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.

On Mobile Ad Technology

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

As the Chief Marketing Officer at mobile growth solution YouAppi, I lead global marketing offices worldwide. I own the marketing strategy including branding, messaging and positioning, lead generation, product marketing, events, public relations, investor relations, marketing communications and sales enablement.

MTS: With programmatic ad platforms being de rigueur in the industry, how do you see this segment evolving over the next few years?

Programmatic advertising will continue to grow, adding more regions and advertising vehicles, including more traditional advertising channels like print, TV, and radio. And at YouAppi, we’re big believers in programmatic marketing, enabling clients to use programmatic platforms to find mobile users.

Programmatic is really part of a larger trend in digital marketing towards automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. We now have technologies which facilitate processing a treasure trove of data instantly, which enable us to make smarter marketing decisions on the fly. YouAppi’s own machine learning algorithms and predictive matching technology allows us to uncover profitable mobile users based on mobile usage patterns and behaviors, so we understand first-hand the power and value of such technology.

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

That’s easy: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These technologies are enabling marketers to do their jobs better and more effectively by uncovering data patterns and insights which are difficult for people to detect, facilitating fine-tuned marketing programs in real-time. Beyond marketing, machine learning and AI technologies are making all technology-driven products better.

We recently surveyed several hundred YouAppi clients about which technologies they plan to invest in during 2017, and Machine Learning and A.I. were ranked #1 and #3 respectively (Mobile Payments was #2).

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

The biggest challenge for startups to integrate a mobile ad platform into their stack is related to data. The first challenge involves quantifying the right data. Data is the fuel in our A.I.-driven technology world, but for the marketing stack to be optimized, it has to run on the right data points which enable optimizing campaign performance and maximizing ROI. Not all marketers have access to the right data. Sometimes it’s siloed within a specific team’s IT, and other times, companies don’t capture the right data across all channels. Marketing data needs to be consolidated and centrally stored and managed, providing unfettered access to the marketing stack.

The second data-related challenge concerns the willingness to share data with external technology partners. I understand the guarded nature marketers have about their data, but the best way to optimize campaign performance is to provide technology partners with data. We can only improve campaign performance when we understand which customers converted based on which data points, and that means having access to the relevant marketing data.

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

At YouAppi, we’re watching the Chat Bot segment with interest, as it’s one of the fastest growing segments in mobile marketing. We want to understand how users are engaging with Chat Bots and what their role will be in the customer journey. A company we’re watching in this space is Exceed.ai, a developer of Chat Bots for marketing and user engagement.

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

The tools I currently use in my marketing stack include Hubspot for marketing automation, email and social media marketing, Asana for project and file management, Slack for team communications, WordPress for website management, Google Analytics to track traffic patterns on our website, Google AdWords for campaigns, Salesforce.com as our CRM system, Stocksy for stock photos and Right Relevance for news tracking. I set these up as one Google Chrome window with 65 tabs across on the largest Thunderbolt monitor and my team thinks I’m insane.

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

One of the reasons I joined YouAppi in 2014, is because I was impressed with how our technology was finding new app users for our clients based on user profitability instead of merely chasing downloads, which was how many user acquisition companies operated in 2014. And today, we’re even more effective in generating users based on performance-based KPIs to ensure that our customers are profitable.

A recent campaign that comes to mind is one for auction app Tophatter (https://tophatter.com/).  By running 90 second auctions for users to win deals 80% off on jewelry, electronics, beauty and fashion, Tophatter has created an entertaining marketplace which is bringing an exciting shopping experience to retail. To make user acquisition both precise and cost-effective for Tophatter, YouAppi is able to deliver users according to their Cost for First Purchase KPI, ensuring that Tophatter is acquiring profitable users.

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

I’m a data geek so I’m really excited by the opportunities that AI-driven marketing will enable. For example, I can’t wait to be able to integrate A.I. technology to analyze my lead generation efforts in order to uncover patterns which I’m missing that will enable me more effectively select the right marketing channels to provide sales with better leads at a lower cost. This will free up more time for the creative side of the business, which will also benefit from the data-driven insights uncovered using A.I. technology.

THIS IS HOW I WORK

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Multi-Tasking. I know it’s a buzz word, but marketing today is all about multi-tasking – doing many things at once that are all interrelated. For example, the data which I’ll use in a presentation will then be re-used in a press release and in our social media and search engine marketing campaigns, white papers and other lead generation efforts. So, though I’m working on many marketing projects simultaneously, they’re all interconnected.

