Pipeline Visionaries

This episode features an interview with Drew Chapin, CMO at Certinia, a platform that connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting. In this episode, Drew discusses monitoring buying signals and generating the right traffic to your website. He also dives into inheriting a rebrand and some of the nuances of marketing in a private equity owned company. Key Takeaways: Cold calls, cold emails and the days of expecting someone to fill out a form to get content are over. B2B marketers need to stop making friction or blockers.Nothing fails like success. If you just continue to execute what has worked in the past, you're going to miss innovation opportunities. Aspire for a champagne flute funnel over a martini glass funnel. Maybe not as many leads are coming in at the top, but they are higher quality and converting and much higher rates through the funnel. Quote: “85 percent of the time the buyer will go with the first vendor that they contact. So, building that trust with the buyer over time is critically important. And so, you know, in the old days, you put a form in front of every piece of content and we would optimize around the contact information.  And then you'd pass that along to some BDR and they would just be banging their head against the wall, calling people who weren't on the buying committee. They weren't ready to talk to a salesperson, you know, and it just was waste so much waste. And so what we're trying to do now is we're trying to monitor the activity at the target account level and look for buying signals”Episode Timestamps: *(02:51) The Trust Tree: Stretching the dollar in a PE-owned company*(06:28) The Playbook: Generating quality traffic to the website *(24:28) The Dust Up: Proving ROI to the board *(26:59) Quick Hits: Drew’s quit hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/Connect with Drew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapindrew/Learn more about Certinia: https://www.linkedin.com/company/certinia/Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/

This episode features an interview with Niloy Sanyal, CMO at LeanTaaS, a growth-stage company that creates software solutions combining lean principles, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and machine learning to transform hospital and infusion center operations.In this conversation, Niloy and Ian debate the merits of last touch versus multitouch attribution models. They also dive into the potential of AI SDRs and the benefits of ungating the content on your website. Key Takeaways:While reporting last touch attribution may help CMOs establish credibility, there are benefits to thinking in terms of multitouch and how to best determine the next best touch. B2B still has a way to go to fully leverage the capacity of our current LLMs, not to mention the new versions coming out. There is immense opportunity in AI SDRs and BDRs. If you may the CEO fill out a form on your website, you’ve lost them. Ungating content allows high level prospects to consume the information they need. Quote: I am absolutely bullish on the impact of generative AI in the tactic of, to start with BDR and AE sales motions as part of our broader ABM execution. But very soon our comms execution, and every part of the marketing execution. But right now, early days, so I don't want to oversell it. But, the promise of what this can do without any improvement on the LLM. Like we were having this debate last night with another thought leader and I don't need chat GPT 5 to come out. I think 4. 0 or 4 is good enough and it's actually great. We just haven't caught up in a B2B environment to take advantage of it. And what I'm seeing from our early experiments, we've been at it now for three, four months, is absolutely astounding in what it can do. It's not going to replace BDRs. Let's be clear, you're in the Bay Area. If you  drive from, you know, Peninsula to the city, I almost feel half the billboards these days are on like AI-automated SDR, BDR type of a thing. Not in my space. It's not going to automate that any, replace rather, but it can supercharge. Those individuals and it can supercharge. So I'm very excited about where we are. Episode Timestamps: *(04:00) The Trust Tree: Last Touch Versus Multi-Touch*(30:07) The Playbook: The Potential of Gen AI SDRs and BDRs*(44:05) Quick Hits: Niloy’s Quick HitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/Connect with Niloy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niloysanyal/Learn more about LeanTaaS: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leantaas/Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/

This episode features an interview with Melton Littlepage, the CMO at 1Password, a password manager trusted by businesses and consumers alike. In this episode, Melton shares his thoughts on building big bets into your budget and how the lightning strike strategy can increase awareness, even on a limited budget. He also talks about how he’s structured his team to create harmony with sales and the importance of focusing on expansion marketing. Key Takeaways:The lightning strike strategy, spending a large portion of your marketing budget on a message over a number of weeks, can increase awareness better than spreading your budget evenly across the  year. CMOs can be very focused on acquisition, but they should not forget to focus on expansion marketing and the value they can generate there. One-on-one sales and marketing partnerships can help ensure both teams are on the same page and operating in harmony.Quote:  