MarTech Interview with Ravi Chalaka, CMO, Jifflenow

Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. What inspired you to work at Jifflenow?

Jifflenow is a market leader in meeting automation platforms (MAP), with a SaaS solution that targets large enterprises and has an impressive list of customers from the Global 5000. Customers who use Jifflenow, love the product and its service.

How does Jifflenow fit into a modern Marketing Automation technology stack?

In today’s business, marketing must find ways to accelerate business growth. Jifflenow’s cloud-based solution addresses the complexity of enabling sales teams to schedule meetings between customers/prospects and company experts and executives at events. Without Jifflenow this becomes a manual, error-prone workflow that requires more admins and yet limits the ability to scale to 100s or 1000s of meetings at events. It’s like the Uber for meetings and events. Easy, fast, cost-effective and efficient. Jifflenow enables offline customer and other meetings from being isolated activities to online, measurable customer engagement platform.

How does Jifflenow’s technology maximize the effectiveness of Meeting Automation at each step of the user’s journey?

When customers move through the buyer journey and reach the engagement stage, which requires a face to face meeting for B2B products, Jifflenow is the only tool with enterprise-class functionality that is customizable to meet the needs of enterprises that enables event managers and briefing center professionals to maximize the number and quality of the B2B meetings which in turn accelerates sales growth.

From the time you started at Jifflenow, how much has B2B meeting analytics evolved?

B2B meeting analytics has evolved from offering event meeting metrics to include influenced revenue, custom reporting and comparison of metrics across different events and much more.

How do you identify the biggest advantages and challenges in Digital Commerce around meeting and events? What role does Jifflenow play in overcoming these challenges?

Meetings at events have been an offline, manual and error-prone activity that was limited by the use of traditional tools like spreadsheet based calendars and back and forth emails to request, schedule, approve, manage meetings, agendas, purpose, customer background and workflow. Jifflenow converts this from offline to a digital online solution that speeds the workflow which results in more meetings with better participation from external and internal attendees.

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

Marketing automation, CRM with Salesforce, SalesLoft, Zoominfo, Tableau, …

What are your predictions on the most impactful disruptions in technologies/innovations to Schedule, Manage, & Analyze Customer Briefings for 2019-2020?

Increased used of SaaS software for scheduling all B2B customer engagements with one platform. These include meetings at events, briefing and demo centers, road shows, executive travel, partner meetings, etc.  Meetings will also expand from customer only focused to all strategic business meetings covering other corporate functions like operations, finance, HR etc.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Marketing Leader?

AI has already penetrated numerous applications that are in use every day.  They include simple things like intelligent search support, chatbots and error correction, worker assist and natural language processing. As a marketing leader, one needs to stay abreast of truly disruptive solutions driven by AI in enabling your customers to gain significant value and implement it in rapid fashion.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

By insisting on producing the best results, which can only be achieved if one can implement good, creative ideas fast by use of the right technology.

One word that best describes how you work.

Focus

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

Communications and collaboration tools

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

Fail fast, learn from mistakes and be prepared to change your paradigm

What are you currently reading? 

A book on “Predictable Revenue”

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

“Disagree and commit”

By explaining how “effectiveness” is better than “efficiency” (Being effective is about doing the right things while being efficient is about doing things right).

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

Articulate the core value

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

Jeff Bezos

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