Scott Brinker on Marketing Technology , Automation and B2B Marketing

 

Introduction

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Welcome to the podcast with Scott Brinker. He is with HubSpot. Over to you, Scott, could you just please take a minute and help our audience understand about your work and the industry that you’re in? And what excites you about your work in the industry?

 

Scott

Yes, thank you so much for having me. So I kind of wear two hats in the industry. I am the Vice President of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, where I help HubSpot do a better job of integrating with hundreds, on our way to 1000s of other apps, you know, throughout the business tech stack, so I get to work with a lot of great startups, you know, bringing their products to market and go to market in our ecosystem. And then the other hat I wear is for Oh, my goodness, more than a decade now. I’ve been writing the chief Mar tech blog, I was the founding chair of the MAR tech conference, just really focused on yeah, there’s this collision between the world of IT and software and technology, you know, and marketing. But yeah, has just gone through an incredible transformation here over the past 10 years.

 

Scott’s take on the evolution of the industry

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Cool. So that takes me to our first question, Scott, like in the world of marketing technology, what is your take on the evolution of this industry? Especially let’s say the last decade. And your observation on how is it fulfilling its potential?

 

Scott

Yeah, it has been an incredible ride here for the past 10 years. So I almost think they were kind of two waves of marketing technology. So the first one, really, from around 2010 to maybe 2017 or so, was this first explosion, we went from having a, you know, a few 100 marketing technology solutions in the market, to having literally 1000s of marketing technology solutions on the market. But to be honest, a lot of them, I’ll say they were trying to basically run the more classic enterprise software playbook, which, you know, was a good strategy. You know, certainly a lot of the larger companies who were looking to, you know, tap into digital marketing capabilities had the resources to invest in it. You know, and so you had a lot of successful companies. But the experience of the software and the experience of the sales process was still kind of classic enterprise software, just like Cloud, versus I feel like the second wave we really started to see particularly over the past 2, 3, 4 years, has been almost more of a, you know, while the whole notion of like product led growth, you know, has certainly applied in Mar tech and sales tech as much as any other category. The phrase consumer grade user experience, you know, has really gets tied in with product led growth. If you don’t have a great user experience for your product, you know, it’s hard for the product to win people over on its own. But yeah, we’ve just seen incredible improvements in PLG. And, you know, consumer grade UX in the mar tech space in these past few years. And I think that’s been phenomenal, too, because in many ways, that is democratizing a lot of the innovation in these marketing technology solutions to just make them more accessible to more companies and you know, more professionals.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Exactly. So what are the areas, especially in this marketing technology that you feel, have really helped the industry evolve faster?

 

Scott

have or haven’t? 

 

Nirmaan Agarwal 

Have 

 

Scott

Have. Okay, yes. Because haven’t is an interesting question, too. Do you know, I mean, I think part of it is, it’s a combination of supply and demand, you know, so on the supply side, all the economics of bringing software to market in the cloud, have just radically transformed what we think of as the software industry. I mean, now, you know, I mean, leveraging, you know, cloud infrastructure from, you know, Amazon and Google and Alibaba and whatnot. I mean, open-source software, you know, all these incredible API services that are available, is yeah, it’s just incredibly easy now for someone with an idea, you know, to be able to bring new software to market. And so this is part of what is fed this in just incredible explosion in the supply of marketing technology today. But of course, you know, supply is only one half of the equation, you know, the other side is demand. And really what it comes down to is companies are now competing in the digital domain, that is where the competition is happening to win customers, to engage customers, to delight customers. I mean, the craziness of the past couple years here with the pandemic, certainly accelerated the heck out of that, you know, but basically, because everyone is now competing in the digital domain, marketers are incredibly hungry, you know, for any sort of capability they can get that will give them a competitive edge. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of innovation, there’s a lot of opportunity for competitive edge there. You know, and so what you’ve got there is incredibly strong demand, you know, from the market for innovative solutions, and so that combination of, you know, a flood of supply, you know, and still like really strong demand, you know, meeting it. Yeah, just like in twined, together to deliver incredible growth to this industry in the past five to 10 years.

 

Companies figuring out how to make marketing work for them in the digital world

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

That leads me to the next question. Like, have companies actually figured out how to make marketing work for them in the digital world fully? Like, also, are there areas where you feel marketing technology could be applied better?

