Beyond Basics: Advanced Marketing Strategies in the Digital Age

Thank you, Harshit. Thanks for having me here. And how are you doing today?

Okay. Well, as you said, it’s a 15 to 70-year-old journey. I started my Marketing from scratch. I had to start at the very deep trenches. When I say deep trenches, I mean as an execution. Of course, this was way before AI and way before the way marketing is right now. It was very bare bones in the trenches, very, very different marketing, which was still in the offline world, where I started my career when it was more integrated in digital and online marketing had just started. At least in the US, it was, but in India, it had just… It had started, but it didn’t have the reach and the technological measurement and all the framework that is there right now. Can we edit? Once again. I’ll continue. We can edit it, right? Yeah. Okay. I started in the pharma industry. I’m a beef farmer by education. I started in the pharma industry and a couple of years there. Then I figured out that I learned a lot from doing offline marketing there. I was handling an entire South India region for the company. I was working for plastic packaging industry, and then digital had just exploded.

Then I got my first big break with Google in 2006. I was one of Google’s first hires in in India. It was a very interesting phase where a lot of people who built Google from the ground up in the US were training the next generation of marketers, next generation of operators within India. It was a great opportunity to get trained with them first-hand. I worked on a lot of good products. I was part of the AdWords team, also worked a little bit on YouTube at Google AdSense and Google Chrome, check out a few other products. It was a very interesting field. That was really my incubation. Think of it like a master’s in marketing within that period. Then I transitioned several product companies. I started out, worked for a company called MagnetQuest for about three years. That was really where I honed. I also had my own agency, which was a part of Magnet, because that we started. Very early days, I’m talking these days, everybody is starting their own agency. It’s easy to do it also in terms of the AI and all that. But it was a difficult time. We The market was not big.

We had to sell SEO services. We had to sell a lot of pay-per-click. People didn’t have the budget. Those years we had, but we still were able to get a few customers. Most of our customers were in the US, early SaaS companies, a few in India, a few big dwellers and real estate companies. But yes, it was interesting faith. Maybe it was a little too early, too soon. So I had to then move back to working full-time companies. Worked in IBM for a year where I was program manager for the Tivoli brand in IBM. And then I post that, I worked for several startups as a demand gen leader. Starting with demand gen leader, move to product. I’ve done pretty much everything under the sun, grew as an executive, then as a manager, then as a director, I’ve VP now as a CMO over the last few years. I’ve, unlike a lot of others in this business, I know what it takes from ground-level execution to managing an entire strategy for a BU. I’ve seen there and then multiple sectors as well, pharmaceuticals, real estate. In IT also, IT services, SaaS products, then products, also different products, Martech, whether it is data warehousing, sales technology, pretty much everything.

It’s a whole length and breadth of expertise in marketing, and I’m fortunate to have evolved along those lines. I would say I’m a marketer by passion and profession as well. I really enjoy marketing. It’s in my name. I always say this, it’s my name, marketing, if you can extend it. That’s how I am. It’s been a great journey. Got a lot of learnings. In the last 10 years, I also mentored a lot of marketers. I’m also an ICF-certified coach. I’m one of the top-rated mentors on ADP List for marketing. I love giving it back. I love giving back to young professionals. With AI coming in, the last three years has been exciting, really. The change that has happened in the last three years, I don’t think it’s happened in the last 10, 15 years that I’ve seen AI coming in, remote work, post-COVID, the cultural mindset changing, the way management has changed, technology has changed. It’s scary, really. I think, in fact, the learning that in the last two years has just been exponential. It’s a very interesting phase. The post-AI phase is very exciting. I think it is the next transition in marketing is how you’re going to use AI not only for your work.

How is your role will evolve with AI? Very interesting times. I think that maybe the next 10 years, I could love, hopefully, build a good career around this year.

