1. Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start/join a martech company)
Currently I oversee CAKE’s strategic global partnerships. I am passionate about building alliances between companies to facilitate mutually beneficial revenue and growth opportunities. My experience spans over 15 years building sales and alliance teams for technology providers, with an emphasis on negotiating, marketing and scaling complex OEM, technology and resale partnerships.
Prior to joining CAKE, I held numerous executive positions at leading SaaS companies, including my most recent role as Senior Vice President of Alliances and Strategy for Compellon. I also served as the Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at Mavenlink and Velocify (acquired by Ellie Mae) as well as the Chief Revenue Officer at Altus365.
2. Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
The Marketing Tech Landscape Supergraphic grew by 27% this year and now includes almost 7,000 organizations. As new martech companies continue to crop up to solve niche pain points across the marketing spectrum, I believe we’ll see two trends emerge over the next few years.
- Simplifying and Streamlining: Less Can Equal More – The proliferation of marketing technology solutions has been fueled by an appetite to find an edge in the sea of digital
marketing complexities. However, this expansion has made things a lot more complicated. Marketing teams are drowning in data, feeling confused about what the data means and acting
on limited insights with little or no confidence. I believe this will lead to the streamlining and simplification of work flows through martech solutions, which when you break it
down equates to three main components: Tracking, Measuring and Optimizing campaigns for maximum return on advertising spend (ROAS). Technologies need to easily glean data-driven
insights to achieve desired outcomes and those that don’t will be pruned back as marketing teams strive to more effectively and efficiently achieve their growth goals. - Break Through Walled Gardens: The digital duopoly of Google and Facebook has a dominant hold on digital ad dollars, with a combined U.S. digital ad market share of 56.8 percent according to the Wall Street Journal. At the same
time, overall digital ad spend in the country is likely to grow nearly 19 percent to $107 billion in 2018. This industry landscape will result in a collective awakening of the need
to decouple the analytics from the ad platforms for a higher level of transparency. Digital marketers will continue to demand a higher level of accountability which is only
achievable through a third-party performance measurement and attribution platform. While Facebook and Google will remain key players, marketing teams need easy access to metrics
that are as accurate and fair as possible.
3. What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
We’re going to see advanced marketing analytics – leveraging innovations like machine-learning and multi-touch attribution – really start to take off. Marketing teams increasingly need to validate that advertising investments are truly generating returns, and there’s been a lot of interest in solutions for measuring campaign performance. Last year, eMarketer cited an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group survey that scored interest in “better reporting, measurement and attribution” at more than 73 percent among respondents. But it hasn’t been until recently that the technologies available for measurement and attribution have caught up with demand for accurate, in-depth, cross-channel metrics. We’ll start so see more marketers making decisions based on actual data and intelligence rather than intuition, educated guesses and siloed data.
4. What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
The biggest challenge that CMOs face is the increasingly complex nature of the digital landscape itself. Consumers engage with marketing messages across a vast array of channels and devices, from social media feeds and email offers to display ads, coupons, mobile apps and more. Marketers have more options than ever when it comes to the tactics and strategies they deploy in their campaigns, but this makes it incredibly complex to accurately measure and understand performance. In today’s multi-channel, multi-touch world, silo-based approaches to measurement and “best guess” approaches to attributing the value of each touchpoint are simply not going to cut it. Capturing an integrated view of the consumer’s path to purchase requires technologies capable of navigating this environment, which means being able to identify users across devices and channels, moving away from outdated “last-touch” attribution models that are too simplistic, and ensuring that performance data is analyzed holistically, instead of in channel-specific silos. A failure to do this will result in blind spots and lost revenue where mistakes can be made based on missing, incomplete or inaccurate information.
5. What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Productivity and efficiency are applauded and I often see team members trying to do it all, at the same time. Productivity without impact is busywork. My goal is to move the needle every day. I’ve learned that focus is the key to maximum productivity AND multi-tasking is a myth. For example – at the end of each day I compile my ‘To Do” list for the next day, then rank the tasks by impact. In the morning, I start with the highest priority, big impact item on my list and stay focused on it until its complete. Not surprisingly, the items at the top of my list are often the most difficult, and avoiding them only delays success.
6. How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
There is a fear of AI replacing roles on marketing teams, however I disagree. The optimum use of AI will be a balance between human inference and machine learning working in concert. As AI and machine learning continue to become more sophisticated marketers will be capable of leveraging these advancements to perform tasks (which can take an inordinate amount of time), such as translating data into actionable insights. AI and machine learning will allow team members at all skill levels to achieve better results in a shorter amount of time. So, when asked how to prepare for an AI-centric world I suggest to first imagine how your teams would work together differently and adjust work streams as if the ‘grunt work’ and data crunching were to happen much more quickly with higher quality results, adding capacity to your teams. Then prepare your strategies and tactics accordingly.
7. What is the core marketing technology capability of your firm that you bring to a marketer? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer life cycle?
We empower marketers with the insights that enables more intelligent marketing decisions. This allows teams to focus more of their energy on creative campaign development and execution, and ultimately helps their brand realize the maximum (ROAS). Our flagship solution, Journey by CAKE delivers accurate and granular marketing intelligence across the end-to-end customer journey. This includes a consumer’s first interaction with a marketing touchpoint all the way through to a conversion, whether they download an app, fill out a lead gen form or make a purchase. The enterprise SaaS solution combines multi-touch attribution (MTA), an advanced analytics dashboard and seamless integrations with popular digital media platforms to give marketers a detailed picture of how all the elements of their campaigns are both individually and collectively contributing to the end result. With Journey, users can see which touchpoints are most influential in driving conversions, how various digital marketing channels are working (or not working) together, plus understand the strengths and weaknesses of their campaign strategies.
8. Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?
Recently CAKE launched Connections, our growing ecosystem of alliances with leading digital media and marketing tools that enrich customer journey insights for brands, agencies and publishers.
Journey also enables our online retail customers to better understand the synergies between digital channels, and identify the optimal combination of funnel strategies for attracting and converting qualified prospects. In fact, a leading online retail brand achieved 120% total revenue growth with multi-touch attribution insights of marketing channels and campaigns delivered through Journey. We continue to expand our measurement and attribution platform form online retailers with features including:
- Voucher code support: leverage voucher codes to attribute offline interactions within the customer journey and determine the impact on your overall marketing goals.
- eCommerce integrations: integrate Journey with shopping cart platforms to ensure online retail catalogs are in sync and provide accurate insights into campaign and product performance.
- Powerful consumer insights in real-time: utilize powerful insights from anonymous consumer behavior for personalization and targeting, as well as retargeting efforts.
9. Could you share for our readers, an infographic or description depicting your marketing stack (various marketing software products or platforms your team uses or subscribes to)?
We use our own platform, Journey by CAKE, to get a complete and accurate view of how all our strategies and tactics are working to drive engagement and conversions with our audience. Other solutions in CAKE’s current martech stack include Salesforce, Marketo, Sprout Social, Asana, WordPress, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook and Hootsuite.
10. Can you share a screenshot of the homepage of your smartphone (iOS/Android/other)? It would be interesting to see some of the apps you personally use on a daily basis to get things done and stay on top of your day.
