Building High Impact Partner Ecosystems
Suresh Sathyamurthy shares his insights into building high-impact partner ecosystems, ways to demonstrate value to your customers, and secrets to non-intrusive marketing.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faze on CEO of Casmin Studios.
And today we are joined by a special guest, Sresh.
How are you?
I'm doing very well, Ian.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks so much for joining.
Excited to chat about single store and all the cool stuff
that you have going on there, and obviously
get into your background.
So how did you get started in Demand Gen the first place?
I started my career right after my MBA.
I got an internship at Microsoft in product management
and marketing.
And that's what got me started in marketing and demand
gen to begin with.
And I grew through the ranks in Microsoft.
I worked in other companies, big companies and small,
and have always been a fan of marketing
and its impact on the business.
And that's what got me here.
And so flash forward to today.
Tell us a little bit about your role at single store.
I'm responsible for all marketing activities
at single store as the chief marketing officer.
In addition to the CEO more responsibilities,
I'm also responsible for developer relations.
We are an application platform product.
We target developers.
A developer relations is an important component of marketing.
And I also work with our product teams
on what we call PLG, product-led growth,
on how do we use the product as an offer
to drive and experience to acquire new customers?
I love it.
We're going to dive into all that stuff.
Let's go to our first segment.
The Trustery is where we can go and feel honest and trusted.
And you can share those deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
So what does single store do?
A single store is a database for modern real-time applications.
So these days when you build applications,
you need information real-time.
Think about Uber, for example.
When you ask for a ride, you can't keep the app spinning.
You need the car to arrive as soon as possible.
At least give you the information in real-time.
So Uber, for example, runs on single store.
And anything that you do on share trading or stocks
where happens real-time, that runs on single store.
And most of the audience in this call
is probably marketing executives and marketing leadership.
Many of the martech dashboards and applications
that they use, like heap, outreach, integrate,
factors AI, phantom analytics, all of them
run on single store.
So we are a database for applications like those
or what we call real-time applications.
And who all the you sell to?
What's your customer persona?
So we have two.
We have the users and the decision makers.
The users are those who build applications
or want data quickly that they can use to make decisions on.
So these are usually developers, data architects, data engineers.
The decision makers are the chief information officers.
And these days, there is a new title, the chief data
and analytics officers or chief data officers.
They are an integral part of the decision process
on the platform that you build for real-time analytics
and use cases such as those.
Yeah.
And what does that buying committee look like?
Are they actually involved in the decision-making process there?
The journey starts with the person
who is building the application.
In the process of building an application,
they decide what data stack they have to choose.
And they start exploring those data stacks.
And that's why we do have a product-led growth motion.
We want to give the customers an experience
to try the product to see if it fits their use cases and needs.
So that's where the journey starts.
But as soon as the developer and the development team
make this decision on the data stack to go for,
then it goes to the decision makers about them,
the CIOs and CDAOs, the chief data and analytics officers.
And that is the tribe that gets together
to make a decision on what platform to choose
for their application and watch data stack
to choose for their application.
And how is your marketing and sales
are structured to go acquire those accounts?
So the way I've structured my organization
is I call it the Engine and Gas Model.
With the evolution of electric cars,
we probably need to find an analogy for it.
But the Engine and Gas Model is actually very simple.
The Gas is the set of information workers and people
who build content, messaging, and value proposition
that we want to take to market.
And we want to take to this audience.
So we have them structured by audience profiles.
And these are the content marketers.
These are the product marketers.
These are those who build technical value,
like TMEs, technical marketing engineers.
The second piece is the engines,
which is essentially the teams that take that message
to market.
These could be campaigns, programs, webinars,
events and trade shows, social media marketing,
all of the engines that take the message to market.
So the way I've structured my team is really four buckets.
In the Gas side, it is the product marketing
and content marketing organizations.
In the Engine sides is everything that we need to do
to demand gen, which is campaigns, programs,
social media, awareness, et cetera.
I do have a marketing ops function
as the third leg of this tool,
which is going to help with data and analytics
to inform those decisions of engine and gas.
And of course, I have also have a communications organization
on reaching media, as well as our influencers in the field,
like analysts and press.
- And then you said that your developer relations team,
does that live sort of like outside of marketing,
tangential to marketing?
How does that work?