Interesting. I’ve seen both worlds. I had my own agency. I have worked with several big agencies, right from Ogilvy and Leo Burnet to smaller lot of agencies, enterprise clients, I’ve worked with startups also, startups of all sizes. So very difficult to say. Like I said, every company has their own pros and cons. I would say that it’s very difficult for me to For example, agencies, the thrill of working with agencies is the variety of clients you work with. You’re not doing a single product. You’re working with multiple agencies, so there’s a lot to learn there. Work on multiple projects. It could be. And so you evolve, you understand a lot of I think that the versatility, if you’re somebody who’s bored of doing the same thing, a lot of agencies are exciting in that way. But the problem with agencies are that you don’t learn something. You’re working with a team, right? When you’re working on a product and building a team, you’re building that product, selling that product, and really building revenue for that. That close net team that you work in a product is not there in agencies. It’s like you’re working for that ground track or that retainer.

There’s a flip side. I’ve seen a lot of agency folks struggle with team-based projects because for them, it’s project-based. They don’t know how to interact in a team-corporate setting because on the flip side and product side, you’re as good as a product you have. There’s a lot to learn in early startups, but it depends on the culture as well. If the culture is great, there’s a lot to learn. What I would say, and then enterprise, of course, you are maybe a smaller cog in a larger wheel. You’re just one It’s part of a larger system. Lots to learn in a sense. I always believe if I have to evolve a template of a great career in marketing, you start out, you can learn as much, but you start out on the bigger brand. I think a bigger brand or a bigger startup because the learning is important. Also, There are mentors to check what is happening, to correct you if things are not. You really learn the best in a very early stage of your career. Then you can start out with product startups and then walk into agencies because to really build a kick-ass agency, I think that journey is very important.

If you are early and start out the agency, you really are learning along the way. You evolve, you have strengths, but you make mistakes, it affects you. There’s a pros and cons. I know a lot of people have started agencies very early in their careers. Unless you are extremely smart, you can evolve. But the best agencies I’ve seen are people who have spent some time, learned agency, worked in enterprises, and know what enterprise customers were, know what startup customers were, done, been through that, and then they can really serve their customers better. Those are the best agencies I’ve seen. But I said there is no template. It is no one-size-fits all. It could be everything. For me, again, to summarize, there is no such thing as what is the best. It completely varies from culture, product, strategy, the team you’re working with, market you are in. There’s so many variables there. Personally, I’ve enjoyed all the experiences. Like I said, I love marketing. As long as I’m building, generating leads for the product, revenue for the product, and building the brand doesn’t matter. Certain products are more easier to do, certain are more harder. But as an agency, you cannot select.

You got to pick whatever you want.

All right. The word go-to-market, 10 people will have 10 definitions for it. But for me, it is really, see, A startup is just two things. You’re building the product and selling the product. They’re just two very simple to make it very simple. You build the product and sell the product. Gtm is really involved in selling the product, whatever is required to sell. When I say sell, it involves basically everything, whether it is the marketing component is all. When I say sell, it doesn’t mean that it’s sales. Gtm is really about how do you take the market, how do you take a product and sell it in the market and build revenue out of that. My process around GTM really starts at Pretty much at a market research stage. It starts at understanding your customers, understanding the market, what you are. The market research and customer research component, make it very simple, is a very important part of marketing. In that, you need to really understand who are your buyers, build what you call your ideal customer profile. You need to know your ICP very well defined. Who are the buyers? Where will you find them?

What are the channels you will find them? What makes them buy? What are their pain points? This research part, it’s a mix of analyzing your data. If you have product analytics data, if you have your website data, all this data that is talks. So your data also talks and also your feedback from the market. It could be secondary feedback from market research or it could be primary talking to customers. Now, all these together is giving you a picture of what your market is about, your researching. So that has to be very clear. That is the fundamental or very core of GTM. That has to be very, very clearly defined and it has to be documented. Your market, your competitors, your ecosystem around which you’re operating, all that has to be. Once that is done, I think the second bit is about how you’re going to position your product. What is the product or service? What is the positioning? That includes creating positioning statements. What is your strategy? Because you have to be unique, your differentiator in the market. Around that positioning, and then some people may call it your brand strategy, some people call it messaging, some people call it positioning, whatever it is.

