MarTech Interview with Jason Grunberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Bluecore

Are lead generation and demand generation fundamentally different? And what should marketers responsible for these activities be doing to create more value when driving their brand marketing journeys?  Jason Grunberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Bluecore shares his point of view:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jason, tell us about yourself and your marketing journey through the years, we’d love to hear more about your new role as CMO at Bluecore.

My role as CMO at Bluecore is to work alongside all members of the executive team to bring Bluecore into its next phase of growth. The organization has been incredibly successful in working with enterprise retailers like Express, Lulu and Georgia, Alo Yoga and other large retail organizations. We are charting our continued growth through product innovation, ensuring every enterprise retailer understands the value that Bluecore delivers. In retail, where margins can be razor thin, brands need precision to drive the types of outcomes that lead to profitable revenue generation. Our technology is designed specifically for large retailers to deliver and scale their results.

I spent a significant amount of time with Fayez (CEO at Bluecore) and the other members of the executive team and I really appreciated the robustness of the process so that we could be sure there was a match on both sides both in terms of culture and capability. My approach to the CMO role, having worked across other roles including most recently, the GM at Sailthru is very growth-oriented, both for the company and for our customers, and I wanted to make sure that was what Bluecore was looking for.

My growth-minded approach to my career started early, when I was on the agency side working with companies in a wide range of industries including spirits, hospitality, pharmaceutical, automotive, and consumer technology. Ultimately I ended up focusing on enterprise and consumer technology because the growth potential was so exciting.

I met the team at Sailthru at a VC conference in NYC and we took things from there – I was brought in to lead content marketing and eventually found myself taking on the marketing leadership position at the organization

I then served as part of the exec team through the acquisition by Marigold (then known as CM Group) and shortly after we were acquired, I moved into the broader CMO role at CM Group, overseeing global marketing across Sailthru, Selligent, Liveclicker, Campaign Monitor, Emma, Vuture, and Delivra (since divested.)

With CM Group’s merger with Cheetah Digital I moved into a role as General Manager of Sailthru, but ultimately wanted to get back into marketing leadership, it’s where I am most passionate.

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As someone who has spent a long time in B2B tech marketing: take us through five fundamentals you feel need to change here and five things that you feel are currently reshaping the way B2B marketing will work in future?

In terms of Bluecore, the team is the most customer focused team in SaaS I’ve worked with – every executive meeting has discussions on specific customers, every executive meets with customers on a regular basis, and we work to understand where our customers are going in the future so that we’re always building for their needs. One of my top priorities is to translate this customer focus into customer advocacy in the market. You’ll see us talking about our customers – and our customers talking about us – a lot more as we move forward. What’s more, our team has extensive retail experience at brands like ebay, Target, Urban Outfitters, Kohl’s, Foot Locker, Ralph Lauren and many others. Our relevant experience is largely hidden, but could provide opportunities for thought leadership and connection in the marketing and sales process.

We’ll also be talking more about our unique capabilities, like how Bluecore enables retailers to combine their product data and customer data. It provides insights into consumer trends trends that I’d like to see us bring to market.

Product marketing matters, too. Our marketing approach will also highlight the depth of our product at every customer touchpoint. The idea of customer movement – turning shoppers to customers; turning customers into repeat buyers – drives better outcomes. We have category level benchmarks on this performance that we will be sharing with the broader market in the future.

The specific tactics that drive first purchase conversion and third purchase conversion are unique to Bluecore and we want to democratize that information so that all retailers can have access to this information.

In this same vein, we have customers who have launched hundreds of customer touchpoints, are using personalization in incredibly unique ways, and leveraging our AI to build automations that bring agility into day-to-day operations – but the market doesn’t consistently view Bluecore as a solution to a specific set of challenges. We need to make those known.

With regard to what’s reshaping B2B marketing, I have to mention Generative AI and the impact that it will have on B2B marketing. The interesting use cases that I’m seeing are around content development – for outbound marketing messages like emails and product marketing like content recommendations for changes to landing pages, pdfs, etc based on inputs like target company and persona. We’re in a challenging market where organizations are clearly focusing on efficiency but also expecting growth, which means new ways of working will emerge that incorporates AI.