I'm a huge believer in lightning strikes. Lightning strikes are so important to us. If you're not familiar with the lightning strike concept in marketing, it's when you align the entire business, everything about the business where you could possibly project the message into the market, the website, all digital marketing, organic, social, paid social, the sales behavior, your presence at an event, everything in this tiny period of time says one thing. And you say it in deafeningly loud. You deploy 25 or 30 or 40 percent of your marketing budget into a window of time that could be just one or two weeks. And you absolutely blast your way into awareness inside your target buyer audience. This goes against the nature of the CMO, right? The CMO, like we all have these spreadsheets of targets where I need to deliver exactly this many MQLs consistently month in and month out with a little bit of seasonality built in and I can't afford variability. Like I definitely can't miss a month. And I don't know if a lightning strike is going to move the needle and so I peanut butter spread my budget evenly. But the problem is unless you have a massive budget, and most of us don't have a massive budget, then you're constantly below the visible line. You're just relegating yourself to being below the visible line.”Episode Timestamps: *(06:52) The Trust Tree: Leveraging solution marketing as you move to enterprise selling *(23:05) The Playbook: Lightning strikes and increasing awareness *47:00) The Dust Up: Navigating CEO-decisions *(49:00) Quick Hits: Melton’s Quick HitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Melton on LinkedInLearn more about 1passwordLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Alex Saric, CMO at Ivalua, a company that empowers businesses to effectively manage all categories of spend and all suppliers, increasing profitability, improving ESG performance, lowering risk, and improving employee productivity. In this conversation, Alex shares his insights into pitching to and engaging with analysts, and how Ivalua has lead in reports since he joined the organization. He also dives into the ways he supports his team in building a dynamic website and when events with significant impact aren’t measurable in terms of ROI. Key Takeaways:There is a strategy to sharing your value with analysts in order to lead in their reports. Sharing strategically chosen customer stories and assessing what influences each analyst can go a long way. In addition to the basics of creating a great website and tracking traffic, you need to create a dynamic website. Empowering your team to make minor changes and request major changes can allow you to adjust quickly and improve your website strategy. There is a tendency to focus on fixing problems, but don’t forget to also assess how to improve and scale what is working well. Quote:  Yes, I'll say when I joined,  we at the time were not a leader in almost any of these reports that were out there. I think we had broken into one. In the  7 years, and knock on wood, I don't want to jinx myself, we've been the leader in every single report from Gartner and Forrester since then. And I'd say, you know, what I really did, it was probably one of my first priorities, given how important it is in our industry, I reached out to the analysts, started meeting one-on-one with the key analysts there. And of course, you know, I'm going to tell them my pitch,  but they're smart enough to know take it with a grain of salt. I think the important thing is to start introducing them to customers because that's where you get a lot of credibility, if the customers back up what you're saying. And you can be very strategic. So, you know, I was very careful in, the competitor that was kind of the top competitor at the time, making sure I introduced the analyst to customers that had switched from that competitor, which would privately both talk about us, but also kind of badmouth,  their past vendor and that really helped kind of flip the switch and start building credibility what I was saying was actually true. And also improving the rankings. And besides the rankings, they're also influencing a lot of deals behind the scenes and I think they start recommending us a lot more after that. Episode Timestamps: *(03:27) The Trust Tree: Structuring the team to tap into regional expertise *(09:27) The Playbook: Engaging with analysts and leading in reports *(33:34) The Dust Up: Healthy tension with other functions*(34:42) Quick Hits: Alex’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsaric/Learn more about Ivalua: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ivalua/about/Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/

This episode features an interview with Liz Carter, CMO at Reputation, a company helping brands understand and improve their reputations. In this conversation, Liz discusses the differences between brand and reputation and the current challenges of building trust with today’s consumers. She also shares her thoughts on experimentation within tight budgets.Key Takeaways:Brand is not synonymous with reputation, Your brand is who you aspire to be, while your reputation reflects how consumers perceive you based on their experiences. Bridging the gap is essential for success.When budgets are tight, think about how you can do small experiments and how you can best leverage them, but keep experimenting.With AI and misinformation, it is a challenging time to to build consumer trust in the marketplace, and brands should be paying special attention to how they