Interview with Lissa Daniels, VP, Demand Generation, Marketing Operations and Analytics, Looker

Tell us a little bit about your role at Looker?

I head up the team that fills and optimizes the marketing lead funnel. Our first goal is to feed our sales development team with the highest quality leads possible. Those leads need to turn into happy customers. We spend our time testing and trying all that we can. Then we spend a good bit of time analyzing to see if the leads do what we want.

What draws you to the MarTech Conference?

It is the best martech conference in the area. It is where marketers who think technology, data and feeding sales team can come together and talk to each other and more than one vendor.

Which sessions at the Martech Conference would you recommend to and Why?

‘’From Data to Impact: How Red Hat Marketing Decides the Next Best Action”, looks very interesting. I love getting frameworks for how to choose the next best thing to do. Ultimately my intuition is what usually tells me what to do, but I train my intuition with data. Data can usually only answer one question at a time, and deciding what to do next is rarely a single question and answer. So, intuition and the human brain is best at balancing all the elements and weighing needs and possible outcomes.

“How to Manage GDPR and Legal Hurdles that Stall and Kill Your Martech Strategy” looks like an important session to go to because, well, we need to treat our prospects and customers with respect.

What is the one piece of advice you have for B2B marketers in 2018?

Keep testing and trying new stuff and retry the stuff you tried a few years back. The market is always changing, your product is always changing, never give up.

How do you see the B2B Marketing landscape evolving, in the years to come?

Technology is going to help us all get more personal. Data, behavior intent and AI can help us all make the experience more personal for our leads and customers. It does make it more work for the marketer. We need to understand the cohorts of prospects and customers really well so we can curate that personal experience, without that understanding and curation, technology is not as effective as it can be.

Which sectors is Looker looking to target to expand its reach in 2018?

We are working to expand our reach across industries, use cases, regions and the people who engage with data. So basically everywhere 😉

What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

Intellimize for website testing and the new Customer Data Platforms. I am curious to see how these evolve for better marketing coordination.

What is the most important metric of a digital marketing campaign that Performance Marketers should track?

Ah, there is no single metric. Data answers one question at a time. It also depends on the goal of the company and the program. I am spending time looking at ROI and contribution to bookings. Whereas 2 yrs ago, I simply focused on lead to meeting conversion rate (how we verified that we gave quality leads to SDRs)

What does your Martech stack currently consist of?

Marketo at the core connects to Salesforce.com connects to Looker. We then have other point tools, Intellimize for web testing, Drift for web chat, Clearbit for data augmentation, and On24 for online events

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

As with anything, understand your goals, brand, and market. Then decide what the best way to go to market, and if AI is a way, test it out.

One word that best describes how you work.

Efficient.

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

Well at work, I could not live without Looker. Seriously, I am in that every day. If not doing my own exploration, I am looking at dashboard folks on the team have created.

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

I print out my daily calendar each evening and mentally review the following day. I list my goals for the day. Then I carry it around with me. I realize I can do that electronically, but paper stares at me, a screen can be hidden too easily.

What are you currently reading?

I listen to a lot of audio books, it helps me get outside walking or going the gym. I like mystery books. I do not read many business books. The best ones I have read are The One Minute Manager and Nudge.

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

Early on at Looker, the VP of Marketing simply told me ‘If something works, just do it again.” That gave me the OK to just try everything and if it worked do it again, if it did not work, move on. It was the start of our ‘test, optimize, expand or stop’ mentality in DG.

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

I think I listen really well to others. And then I love to do, learn and try new things.

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

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