Martech Interview with Nishant Jain – Group Head – Netcore Cloud

Nishant Jain shares his views on AI in marketing

To understand how technology has impacted the marketing sector, one needs first to understand how the role of a CMO has evolved in the last few years.

1. Tell us about your role in Netcore Cloud?
I recently joined Netcore Cloud to help with the following:
Drive business strategy and revenue operations in organic investments across functional departments, product lines, BUs, and critical markets. It involves identifying opportunities to maximize our return on investments and scale up those areas. The goal is towards securing top quartile SaaS metrics across all key parameters.
Towards creating a robust M&A roadmap, I am in charge of aligning market opportunities with our product roadmap. I am also responsible for carving out niche areas for tuck-in acquisitions to enhance our product portfolio. Along with this, I also focus on larger acquisitions for gaining a larger market share in strategic markets.
All this will drive towards our upcoming IPO launch, which is scheduled in 18-24 months from now.

2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I have been following the Indian SaaS ecosystem very closely for over ten years now. I started in investment banking and venture capital firms. This experience enabled me to develop a more analytical top-down view of market opportunities, products, product-market fit, and scaling. The last few years of my career were spent on the operation side, giving me the much-needed bottom-up / ‘how to build’ experience.
This combination of the top-down and bottom-up view has shaped my career and enriched my experience and outlook to front-face today’s dynamic and hyper-growth environment. I believe that the ability to zoom in and out across crucial business areas is critical in today’s world.

3. How do you think technology is upgrading the marketing sector?

To understand how technology has impacted the marketing sector, one needs first to understand how the role of a CMO has evolved in the last few years.

While traditionally, the CMO was responsible for advertising, brand management and market research, today, a CMO is a pivotal architect delivering business growth. They, therefore, are today looked upon as ‘Chief Growth Officers’ of the organization. In the post-pandemic era, amid lockdowns and changing consumer behavior, as businesses re-work their product, channel, and demand strategies, CMOs are expected to be ready to deliver growth more than ever before. Fortunately, the ‘new-age CMOs can fall back on technology for this.
Technology grants the much-needed frameworks to CMOs, enabling them to take much informed decisions and calculated risks. Furthermore, CMOs can scale up and down at will. They can harness the power of data to tap into the customer mindset and leverage those insights to drive growth. Therefore, organizations will look up to CMOs to drive growth and stability in the days to come. To fulfill this role successfully, a CMO would need to harness customer data and technology.

4. How has the integration of AI, empowered marketing campaigns?
There are a couple of tectonic shifts happening in how communication is undertaken between a brand and its consumers.
1. From channel-centric to consumer-centric – Moving away from designing campaigns in silos, based on the channel (email, SMS, display, etc.), marketers create cohesive experiences with their consumers based on the buyer journey, preferences, mood, etc. irrespective of the channel. The focus is more on the consumer and their experience with the brand rather than a particular channel or message
2. From fragmented messages to ‘moments that matter’ – It’s no more just about the ‘right message’ but delivering the ‘right message at the right time’ to consumers which requires a deeper level of understanding of consumer preferences, mood/sentiments, and behavioral data.
Fortunately, most of this is being addressed by the intelligent processing of consumer data. From rule-based campaigns, marketers are increasingly identifying the benefits of a dynamic contextual-driven approach. All this is only possible by using data in the right manner to predict user actions and behavior, which we commonly call AI for marketing.
But to achieve this, brands need to understand customer behavior across devices and platforms. The strategies implemented must follow this to reach the right target audience with the right content at the right time. Combining this intelligence (AI) with marketing campaigns allows a marketer to craft a highly personalized, contextual, and real-time consumer experience.
Today, AI is being leveraged by marketers in the following ways,
• Helping users with Product Discovery
• Predicting what they will do next
• Building content backed with Science Delivering Intelligent Insights – Answering the “Why”
• Prescribing the right actions to every user

5. Recently we covered the news about Netcore Cloud’s collaboration with BYJU’s. How will this collaboration enhance the capabilities of Netcore Cloud?
Working with the world’s most valued Edtech company is a testimony of our products working at scale for new-age digital-first brands. Our No-code Product Experience platform is amplifying BYJU’S personalization learning journeys with multiple layers of customization backed by data segmentation, thereby ensuring a seamless learning experience for its user base.