 

Scott

Yes. You know, so I mean, it’s a distribution curve. You know, and there are some companies at the top of the curve, who are phenomenal at this, right? I mean, they’re leveraging digital marketing, you know, digital sales as a way to really win. You know, but then there’s this other distribution of companies that are at different stages in their journey. I wouldn’t say most companies still have quite a ways to go. I mean, these are net new skills, these are net new capabilities. Change is hard. You know, getting the right talent, developing the talent is hard. And so I think, yeah, we’ve still got quite a ways to go. And it doesn’t help or I guess, maybe it does help if you really lean into this, but the field is not static, right? Like, the expectations of what you needed to do to be successful in digital marketing last year, are slightly different this year, you know, this space continues to evolve very rapidly through, you know, I mean, you know, changes in the environment around compliance, you know, things like the third party cookie kerfuffle and how that’s, you know, changing the whole mar-tech, ad tech landscape? You know, fact of new channels. I mean, you know, there’s all this discussion lately about, you know, the metaverse, depending on who you ask what that means. But right, you know, at some way, like, these are new channels, new experiences, that marketers are going to have to find a way to engage with, you know, for their audiences. And so it’s like, you just if you’re in marketing today, you are just in a state of constant learning and experimentation, the industry is just not standing still.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

Thanks for your insights. So how should you suggest marketing technology, we strategize and adopted inside a company, like let’s assume a startup, which is like two years old, right? Still, just figuring out its feed has got a certain GTM in the market? It’s figured out okay, this is what is working digitally for them in terms of marketing, has not probably figured out everything in terms of the channels online. But so how do they strategize their marketing technology stack or the entire strategy around marketing technology?

 

Scott

Yeah, that’s a great question. Because I think there’s kind of two angles you take to that. And it’s kind of finding the balance between them. You know, so one level is the actual capabilities, you know, and this is very much typically what a marketing operations marketing technology leader inside the marketing organization is responsible for is making sure you know, that the underlying infrastructure, you know, stack that we have the capabilities, the way they’re configured and put together, you know, that you now have this set of powers, you know, in place for how well the marketing department, you know, can find engaging delight customers. But that has to be paired with the actual marketing strategy itself, you know, like, it’s how we leverage this infrastructure and these capabilities, you know, creatively, you know, with the empathy and understanding like Okay, what makes our company unique? What’s our, you know, position with our audience? You know, really applying these technologies, you know, in creative and strategically smart ways. You know, at the end of the day, that’s really what has the ultimate impact on, you know, are people successful with our marketing technology stack? And so yeah, I definitely feel like it takes a village, it needs both, you know, the head of marketing, tech and marketing ops to be, you know, building the right infrastructure, but it requires the people who are leading, you know, the campaigns or the demand gen, or the customer experience side, you know, to really have a clear vision of what do they want to deliver to the customer, what do they feel is the winning way to reach and engage people in this digital domain. And that has to be a partnership.

 

About rev ops

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

So at this point, do you suggest our audience look at Rev ops, I think, in one of your sessions you have spent some time on the Rev ops. So is that approach good for startups?

 

Scott

Yes, I mean, I think one of the things is like in the industry, you know, we get carried away with our terminology here. And so if you’re just getting started is a, you know, a small startup-like, you know, I mean, boy, you’ve got your hands full, you’re probably not going to have a dedicated marketing ops person, much less of a, you know, dedicated sales ops and Customer Success ops, and then get them all rolling up to Rev Ops, you know, better you have to grow a bit into these. But that being said, if we stop for a moment, and not worry so much about the labels, and we say, in the digital domain, the speed by which customers move across marketing, sales, and customer service, touchpoints, is incredibly fast and fluid, you know, and so I think, you know, the concept of RevOps is to say, Listen, these activities, and these systems, and the data that we have in place cannot be siloed, separate in marketing, separate in sales, separate in customer service, we really do need these pieces to fit together into a bigger picture of how we see the end to end customer journey.

