Pipeline Visionaries Metrics: A CMO's Best & Worst Friend with Jay Lee, CMO of Avalara
This episode features an interview with Jay Lee, CMO at Avalara, a leading provider of tax compliance automation software valued at $13B.
Jay is a two-time CMO with more than 20 years of experience developing high-performing marketing teams, and previously held leadership roles at GE, American Express, and PayPal.
In this episode, Jay walks us through the ins and outs of partner marketing, growing site traffic, content strategy, and the key learnings that he and the marketing team at Avalara are reflecting on post-pandemic.
Key Takeaways
- If your company is in a rapidly changing industry, treat your website as an online newspaper. Keep your users up-to-date on what’s changing in your industry so your site is the go-to site.
- Always have backup marketing channels at the ready. You never know when the next curveball will be thrown your way.
- CMOs that don’t have the numbers on their side are in deep trouble. Metrics are your best and worst enemy.
Quotes
“We are always trying to get a sense of what the spend is and then what the return is. In B2B, it's all about what kind of leads you are creating and all the different programs that you have and what kind of pipeline you're generating for sales.”
“A recommendation from a partner, ‘hey, you should use Avalara to manage your tax compliance in our system,’ that's enormous. We do a lot of direct marketing ourselves. But it's always better to have that trusted advisor or a system that you're already using to endorse us because you know that it's going to work and that’s what really matters.”
“COVID happened in March and immediately the whole events industry shut down. That was a whole channel for us. It just went dark. If you're thinking about a multichannel approach to go to market and one of the main ones to your target audience gets shut off — what are you going to do? What we did was we leaned into all the other channels. We put up a bunch of webinars and started to get ourselves into the virtual world.”
“What's so great about marketing versus any other part of the company is it's where you're actually supposed to test a ton of stuff. So there really isn't any bad marketing campaign. Just as long as it doesn't cause any reputational issues or do anything that’s too strange.”
“Marketing should never say this: ‘We tried that and it didn't work.’ Because the world is always different today than it was yesterday. And circumstances have changed. Testing is always a part of the budget that people should make sure that they have.”
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.
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