conversely, too many days in a row without a free day and I start to feel burnt out and less productive professionally.

MTS: What are you currently reading?
I have listened to five books since the start of this year including Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. I am currently reading the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis which is a great story about how we make decisions.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“‘No’ is just as good an answer as ‘yes’.” I know for many sales reps, getting a “no” seems like a dead end or a failure. However, after being in the industry for many years, I’ve learned that in many cases, “no” really means “not yet,” and that time spent meeting with a prospect is never truly wasted. If you have a positive meeting – one where you’ve done your research ahead of time and the conversation goes well – you never know what future opportunities the meeting could bring. I can’t count how many times that months, or even years, after a meeting, someone has come up to me and said “You met with my colleague” or “I heard about your offering from so-and-so” and I end up making a sale through word of mouth. Every meeting, even if it ends in a “no,” is experience and often helps to plant the seeds for future relationships and sales deals.

MTS: Who is the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read?:
Tony Robbins

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