- The way I've structured it now is I see developer relations
and the advocates in our developer relations team
as those who build content that adds value to developers
that helps them through this decision process
to try the product.
So they sit within that gas arm of the team,
the product marketing, content marketing,
and developer relations are a part of that organization.
I do believe that they could be
a standalone organization as well,
but as it stands today,
based on the competencies that I have in the team,
they fit very well with where they are today.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
And that's what we see a lot of times
like if we're making a podcast
and someone has that sort of either developer relations
or a similar type of expertise field,
a lot of times they'll sit close to content
or community or whatever that piece is.
And then you mentioned how demand sort of fits in there.
What's your demand strategy?
- So there are a couple of strategies for demand.
The first of course, I told you where we have to start,
which is during the buying cycle,
the developer has to evaluate the product
to decide what stack to choose on.
So that's where the journey starts.
So the first part of our demand gen
is getting people to trial.
The discovery and consideration of the product
is targeting developers
and getting them to trial.
So we have free offers to get them to try the product
and we have a team, and these are not salespeople,
they don't carry a quota,
a team that is dedicated to making sure
that the developer is successful in the project
that they are trying to do.
And by getting them to adopt and use the product,
we generate what we call PQLs or product qualified leads,
just like MQLs, but by getting people
through the experience of trying the product, right?
That is where the journey starts.
Now, of course, there are other decision makers
and influencers in that tribe
that has to choose the product beyond just the developer.
So we provide them with information of value
that can help them make the right decision
and choose the right product for the data stack.
And these are more content that is more thought leadership
that gets them to explore new ways of thinking
about modern applications and data stacks,
as well as to give them enough information
for them to consider a newer emerging technology
like single store instead of a traditional legacy database
product as well.
And we believe that the combination of PQLs and MQLs,
PQLs, product qualified leads,
driving the user adoption and MQLs that provide enough value
to the rest of the decision tribe
is the right approach to drive demand.
- As you're driving those PQLs,
how much outbound stuff are you doing
to drive those type of things
versus using that energy to drive the MQLs?
- I would say it's a combination of both.
So developers don't like to get marketed to.
And what I mean by that is they want to find information
in the places, in the watering holes
that they go to for information.
So part of the way we achieve that
is with our developer relations team.
We want to make sure our developer relation team
is building content of value to these developers
and making them available in the watering holes
that the developers go for information in.
And once they get that information,
they become an in-bird lead.
They come to the website to explore the product
to try the trial or read more or learn more about the product.
And that becomes more of an in-bird lead.
But in addition to that,
we also want to have more of the speed media and outreach
to acquire these developers who are users of other products
today, are users of competitive products,
users of substitutes to achieve the same goal
and inform them about the value that we bring to the table.
And that we take more of an paid approach.
So it's a combination of paid an organic inbound and outbound
that helps us get the right source of leads
from a PQL perspective.
- Anything else there on strategy
or even some broader thoughts on marketing strategy?
- There are a couple of things that I would add
in addition to those.
The first is there is also an ecosystem
that is involved in the decision process.
Data stack decision is not made in vacuum.
It is what other technologies do they work with.
For example, in the case of ingesting data
that is streaming or real time,
how the product works with Apache Spark,
which is an open source tool for ingest,
that becomes an important factor as well.
So we also focus on what ecosystem of partners
that we have to partner with
to provide a more holistic value to the customer
beyond just the value that the product delivers.
So we do have an what we call an innovation lab
based in Raleigh, North Carolina,
where we work closely with ancillary partners
and other technologies.
And essentially our intent is developers and customers
will come to us if we provide them
with enough differentiated value.
And by partnering with these other technology providers,
we are able to give a more comprehensive value
to the developers building application.
So that is a strategy that we have invested in as well
to add value and to acquire new customers.
- I love it.
Let's go to the playbook.
This is where we open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
- You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play it, it's just play it.
- What three channels or tactics
are your uncutable budget items?
- So my uncutable budget items
is all focused around discovery.
Being a startup, we are relatively less known brand
and our competitors are big ones like Oracle and Amazon
and Google.
They have a lot of brand awareness already behind them.
So what we have to do is we have to make sure
that we are in the right place
and in the right time to be discoverable.
So one of the activities that I would never cut out
of my budget is paid media specifically targeting
competitive keywords, paid search specifically targeting
competitive keywords because that is the journey
that is where our developers and users start their journey.