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

The tools I can’t live without are the ones listed above, I use them all day, every day. Hubspot for marketing automation, email and social media marketing, Asana for project and file management, Slack for team communications, WordPress for website management, Google Analytics to track traffic patterns on our website, Google AdWords for campaigns, Salesforce.com as our CRM system, Stocksy for stock photos and Right Relevance for news tracking.

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

Asana calendar view of all of my campaigns and tasks is my go to productivity hack!

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

I’m reading Play Bigger, How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators create and dominate markets. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category.

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

Learning to move on after making a mistake. People sometimes have a tendency to over analyze performance, but if it already happened, the best advice is to recognize your mistake and move on. Tomorrow is another day, and in today’s marketing world, where everything moves at the speed of light, it’s best to just move on.

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

Tying into multi-tasking, one thing I do very well is putting together the various marketing elements across channels to create one cohesive voice / series of messages when communicating with clients / partners / stake holders. With all of the channels needed in marketing in 2017, it’s easy to create a lot of noise that is inconsistent. My strength is understanding the value delivered by each channel and putting it all together.

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

I’d love to read the answers my 3 year old son Cole will give to these questions in thirty years to see how close he develops to how he is today and to see how close his answers will be to mine.

MTS: Thank you, Jennifer! 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 work at a martech company)

I’m the VP of Marketing at Tealium.  We help companies take control of their data across every one of their channels so they can truly execute on a customer-at-the-center in real time.

I started my career at the dot-com side of a major news organization (ABC News) which started me down a path of using technology to both tell a story and understand how people interact with content and experiences. After that I worked in various roles at a number of analytics companies, from early pioneers like WebSideStory to more niche players like Kontagent.

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

I don’t expect to see a slowdown in the number of technologies available as I think martech as an overall space is becoming more complex and fragmented. But at the same time, brands need to adopt a customer-at-the-center mandate and that means that experiences and insights must be connected across every aspect of the customer experience.

I think over the next few years marketers will push for their technologies to work better with one another in real time around a single view of the customer. I also think marketers are starting to understand that marketing is bigger than just one team. In reality, it should be a cross-functional, organization-wide strategy. Customer data is a brand’s greatest strategic asset – the better they harness data to build better experiences for customers, the more successful those brands will be in the years ahead.

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

Consumer trust is often talked about but is not fully understood yet. If we want to better understand customers and build incredible, relevant experiences or explore what machine learning could mean for our brand, we need data. And to get that data, we need to make sure consumers are comfortable with how their information is managed and used.

New privacy laws like the GDPR in Europe are starting the conversation inside businesses, but consumers are still skeptical over how their data is handled. As marketers and brands we need data. To get that data we need consumer trust and we need to use it build amazing customer experiences.

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

I think there are three key challenges they currently face. The first is connecting customer data across various channels and vendors to fully understand what users are doing. Customers don’t see that brands use 20+ technologies to build their customers experience, they just expect a seamless experience. But making that work requires a universal approach to customer data. The second is getting organizational buy-in so more parts of the business contribute to and benefit from the customer data supply chain. Marketing can’t work with different data than a BI or CRM team.  They both need to share and enrich data in a common language and platform. The third is being willing to experiment with emerging experiences and technologies that can help bring messages and campaigns into a new realm.

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

While most are in their very early stages, I think the Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups are interesting, particularly the narrower application of AI in areas such as chatbots. How can chatbots help my customer service team be more efficient and answer more questions? Does this give me the ability to extend into new channels, such as Facebook messenger? It introduces the idea of being able to have impactful interactions with a customer without the need for a UI.

There is also a new generation of companies disrupting the more established categories like email marketing, marketing automation, and on-site chat, which is interesting. They are more open and flexible than their predecessors – providing the ability to customize virtually all elements – and they are well positioned to grow and change.

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

Data. Data. Data. Many people are trying to explore machine learning even though they have incomplete data. If 92% of a retail customer’s experience happens offline, is that data being taken into account in data models? Most times, no.

Marketers are generally limited in the data they have access to, and how much their data can integrate into a single view of the customer. This has to be solved before we’ll see truly great AI take shape.

This is how I work:

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Holistically

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

Slack, Evernote, and Any.do are my day-to-day necessities.

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

Having an Evernote notebook for every project, standing meeting, and one-on-one where I can collect ideas, discussion topics, news articles, and handwritten notes via Livescribe. That way when an idea comes up for a new program, I can add it to the notebook for next week’s agenda and get it off of my mind. It also helps to track what ideas, needs, or thoughts came up over time.