The second The key thing is really how are you differentiating your product in this competition? How does it make stand out? It could be your messaging statements, your feature-related, your benefits. How are you addressing the pain points? Everything has to be very well understood. That part is great. Then around that, you have your branding also. Visually, how will you differentiate? What are the color palette? All these are also there. These are the more direct application part of it. In this, your organic strategy is also very important. What are the keywords that define you? What are the How would you define? For example, HubSpot said inbound marketing. Salesforce said no software initially when they started out. Each one of them has their own, or Drift started with conversational marketing. That was their buzzword. You need to really find that hook or that main differentiator in that. That has to be, of course, sitting with your product team, with your customer success team, with your entire… You build that. Then the strategy has to be drawn out. Then all All these branding elements are there. The third part of GTM is really about the acquisition part, which channels to use.

I’m making it very simple for you, but there are, of course, a lot of things that go on depending on company size and all that thing, culture and what the teams are. It could be as simple as doing it in one week. Some companies take a month for a GTM, but these days it’s very agile. The third is acquisition, what are the channels that you’re going to acquire customers on? End-to-end, what you call that, the complete growth curve. You have the entire framework. You’re a customer retention, acquisition, activation, engagement strategy, everything. The channels that you would use and what would be your tactics. You go down to the micro level of campaign tactics, everything that is there. That is more of the acquisition engagement plan where We also have your metrics and all that is defined at a… In fact, metrics are very defined. Goals are defined at a very early stage also, maybe in the second stage. Then the third is sales part. How do you enable sales? How do you enable partners? See, if you’re a product which is direct subscription, where you do not have a very strong sales cycle or you don’t have sales touchpoints and all, then the third part is fine.

You’re just restricted to yourself. But when you have a sales touch, if you’re selling enterprises, if you’re selling services, if you’re selling digital services, enterprise, IT services, or manufacturing, or those companies. Then your sales is also very important. How do you enable marketing’s job also as a product marketer to enable sales? That is the fourth component. Your decks, your sales pitch decks, not sales decks, your presentations, your pitch sales pitch, your video, a good demo, hopefully. Basically, helping sales go out there and sell your product better. That’s another fourth component of it. The fifth is basically where the loop completes. You analyze, you measure everything at that end, Everything is measured and then you go back to planning it. That is really… Generally, GTM is when you launch a product every quarter. Generally, people launch one big bang launch, or sometimes they have soft launches in a quarter, and then they keep that in loop. This is the process, but the main thing is if you’re launching a product or relaunching a product or launching a new feature or launching, or sometimes people just repackage and launch a product again, whatever it is that GTM comes during that time.

That is really at a very basic level what goes into a GTM, and you need to work with teams on that.

I keep saying that earlier you needed an MBA in marketing. Rewards that, it has become you need ABM now. An MBA marketing is no longer enough. You have to be, Okay, what exactly is ABM? It’s a term that keeps being told a lot, and it’s been there for a long time. It’s not that it’s a new term. The thing with marketers, you need to understand is that we have this sometimes good, sometimes not so good habit of coming up with terminology, churning out the same thing. Every marketer or every product will try to position their product on the same thing. When you go to the fundamentals, it’s the same. But a company might rebrand it their way. Hubspot is inbound marketing. It’s actually digital marketing inbound way because they’re selling their software. Whatever it is, terminology, we are notorious for that. But cutting all that around, ABM has been there for a long time, for 20 years. It basically is something Which enables you to sell to larger organizations. Historically, it came from these big IT companies like IBM and before the advent of big software e-commerce and where we were selling, the sales process was dominant.