They start looking for solutions that is out there
and explore solutions that is out there.
The second approach we take,
the tactic of course is still paid media and search
but the approach that we take is we also buy keywords
for common problems that customers have
with their databases that single store can help address.
So by going after those problems,
we find that developers usually go search for solutions
to those problems and use those keywords.
By using those keywords and having the right content
to help address those problems,
we get customers to come to our website,
explore our product and treat it as a potential solution
that could potentially be a lead for us as well.
That is then part of our uncuttable budget,
paid search and paid media.
The second part that I believe is uncuttable
is the developer relations aspect of it.
Database as themselves are application platforms.
So it's critical that the user is involved
in the decision process of a database.
And developers are the primary users of the,
or decision makers here, the users and decision makers here.
So by giving them value,
the developer relations team's primary mandate
is to provide value to the developers,
the users of the product.
I think that is uncuttable.
I do think that marketing's role is to help add value
to the customers.
And by adding value to the customers,
they come to us for solutions for it.
And this approach that I saw embrace
is just giving customers value that they find with the brand.
So they come to the brand to address solutions for them.
It helps us build our brand with the developers as well.
- Yeah, I'm curious.
You mentioned that developers don't like to be marketed to.
It seems like they do click on Google Ads
and stuff like that.
So they're sort of like when they're in that moment,
looking for different things, then that stuff is there.
And developer relations kind of acting like a brand play almost
to make sure that they know who you are
and that you exist and that you're there to help.
Is this something that like as a smaller organization
or smaller company than your competitors relatively,
there's some like hidden value there
that you could be more personalized
or you could invest in that,
whereas you can't necessarily invest
in like huge brand campaigns, for example,
but you could invest more in sort of like building
those relationships one to one almost.
- Yeah, there are actually two things
that more agile, fast growing smaller companies can do
that I found that these large companies struggle with.
And it is also the advantage of these fast growing
scale ups and startups have over the big,
more established players.
The first thing that we can do,
and I'll give you an example on how we are doing this as well.
I talked to you about developers searching for problems
that they run into when they are building their application.
So most of the developers who are choosing a database
start with an open source database like MySQL.
And as their application grows, they run into errors.
And there are usually one to three common errors
like too many connections, the memory is full, et cetera.
What we did is we targeted those specific errors
and we had our developer relations team
build content to help address those errors,
to tell them how single store can be a solution
to that problem.
And we provided a rich set of information
to those developers and we asked them for nothing,
inter-term.
It was helping them solve the problem.
And of course, as a function of going and learning
about how to solve the problem,
they discovered that single store
is a potential solution to the problem.
They give it a try.
Now, we didn't market all of the capabilities
that single store could do.
We only marketed that problem that single store
could solve for them.
And once they use us, they learn that it could solve
many more problems that they had
and they start using the product
and they start displacing the computation.
Now, this is something that you will find big companies
don't do.
They are more often than not focused on talking about
all of the capabilities and functionalities
that their product can deliver.
They are not focused on solving a specific problem
for a small customer.
The second thing, which I think small agile companies
like ours can do, is we can lean into more aggressive marketing.
We can get more attention by cutting through the noise.
Whereas in larger companies, there's a lot of red tape
and bureaucracy behind what should be the brand associated
with because they just don't have one product.
They have a portfolio of different products
and they have a brand that has its own value
in the balance sheet that they're supposed to protect.
This gives us a lot more attention and ability
to cut through the noise.
And single store has done that with its billboards
that you see in 101 here in Silicon Valley.
We take more of an aggressive marketing approach
to get attention that people take photos
and tweet and talk about as well,
which many companies don't do.
Their ads are very bland.
- Yeah, and it seems like that those sort of things
like understanding what the inside jokes are.
And obviously you can do research and data and all that stuff,
but it seems like the only way to really do that
is to have people that are living it every day.
You can't just throw a hat on a marketer
and say like learn everything about developers
and hope that they are gonna understand all that stuff.
It seems like you have to pull a lot of that
out of the communities.
- That is true as well.
And one of the biggest benefits of having your developer
relations team aligned to your marketing organization
is they tell you what the developers value.
They tell you what they like and don't like
about your messaging or content.
And they give you input that makes your product marketing
and other functions in your marketing organization
better as well.
And you're aligning and all the ships are sailing
in the same direction towards adding value to the developer,
which is exactly what we want to do.
