Ben Shapiro shares his views on the recent offering and the benefits. He underlines the need for customer transformation concerning business impact.
But to achieve true business transformation using marketing technology, you need to take an always on approach.
1. Tell us a bit about the Dataweavers and Triggerfish businesses and your role with each.
Triggerfish was the first business that we launched in 2017 and is a leading MarTech company that uses marketing technology and customer experience implementations to transform businesses and drive profitable growth for clients. We work with B2B and B2Member organisations in Australia and across the globe and help clients find and deliver their competitive advantage using marketing technology. Built around a fast execution cadence and guaranteed outcomes, our approach to business is redefining what is acceptable for enterprise MarTech and CX management. Founded a year later in 2018, Dataweavers is a ‘Next Generation MarTech Hosting’ company offering full-service Application Management, Full Stack Hosting, DevOps and Performance Optimisation. Through Dataweavers, we’re proud to offer clients the ‘Ultimate SaaS experience for Sitecore’, which is a global, first-to-market product that delivers performance, security and price guaranteed on the Microsoft Azure Platform.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur, having started my first company at the age of 18. Since then, I’ve spent the past 25 years’ building and growing market-leading organisations in technology, marketing, and management consulting. For me personally, I’ve always held a deep curiosity for uncovering industry competitive advantage, which has led me to start many of the businesses which I’ve gone on to eventually sell.
3. What was your inspiration for starting each of the businesses – Triggerfish and Dataweavers?
I’m genuinely passionate about the intersection of marketing, technology and business, which led me to identify a capability gap between thinking and execution in the MarTech industry. It was this gap that inspired me to launch Triggerfish, with the business model built around delivering ‘speed and certainty’ for clients – something that was missing in the industry. We also champion the connection of cross-organisation business goals and help clients create an operational rhythm with marketing and technology that fuels business growth. Through our CX transformation work, we identified another industry-wide challenge that led us to launch Dataweavers. We found that many clients would experience problems with Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) like Sitecore, largely because they’re often hard to set up, not repeatable, too complex, take too long to deploy, or simply cost too much to upgrade. Then, as clients would begin their CX transformation projects with enterprise MarTech like Sitecore, they’d often get blocked by these DXP complexities, religious technical arguments, and unpredictable costs – all of which created barriers to actually getting started. So to help CMOs and CIOs simplify these technical problems and accelerate business outcomes using complex DXPs, we launched Dataweavers, offering proven, tested and streamlined products that are standardised, operationalized, repeatable and scalable.
4. How has technology empowered marketing industry as a whole?
Because of our ability to “see” customer behaviors when they are researching, purchasing, and comparing, technology gives us the ability to find, and identify them in multiple places – not only their web browsers, but on their phones, in their offices, and at home. With so many devices and connections, we can really start thinking about who these individuals are and understand their patents for acquisition and retention, and therefore how to nurture effectively to help drive better conversions overall. This is especially beneficial for organisations that have long complex sales cycles, and who need to start influencing buyer behaviour early on.
5. We recently covered news about your world-first SaaS experience for Sitecore – can you explain what this product is and why it’s so revolutionary?
Our ‘Dataweavers Managed Sitecore’ product offers clients the ‘Ultimate SaaS experience for Sitecore’, and delivers performance, security and price guaranteed on the Microsoft Azure Platform. As mentioned previously, we wanted to help senior marketers overcome the all-toocommon issues that businesses would encounter with complex, enterprise DXPs and so we set out to create pre-built and battle-proven products that were standardised, repeatable and scalable. ‘Dataweavers Managed Sitecore’ makes the most of an enterprise scale, flexible DXP platform that is also kept secure, available, and up to date on the latest version.
6. You mentioned the price guarantee with this product – how can you make this promise to all clients?
Simply because it’s a pre-built ‘product offering’ that is standardised, repeatable and scalable. Having the capability already built means that when working with enterprise MarTech, we’re never starting from scratch, which is how we can offer speed, certainty and our price guarantee. In fact, while some businesses can take months and even years to activate, this infrastructure allows us to go from zero to cloud and deploy in as little as fourteen days. To develop this world-first product, we have configured, tested, and battle proven thousands of different technical variables to identify what makes Sitecore work best. Identifying this secret mix and knowing the right technical combinations has enabled us to develop the proven infrastructure that is always ready to deploy and optimise for all clients, regardless of their requirements.
7. You’ve recently launched this offering in the US and UK. What are your plans for the future?
It’s exciting times for us, and we’re making sure that our brand is understood and known in Europe, APAC and the Americas. We feel we’ve got a great product to deliver to market, and can service a large worldwide market from anywhere in the world, which gives us amazing scale. And from there, it’s about making sure that we can use technology and tooling to start looking at other DXP platforms, including the Adobe’s of the world.
8. You talk about ‘Planning to Fail’ being the key to MarTech success. Could you extrapolate on what you mean by this?
It’s about letting go of perfectionism. I believe a fundamental industry challenge is the perception that everything needs to perfect before launching or deploying any new technology, a process which can take months and even years – by which time budgets are exhausted, technology can become outdated, and organisational motivation becomes depleted due to lack of results and business impact. Businesses then become less inclined to invest in or believe in the power of marketing technology to truly transform a business.
But to achieve true business transformation using marketing technology, you need to take an always on approach.
That is, to let go of campaign or project-specific activity and instead adopt more of a consistent, agile approach that supports a longer-term view of the business and it’s goals rather than a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. So, rather than chasing a view of perfectionism (with no outputs), the key to MarTech success and creating profitable growth for clients is to create a culture of continuous improvement. Executions may not always be perfect, however being in market sooner and having an ongoing process of testing, learning, adapting, and improving will derive greater and more impactful results over the long term – but to succeed with this approach, businesses do need to be prepared to fail.
