MarTech Advisor | Ginger Conlon Interview

I did an interveiwe with Ginger Conlon. It was about tech skills that marketers need to have.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to MarTech Advisors Executive Interview Series. I’m Ginger Conlon, a contributing editor to MarTech Advisor. And joining us today is Venkat Nagaswamy, who is CEO of Mariana IQ. And Venkat and I are going to talk about the skills that marketers need to succeed in marketing today. Venkat has a great perspective. As a CEO, he hires marketers, but he also works with a company and runs the company that works very closely with marketers. So welcome, Venkat. Thanks for being here today.

Glad to be here.

So before we dive in, I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey to becoming CEO of Mariana IQ.

Yep. So before starting this company, I used to run enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks, which meant that I was head of lead gen, demand gen solutions marketing for enterprise business for Juniper Networks, which is a $1.8 billion business. And as I always say, that’s where that gave me the background. I worn the shoe of a marketer and if you’re developing tools right now for marketers, it’s with the experience of being a marketer myself and having led teams. And prior to Juniper, I used to be at McKinsey. I was a consultant serving high tech clients for the most part in sales and marketing, but in other strategy matters as well. Prior to that, I started another company. I used to sell plastics back in the day in the automotive industry for GE in Detroit. And by background, I’m an engineer. I went to IIT Madras in India and I was doing a business. I was a sales manager. I was a sales manager. I was a PhD in what we would today call as high performance computing at Georgia Tech when I bailed out of the master’s when I realized that research was not for me. And I also did a business degree. So in terms of my background, I’ve been a salesperson. I’ve been a consultant and I’ve been a marketer. And by background, I’m an engineer. So when I got brought into the marketing team at Juniper, it was I came in with a slightly different background than your typical marketer. And having been a marketer now, we’re developing tools that could help marketers.

That’s such a great background for a broad perspective on what it takes to succeed in marketing today.

Yeah, I hope so.

So first question, hiring marketers has been a part of your role. You were a marketer. What do you see as the key either skill or trait that you need to succeed in marketing today, specifically as a marketing consultant? Specifically as a marketing leader?

Absolutely. So, I mean, for this, I have to, again, go back to my own experience in terms of when I got brought into marketing. My boss, then boss, Lauren Flaherty, who was the CMO of Juniper, she’s now the CMO of CA. She brought me into marketing to bring more of a structured process into marketing. This was about six, five, six years ago. Far, much before most people were thinking about marketing. Right. So, she saw that we need to bring in more analytics and being far more rigorous, at least in the B2B world, when it comes to marketing. She saw that we need to bring in more of analysis and analytics into the picture. Even though she has a more traditional marketer’s background, she saw the need for bringing more of these things in. So, anything I say now is based on the vision that she saw. So, I got to give her most of the credit. So, in terms of hiring marketers, one of the big things that’s happened in the past ten years is, as everybody knows, the profession has become more and more analytical and more and more technology heavy. Right. And with it becoming more and more technology heavy, there are a whole bunch of pitfalls that we could fall into that we need to be careful about. So, in terms of the skills that we look for when it comes to marketing, it’s… And, in fact, one of the first hires that we did was a marketing person. She comes in with a communications background from NYU, but we’re adding more and more of analysis and coding skills to her to develop a modern marketer. So, a modern marketer has an ability to understand numbers, delve into numbers, understand what they mean within the context of the strategy that they’re establishing. So, we’re still having the creativity and the energy and passion that a normal marketer has. And one thing I should note on the side is that with the rise of AI, one hopes that a lot of routine numerical things that people are doing now with respect to data, hopefully those things would go away and marketers can come back to focusing on creativity and so on and so forth. But for the most part, today you need this combination of left-brain and right-brain, even though I personally don’t like that analogy of left-brain. But anyway.

So, if you are, say, mid-level in your career in marketing and you need to get a better analytics background and what have you, so you can take a leadership position, what are some steps that you can take to achieve that? Spend more time with the data analysts, take some classes, get out there in the market, get a mentor. What advice do you have?

Yeah. So, I would say two or three things. Tools have gotten much better today than what they were six years ago, let’s say. So, now, six years ago, if somebody had asked me this question, I would have said go, first step, go learn Python to go get the data from the source and do the analysis yourself. However, in the past six years or so with the rise of tools like Looker, Periscope, Domo, and Tableau and so on and so forth, it’s not going to be the same. So, I would say two or three things. And then, third, if you have a really good source, you’re going to have to learn how to use it. And then, fourth, ability to use these tools to bring things together has become more important. Of course, learning Python or knowing Python is an important thing, but I would say that’s a second step. The first step, I would say, is that is to learn tools like Looker and Periscope and all these things. Because one of the key things in terms of understanding analytics is being able to gather and get data from multiple sources, keeping it in one place to try and draw lessons and work on it. So, you know, that’s the first step. And then, of course, using that to tell a story. Those are two pieces of puzzle that we believe is always going to, certain element of it is always going to remain human. And we need to keep looking at it as the time goes by.

Absolutely, absolutely. Venkat, thank you so much for all the great insights today. And I want to thank everyone who’s joined us watching the video. And also, Venkat and I had a great conversation about account-based marketing in another video, so I hope you’ll check that out as well. So thanks again for being here today. Thanks, all.