 

How do we make sure there’s continuity to that? You know, how do we make sure that all the teams are aligned in the proper ways and how they’re been delivering that collective experience. And that’s really, you know, to me, one of the big missions of the RevOps concept, you know, is to provide that connective tissue, you know, across all of the customer-facing customer touching pieces of the digital business. And so even if you don’t have an official rev ops team, as a startup, I would highly recommend, like thinking about how you structure the capabilities being built there with a Rev ops mindset.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

I think personally, I’m fascinated by the concept because in my company, we’re trying to do a lot of automation and begin our journey in automation. And RevOps as a concept made a lot of sense to me when I wanted to look at marketing technology, marketing strategy and overall organization. So definitely, I think startups should look at DevOps in the way you have defined it. Coming to thought on marketing automation, right, like startups, in their journeys, are adopting marketing automation, much more than let’s say, five years ago, 10 years ago, like, we as an organization are also trying to do a lot of automation, not just in marketing, but also in other processes. So I read about this thing called Big ops, they have defined it. And it resonated with me, probably does resonate with a lot of companies of varying sizes. So my question is, how do you suggest companies get their automation journeys right? Okay. Like, how should they get this culture, strategy right, in adopting automation in the right way?

 

Scott

Yeah, wow, this is a fun topic. Yeah, I kind of feel like, you know, there’s been so much emphasis on everyone going digital about the customer experience, which is great, right? I mean, that’s, it’s important to get the digital customer experience, right. But there’s been less recognition of actually how much the digital realisation of internal process and operations is actually having as much if not even more of an impact on how businesses actually work. You know, and why You know, I mean, the phrase big Ops is sort of this recognition that, you know, you’ve now seen these digital ops teams popping up all over the company, you know, it’s data ops, and marketing ops and business ops and legal ops, it’s, you know, it’s crazy. It’s awesome that you have these things moving in this direction, but what seems to be missing right now is a recognition of how to connect these different pieces together, and to provide some overarching standardization and some governance, you know, so that you don’t end up with, you know, like, in the days of big data, right, it all the concern was, like, you know, this fragmentation and siloization of data, we’re getting much better now at, you know, unifying data into, you know, common data warehouses and things like that. It’s kind of like, now we’ve got that same challenge. But at the ops levels, we’ve got this siloization, and this fragmentation of different kinds of automation happening all throughout the company, you know, but there’s not a lot of like visibility, you know, at the at the higher level of like, okay, well, where are the handoffs between these things? And how do we make sure that automations aren’t getting orphan there that is there’s some sort of, you know, problem, like, if there’s an exception that happens with a particular automation, you know, how responsive, you know, is the company able to be even realizing that and take action to correct that. And so I think, first and foremost, is just a matter of like, recognizing how big of a deal this is, and making sure that the teams involved really investing in that. But I think you also want to start to look at like, Okay, how do we, how do we aggregate some of these capabilities, you know, aggregate around the, you know, like automation for, you know, the customer touchpoints aggregate around an automation platform for DevOps, aggregate around, you know, an automation platform for perhaps all of the other business operations, partly so that, yeah, I mean, you know, keep your SAAS spin, managed, partly so you have, you know, some standardization and what, you know, people learn how to do across a company to get some economies of scale. But as much for anything, just to make sure that we’re starting to provide visibility to how the automated firm actually runs. So yeah, I think this is gonna be big, it’s a huge opportunity, you know, for startups who are addressing this space, just because, yeah, it’s so new. And there’s just so much work to be done to figure out how do we do this well, yeah.

 

Automation strategy for startups

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

So let’s start a founder. I’m one, I’m a startup founder as well. Do I think of an automation strategy from top to bottom? Or, like, from bottom to top? What I mean is, let’s say, do I figure out, like the individual automation, individual process automation, inside respective teams? Or do I first define that this is what automation needs to achieve for this company, and then drill it down and see where it takes me?

 

Scott

Yeah, I actually think it’s a mix of both, I think from the top down, you want to have some standardization on platforms, and you want to have a good governance framework, you know, so that when automations get put in place, you really, you know, that they have that visibility that they have, the SLA is that there’s ownership associated with them. So things don’t, you know, suffer from entropy or get lost somehow. You know, so I think you want that top down framework and governance, but the actual implementation of automation, I think it’s fantastic for that to be much more of a bottoms up lead activity, because it’s really the people in these individual teams and the folks on the front line of you know, both our back office technical processes and our you know, Front Office customer experience, but they actually understand the jobs to be done, I actually understand you know, where the connection points need to be made. And I think if you’re able to empower them, you know, that many of these now low code and no code automation, platform support. Yeah, you can go and get the best of both worlds of all that sort of creativity and on the ground knowledge of, you know, what really needs to be automated, but at the same time, provide a bit of a top down governance structure. So it isn’t like total chaos.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Yes. And organizations tend to grow very fast, right, let’s say automation is growing so fast. So let’s say if you define it bottom-up, and you’re growing fast, I want to visualize how a top-down view should still be maintained, such that there is not a lot of chaos, which cannot be managed later on.

 

Scott

Exactly, I think, you know, and again, it doesn’t have to be a super-strong hand. You know, top-down I think, you know, again, this is part of the power of, you know, distributed workforces, you know, the democratization of technology with no code low code capabilities is The bottom-up is an incredible source of power that you want to be able to tap into. But you do want that top-down standardization on saying, okay, here are the minimum requirements, so that any given automation, you know, needs to have, you know, inside a business, it needs to have an owner, you know, it needs to have some sort of, like, audibility. So that we know, did it work? Did it not work? you know, it needs to Yeah, you know, be visible, you know, in some sort of, you know, higher-level framework so that if somebody leaves or you know, somebody changes jobs, or, you know, whatever it is that this automation don’t end up orphaned, you know, and sort of like zombie automatons that can cause all sorts of havoc for us. So I think you, you want to be really clear about like establishing the rules and the guardrails for that. But inside those rules and guardrails, I say, Yes, by all means, let the creativity flourish.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

So we have the case study to recommend to the audience that say, something, some company that you suggest we study, who has done this well, like both the bottom up approach and the top-down simultaneously.

 

Scott

Oh, wow. I mean, just a ton of companies have done it. I have to be careful on the spur of the moment that I don’t give away one that I’m under confidentiality with, but I guess I would suggest, like, if you can go to like a product like workato, you know, and you look at some of the case studies of, yeah, the companies are leveraging a tool like that. I mean, we’re kind of to be is one of those, you know, providers that’s thought a lot about the both top down governance structure, you know, and the sort of bottom up democratization of the tool. And so you see, they have a number of their customers that, yeah, they don’t just use workato, in some sort of isolated department, but they’ve actually found ways to adopt it across the organization as a broader automation framework.

 

Current trends

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Okay, thanks for the insight. So, let’s say with the pandemic, I think digital marketing has changed considerably. taken a lot of turns, still figuring out what turns it has taken, perhaps. And a lot of businesses would have taken to digital marketing for the first time and tried understanding the passages there. So what has worked really well, for companies in digital marketing in the last 18 months, like currently?

 

Scott

Oh, that’s a great question. Well, I think, first of all, web experience cannot be under estimated. You know, I mean, like, yes, you know, the idea of the company, web presence is the, you know, 25 years old here at this point. So it’s sometimes easy to say, Oh, well, that isn’t really the sexy thing. But the truth is, like, it’s our website that, you know, so many prospects and customers use as their primary digital touch point to us. And so you still today can go around from website to website. And some of them are great. A lot of them aren’t that great. Some of them are downright, like awful, like, they don’t provide the right content, or they’re just hard to navigate or any sort of app like functionality, you know, just kind of weird and wacky. And so I would say yes, before anything else, like get that web experience, right, you know, make sure you know, it’s, you know, mobile optimized, you know, I mean, this ties into all the strategies you probably want to be doing with search engine optimization and content marketing. And, you know, increasingly now is we’re in the space where there’s more and more digital commerce happening, even in b2b. You know, this is again, like as the majority of that conduit is now coming through these web touchpoints. Yeah, just make sure you’re investing getting that experience, right.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Yes. So just trying to go deeper into this part. Let’s take an example of an industry that I think perhaps has explored it a lot more than earlier. Already, it was happening well, but I think it definitely exploded it as a part of this is D2C, direct to consumer, right? So ecommerce was already there, we had Amazon and other companies, right. But then due to great marketing technology of all kinds of better distribution capabilities. Most of the touch points that a customer has gone digital. Right. And has that really changed marketing a lot more like the advent of let’s say, the industry called DTC?

 

Scott 

Yeah, and I think you’ve picked up a fantastic example. You know, DTC is Yeah, I mean, really, this is where the revolution has been happening in, you know, creating a whole bunch of digital First businesses that aren’t about a digital product, they’re about a real world, you know, product or service. But the entire engagement around it, you know, is both finding and attracting customers, but then actually engaging and serving them through entirely digital channels. And so yeah, there’s just, you know, if you want to learn how to do the very best things, you look at the companies, the very, you know, evolving the fastest. And I think DTC companies are a great example that, I think one of the things with DTC companies, that’s pretty exciting is, you know, we mentioned in passing earlier, you know, this kerfuffle, around third party cookies going away, you know, the degree to which that’s gonna impact, you know, advertising, digital advertising, there’s lots of debate about how big are not big the actual impact will be. But, you know, let’s assume for a moment that, yes, the advertising world is going through some churn. Most of these DTC companies really thrive, because they’ve invested so much in direct relationships with those customers. You know, in fact, that whole bunch of it’s actually happening through email. I mean, again, email is one of these channels that, you know, I mean, it’s been around from the beginning, you know, it’s like, we’re the oldest channel, you know, in digital marketing, arguably, you know, but it’s still to this day, there are companies that do a really good job of, you know, both the quality of what they’re delivering the way in which they figured out how to personalize getting the right, you know, emails at the right cadence to, you know, the right segments, you know, to really then fulfill the promises when people are engaged with those emails, what happens next, when they take a click, you know, that whole post click marketing or post click commerce experience? Yeah. So I mean, it again, almost goes back to yes, there’s some really innovative technology here too. But a lot of it comes down to just the actual execution and strategy of a great experience.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Yes, and I think industry has certainly evolved to take ownership of newer channels, let’s say, video commerce, I think DTC startups are also experimenting highly with newest, newer customer, reachout channels. I think video commerce has done really phenomenally well across the world, especially in my part of the world.

 

Scott

Yes, I would agree with that. You know, and I mean, again, this is kind of the thing that, you know, when we were talking about the big ops side, this ties into it, because very often, yeah, the way you’re winning in digital marketing is because of this rapid agility, for experimenting with new ideas, you can try a whole bunch of new ideas, you can try them quickly, you can try them cheaply, you know, most of the new ideas you try out, don’t quite work out, but then you keep trying more. And then of course, you find the ones that are the winners. And then when you find a winner, you’re very quickly able to scale it, you know, expanded as much as it’s actually capable of loading. You know, and so you think about like, yes, okay, from a strategic perspective, that makes sense. But to actually be able to deliver on that, right, you need to have your internal operations be able to adapt and move at that sort of speed. And that’s really where the behind the scenes backstage, you know, digital capabilities and the management mindset, you know, supporting that really needs to embrace the agility too

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

and is it easier with smaller companies than with enterprises?

 

Scott

Oh, absolutely. Yes. It’s the perennial advantage that startups always have, you know, is their ability to just stay coordinated to stay agile, to yeah, I mean, you know, the risk of, you know, for startups is never the status quo. Startups are disrupting the status quo. So yeah, they definitely lean into it. And that is always the advantage of the startup take as much leverage of that as you can,

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

especially if, let’s say the ability and the culture to experiment is good. And if that means that’s funding, that’s like a very nice combination to take on any status quo.

 

Scott

Yes, yeah. Completely.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Yes. Nice. So this, this whole conversation around meta, since a few weeks, I suppose Facebook, started talking about it. How do you think the world of marketing is going to change?

 

Scott

Yeah, it’s a great question. Um,

 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

 and by this, I mean, I’m just asking you to be imaginative. I mean, there’s no right or wrong answer

Scott here.