9. What is the single biggest barrier you see that prevents businesses from experiencing true CX transformation and business impact?
There’s several factors that can help drive true CX transformation in a business, but if I was to single out one key barrier, it would be when the marketing and technology teams aren’t working effectively together, or towards a common goal. In our business, our success is built around creating an operational rhythm with marketing and technology – which in my view is key to supercharging MarTech success. This cross-functional approach to teaming ensures that the marketing and technology teams – teams often made up of different people and diverse skillsets – come together to work efficiently and effectively on a common business-related goal. This hybrid approach is the new normal for getting the most out of a digital landscape and a digital world, and marketers who don’t have a cross-functional view, run the risk of falling into a tactical way of thinking, which doesn’t drive business transformation. Ideally all of this results in a sharing of skills. The developers can talk in a marketing language. The marketers can talk in a developer language. Everyone can talk business outcomes language. You’re being clear about how that works and articulating that well to customers.
10. At Triggerfish, you guarantee outcomes in as little as 90 days. How can you make such a promise?
As mentioned previously, our whole business model is built around a fast execution cadence and guaranteed outcomes, which we position as delivering ‘speed and certainty’ to clients. And the key to being able to achieve this is learning to say no. The traditional MarTech model often sees agencies taking up to nine months (if not more) to plan and deploy, and I believe this is far too long and costly for any business to not be seeing any business impact. Central to our 90-day launch and business transformation model is being very clear on what we need to focus on in order to drive the transformation. We’re also comfortable saying no to anything that doesn’t support that goal. Being very specific on the business goal is also important. Instead of setting broader goals like ‘increase sales’, we instead set smaller, more specific goals and focus on holding people accountable. Once these goals are met, we continue setting small, specific goals according to the ongoing business needs – that way the goals feel attainable, and the business and its people feel a continued sense of accomplishment.
11. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of customer-led innovation. And when it comes to start-ups, and trying to get to product-market fit, my best advice is to work with the customer to really understand what their value drivers are, and make sure that they can help you build the product that makes sense. You can get to product-market fit a lot faster, while also exploring commercial and pricing models at the same time.
12. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
The big opportunity with AI in a marketing context is the ability to test, trial and understand what the best conversion paths are for a particular cohort, audience or segment. AI doesn’t just help us see and predict the best conversion paths based on behaviour, it also leads us down a hyper segmentation path which is especially beneficial for a marketer or someone to make sense of it. But it’s a double-edged sword. It can obviously help us make good decisions for driving conversions, especially when trying to do lots of variation and process lots of data to inform decision making. But it’s also nice to create data and segments that are meaningful and make sense. There’s the 20/80 rule making sure you’re spending 20% of your time on things that are driving 80% of your results. Managed incorrectly AI also has the potential to send you down rabbit holes, if you’re not mindful.
13. What movie inspires you the most?
This is a hard one, and it took me a while to think about the one movie that inspires me the most. But it probably comes down to the Back To The Future movies. I have a fascination with space and time travel. It’s all very ethereal and hard to get your head around, but the fact that it also incorporated some cool things like, flying skateboards and flying cars made it very appealing (in fact the DeLorean has an amazing backstory of its own). As a young kid who skateboarded every day, it was one of those movies that brought a whole lot of sci fi and cool stuff I was into, all into one movie.
14. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
I’m going to answer this one by describing the ones that are actually on my home screen, and probably the ones I use the most. Apps on the bottom tray of my phone include Messaging, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook. Above that I have Audible for audiobooks, OneNote, and a Group of apps for guitar that include, tools to unpick and learn songs, as well as 1Password to help store passwords securely in one place (and hopefully not get exposed by Facebook!). Then there’s my Schlage Home app which allows me to remotely lock and unlock dead bolts at our premises, another Group of apps for Cloud storage, and another for Socials, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Clubhouse and Twitter. Next row has app groups for Ride Sharing, Music and Maps in Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps (because sometimes one works better the other). Then there’s the good old camera (which I don’t really use from the home screen as I normally just swipe down). And lastly, I have a group of Weather and Travel apps, which unfortunately haven’t had much use in the current landscape.
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Starting his first successful company at the age of 18, Ben Shapiro is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience building and growing market-leading organisations in technology, marketing, and management consulting. His drive and deep curiosity to uncover industry competitive advantage has led him to build or cofound thirteen different, highly successful companies, many of which he’s sold to either global management consultancies, private equity firms or ASX listed organisations. Ben holds a genuine passion for the intersection of marketing, technology and business; an interest which helped identify a capability gap between thinking and execution in the MarTech industry, and inspired him to launch his most recent venture, Triggerfish. Founded in 2017, Triggerfish addresses the opportunity that the ‘Experience Economy’ presents: that is, the need for businesses to operationalise their digital experiences and not just deliver oneoff capability projects. Today, Triggerfish helps B2B and B2Member organisations in Australia and across the globe find and deliver their competitive advantage using marketing technology. Taking a customer-centric approach to problem solving and executing with speed and certainty, they help senior business leaders unlock business potential and maximise investments in MarTech Tools and Digital Experience Platforms to drive profitable growth. This fast execution cadence and focus on driving low risk and high ROI outcomes, is helping to redefine what is acceptable for enterprise MarTech and Customer Experience implementations and in turn, disrupting the typical marketing agency and consulting model – an approach which has fuelled the company’s global growth. Also supporting the global expansion was the launch of Dataweavers, a managed MarTech hosting service and complementary business to Triggerfish. As Triggerfish clients attempted to operationalise more of their digital experience, Ben and his team saw the need to expedite the way incremental value is reliably delivered to business and marketing teams using enterprise MarTech stacks. And so, with an unyielding drive to accelerate client outcomes, Dataweavers was born.
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