The Demand Gen Strategy for a $4B+ FinTech Disruptor with Vidya Peters, CMO of Marqeta

This episode features an interview with Vidya Peters, CMO of Marqeta. Vidya is widely recognized as one of the top leaders in Financial Technology, and joined Marqeta in 2019 after previously serving as CMO of MuleSoft, which she helped scale into one of the most successful and fastest growing public enterprise software companies. 

On this episode, Vidya discusses the most important elements of setting your strategy for the year, how to keep up with the rapidly changing MarTech landscape, the key elements of her tech stack that she couldn’t live without, and much more.

Key Takeaways

• The most important part of setting strategy for the year is doing so in close partnership with your sales team. Name the targets that are must-wins for the year and talk openly about the personas that you think would be the most engaged in looking at your solution. 
• As a marketer, you have to bring hard numbers to the discussion. The burden is on you to arm yourself with data and information so you can have the right conversations with your partners.
• Forget everything you learned in school or business school about demand generation. Even the things you may have learned a year or two ago are probably out of date. The space is evolving so quickly that the best way to learn is to talk to your peers in demand gen leadership.

Quotes

• “The reality is when you go out and try to put your strategy to work in the market, you realize that every bullet, sub-bullet, and tiny little word in your plan can take months to execute and actually even longer to execute successfully…there's a very large crevasse between thinking about the answer and actually operationalizing the answer and making it successful.”
• “Sometimes we make this huge mistake of saying, all right, I'm going to go bid on Google AdWords and put up a ton of money and then I'll feed those leads to the sales organization. Then what you often hear back is all of those leads were low quality. What's important is to start with the strategy first and then know that all the channels and all the technologies that you have in your arsenal are in service to that strategy.”
• “Our goal here is to have the closest partnership with sales on the strategy up front, determine the right channels to reach those accounts–whether that's through targeted events, digital channels or a content strategy–and be the domain leader for the keywords and the topics that we care the most about.”
• “I'm a big proponent of really leading with content and thought leadership to earn the right to be able to have a conversation with your prospects. It's less about pushing messages and ads, and more about answering customer questions and being helpful to them and earning the right to speak to them.”
• “You still have to put money in Google AdWords and you still have to own and absolutely dominate the keywords in your category and your space. It’s about shoring up the moat.  If someone were to cut my Google AdWords, I would say we just lost our competitive moat and it can take a long time to earn that back.”
• “Technology is changing so fast in software, and so much is changing so quickly, that marketing has a responsibility to not only keep up with those changes, but to be an educator and a trusted informer to the market, because unless your buyers understand this quickly changing space, they're not going to be equipped to make purchase decisions with the right information.”

Sponsor

Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.