are perceived by target audiences.Quote: In an environment where budgets are getting cut and things are being tightened or whatever, you know, you have to think about like, is now a time for experimenting with big dollars or is it time for little experiments and what can you get out of that? And so, I mean, again, it's a balancing act of knowing sort of what's happening in the market or in your business specifically at a given time and how and when to sort of look for those opportunities.Episode Timestamps: *(08:17) The Trust Tree: The difference between brand and reputation *(14:07) The Playbook: Bringing crazy ideas to your CFO *(34:41) The Dust Up: Alignment and clear expectations *(35:57) Quick Hits: Liz’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/Connect with Liz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-carter-a9842a2/Learn more about Reputation: https://www.linkedin.com/company/reputation-com/about/Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/

This episode features an interview with Calen Holbrooks, VP of Demand Gen at Airtable, the no-code app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. In this episode, Calen shares with us how she thinks about “big C and little c community” and why it is important to invest in, even when it is harder to measure. She also dives into her approach to accessible content and how they increased their conversion rates through a homepage refresh.Key Takeaways:We know that people are consuming content in a binge-like format; we should let them binge! While sales’ desire to gate content is understandable, ungating is a no-brainer, especially given all of the data we have now. Investing in community pays dividends and drives intent. While some community investments are more measurable than others, it doesn’t mean you should not invest in those less-measurable communities. The homepage is crucial, and refreshing it to tweak the way Airtable told their story resulted in a 25 percent conversion increase. Quote: “ I'm surprised at how  slow organizations have been to adopt some of this, ungate 80 percent of what you're doing strategy. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, like, I get it. The processes with marketing to BDR to sales handoffs require a lot of this sort of traditional lead flow of things. Not to point fingers, but I do blame a little bit on the sales side and sort of  what they need to be why we can't do that. But it seems like a no-brainer when we have the amount of data that we have today… When we know everybody is scrolling and consuming content in a binge-like format, like, let them binge!”Episode Timestamps: *(03:53) The Trust Tree: The evolution to enterprise selling *(21:26) The Playbook: Investing in community and tracking account propensity *(34:23) The Dust Up: Demand gen versus brand araguments *(41:42) Quick Hits: Calen’s Quick HitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Calen on LinkedInLearn more about AirtableLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Lyndsey Rojas, CMO at IFS Ultimo, a SaaS enterprise asset management solution, focused on maintenance & safety and well known for a rapid deployment, ease of use and an unparalleled time to value. In this episode, Lyndsey dives into leveraging partner marketing to move from a regional to a global player and making sure communication is transparent to maintain 98 percent customer retention. Key Takeaways:Investing in your team, particularly with all the rapid changes in tech and AI, is uncuttable. It’s essential to equip your team to use new technologies and to be strong storytellers.Transparency through the full buyer's journey helps reduce friction in the customer experience by setting accurate expectations, ultimately resulting in high customer retention.Partnerships are especially valuable during times of budget constraints because it allows you to do more with less and helps companies move from regional players to global brands.Quote: Search, paid search and social, they keep changing the game on us. The algorithm changes, cookie lists, all these things keep changing. It keeps us on our toes, and it is like a game you play. You know, you think, oh, I'll pull this lever, and maybe the cost-per-click will go down. And,  it's not something that you can figure out one time and be okay with it.  But, for us, like most B2B tech companies I think, it is the number one traffic generator for our website. It is the top two lead generator for us. So, it is something that we absolutely have to stay on topEpisode Timestamps: *(02:35) The Trust Tree: Authentic communications and creating efficiency for customers *(12:55) The Playbook: Doing more with less through partnerships *(32:40) The Dust  Up: Setting objectives with sales *(33:45) Quick Hits: Lyndsey’s Quick Hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Lyndsey on LinkedInLearn more about IFS Ultimo Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Louise Clements, CMO at WorkJam, the world leader in the digital frontline workplace, revolutionizing how HQs and their frontline workforces work together.In this episode, Louise discusses why she is no longer looking at attribution and is instead focusing on intent. She also dives into how she is using AI to automate and improve their marketing efforts and managing joint ownership of the funnel with sales. Key Takeaways:AI makes marketing better by giving the team more time to reflect and think. CMOs should be investing in automation. Marketing is increasingly owning go-to-market and jointly owning the funnel