Ep #117: Using a 'Pod' Segmentation to Improve Personalization Where it Counts w/ Shawn Ahmed

On this episode of The Marketer’s Journey, I interview Shawn Ahmed, the CMO of CloudBees, a platform which provides the leading DevOps solutions for large and compliance-first organizations. We discuss how Shawn has helped to scale the company from 18 to 60 employees, the concept of using a “pod” when organizing your go-to market strategy, and the need for segmentation at different parts of the sales funnel.

Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer’s Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts!

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Take risks. Shawn mentioned that throughout his career, he’s learned the most by taking big risks, such as moving from a CEO role to come on as CloudBees CMO. He believes that to really understand a business, you need to experience all elements of it rather than pigeonholing yourself to one area or specialty.
• Focus on segmentation. As a marketer, Shawn understands the value of really knowing your audience and what motivates them. This is why he places a strong emphasis on segmentation and identifying different strategies for different parts of the sales funnel.
• Personalization is key. Any good marketing strategy should be tailored to its audience, but Shawn reminds us that this is especially important at the top of the funnel because capturing initial interest is the most difficult aspect of the journey. As you move further down the funnel, personalization is not always as vital.

Learn more about CloudBees here: https://www.cloudbees.com/ 

Learn more about Shawn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnahmed/