They had great perspectives on all things Marketing, including:
Our moderator for this week was Robert Gammon, Senior Consultant at Cortado Group and a frequent Co-op contributor.
Praveen Das, Co-Founder & CPO of Factors.ai, is a Product Leader with 10+ years of experience building Data, Analytics, and Segmentation Platforms. He is from the beautiful state of Kerala, India and his hobbies include running, reading non-fiction, and Bollywood movies. At Factors.ai he is focused on building the next generation, AI-powered Marketing Operations platform which enables B2B marketers to drive more revenue and cross-functional alignment.
Srikrishna Swaminathan, Co-Founder & CEO of Factors.ai, is a Business Leader with 10+ years of experience. Had started up & built $ 100 Mn + P&L at InMobi (AdTech platform). At Factors.ai he is focused on bringing together a world-class team to build a disruptive Marketing Operations platform for B2B marketers. He is from Bangalore, India, and outside of work is passionate about quizzing, history, and flying kites.
Howdy Everyone and welcome in! Today were talking with 2 super smart Entrepreneurs Praveen and Srikrishna about:
A quick intro about Factors.AI : Factors.AI empowers B2B Marketing Teams to make sense of their diverse customer data and make smarter, faster decisions. With Factors, Marketers can say goodbye to data aggregation, manual analysis and spreadsheet errors, letting their AI uncover root causes and highlight anomalies for immediate action.
Thanks a lot for the introduction Robert Gammon. Very excited to be here.
Hi Everyone, Excited to be here and look forward to the discussion.
Marketing Attribution is oftentimes looked at as the pinnacle of GTM analytics and so can often be intimidating.
I would say… “We help Marketing Teams at B2B companies reduce the amount of manual effort in doing data analysis and focus more on the exciting work of campaign activation. Analytics is largely seen as a chore, an unpleasant but avoidable step. We help make using data for informing decisions enjoyable and pleasant.”
In one line I would say "Helping Marketers understand their customers and impact of marketing on revenue."
That's simple enough!
RevOps for me is the organization level function to understand levers affecting revenue and forecast.
In my view ‘Operations’ is everything around optimizing existing processes to achieve higher efficiency and alignment, keeping in mind specific metrics.
Revenue Operations is hence the workstream of focused effort to optimize revenue related metrics such as Pipeline, Deals Won, Average Selling Price, Conversion Velocity.
Optimize Optimize Optimize! Such a great way to say that.
So, analytics involves a bunch of critical but irritating issues such as:
Top things that come to my mind include:
Campaign Member Object in Salesforce is more fully developed and easier to analyze in my experience.
In Hubspot to persist campaign member status changes, you might have to add custom fields with timestamps to the best of my knowledge
Sri,Love this question. Analytics tech can get over complicated really quick.
That depends on the stage of the company. Assuming it’s a Series A high-growth firm with a lot of inbound leads, channel marketing and content, I would recommend Clearbit (Deanonymization), Hubspot ( CRM, CMS, Marketing Automation) and a strong analytics product to stitch and visualize the data.
Srikrishna, that seems like a legit framework. Lets see:
1.Channel Marketing tool
2. Something to handle Attribution
3. a CRM
4. Data Visualizer
I see Seb van Heyningen has entered the ring! Happy to see you here, sir!
Seb, I would recommend starting with simple funnels and measuring campaign influence of each campaign against the end outcome. SFDC does this well for offline campaigns.
Moving beyond influence would be questions like which campaigns help convert from Stage 1 to Stage 3, or which campaigns help attract vs close.
The last aspect would be cost efficiencies and bringing in the entire spend / ROI aspect.
Best to look at it as a roadmap with quick wins along the way.
For later stage firms, the tech stack becomes more complicated, with specialist Marketing Automation (Marketo) + CRM (SalesForce) + Chat (Drift/Intercom)+ Data enrichment + Intent Data products + Analytics & Attribution suite. Without a strong Analytics layer, you would end up working with Data Engineering and ETL tools to bring together data and then visualize them on BI. This doubles the cost and maintenance.
The key is the ability to bring in campaign data to website events and leading to CRM & product data. GA doesnt get campaign cost data, SFDC reports are not built for analytics and marketing data. Amplitude/Heap work for product event data.
Most of our current customers are working on a planned analytics roadmap for 6 months with very specific milestones for every month. Depending on the stage of the company this can range from:
Marketing Operations would involve a bunch of work around Campaign Execution, Vendor Management, Analytics and Data Management.
Analytics is important for a Go To Market organization because it could:
We are ALL about ALIGNMENT!
🙂 MarTech is a truly exciting space, as more new subcategories are getting built and we have more data in our hands!!
This basically means a lot of tools, a lot of siloed data and companies trying to figure out how to put all pieces of the puzzle together and drive execution.
THIS^
This is where customer journey analytics, attribution and importantly Marketing Ops/Ops as a strategic function becomes relevant.
As a CEO, I am very excited the macro trends are in favor of analytics. But where I see real winners are when it comes to applied AI and surfacing that up to key decision makers at the right time with context.
AI powered Marketing Operations Platforms will be integral to B2B companies as they grow their digital footprint.
Yes, for AI to be relevant you should be able to bring in the data and stitch it together. That takes a lot of plumbing and difficult data engineering!!
We do the plumbing and have the AI layer on top of it.
Well that brings us to the end of our AMA session with Factors.ai! I want to thank everyone again for joining today and keep your eyes and ears and slack general channels open for more content just like this!
Thank you to all that participated! And thank you to Srikrishna, Praveen, and Robert!
Thanks Erin and Robert!
Thanks a lot for this opportunity Erin, Robert and the RevOps Community. Really enjoyed the session and the questions. The live chat mode also was very refreshing and a cool experience.