Yeah, no. Well, I mean, because part of what I would say is the two things that immediately come to mind is, first of all, I have no idea What is gonna actually like, but the second is, I’m 100% certain that it’s going to be new and different than what we have today. I mean, this is the state of, you know, marketing is just the environment is changing rapidly, and you have to be prepared to experiment and learn and adapt. But I think it’s Wow, to me, it’s so exciting, because if I let my imagination run, it’s this idea that an increasingly AR VR experience is just going to be so much richer, you know, and everything from, you know, I don’t know, like, pick, just, you know, one thing, so let’s say something context of, you know, b2b, and, you know, it’s the top of the funnel for engaging that prospect, you know, so once upon a time, the way in which that happened was, you know, physically in person and things like trade shows, or people doing sales calls, you know, field staff, we’d like, you know, flying to different cities. And then in this past couple years, with the pandemic, one of the things we realized is, oh, well, hey, my goodness, actually, we don’t need to get on an airplane and fly to all these places, we can do a lot of this, you know, through digital channels, it’s more efficient, you know, for us, it’s more efficient for the customer. But, we kind of realize, yes, there are all these benefits that, you know, happened from taking, you know, more digital only or, you know, approach to that, but something was lost, right? I mean, just the richness of the experience, you know, and what it looks like sitting through Zoom meeting is just not the same. You know, and I think the thing about the whole Metaverse and VR and AR is not that I think I’ll ever replace, you know, some of the dynamics of in person. But I think if you look at there being a continuum with like a Zoom meeting on one end, and the real life engagement at a restaurant, you know, as another, you know, the AR and VR experiences that are going to be developed here over the next five years, I think are going to give us a lot more flexibility in between those two extremes. And I think that’s going to be an incredible heyday for a marketing and sales and customer service.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Interesting, and what use cases you think that it will take to first like, let’s imagine, do you think it will be more about experiencing technology involves experiencing I mean, getting different experiences, and then translating those experiences onto let’s say, digital platforms?

 

Scott

Yeah, you know, if history is any judge, you know, the biggest advances in technology are not those that are trying to replicate something from a previous Yeah, channel and say, like, oh, well, this is what worked in television. So let’s move this to the internet. You know, like, if that’s all that YouTube had become was, you know, like, Yeah, well, this is just a larger set of television channels, you know, that everything would have been fine. But you know, nothing like the explosion that happened where Wait a second, given the dynamics of how this works like, there doesn’t have to be this constraint of who can be a creator. I mean, you know, what makes YouTube actually work is essentially infinite creators, the entire creator economy, and that, like, changed the entire trajectory, you know, the entertainment industry with us. And so I kind of feels like the same thing is like, yeah, we’ll probably start of trying to take things like, you know, conference meetings and trade shows and stuff like that, and, you know, create virtual versions of it. And I think that’ll be interesting. But if I had to bet money, I bet there’s going to be like, some native kind of experience that gets created in these worlds that, yeah, it’s almost impossible to imagine any, like real world, you know, analog to it. And that those are going to be the things that like, really take off.

 

Right content strategy for startups in the digital world

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Okay, I think we can schedule another session just to discuss that further. Yeah, so I think this is already like a lot for this podcast. But I think there’s one question that I personally wanted to understand more. There’s a lot of focus on content marketing for every founder. I mean, they feel content as something that they can use to engage their audiences better. More so in terms of just informing them of what the world is, but there is no clear concise strategy behind what they can do with content, and how they should be adopting the content strategy on a longer term. So what would be their advice? I mean, what would you advise to the startups and how to figure out the right content strategy in the modern digital world?

 

Scott

Yeah, I think my advice would be, do fewer things really well. I mean, there’s just so many channels, there are so many possible ways in which you can, you know, create content. And I think, yeah, just as a startup, you’re limited, you know, in time and resources. And the competition, you have not, you’re the direct competitor to your company, but just the competition for attention that you have in people’s lives is ridiculously intense. You know, and so I kind of feel like, yeah, you know, there was a time where, like, the easy content strategy was all about quantity, just get the quantity . I don’t think that that works anymore, I think, you know, you are far better off having like one or two or three things that, you know, you really focus on, and they add so much value, like people look at, and they’re like, Wow, that is an incredible piece of content, you know, and they share it, and they appreciate it, and the value they associate with your company and your brand as a result of having created that, you know, really moves you forward in the positioning, you know, in the mind of those prospects. You know, and again, for every company is going to be different what that, you know, one or two things is whether it’s like, you know, the killer newsletter, or it’s, you know, the best report, or some sort of like, yeah, really creative podcast show that, you know, like, your whole mission is like, let’s break through, like, let’s make this you know, a worldwide show. Yeah, find the one or two that’s most relevant to your audience and just double down on them.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

That’s, I think, is a fantastic suggestion. And, yeah, that should work. Like I’m sure most of the startups think that if they can work on all the channels, it might work for them. But instead, it may better serve them to just go deeper in one channel.

