1. Tell us about your role at Incorta.
I am Incorta’s Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the marketing and strategic go to market functions here at Incorta.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into the data and analytics market?
I have worked in enterprise software for more than 25 years, beginning at Oracle in the early 1990s. From my time at Oracle until now, I have both used data to drive marketing success in my daily life and also marketed software with data and analytics at the heart of all solutions.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading the marketing sector?
The MarTech stacks are piled high right now and have been growing steadily over the last 15 years. It has certainly upgraded our ability as marketers to create a near-real time customer experience that drives increased revenues and brand success. Sales and Marketing teams are using upgraded technologies—namely cloud technologies—to keep up with an age of disruption.
4. How can a data-driven approach enhance marketing strategies?
Marketing today is data driven, even PR and creative functions.
Leveraging all the data in today’s sales and marketing tech stacks to drive operational efficiencies has become a prerequisite for any team.
Incorta’s approach to bringing together one single source of data truth—as well as the ability to act on it—has won Incorta the trust of some of the world’s largest consumer and business brands. From in-app star ratings, to cart abandonment rates, to predictive churn analytics, marketers in both B2B and B2C rely on data to pivot and succeed on an hourly basis.
5. Can you explain how your Direct Data Platform empowers sales professionals?
Incorta’s Direct Data Platform brings all your tech stacks into one, simple view, making it easy for sales professionals to run self service analytics. Sales leaders in separate business units (or as overall leaders) can increase pipeline conversion rates and velocity with better sales analytics from Incorta’s Direct Data Platform. Sales professionals can measure and monitor standard pipeline KPIs, such as the amount/value of pipeline by sales cycle, conversion rates between stages, velocity between stages, number of opportunities per stage and win rate percentage. These types of analytics can be run even on data pulled in from separate, highly customized CRMs, SFA systems, CDPs and even compensation and incentives systems, all while keeping full data fidelity. What used to take a lot of time and organization with IT is now truly self service analytics.
6. What features of your Direct Data Platform differentiate it in the market?
The Incorta Direct Data Platform gives any business user the ability to analyze complex, full-fidelity business data in real-time. It provides integrated user access to all components of the data pipeline — data connections, business semantics, security settings, scheduling and publishing — allowing lines-of-business to be more self-sufficient and more agile. Incorta customers skip past costly and time-consuming data warehouse projects, and focus on delivering data, insights, and real business results.
7. Can you share any major product or corporate developments you have in the pipeline?
We offer Incorta Cloud, our fully-managed service that provides a modern and cost-efficient platform for data analytics, data science, and business intelligence, today as a free trial—the platform gives business units a world-class cloud analytics infrastructure, in minutes, without needing technical expertise. Incorta Cloud can start small and grow to enterprise scale, leveraging Incorta’s exclusive Direct Data Mapping for unparalleled speed and agility. Offered as a cloud service, The Incorta Direct Data Platform™ is an all-in-one data management and analysis platform that gives any business user the means to acquire, enrich, analyze and learn from operational data with unprecedented agility and incisiveness. We’ll continue building out our cloud product over 2020-21, as COVID-19 has only accelerated what was already an unstoppable force of cloud migration.
8. What advice would you give to fellow tech startups?
Don’t try to create a category. If you answer a specific pain point or challenge people are having, focus on that (and the measurable outcomes your customers realize from buying you versus another vendor). Make data driven decisions and keep things simple – don’t have more than 5 tools in a tech stack per department, as complexity is the enemy of productivity.
9. What do companies need to do to prepare for an AI-centric world?
AI is built into so many of our tools and systems today we almost forget to mention it as a differentiator. Today’s companies should embrace AI, not be intimidated by it. Automation allows for a much more predictive world, and therefore one with more risk mitigation
10. What work-related hack do you use to enjoy maximum productivity?
Scenario build. I write down or draw what a scene will look like 3-6 months from now, and then check myself against it once time has passed. I believe there is nothing stopping teams from manifesting successful scenarios today – you simply need to plan for them.
11. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
I have marketing and sales development reps report directly to me, as I believe it bridges any gap between sales and marketing to have sales development flow into marketing. My team supports me by being experts in their own right and owning areas such as demand generation, product marketing and creative services. The best support is when they work as a team in real time – of course that is happening now all day long on Zoom!
12. What movie inspires you the most?
The Night Shift is a really old movie where Michael Keaton is “an idea man” – he has a line that says “call Starkist, feed the mayonnaise to the tuna,” and I always think about that. How can marketers get so ahead of the game and win a brand advantage?
13. Can you share some fun pictures of your workplace/coworkers?
14. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
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