Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to start MeaureMatch?

I am the Founder and CEO of MeasureMatch, a professional services marketplace platform. Our platform provides Business Leaders in Marketing, Commerce, Analytics, Product, and HR with direct, seamless access to a global network of vetted, interviewed and certified independent consultants and consultancies, currently across 50+ countries, to execute enterprise systems set-ups, advanced configurations, deep integrations, troubleshooting and to create outsized value from the vast volumes of data collected by these systems.

Importantly, we’re an early-stage technology startup, so my role is broad and deep. When I’m not identifying and writing up platform optimization opportunities, then I’m deep in Business Planning, Sales and Marketing for customer growth, interviewing for new team members, interviewing service providers (independent consultants and consultancies), welcoming new clients into the service and much more.

I was inspired to start MeasureMatch in Q1 2016, when I was at the tail end of an ambitious M&A exercise, a roll-up of Analytics consultancies across Europe that had I dreamed up and started pursuing nearly a year earlier.

That roll-up was an attempt to do something big. And it was indeed a big, hairy, complex pursuit, but MeasureMatch is much bigger and boy am I glad it’s worked out this way.

Now, through the MeasureMatch platform, I can help, learn from and support the growth of independent consultants, consultancies and their clients around the entirety of planet earth (our supply-side network will easily reach 75-100 countries by the end of 2019), which is superbly exciting.

How does MeasureMatch benefit marketers? What are your objectives for 2019-2020?

The value for marketers, and also Commerce, Analytics, Product and HR leaders, is simple: MeasureMatch is a direct route to highly-skilled extra pairs of hands to get important systems and data work done fast. The platform we’ve built is end-to-end, much like how Airbnb works, all the way through to payment processing, star ratings and written reviews.

Importantly, MeasureMatch is not in the full-time employee recruitment game. It’s project or contract work that we’re facilitating, the kind of work that probably should have been done weeks or months ago, or it needs to get done because someone unexpectedly left the business, or perhaps it’s work that keeps the business moving forward while a full-time role remains open.

Either way, the skills on tap via our network of over 2,000 consultants and consultancies in over 50 countries are generally very hard to find, especially locally, but the skills are out there. We simply made a point of aggregating and organizing the amazing systems, data skills, and talent for easier access and rapid value creation.

We’re calling it the Platformization and Personalization of Professional Services.

According to Gartner, marketers are dedicating nearly a third of their budgets to technology investments. That’s huge. And, in many cases, it’s more than their human capital investments. That disparity might suggest Marketing technology systems are getting easier to use, and so require fewer people, but that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing that the opposite is true. Clients are increasingly turning to MeasureMatch to extract greater value from their systems and data investments because their teams are bandwidth constrained i.e. too small, perhaps too new, with too few of the right skills or confidence, but they are ambitious and the organizations behind them are prepared to invest in on-demand pro services.

Regarding our objectives for the remainder of 2019 and going into 2020, we are wholly focused on customer and revenue growth. Despite doing no active recruiting, our network of service providers is robust and growing; we receive applications from around the globe every day.

How would CMOs benefit from paying more attention to Marketing and Analytics systems and Sales Velocity tools in 2019?

To start, they would probably see that many of the Marketing and Analytics systems currently deployed – some free, but many no doubt costing a pretty penny – are heavily under-utilized.

The four primary reasons are:

• Team members have too little bandwidth (overstretched)
• Members don’t have the skills (not actively trained or incentivized to pursue and complete formal lessons, courses, and certifications)
• The team may have the skills but are ‘lost’ in the organization (there is no easy way to find team members with specific skills)
• Product Functionality has evolved faster than the organization’s usage and/or skills.

Importantly, it’s worth noting that ‘paying attention’ to systems and tools is the easy part. Tools and technologies are of little value without good people deploying, operating and optimizing them.

What is Technographic Match and how marketers can leverage it in their campaigns?

Technographic Match is a value-added element of the MeasureMatch platform which essentially is a way of saying to clients, ‘We’re doing our homework. We’re going the extra mile to create what will hopefully be a seamless experience for you in the MeasureMatch platform.’

Essentially, what we’re doing is creating instant initial value on entry into the MeasureMatch platform by presenting independent consultants and consultancies that are matched to the actual software systems used by a client’s organization. We’re not making a big deal of it, meaning that it’s baked into the entirety of the experience. It made a lot of sense to us to provide this layer of Personalization for clients. What we have now is just the beginning. We have big plans to make Technographic Match enormously valuable.

What startups in the B2B technology industries are you watching right now?

The ones I’m watching most are, naturally, in the Marketing technology ecosystem. I’m big on anything that advances business data collection and its management for Transformation, Visualization, Analytics to create better customer experiences, to explore space, for medicine and so much more.

What tools do your Marketing and Advertising stack consist of in 2019?

We’re using Segment for foundational data collection, but we’re also using FullStory for CX insights (awesome for product optimization), Google Analytics for general website and platform measurement, Intercom for customer service comms, Zapier is a growing favorite for shooting notifications into Slack and data into Google Sheets and a few other things.

Would you tell us about your standout Customer Success/Digital Transformation story at MeasureMatch? 

For us, every successful service engagement between a client and a MeasureMatch network service provider is a standout story. The problems that clients are looking to address or the solutions they need to get into place are all unique and challenging in their own ways. When we see clients find and book consultants or consultancies into contracts via our platform, well, we’re pretty stoked.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Business Leader? How do you leverage AI capabilities at MeasureMatch?

We’re not really in a position to provide guidance to clients regarding how they should prepare for an AI-centric world. That would be for our network of consultants and consultancies to do.

Regarding our approach to AI, it will be no surprise when I say that we’re only at the very beginning of our Data Management and Analytics capabilities. AI and related advances in data-driven value creation require access to substantial volumes of data, which we’ll be prepared to capitalize on in 2020 through a combination of first and third-party assets. For now, we’re focused on Designing, Building and Optimizing platform functionality to make for the best possible customer experience – I have to tell you, it’s kinda hard to build software that takes into account all of the unique, human nuances of the buying and selling of enterprise systems & data professional services. But we’re getting there. Step by step.

How do you get tech and people to converge at one place?

Bring doughnuts.

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

LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, and WhatsApp.

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

Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Yep, that’s as ‘smart’ as it gets 😉

What are you currently reading? 

I loved reading ‘Sapiens’ last year. I’m now trying to get into Yuval Noah Harari’s ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’. I read real books together with my wife, Valeria; we read passages out loud to each other. It takes a while to get through a book, but we enjoy the process. Otherwise, I’m an eager newsreader; my news centrally comes from the Bloomberg website and app (subscribed).

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

Perception is reality.

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

She’s not in the industry, but I’m a huge fan. Her name is Dr. Tana Joseph, Founder of AstroComms and Royal Society Newton International Fellow in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester.

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