When you sell to large… See, the thing is when you’re selling to a larger enterprise, why do you want to sell to a larger enterprise? When I say larger enterprise, I’m talking about companies who have large sales volumes. You’re selling $10,000, $50,000 worth of software that you’re selling. It’s not a subscription that is $20 that you can substitute using a credit card, not like that. When you’re selling, it requires you to… Solutioning is required. It has long sale. It takes two months, sometimes even years to sell a product. I know in IBM and HP, it takes accounts which have taken years to sell. They have big accounts. But what happens is once you get a big logo, your brand is there and they have retainers because the implementation process takes so much time that they They sign for multi-layer contract. In one big customer, you actually can sustain your sofa a long time. That’s why everybody wants to sell to enterprises in a way. And ABM is one way to sell to those enterprises. That’s because, as it says, account-based marketing. An account is a customer account. If you’re selling to, say, for example, Microsoft, Microsoft is your account.

You are selling some software or some service to Microsoft, and you want to get Microsoft as a logo on your as a customer. What you’re doing is you’re Or not, the conventional way of bombarding messages and push marketing will not work. You understand the account’s challenges, you understand what the account, and then with technology, it’s become very easier. You can understand the pain points. You have something called as intent data where you can see the intention of customer to buy. There’s a lot of tools right from what they’re doing on your website to what content they’re consuming. Certain softwares, in fact, have the propensity to buy using third-party systems. They will tell Now, they’ll give you an ad saying that this is in-market, that this account is right to buy. That data is very important in current ABM. Without data, ABM just falls flat. It’s just old-school account-based sales engagement. So data is very important. You get that data, understand what is there about a customer, you understand the contact, who are the people. That is the first thing. Second is personalization. You really personalize your messages to that particular account. Microsoft has a problem with, say, their Microsoft 365 team has some pain the points that the software set.

You personalize your messages along those lines. Personalization in ad content, personalization in emails, personalization landing pages. Now, the vendors out there have made out ABM like an ad. If you look at a lot of vendors like demand base and few, they use personalized ads. These vendors, for them, ABM is display ads to their account. That is one part of it. But I think that at the largest stage, it is also about communication and sales. The third key thing is interaction with sales. You Sales, it’s not just marketing. Sales, I’ve always been marketing, but the reality is that it is a team game. You have the CEO, right from the CEO to the sales to customer success to everybody. Product team has to play a very, very key role. It’s a tag team effort that’s going on. Drivers It’s done by marketing. Marketers are the orchestrators. You have a conductor of an orchestra. Marketers play that role, but in the end, everybody… Sales has to be… You need to work with sales to close those accounts. Basically, data which understands which accounts to target, what messages to hit the account with, how do you reach those accounts, and then help sales go hide and close that.

It is the same thing. It’s just that… Think of it like a sniper-based approach. When you have two things, you have a shotgun. If you’ve seen the Terminator to Judgment Day, he goes about banning people with a gun just like that. That is old-school marketing. Here, this is like a sniper. You have the focus of the account and then you try and aim it that way. It’s a sniper-based approach rather than a shotgun approach where you just go out of there. That is what ABM is. I think it’s very important if you’re selling to it. It’s an approach. It has had great success for a lot of customers. I think with that approach, if done well, it can really… Putting the technology aside The approach of ABM and the cultural aspect of ABM, if you can imbibe, very good. Technology is very important, but it’s not just the technology name learn, not the main thing, mainstee about ABM. Hope that answers.

So branding, well, it’s… See, many people have different notions of branding. I told you when I answered the question on GTM, I told you about the second important facet of GTM really is about differentiating your product in the market. Now, how do you differentiate? There are multiple ways you do that. Your visual elements is very important, but really it’s about your identity. If you think of any brand in the market, we’re looking at biggies like Apple or anything, the perception. It is about awareness and perception. The two very important things of branding is you need to have people aware of your brand, so build awareness around your brand. When the awareness is there, what they perceive you, good, bad, proud, arrogant, not that great a brand, they are there, they do all practices. They’re excellent brand, very good. I feel very whatever. That perception of that brand, that is what is the two important things in branding. How do you build that? It’s an art, it’s a science. Science is where you’re living in technology, where I spoke about GTM, but the art is about how you do that. That’s, again, very individual thing. It could be in your visual elements.