We believe that if we add value to the developers,
they will come to us for solutions
and they will give us a try.
And we know based on our data that when customers come
and try our product be more often than not when.
Our focus is to add value to their process
of building an application or helping them make the right
decision for their data stack, which also means
there may be use cases or workflows where single store
is not the right fit for.
And we should be able to tell them that
and tell them why they are better off with a better solution.
And that honesty and transparency on where we work,
what works best for them also builds trust on your brand.
So the next time they have a real time app need,
they come to you as a solution.
- Yeah, it's interesting.
We always talk about the product has to fit the marketing,
like the culture of the company and all that stuff,
because if it's disjointed, the person kind of knows.
It seems like because of the way that you have
this PLG motion that you can have these people out there,
the developer relations folks,
and just say like out there helping people and they're like,
"Hey, by the way, you know, like we do this,
"you can try it, it's free, like go check it out.
"You know, if you like it, then that's great.
"And if not, no worries, no harm done," sort of a thing.
It seems like those two things go together
that you get a little bit more just honesty
and transparency there.
Whereas if you were like,
"Hey, yeah, we're just here to help."
And then you have a bunch of gated stuff
and everything is sort of behind big paywalls
and it's super complex purchase and all that stuff.
Well, that's not really something
that I can just kind of sink my teeth into
and see if I like it.
- Exactly, exactly.
We think about it as a non-intrusive marketing
or value addition.
We don't want to be intrusive.
We want the customers to evaluate their product
in their own terms.
I'll give you some examples of how we have achieved this.
You could go to our website today.
There'll be a button on the top right that says, "Try me."
You click on it.
We are not going to ask you to fill a form.
We are not going to ask you to give your full name,
your phone number, your address,
and your official email, et cetera.
You go, you use your single sign on,
whatever you're used to using.
Your email is all we need to get you started.
That is one way of making sure
that we are focused on the experience for the customer.
Now, if they do need help from you,
we have a chat where there are engineers, not salespeople,
engineers waiting to help the developer build their application.
So, the chat facility is, again, not focused on selling,
but help you be more successful in your project.
And we are also engineering and product teams
are working closely with marketing
to also improve the experience of using the product
in the customer's own terms.
So, it makes it easy for them to try it,
decide if it's the right choice for them,
and buying the product, again, in your own terms.
You want to use your credit card and buy directly
from the website.
You want to talk to a person that is available to you.
And philosophy of ours is,
the customer should not feel like we are intruding
and they only do it in their own terms.
And I do believe that adds tremendous value.
The experience itself creates perception of the brand.
It also helps the customer make faster decisions.
That is really cool.
I didn't know that you all did that before the episode
I went through and did the try-free
and all that sort of stuff, just to check out your stuff.
But I didn't realize that you could chat with engineers.
Obviously, we talk about chat a bunch on this
because our amazing sponsor, Qualified,
is the number one place for pipeline development
and conversational marketing.
So, we think about that a lot,
but I hadn't heard that use case of saying,
like, hey, actually, you can just chat with someone
who's going to help you solve your problems right away.
That's really cool.
- Yeah, and we believe it's a fundamental tenant
of our brand as well.
We are here to add value, not to market to you.
Marketing is a term that we just use internally,
but we believe if we add value to our users,
the customers will come to you.
- Okay, what's your third uncuttable?
- The third one that I've seen
that has added tremendous value to us
is a focus on our strategic partners and ecosystems.
So, if you look at our last quarters announcements,
if you look at our press releases,
we announced a partnership with SAS,
which is the largest data analytics provider in the world.
They are the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader
for data analytics in the last eight years.
We have a very close partnership with IBM.
And with these, what we are working towards is
making sure that single store is providing value
to both the partners and our joint customers
through tight integration with data stacks, products,
and the ecosystems that cater to our customers' needs.
And from a marketing perspective,
the co-marketing, the experiential marketing
of engaging with CXOs is a critical aspect
of how we go to market as well.
So you will see us in many of the CXO marketing
and sponsorship activities, like we do golf sponsorships.
We are a part of large events and trade shows
where these customers and partners have a presence in.
And I do believe that the co-marketing
with these strategic partners,
this includes Amazon Web Services,
this includes IBM, this includes Dell, HP, as well as SAS,
is a critical component of our go-to market.