 

Scott

I think it’s a good way to start. With one and then yes, earn the right to grow in the next year.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

So so true. In fact, if they can do one channel, well, probably they figured out a totally new channel. And that could be a good, good strategy for them creating their own channel.

 

Scott

Yep, somebody when like, this is a beautiful thing about the landscape continuing to evolve. And there’s always new channels, there’s always new ways of engaging with people. And yeah, whoever figures out those things first, get a real advantage.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Sounds good. So this point is so easy to understand. But so difficult for a startup founder who’s like, or even marketing teams are at startups, right? They’re so engaged in like, doing the day-to-day tasks that they’ve defined over months, right, that they forget, or don’t understand what that new channel can be. So, will you have any advice on how to how to keep track? Or how to identify this new channel?

 

Scott

Wow, I mean, all I can say is like, keep your eyes open. You know, I mean, like, you know, anytime, yeah, like, do you know, reading TechCrunch? Or, you know, you’re on Twitter, you know, and I mean, like, yeah, they’re always these new channels that are popping up, you know, throughout the US. I mean, you know, they’re not always completely net new channels. Sometimes it’s an entirely different way, like all the experiments Twitter has started doing. You know, we’re like, yeah, I don’t know which of those will like stick around and which ones will work. But, you know, it’s the perfect example of there’s experimentation that’s happening there. And some of those will work. And some of them will breakthrough. And yeah, you know, if you figure out how to make that work to your advantage before anyone else does, yeah, that’s a win.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Moving on to some recommendations on resources that startups can look out for marketing, strategy, marketing, automation strategy, any recommendations?

 

Scott

Well, you know, I’m biased here. But, you know, I would say HubSpot Academy is actually a great set of resources. In all seriousness, not just, you know,

Nirmaan Agrawal all other startup founders.

 

Scott

You know, but the other thing is like, Yeah, I mean, you know, if you want to stay up to speed on, you know, martec things, you know, my blog, Chief martec, I’ll give them a plug martec.org, which is a publication in the space. David Rob, who’s like, sort of the expert of all things customer data platform, you know, the CDP Institute, you know, has a great daily newsletter. Yeah, there’s a ton of resources out there. There’s more resources than time in the day.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Absolutely. And so the low code platforms that you think will define the future of marketing ?

 

Scott 

yeah, you know, I’d hate to pick favorites at this point. Just because there are hundreds of them doing this, I almost feel at this point. I feel about low code, no code kind of the same way I ultimately felt about AI, which is, I don’t think it’s so much a category so much is it’s just a new capability that’s being embedded in pretty much every product. Yeah, I mean, not every product, but asymptotically. You know, it’s like, you know, well, if you have a CMS platform at this point, you know, you surely have like low code, no code capabilities for it for marketing automation in the low code, no code being built in, you know, the CRM, it’s just like, it’s a way of basically saying, hey, for all of these incredible products that people are adopting in digital business, you know, we don’t want to be constrained by just what they do out of the box. And we don’t want to have to, you know, hire expensive software engineers, anytime we want to, like change any tiny thing about this, we want more and more power to be in the hands of the business users in martech, in the hands of the marketers, you know, to be able to shape and create and flow things the way that they want.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

That’s a good view on how low code no code is actually transforming software right. So my final question, any any particular individual or professional that you recommend that we should talk to next, to continue the discussion on marketing technology, marketing automation?

 

Scott

Oh, wow. So many great people out there. Yeah. Well, if you haven’t spoken to David Rob, yeah, that the CDP Institute, I mean, boy, he’s followed this industry for, I think, before I entered this industry. So he’s got like a really like a long term view, but absolutely state of the art understanding of what’s happening around marketing, automation and CDPs. So I guess he would be my nomination.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Thanks so much. So that’s it, Scott. I think we’re touching 45 minutes. So thanks so much for your time. And I hope you enjoyed the questions. And we could share the transcript with you. And the recording and a finished version of the podcast so that you can share it with your network. And I’ll keep you posted.

 

Scott

Yeah, that sounds great. Well, thank you so much for having me as a guest. And yeah, I look forward to seeing the final version and helping to spread it around.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Thanks so much, Scott. Thanks so much for your time, and let’s connect again on other topics.

 

Scott

Sounds good. Have a good evening. Thank you again.

 

Nirmaan Agrawal

Thank you.