Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What made you join Sales Layer?

I was a technology consultant for 10 years, and found the same problem in every company: managing thousands of images, descriptions, specifications… in a growing number of sales channels.

How do you see SaaS landscape evolving with better automation and analytics platforms?

Better integrations, faster setups, Machine Learning and AI — this distribution model can bring lots of benefits to your daily work.

Does having a background in technology enable CEOs to make better marketing and buying decisions in B2B? How did it help you in your career?

Obviously, yes. Technological solutions are never an isolated tool. They are always part of a much bigger ecosystem of corporate solutions. Having a tech background helps you to understand information flows and integrations much better.

How much have Sales Operations changed since you first started in the industry? How do you leverage these tools at Sales Layer?

With the help of new generation CRMs, reporting is real time. With Marketing Automation, sales reps have many more tools to learn about their prospects and interact with them in the sales process.

Which Marketing and Sales automation tools and technologies do you currently use?

Mainly HubSpot integrated with Salesforce. Also Intercom for the on-boarding processes and for customer success.

What are the core tenets of your business development model?  How does Sales Layer add value to digital transformation journeys for businesses?

The main aim of our PIM system is making the day to day of our customers simple. We help companies to digitize their product catalogs for the very first time and provide a better service to their clients with more and better information. Our PIM enables them synchronize to all their product information and control the visibility of them. In addition, it provides an analytics service, which automates reports about information consumption on every sales channel.

How often do you measure the performance of your Marketing Analytics and Sales Reporting?

Every Friday in our weekly meetings.

What are your predictions on the most impactful disruptions in marketing operations for 2018-2020?

Everyone knows about IoT, Influencer Marketing and customer-centric strategies. Unfortunately, those great trends fog other marketing trends that are easier to implement on our strategies and they will have a great impact on our results. Video content is an example of this — especially for our digital strategies. Search engines and their algorithms are now prepared for this type of content and, in fact, video content will be promoted over any other type of content.

When marketing gurus talk about bigger trends such as IoT or other expensive marketing strategies, they don’t think about a huge number of business that can’t invest in those implementations. I love video content because it will make a big difference in digital strategies and everyone can do it with their phone camera.

What startups in the technology industry are you watching keenly right now?

All of these 3 startups are on the right track to achieve excellence in sales processes:

• Gong
• Cogito
• Node

Could you tell us about an outstanding digital campaign?

We are on continuous digital campaigns with different aims: One is focused on brand awareness and others, specifically, on our PIM software. We’ve got a great software and we must tell the world! But our most outstanding digital campaign is one that has been built in a very natural way: our blog. We started writing our blog to help companies with their product information. We wanted to share all of our knowledge about this topic. We are happy that nowadays our blog is a great referral in the marketing industry. This brings a lot of traffic to our website that gives visibility to our software.

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

I’m always searching and learning about new methodologies, technologies and developments that can make our PIM software much bigger and much better.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

By making it simple to them to understand how it works, with detailed processes and manuals. Also by using it daily and being an example for them.

One word that best describes how you work.

Agility.

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

Salesforce, Google Apps and HotelTonight!

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

Being an expert user of the tools that I use every day.

What are you currently reading?

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

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

Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.

Something you do better than others — the secret of your success?

Understanding the environment, empathy with the people I work with.

Tag the one person (or more) in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Data Managers, Product Managers, Heads of Marketing, IT Directors…

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