And marketing is very closely involved
in co-marketing with these partners as well.
- Any piece of advice on co-marketing,
we do it a bunch because we have a bunch of podcasts
that we do where you'll have a primary sponsor
and they'll bring in partners.
You know, it's such a tricky thing to like get right.
And when it is right, it feels so awesome.
But sometimes it relies obviously heavily
on having a good partner marketing org.
And those can be obvious, just like everything hit or miss.
So yeah, curious any piece of advice
on how to partner market and evaluate away.
- So I do believe that before we talk about marketing,
the most important thing is just like how I talked
about a marketing approach that adds value,
the best way to think about marketing with partners
is to think about how you're adding value to the partners
and the joint customers, right?
And that will prompt the right behavior in terms of working
with the right engineering folks,
the partner teams to build a solution
that solves for gaps in the partners products
and adds value to the end user and customer.
That actually makes it easier for the marketing organization
to then work with the marketing organization
of these partners as well,
because it is solving a problem that has been coming
in the way of their sales motion and sales cycle.
And I do think that is the first bridge to cross.
But once you do that, then making sure
that you have a close alignment
with the partner marketing organization of the partner team
becomes a critical component of how you go to market.
- I'm always surprised that more folks don't do this.
In my opinion, that one of the big,
where the rubber meets the road is just like
having both partner marketing orgs,
being able to align on that stuff.
But to me, it just ends up being like,
okay, we're gonna chuck X amount of dollars of partner marketing,
spin up a smaller team.
Now, they're not gonna be quite as resource.
We're not gonna expect as much.
And we don't really know how it's gonna drive ROI,
but hopefully it does.
Maybe it'll just be more a brand place.
And it seems like it's kind of a silly thing to do,
but I don't know if there's a better way to do it
other than that, because it seems like managing
all of those partners is such a massive job
from all the partner marketing folks
that I've worked with managing
the massive ecosystem of partners
is really more like a people management job
than it is a pure marketing kind of play.
- There are two approaches.
The first is choose fewer strategic partners.
If you are working with more than 10 partners,
you have too many partners in your hands.
And when I say strategic,
your product should truly add value
to the joint end customer
and fill a gap in the partner's needs.
Choose the few that you can dedicate your time
to go invest with and have the vision aligned.
For example, some of our most successful partners
are aligned on the vision
that the world is going real time.
And real time analytics is what most of the future apps
would be, because if they are aligned on it,
they are not just bidding on you for current revenue.
They are bidding on you for growing their business
in the future.
And you want to find the kind of partners
who believe in your vision,
who see where the puck is going
and want to partner with you today so they can grow with you.
And you can't have hundreds of partners in this cycle.
You have to focus on fewer bigger partners at scale.
So you can dedicate the time and energy with them.
And then over time, you're creating proof points
and value that other partners are going to look at and say,
I want to be a part of that story.
Seems like that is going very well
and it's helping create pipeline.
So create the energy and evidence that you need
for partners to want to be a part of your ecosystem.
If you're not an integration partner,
if you were a single store in Caspian,
we're like, hey, let's create a partnership
for a joint billboard campaign.
I don't know why we do that.
But in this case, we're both trying to reach developers.
And so we're going to create a billboard campaign together.
It's like, life is better with single store in Caspian.
And we're not monetarily integrated.
We're like, the money actually is someone biased.
Caspian, then it helps out single store advice versus.
If you're running more separate in that way,
is that something that people should be doing
and investing?
That's a broad question.
But how do you think about those type of roles?
So the way I think about it is what value
is the partner bringing to the table?
And what value you're bringing to the partner?
Be clear about those two aspects of things.
In the case of reseller and distributor partners,
more often than not, the value that bring to the table
is because they have sold other products to customers
over a period of time and have the relationships, accounts,
and connections.
And they know as a function of the footprint
that they have within those accounts,
what their needs are and who the people are.
For you, the value that you're bringing to a partner
is a piece of technology or innovation
that is going to help their customers be more successful.
And that in lies a partnership opportunity.
The ability for the partner to add more value
to their end customer.
And for you, the ability to take your product
and allow it to reach a larger audience
that you wouldn't have been able to do yourself
or it would have cost you much more to do yourself.
Simply because you have to generate the pipeline
and contacts and ads to reach those customers.
And now you have someone who has those contacts,
has the footprint and can allow you to reach.