Given how mature and crowded most B2B SaaS markets are, there’s an increased focus from buyers on verticalized solutions – a retailer needs a different solution than a healthcare provider, for example. I think we’re going to see more and more of these emerging and growing. As vertical specialists emerge, we’ll see deeper capabilities and innovations that will focus how marketers position their offerings.

From a retail marketing perspective, the sales process needs to change based on new buyer profiles. New titles are emerging in B2C organizations that are representative of managing the total customer experience – there are fewer senior positions in individual channels and more so in total journey management (no more “head of mobile”). On one hand this is a good thing, but on the other hand it means that expertise in individual channels is decreased. Combined with reductions in force happening across all markets, this means that service and partnership models are more closely inspected and critical to success and B2B marketers must focus on this because if the technology won’t be maximized, it’ll be on the chopping block.

The maturity of most B2B markets is also changing the way products are being developed and delivered…Marketing and selling a vision is important, but marketing and selling on vision alone is no longer viable. Enough buyers have been burned by this to necessitate the change to launch products that are ready to deliver results.

We’re seeing the pendulum swing back to technology teams having greater influence and buying power over marketing buyers. This swing has gone to either side over the past 20 years, but B2B organizations must be looking at how they are engaging with tech buyers, data science, and analytics organizations versus targeting marketing personas alone.

We’d love to hear about some of the core marketing processes/strategies you have used in your marketing journey to often fuel marketing goals, as well as a little about the martech that powers all of it? 

I view lead gen and demand gen as being fundamentally different. Anyone can put a gate in front of content, syndicate content, hand an event attendee list to an SDR, or build a database and create a big email program to drive leads, but building sustainable, effective demand is a long-game and you must recognize that people buy from people, not from companies. Creating trust is accomplished in a manner that is highly specific to the organization and its buyer.

My approach focuses on bringing experts forward (internal, customer, and partners), making their points of view accessible, and working to bring our people and our potential buyers closer together. I call this a “relationship demand gen chain” and I focus on the fundamentals of high quality relationships – becoming known , respected, and trusted and then above all else creating safety for the customer. I believe that high quality, targeted content that is open to all and the events targeting specific personas are critical.

Of course we can’t create a unique marketing program for every customer and prospect, no marketer has unlimited resources, so I encourage my team to research and place bets on bigger initiatives that can deliver very specific value simply by adding another lens to it, like with what we did with the Retail Personalization Index. This gigantic deep dive into the top retailers using personalization includes many data points and retail categories so we can always mine it for really relevant insights depending on who we are talking to.

On the technology front there are always the core building blocks to any program and then point solutions that allow you to scale the moments of surprise or joy throughout the experience. Every organization is unique when it comes to its needs for technology and program scale. Historically I’ve used Marketo, 6Sense, and Optimizely as core solutions and then have partnered with companies like Alyce, ReachDesk, Splash, and others for specific moments. Given Bluecore has a very defined target market, we’re going to be less focused on tech-enabled moments and more focused on personalizing the experience at the contact level.

For marketers who are looking at martech optimization and budget optimization practices for the rest of the year: what thoughts would you share? 

Consolidation of technology and budgets is happening right now as a result of stalled growth. Before looking at technology on a flow chart and making decisions about where to consolidate, it’s important to have the pointed conversation with each vendor about where they can lean in to drive growth for you. Set agreed upon targets with guardrails based on how you want your customers treated, and then respond appropriately if they miss or beat those targets. You might be under-utilizing technologies in your stack and over-emphasizing others.

Be transparent and focus on value exchange. If your vendors are actually partners it should be easy to have an open conversation about what’s important to you and what’s important to them. Find a way to make any situation a win/win.

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Take us through some of the biggest B2B marketing faux pas you’ve seen brands make of late and what key takeaways marketers can learn from these observations?

The biggest mistake I see is related to what I said above in terms of strategy – conflating demand gen and lead gen. Every time I download content and I get a call from an SDR I just shake my head. Not every signal is a buying intent signal and treating every signal as if it’s a buying signal is a turn off – and in the long run it works against you because people stop engaging with your content, coming to your events, etc because they lose trust in your intentions and approach. You can recover from a mistake; but recovering from a loss in trust is a massive challenge.