6. What features of your marketing automation solution differentiate it in the market?
Over the last 20+ years, our product portfolio has grown significantly, starting with CPaaS with the engagement stack and, more recently, the product experience stack. What makes us stand out vis-à-vis the rest in the market is that we are one of the few platforms that brings communication, engagement, and product experience together to give brands the much-needed ‘unified/Single view’ of their consumers in today’s digital-first world.
To give a more detailed view of our strengths,
We combine the powers of Communication Stack, Engagement Stack, and the Experience Stacks to give brands a complete ‘Digital Customer Experience’ solution. Right from possessing the capabilities of a strong Customer Data Platform (CDP), Delivery to Campaign management services and Journey orchestration to Personalization, Product Experience & Analytics, and Consulting services, we have it all. Therefore, our customers view us as a complete ‘Digital Customer Experience’ stack.
Many industry players use third-party vendors as partners to push their clients’ communication across channels like email and SMS. However, our communication channels are self-owned and powered by intelligence across the behavioral data we gather. We are one of the very few industry leaders who provide customized solutions to every client to drive their KPIs, from onboarding and training to campaign optimization and new feature adoption, giving us a significant edge over the competition.
Secondly, we developed unique capabilities that empower mobile-first brands with cutting-edge features. Some of our unique capabilities include contextual walkthroughs on apps, feature management, Push amplification (hyper-personalization at scale) capabilities which are helping brands deliver ‘best-in-class experiences to their consumers. All this, along with other features like personalization, analytics, and engagement, help our ‘app first clients boost revenues and retention,
Lastly, Netcore Cloud as an organization embraces the true power of AI. Leveraging our wealth of experience over the last two decades working with enterprise and new-age brands, we have a strong understanding of the importance of AI and ML in marketing. We believe that harnessing the full potential of AI capabilities is the key criteria for companies in the future in the ‘Digital Customer Experience’ space. Hence, we are heavily investing in AI in our roadmap. Our AI-led personalization is increasing the marketing ROI by 10-15x for many brands we work with.

7. What are your predictions of the martech industry?
Two significant trends are emerging in the martech space:
Unified/Single view of a consumer is becoming key: With digital disruption, consumers are communicating and engaging on various online channels with brands. They demand a cohesive brand experience across these channels. Brands are forced to shift their thinking from channel-centric to consumer-centric to match up and meaningfully engage with these customers across channels. Therefore, brands are looking for integrated solutions which can give them this much-needed complete view of their consumers.
The shift of budget from Adtech to Martech: Focus on unit economics is becoming key. Over the last decade or so, a lot of growth capital has gone into acquiring new customers across all big and small brands. Marketers now realize that the rising ‘Customer Acquisition Cost’ (CAC) is not sustainable. They need to look for profitable growth as many are heading towards late-stage investments/capital markets. This leads them to focus more on profitable customers rather than just acquiring and reacquiring customers that don’t give them value. This entire shift of focus from just acquisition to retaining and growing the wallet share of engaged customers (customer lifetime value) is also driving a budget shift from adtech to martech. As a result, I feel the future of martech will be built on driving best-in-class customer experience and eventually customer lifetime value to a finite set of customers.

8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start-Ups?
I believe every founder must continually invest considerable time in understanding the market and market trends they operate in and evaluate the product-market-fit (PMF) accordingly. It’s essential to work with various early adopters/ customers in the targeted market/region to ensure a good PMF in the initial days itself.
Build a team of co-founders with complementary skill sets and roles across the organization. In today’s dynamic world, which requires start-ups to be very nimble, it’s difficult for single founder companies to work across all aspects of the organization.
Lastly, continuously think of ways to increase your TAM by adding features and products which can coexist and deliver more power to the same customer cohort.

9. What work-related hack do you follow to enjoy maximum productivity?
Over time, I have come to learn that the first half of the day is the best time to indulge in tough decisions or brainstorming sessions. We usually tend to leave these engagements for the latter part of the day. Ultimately, we are drained out, so is the quality of our decisions. Secondly, I try not to take an important decision in a hurry. Whenever I find myself between two roads, I wait it out for a few days; more often than not, clarity emerges.

10. What are the significant developments you are planning in recent times?
I am currently working towards strengthening the presence of Netcore Cloud in developed markets like the US and EU. Towards this, I am in the process of identifying potential partners, consultants, investors, and customers in these markets.

11. What movie inspires you the most?
The Pursuit of Happyness is one movie that never fails to inspire me no matter how many times I watch it.

12. Can you give us a glance at the applications you use on your phone?
I use very few applications, mostly around helping me manage my day and health.
Day – Very often I may tend to drop the ball or not follow up on older initiatives. This is why I like using Trello to keep me in check on the ‘to do’ list.
Health – Some days are longer, some shorter, hence a health regime on a day-to-day basis might be challenging. I like to monitor health activities on a weekly basis hence I use the Nike health app.

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