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

I have a pretty rigid media diet that starts with the New York Times and Washington Post every morning. I use the NPR One app on my way to the office and I browse the tech and martech blogs over coffee or lunch at my desk.

In the evening, I generally read for pleasure. If there’s an interesting business book I usually power through it in a day or two but with other books I’ll linger for weeks if possible. Right now I’m reading ‘A Long Way Home’ by Saroo Brierley.

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

That the numbers in my spreadsheet or Google Analytics report mean something.  They are real people raising their hands trying to tell you something about your business. You have to think through to what people are actually doing if you want to make sense of your data.

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

I’m a jack of all trades, which has served me well. When I started my career, I had to be able to write copy, code web pages, edit video, and build graphics – all on tight deadlines. That helped increase my productivity and taught me the importance of being able to produce and edit pretty quickly.

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

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a MarTech company)

I’m the CEO and founder of Elastic Grid. We started life more than 16 years ago as Elastic Digital, a creative agency for large B2B IT Vendors (Symantec, VMware, NetApp etc.) in Sydney, Australia.

The inspiration to start a MarTech company came from when I was the marketing manager for a large IT distributor. Beers, sporting events, golf, email and print ads (pretty much in that order), were the typical IT product marketing manager’s list of things to do.

The return on investment? Not quite measurable. Yes, some great relationship-building went on, we’re talking beer after all, but were deals done and revenue raised all attributable to those activities? Possibly, but how could it be measured? Which activities did, or did not, generate leads and convert those leads into revenue?

Suspecting some significant waste of marketing funds, I started Elastic Digital. That’s when the quest really began: Create measurable ROI for the B2B partner channel, globally.

The transition to Elastic Grid came more than five years ago after realizing channel partners sold multiple brands via multiple platforms and were in desperate need of one platform that enabled easy access to various campaign content. That’s when we changed direction and morphed into a single SaaS marketing automation platform, which is very partner-centric and helps brands create sophisticated digital marketing campaigns for their resellers.

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

Technology is evolving rapidly and it can be difficult to keep up. And not all marketers have fully embraced the opportunities of this new digital era. To be successful, don’t simply add digital to your marketing campaign, but rather, create a marketing campaign around digital.

Elastic Grid have a different model to other MarTech companies. We provide a platform, personal support and content that can be simply accessed by our client’s partners.

These partners usually fit into one of three categories: do it themselves, do it with me and do it for me. They’re often time poor, with little to no marketing experience or team, so we cater for all these different partner types and help them depending on what they need.

One of the biggest roadblocks of MarTech platforms is a lack of user-ready content. Content is still king, but it’s hard and time consuming to produce. The biggest evolution to the Elastic Grid model is the creation of a content Marketplace where resellers can access campaigns for all the brands they sell.

Currently other MarTech platforms operate as individual islands. So, I see the biggest MarTech trend is providing a single platform that comes loaded with world-class content from numerous brands.

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

Keeping in line with above, it isn’t new but it’s still the most important trend for MarTech, which is great content mapped to the buyer’s journey. The right message delivered at various stages of the buying cycle. Creating content for multiple brands and solutions is often challenging for our users so our creative team are able to do it for them.

This content Marketplace is currently for B2B IT clients but the concept could be delivered across any industry that sells through an indirect (partner/franchise) channel.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge to make marketing technology work?

Artificial Intelligence, predictive analytics, optimization technologies, there’s a lot of bells and whistles out there…In basic terms, we need to get the right message to right person at the right time and then reporting back if they’re interested.

I know I’m going to sound like a broken record. You can have the most advanced MarTech platform in the world, but without world-class content that engages and adds value, it’s just a platform (with bells and whistles ?).

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

– Engagio –  Account Based Marketing
– Trello – Just acquired by Atlassian

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

Our marketing stack consists of the usual suspects: Campaign Monitor for newsletters, Buffer for social media posts, AdWords, Zapier, Salesforce and Klipfolio.

I really like Klipfolio – Dashboard software for teams who want to continuously monitor the health of their business. We track everything in our business in one dashboard. This lets you keep up-to-date with a quick glance.

Additionally, we drink our own champagne and use the Elastic Gird Marketplace for our nurture flow marketing campaigns.

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

We have a lot of great case studies on our website but Juniper Networks is a real standout, its title is “How did Elastic Grid enable Juniper Networks to achieve a 2400% in pipeline growth?”