with sales. This is a bit of an evolution, and it allows you to focus on influence over attribution. Obsessing over first and last touch attribution is not useful. CMOs should focus on driving intent. Quote: “One thing that we've done is we've sort of stopped worrying about first touch and last touch attribution. I don't care. Is it ultimately working? You can drive yourself insane, worrying about specifics. Instead, it's looking at how all of those channels connect. And I think one of the greatest things in the last couple of years is, we’ve got these fabulous new tools. As B2B marketers, whether you use Sixth Sense or Demandbase or whatever, you can go in and understand intent in a way that we never could. So ,what I'm looking at is, are we driving intent? And then, let's time box that campaign and everybody who came in or who we touched. I want to understand what's the time lag? Are they going to come back? And I'm looking at things like that way more.”Episode Timestamps: *(03:41) The Trust Tree: The power of investing in PR *(15:28) The Playbook: Focus on driving intent *(41:05) The Dust Up: Agencies and fighting over scope*(42:30) Quick Hits: Louise’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Louise on LinkedInLearn more about WorkJamLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Millie Hogue, VP of Marketing at Hakkōda, a modern data consultancy that helps companies harness cloud platforms and AI capabilities.In this episode, Millie discusses the power of co-marketing with major partners like Snowflake, personalized one-to-one advertising strategies and optimizing tech stacks to maximize ROI.Key Takeaways:Marketers are wasting an extraordinary amount of budget on unused tech spend. Part of a CMO’s strategy should include making sure they are optimizing on their investments in tech. If you want to partner with big organizations like Amazon and Snowflake, building a reputation for quality and reliability can help you compete for their attention and become a go-to partner for execution.Shift from the mindset of optimizing for productivity, and optimize for impact. Quote: “I was reading an article the other day about marketing budgets and where everyone's allocating and how all of that is shifting. And marketing technology was the big thing that kind of kept coming up. And the takeaway from that was that right now, if you ask CMOs, they had a whole survey for 2024 Q1, about 50 percent of our tech stack is actually being utilized right now. So, of our technology investments, half, and that was so striking to me as someone who works in a data and technology space and knowing where this kind of industry is headed. There is no way that marketing is going to continue to exist if we have that much inefficiency in our technology spend. So, I think when I'm looking at strategy, not just for my next two quarters, but for my next three years, that's a huge piece of it. How do you invest in the right tooling and make sure that it's actually being adopted by your team? Because it looks a lot like we're kind of failing as an industry at that right now.”Episode Timestamps: *(02:53) The Trust Tree: The power of comarketing*(21:39) The Playbook: Deanonimizing website traffic, intent data and personalized marketing *(41:38) The Dust Up: Marketing and sales should not be fighting over attribution*(43:40) Quick Hits: Millie’s quick hits  Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Millie on LinkedInLearn more about HakkōdaLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Susanne Rodriguez, CMO at Auvik, a cloud-based IT management platform that reduces friction and increases agility.In this episode, Susanne talks about how they think about growing market share by getting customers to switch to Auvik and their big investments in community. She also discusses the future of paid search and why they are focused on authentic forums like Reddit. Key Takeaways:Despite the “paid search is dying” narrative, paid search remains a high ROI channel. Continue leveraging search but prepare for shifts by building a presence in other forums like Reddit and focusing on authentic community building.Campaigns focused on switching customers over from competitors can be part of a strategy to gain market share. Categorizing potential customers into "easy switchers," "difficult switchers," and "non-switchers” can help target campaigns.Auvik saw success with their rapid response campaigns, partially because they so specifically catered the reward to their target customer, which attracted qualified prospects and encouraged meaningful product engagement.Quote: “  I mentioned Reddit as part of a, one of our three paid channels that are uncuttable, but we also have a really large effort to build awareness and conversation and community in Reddit more organically. And that's just because, as we talk about the future of search and search disappearing, if we think about where Google could potentially drive people, it's to these forums like Reddit. And so we're working hard to build our presence there organically, too. Reddit's tricky, though. You have to be authentic on Reddit in a way that you don't have to be on any other platform. They will call you up.”Episode Timestamps: *(02:26) The Trust Tree: Getting customers to switch from competitors *(10:14) The Playbook: Paid search and authentic forums *(27:34) The Dust Up: Get aligned and come armed with data *(29:38) Quick Hits: Susanne’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Susanne on LinkedInLearn more about AuvikLearn more about Caspian Studios