MarTech Interview with Lynn Girotto, Chief Marketing Officer, Heap

 Data is everywhere and forms a core part of most marketing and sales strategies today, Lynn Girotto, Chief Marketing Officer, Heap delves deeper while sharing a few observations on what key trends marketing teams need to follow given today’s business dynamics. 

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Tell us a little about yourself Lynn…we’d love to hear about Heap? We’d also love to dive into your role as CMO and how a typical day at work is in the Marketing team at Heap?

Heap is the leader in digital product analytics, and our mission is to power business decisions with truth and data. This mission has been a foundational aspect to my own marketing career, too. In my experience, there’s never one perfect way to solve any problem! The strategic approach you take will always depend on the nuances specific to your business, your market, and your stage of development. But in a highly-dynamic environment (which marketing always is!) data is always the best way to find quick, smart ways to engage with your customers. Good data can both guide you towards hypotheses and help you test them in the market. It’s really key for moving quickly and iterating.  e. I’ve done marketing at a wide range of organizations, from large consumer brands, enterprise technology, eCommerce to SaaS start-ups, and now a more recent focus on analytics. In all cases,  I’ve always built and grown my teams around these principles, collecting  marketers who are curious, and who are interested in using data to learn and iterate.

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In today’s ‘’new normal’’ (since 2020!) what have been some of the core processes and marketing technologies that have helped you drive better business and marketing outcomes that you’d like to highlight today? 

Prior to 2020 customers were already starting to shift their interactions with companies into the digital realm, but COVID greatly accelerated that trend. On one hand, this has given companies more opportunities to connect with customers and improve their experiences. At the same time, however, it’s made it much harder to break through the noise. Today, your brand experience isn’t something that happens out in the world with the goal of driving people to your digital experience; today your brand is your digital experience. Customers now may try your product before even really engaging with your marketing website — in these cases your product itself is your brand. In this new state, where brand, digital experience, product, and customer experience converge, you just can’t approach things from traditional functional silos. At Heap, we believe in approaching everything with what we call a “product mindset” – thinking strategically, gathering and applying feedback, testing and iterating. To do this and stay aligned across all of our efforts, we focus on gathering data across every point of the consumer journey, and using it to improve customer experiences across the business.

No marketer can turn a blind eye to data today, a few best practices and tools that you feel marketing teams need to be more adept with today to drive better data-driven decisions?

Data should be at the core of every single business decision you make. The good news is that data is everywhere – it’s being generated at a pace of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. The difficulty, however, comes in understanding how to use it to meet your goals. The better you can use data, the better a customer experience you can provide. Think about taking a customer through a trial journey. You literally can’t improve that journey if you can’t track where customers get stuck or drop off, or what they do before and after these events!  It’s the data behind all those touchpoints that drives decisions about resourcing and content, and that helps you shape your product campaigns, virtual events, and future innovations.  If you’re not using data to hypothesize, test, and iterate, your marketing efforts are pure gut instinct, and this lack of precision in customer experience won’t help stand out you among the competition.

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How do you feel marketing teams can scale their go to market processes and strategies more effectively (faster) and reduce the typical go to market journey that most teams and maybe even marketing leaders are known to follow?

Marketing isn’t just about investing all of your time into one massive creative campaign. Moonshot ideas absolutely have their place, but it’s the more frequent customer interactions that should be the foundation of your marketing plan. Building a lasting, scalable strategy is about understanding your audience, testing out ideas, iterating approaches and learning from your results. This curiosity-driven approach will yield stronger, consistent and scalable results, and should also apply to the team you build. Your company needs people who are curious, who are willing to learn, craft and capture those creative stories using data to stand out in a crowded, attention-deficit environment of digital fatigue. 

Take us through some of Heap’s upcoming innovations and upcoming (exciting!) marketing events / movements or moments for 2021?

We’re fiercely dedicated to our mission of putting data into the hands of digital experience owners across the org — in product, marketing, or customer experience and our initiatives center around making it easy for those owners to get the data they need and use it to generate helpful insights and take direct action.   We have a ton of exciting innovations around AI and ML. We’re building tools that proactively identify those ‘a-ha!’ moments for product teams that turn customer insight into game-changing action. We’re using advanced data science to illuminate insights you’d likely never have found on your own. We’re automating integrations so you can use behavioral data to drive other tools. We’re developing governance tools that make it easy to use data at scale and across large teams. We’re giving companies the data that helps make large strategic decisions about prioritization. 

Each of these is built on top of our major differentiator: the fact that among all product analytics tools, we’re the only one that can give our customers a complete set of data around customer behavior on their site or product. We firmly believe that analytics tools are only as powerful as the data you feed them, and we’re committed to giving each customer the complete foundation of well-governed data that makes AI and ML analyses worth it.

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