If you have time, go to our website and watch the video of Matt Hurley. https://www.elasticgrid.com/Clients.html#results

THIS IS HOW I WORK

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Direct. This eliminates any miscommunication, helps guide people in the right direction, but also promotes a culture of taking responsibility.

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

I really like Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for business – we run a global company and one of our core tenants is “Humanize”, so we do a lot of video conferencing, one-on-one as well as in teams.

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

Read getting things done…my inbox is empty every day, well most days.

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

There’s always something new to learn and I think the best way to do that is by reading a range of different material, not just business related. You can then adapt that to your business. On the list at the moment is

– The Hard Thing About the Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. It’s packed with advice on building and running a startup.
– Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, by former FBI negotiator Chris Voss.
– Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.

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

I’ve always liked American writer Elbert Hubbard’s saying, “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive. “…I’ve had a lot of great advice, but this one always makes me smile. It’s important to have fun, laugh and spend time with loved ones. It’s a culture we instill across the whole company.

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

As a CEO, I’ve come to realize I work for my employees not the other way around. I try and look at every situation through multiple lenses to get a better gauge on it. And I always try to be fair.

MTS: Thank you Cameron! 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.

I’m currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Protagonist, a Narrative Analytics company. The executives approached me after becoming familiar with some of my past work. I have been in the marketing business for over 20 years now, with roles at both start-up level companies and Fortune 500 businesses in software, media, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to holding executive positions at GoGrid, Clickability, AOL, Ziff-Davis (ZDNet), Ofoto (now Kodak), and Wind River, I was a founding team member of GNN, the world’s first commercial website back in 1995. Since then, I’ve focused mostly on SaaS applications sold at the enterprise level. Protagonist fascinated me when I learned about it and about Narrative Analytics, because I truly believe that its work is both unprecedented and paradigm-shifting.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years? What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Right now, there is a lot of money being spent on marketing technology. I still think there is a big sense of dissatisfaction among CMOs, around how much budget they spend and how little data they can leverage. Marketers have access to  a lot of data sources right now, but oftentimes, they don’t know what to do with it– which essentially renders it useless. I see Narrative Analytics being the future, because it brings clarity– marketers and brands will be able to use data to understand and activate target audiences in ways that were never before possible.

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

In addition to receiving too much data without proper insights, another challenge I see is CMOs struggling to find quantitative resources to back up their efforts, highlight their successes and prove their value. Marketers are always straddling the fence between art and science, and it’s not easy.

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

Right now I’m a big fan of a company called Engagio– an account-based marketing analytics and sales automation software that orchestrates human connections at scale. I think a lot of companies struggle with this and don’t know how to do account-based marketing, so this company has a ripe opportunity to disrupt a market.

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

Of course, first and foremost,  we use our own Narrative Analytics Protagonist Platform for most of our efforts, we also use Pardot, a marketing automation tool by Salesforce. I am also a big fan of using agencies and third-party service providers, because when working at a smaller startup, it’s easier to operate like a large company if you leverage outside talent.

MTS: Could you tell us about a stand out digital campaign?

We recently did a joint Narrative Analytics project with Nielsen. The target audience was CMOs at consumer packaged good companies, and we successfully got them to download the corporate background content and schedule meetings to discuss next steps. Content that drives true value and resonates with one’s target audience is always a major asset in business success.

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

As a marketer for Protagonist, I’m always thinking about  humans and their beliefs, behaviors and ways of thinking. I think that AI is very interesting and is a good tool to use for certain purposes, but I firmly believe that the human mind is irreplaceable. The depth and complexity of the narratives that surround us can’t ever be automated. So while marketing leaders might want to use Siri for scheduling calls or taking notes, I don’t think there’s cause to feel the true work of marketing is likely to feel the effects of AI any time soon.

THIS IS HOW I WORK

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Collaboration– it takes a village. This gets back to my point earlier about being a startup, yet acting like a big company to be perceived as a big company. It’s really important that you can collaborate with others and work with partners.

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

One app that I really like is called “Headspace,” which guides me through a daily meditation. It’s really great for people who are busy and struggle with developing a practice.

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

Collaboration– being able to engage and build rapport with third parties in order to operate at scale.

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

I do like to read a lot. Right now for pleasure, I’m reading a biography about Walt Disney.  For my own personal development, I’m reading a couple of books; one called Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss and the other titled, Speak like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln, by James C. Humes.

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

Play offense. Don’t play defense.

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

Storytelling– my ability to truly listen to others and take in different opinions or ideas, then distill those ideas down to its essence and retell that story in a way anyone can understand.

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

The Dalai Lama.         

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