MarTech Interview with Debjani Deb, CEO at ZineOne

Debjani Deb, CEO at ZineOne chats about the inception of ZineOne and thriving in an evolving martech ecosystem in this quick catch-up:

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Welcome to this 2022 MarTech Series chat, Debjani, we’d love to hear more about your B2B journey and more about being CEO at ZineOne…what’s a day at work like?

When I co-founded EmPower in 2004 and then eventually had a successful exit when we sold to Genpac (NYSE: G)  in 2012, I could not wait to do it again!  The journey of getting a group of people together to create something new is extraordinary.  It wasn’t long after that experience that I started looking for the next market opportunity and came together with my current co-founders to start ZineOne.

You know, when I was early in my career it was more about doing the work, producing and executing on deliverables. Now as CEO it’s much more about the vision and the bigger picture of where we want to be as a company and how to execute with limited resources to get there.  On any given day that translates to prioritizing my time and working smart with all parts of our business. Time has become the most valuable resource, toward achieving the big picture goal.

Take us through some of the top business growth strategies you’ve often relied on to boost company output?

Really honing in on our core strengths and our core message are vital.

The more you can fully articulate not only what you do, but how you are adding value to your customers the better positioned you’ll be to grow. Yes, it’s about having a solid market fit, but it’s also key to really know and refine the story you’re able to tell around how you alleviate specific pains your customers have. Once you know that, deeply, to the core, you can get all areas of the business aligned on that vision and direction and work together toward a unified approach to grow your business.

For CEOs in martech today, what do you feel are some of the top challenges? A few best practices that come to mind to help solve them?

Yes, there are a lot of marketing technology companies out there and if you’re a CEO competing in this space it’s going to be very challenging. There’s a lot of noise and difficulty differentiating for the vast majority of martech vendors. If you can fine-tune what sets you apart from the others and add a lot of value, you’ll be able to carve out a path of success. I feel fortunate that at ZineOne we’re positioned well at a time when data privacy trends are of high importance. And that our intelligence models provide retailers and ecommerce brands with in-session insights that optimize experiences for anonymous visitors.

Personalizing in-session experiences for anonymous website traffic isn’t talked about very much, even though 80 – 90% of website traffic comes from unknown visitors.

I see our market opportunity similar to the experiences of an Omniture or Amplitude who were in the right place with the right technology at the right time.  In a privacy first world, having the ability to add value to the anonymous audience takes on great importance, and we find ourselves leading the conversation in this new category of In-Session Marketing

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What are some of the top trends that come to mind for 2022 and beyond when it comes to evaluating and predicting the immediate future of the B2B marketing and martech space?

Some top trends for B2B marketing are going to be the rise of users expecting much better experiences. These are digital natives who have grown up with technology. They are omni-screen, expecting much more intelligent experiences based on what’s happening in the moment. We’re going to see even more data privacy regulations which are going to demand more utilization of AI and machine learning to optimize user experiences and rely much less on proprietary data for personalization.

As martech and B2B marketing evolves, what kind of martech and marketing practices do you feel will become more crucial?

What will become more important for marketers is adapting to omni-screen, always on, sophisticated buyers. Marketers will have to rely on more intelligence and machine learning to provide the level of experiences that today’s consumers demand, while balancing increasing data protection.  Intelligence about consumer behavior will be at the heart of everything we do to engage the consumer.

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Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up!

My final thought is that as we approach a more privacy oriented world, the 360 view of the customer will quickly become an obsolete notion.  We as marketers will have to be comfortable in a world where the consumer is hopping from screen to screen and is anonymous.  In the moment predictive intelligence will be key to adding value to that consumer.