So I do think that is the best approach
to even choose a partner by deciding what is the value
that each of you bring to the table
and how that one plus one is going to be equal to more than two.
So it's more than depth and simply like co-marketing
and doing something together like that.
- Exactly.
And the co-marketing becomes a lot easier
when you're aligned on that value addition as well.
Then you know what you want from each other
and you can decide how to best go to market with that value.
- What is something that you're not maybe investing
in the near-term future or something
that might be fading away a little bit?
- So one of the things that I've seen as actually
I don't know yet if that is adding value
is sponsorships in third party events and trade shows,
big conferences.
I think the pandemic has changed
who and how attend these conferences
and how we derive value out of it.
There is an awareness aspect of ads
and sponsorships of these big events.
But generally speaking, I struggle with seeing value
from sponsorships of events and trade shows
with some exceptions because we go after a developer audience,
we do see a lot of value in big events like AWS re-invent.
But we are increasingly seeing that we don't get
adsmixed traction from big data events as we used to.
Big data used to be big back in 2012, 2014 timeframe.
I think those are all fading.
So picking and choosing which events and trade shows
to be a part of is an important thing as well.
I wouldn't do a blanket sponsorship of a set of events
and trade shows that goes after our audience anymore.
I'd be very picky and choose carefully
about where to put my money in.
- Yeah, we've heard of a similar thing from folks
where they're like, hey, I'm gonna go really big
on obviously their own customer conference or whatever.
And then kind of, hey, we're not gonna do rest these.
I'm curious though, because you have
a strong developer relations team,
is that something where you send those folks
on the road to those type of events?
So that at least someone is there,
even if you don't have a sponsored presence
or is it just that it's too expensive for the ROI piece?
- So if you were to ask me this question a year back,
I would say I'm not sending anyone
and I wouldn't be paying a single penny
for these events in trade shows.
That's because we are just coming out of the pandemic.
All these events were either getting canceled
or not getting enough attention
and wasn't getting the foot traffic
that booths used to get.
It's changing a little bit this year.
I think there is no more willingness
to people to attend conferences and events.
And there is more traffic that we see in those,
but I completely agree with it.
It's focusing on your own events.
We recently did our own event revolutions 2022,
a supercharging real-time.
And we sponsor a few handful of big events,
either those that matter to our strategic partners
like IBM and SAS,
or those that matter to our developers,
like AWS re-invent.
And that is all we focus on.
And the day and age where we used to have
20, 30 event sponsorships,
I don't think it's coming back anytime soon.
I think the approach going forward
is going to be the one that you mentioned.
Your own user conferences combined with a few large conferences
where you want to get a higher sponsorship level
and get a lot of attention on.
- It's interesting though,
one of the things you didn't say there,
which is something that you already discussed earlier,
is you have a developer relations team
that is in those online communities,
like all day, every day.
But they're just not at events, right?
And I think that that to me,
is the thing that is the most important,
is if you can create original things yourselves
and then be in the community,
I don't wanna say 24/7, 'cause that's not realistic,
but be present in the community year-round,
that it's like dropping in at a few of the things
the utility there is that you get to actually meet
these people in person, in an event setting,
that's fun and educational and you can party
and do whatever it is that you want to do at an event.
Whereas you can be in these watering holes
for basically free or with investments
in your own content and all that sort of stuff,
where that sort of thing compounds.
That's to me where I think we get so obsessed
with quote unquote events, because of the sales thing
is like Chuck salespeople at it,
they get to have a bunch of conversations,
they get a bunch of leads, everybody feels good.
It's so much easier to be digitally aware all the time.
- You stole the words from my mouth.
That is exactly what our devial team focuses on today.
More digital outreach than anything else.
And we do have an SLA in our community,
the forums which you can also access from our website,
where we try to respond to any questions within a day,
within 24 hours, but our average has been three hours or less.
In some cases, the dev app grids are so passionate
about their work that they are actually there at 24/7,
whether we ask them to be there or not.
So, but that is exactly how it works.
How do you view your website?
- There are a couple of approaches that I take to my website.
The first thing is it has to help with the customer journey,
which is essentially is it if an audience
is coming into our website, do we offer them
the right learning materials?
Once they discover, come to our website,
do we offer them the right learning materials
to help them make a decision?
Do we give them the right path that they could choose
to go with?
