Episode Summary
According to Aashish Dhamdhere, optimizing customer experience is at the core of every marketer’s goal. Any interaction should add value to the company. Companies need to have a clear sense of their brand projections to ensure that they give customers the right impressions. Aashish Dhamdhere emphasizes that the number one driver of business decisions is how customers respond and interact with the products. A close second is the support and education provided by the company to the customers. Deliver content in a variety of formats. The goal is to find what works for the company. Options include webinars, question and answer sessions, and conferences.
Marketers must put themselves in the mind of the customer. What type of experience is the company providing to the customer? Along with being particular about the content offered by the company, how is the content being delivered? Websites need easy navigation with user-friendly designs. Building and nurturing connections is also an essential facet of marketing. The more interactions, the more likely that trust levels improve between customers and the company.
Sales and marketing departments need the same goals, which boils down to pipeline. The pipeline for sales and marketing is always the same. Aashish Dhamdhere stresses how his goal is to pipeline everything up. Sources of lead generation are less important than securing the high numbers, no matter what channel used. Collect data, but collect the right data to make high-value decisions. To achieve this, focus on designing a reliable data infrastructure.
Guest Profile
- Name: Aashish Dhamdhere
- What he does: As the Vice President of Marketing at Skilljar, Aashish leads the marketing efforts for Skilljar is the leading customer training platform for enterprises to accelerate product adoption and increase customer retention.
- Company: Skilljar
Key Insights
- Developing the Right Goals - One major downfall in marketing is only relying on long-term goals. A common misconception is that marketing campaigns should have a wide berth to make an impact. The problem with that idea is you can pour money into a strategy that does nothing but cut into the budget. Although a company should strategize long-term goals in the next six to twelve months, they should prioritize the short-term lens. With this type of plan, teams figure out what to fix next week or next month.
- Company Size Matters - Scalability is critical when developing marketing strategies. Small to mid-sized companies have the luxury of making significant changes at a faster pace. Smaller companies can test out new and experimental approaches to gain market traction. With larger companies, more stakeholders are involved. You can't make changes at a day's notice; instead, you must wait for sign-offs to occur. The process can take up to weeks to instill. With companies that have more than 10,000 employees, the timeframe can even be months and months.
- Importance of Content Strategy - Content strategy is developed by thinking about the audience. What type of problems are they looking to solve? Analyzing issues can be simplified. Categorize all problems as belonging to one of three buckets. The first bucket is deciding to go against the status quo—meaning investing in improving the brand. The next bucket is how to get from one goal to the next. What does the journey look like from milestone to milestone? The final is deciding on customer reach. How do you reach your audience?
Episode Highlights
- Targeted Goals
Sales and marketing departments need to be in constant communication. The first step to working together is to identify targeted accounts. According to Dhamdhere, “It is extremely important to be on the same page—from a sales and marketing perspective on target accounts, target personas, target use cases, and a lot of tech thinking, the more influenced it is by your best customers.”
A way to figure out targeted goals is to research trends. Trends are consistently changing, with results never the same among competitors. Companies shouldn’t stick to one single pattern; instead, they must blend in a combination of patterns to accelerate growth. However, the way that works for a company with a 250 to 500 employee size may not work for companies with a staff size of 500 to 1,000. Dhadmere also states that “having the right leading and lagging indicators” can help tremendously. The obvious thing that all should be shooting for is the pipeline, despite the potential of being a lagging indicator.
- Reaching Different Personas
Content grows stale at lightning speeds. Content needs refreshing often and highly relevant. Never share content that doesn’t add value. The media requires relevancy partnered with visual representations like crisp imagery. Another part of content development is that the content speaks to your target audience. Knowing the personas of your audience helps you tool marketing efforts. As Dhamdhere states, “We’re continuing to invest in tooling. And again, the tooling is, is from a vantage point or from goals, outcomes perspective of improving the customer experience on one side. Two, but also capturing all the right data that helps us make smarter decisions in terms of what’s working the way we need to double down versus everything else.”
Expanding the marketer’s toolkit is a priority when trying to reach different personas. Dhamdhere reflected on his team, first only used Hubspot. His inclusion to the team led to incorporating more tools such as Salesforce and Clearbit.
- Renewed Significance of Inbound Marketing
Aashish Dhamdhere reflected on how ten to fifteen years ago; all of the marketing was inbound. Then, account-based marketing took over and was given the highest value. Although account-based marketing has value, Dhamdhere believes more effort needs to go back into inbound. As he states, “In a lot of cases, there’s this, this wonderful sort of melting melding of the worlds where you can even do account-based inbound if you if you play it right.”
Companies’ key takeaway is to ask themselves, “am I investing in the right things?” Review and evaluate marketing investments at least every six months, especially in the case of fast-growing tech startups. The right goals will get a company where it needs to be.