Do they want to download a new book?
Do they want to go to trial?
Do they want to watch a webinar?
Do they want to download a white paper?
The reason we offer those is because different people
consume information differently.
There is no one website that would work
for every piece of audience.
We have to offer the different consumption choices.
And I personally learned this myself.
Me and my brother are completely different.
People, my brother is a voracious reader.
While I consume information more through visual media,
more through podcasts, more through webinars.
And I don't spend as much time reading a lot of content.
But I consume a lot of information,
maybe even more than he does.
But he approaches it very differently.
And that is exactly what each of us are.
We all consume information differently.
And the way I'm designing the website
is to offer the different consumption choices
that you prefer in your own terms
as you go through the journey.
So once you discover, then you learn,
and then trial, you've seen the trial experience
right on top of our page, giving them the opportunity
to try the product themselves
and the ability to buy the product.
What we also do is the last phase of the journey,
which is we want them to use the product.
And if they are happy with it,
become advocates of our product as well.
And so we do have forums in the website
and communities in the website,
not just for asking questions,
but the community helps each other as well.
That is how we've designed the website
for the entire customer journey from discover,
learn, try, buy and advocate.
And the second aspect of this is designing it
for the visual look and feel,
just the plessiveness of experience of it.
We have an in-house design team.
We want to make sure that the page doesn't have
so much content that it crowds the mind.
And we track where the users click
and how to make the design experience
so convenient for the user
that they have a pleasant experience
visiting the website as well.
Now, if you don't see a lot of content in certain pages,
it is by design as well.
And we also do constant testing to keep improving it.
And this is one of those things that requires
ongoing experience improvements.
It never comes to an end.
We test our website and web pages all the time
to see which creative works,
which message works, where are they clicking,
where should the button be?
The digital experience of it also matters in the website.
So it's both the content and the experience.
- Love it, great, great.
I couldn't agree more.
And I think that so much of the future
is gonna be geared towards having content
that is tailored to the way that people consume
rather than just what it is,
because I think that you're exactly right.
We all consume things slightly differently
and having more options there.
It allows you to target non-consumers
of the stuff that you've been creating.
Final segment here, let's get to our quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how quickly qualified helps companies
generate pipeline faster,
tapping your greatest asset, your website
to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversation.
It's quick and easy just like these questions.
Go to qualified.com to learn more,
Suresh, quick hits, are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- Do you have a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- Tennis.
I do play tennis, it's not on my resume.
- Do you have a favorite book, podcast or TV show
that you've been checking out recently?
- My favorite book, which I also gifted my team recently,
is a book called Influence by Robert Cialbaldi.
And I think it's important for every market
I've ever read it to.
- Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby
that maybe sort of indirectly makes you a better marketer?
- Yes, I've just taken to learning gold
and I do think the networking aspect of it
combined with learning from other people
is helping me be a better marketer.
- I love it, you're in the Bay Area,
we'll go golfing together sometime.
- Of course.
- I'm pretty bad, so.
- That would totally work for me,
I've been good company then.
- Perfect, if you weren't in marketing
or business at all, what do you think you'd be doing?
- I think I would be a product manager,
that's where I started my career in
and I gravitated towards marketing.
- What is your best piece of advice
for a first time CMO?
You've been doing this a couple times
and this whole CMO thing,
so what's your best advice for a first-timer?
- Hire the best marketing operations person
that you can find because you need a way
for data to show value of the marketing activities
that you're doing and it's important
that you be data driven in your approach to marketing.
- I love it, it's fresh, this has been awesome.
- Thank you, you made me think.
- That's awesome, I'd love to hear that.
For listeners go check out singlestore.com,
go through their stuff,
some really cool information content,
especially their developer stuff,
of course is great, singlestore.com.
Search any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- Yeah, one of the things that I want to plug in
is most of the listeners of the Spark cards
are either marketing leaders
or those interested in dimension and marketing.
Be aware that most of the Martik stack that you're using
have real-time needs and they are built on singlestore.
- So make sure when you buy new Martik stack,
ask for whether the product was built on singlestore
because in that case you can make sure
that you're getting your data real-time and not a day late.
- I love it, singlestore inside.
Make sure that it's on the box, the proverbial box.
It's fresh, thanks again, we really appreciate it
and we'll talk soon.
- Talk soon, thank you again.
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