If you take Marketo, for example, I’m taking a product example. They use a lot of purple in their branding. You think about purple A good way. Then we have done that with that and then you think about it. You think about something like Apple, of course, there’s no color association, but it’s Apple, you think iPhone and the products, I mean, smart products, and you think about it. The way you build that, of course, is visual elements is there. Color, typography, your content, your experience that you have, positive images, whatever. Or Titan had that signature to you. Airtel had that signature. You could use audio. Something that makes your brand stand out, creates or makes you aware, makes the customers or prospects aware and the right perceptions. That is branding it at a very simple and a very basic level. It could be just the way you create your website. Your website and your other digital assets could also be talk about your brand. Very simple. If you don’t have to be Apple and Microsoft and big enterprises with large budgets to do branding at a very basic level. I also believe that it’s the customer touchpoints.

Every customer touchpoint, there is something that the customer is taking, prospect is taking. Those touchpoints have to really create a good experience for the prospect. That is, for example, even our email sent, if they are downloading the software, the landing page that is there, or they come to your office, how do they look at your office? All these are small things, add and or minus or multiply or subtract from the brand perception and awareness. I can go spend an hour on branding, but the basic thing is whatever distinguishes could be a tagline. Nike is just do it. Nike has a tick says just do it. That sticks. So brand name, tag, everything that can help you, again, to summarize, create the right awareness and perception in the market is what branding is. See, for FIALDA, what we did is it’s the term that we need to own. It’s a very calm. See, we are not a big brand where we have a huge budget to go out there You can sponsor the Super Bowl or sponsor IPL or those things. It’s about simple things that create that impact. It’s about the tagline that we own.

We need that category that we own. Within that area where you’re organic comes in very play. Organic also, you can create a good brand. It’s keywords. I’ll give you an example in cricket. Take a cricket example. You’re a hold of ESPN Cricket. I don’t know if you’re a cricket fan, but ESPN Cricket is a very famous cricket site. There’s a site called Cricbus. If you see Cricbus, you search for any keyword around cricket, Criquibus will come on top because they’ve done that, nailed their organic strategy very, very well. It’s not a bad site, but ESPN Cricket comes a little later. But ESPN Criquibur has created such a brand in the minds of customers, in cricket fans and all that, that people don’t even go to that top many people. Of course, those are fly-by-night cricket fans who are not very serious, they will probably click. But people who really want good content and really, they will always go to Criquibur because they don’t need to go to organic. Because That’s the brand that they have created. See, the different person has also done a good job. Organically, they have nailed it. For us, it’s all about owning that organic space a little, and it’s also about our customer experience that we can provide with.

That’s where we are trying to distinguish with our brand. The brand identity, the colors that we have, and we want to own the colors. If you see it on the field logo are very different. It seems like a WiFi, right? If you see those. We’re trying to play around that. The logo has recollect and terminal. It’s all about the customer pain points. Because see, it’s a very niche software. It’s an industry software going to very niche industry. I think in this industry, when you’re selling to industry-specific B2B niche software, your brand is your customer in that market. How are you perceived? That is all about your customer service. For us, our customer support and service is one aspect of our branding, and we are very good with customer support. Our customer support, even with prospects, when they come to us, that is a part of our brand. For us, we believe customer service and customer experience is a very important component rather than a lot of other awareness, those things. For us, that is very important, and we give it a lot more importance. That is where it is.

Yeah, we do a lot of thought leadership. Yes, we have thought leadership is important in this space because we have customer webinars that we do. We have something called as Customer Expert Advisory Board, not EAB, Expert Advisory Board, where we have… One thing about this industry is that we need domain experts because the industry is so dynamic, it is so niche, it is so knowledge-centric, knowledge-heavy that you cannot just have any… You call it inferences. You call it inferences for the EABs, basically are inferences in that market. It could be somebody who is there in the electric utilities? Somebody who has been years in the electric utilities industry, who knows that industry well and put be our influence. They are our inferencers. We don’t go the normal Instagram route and all that. We need such people, what you call SMEs, subject matter experts or domain experts. They are the ones we are part of our EAB. We have a few prospects who are part of our EAB. There’s one who is in the construction industry, who knows the inside-outs of constructions. They are our eyes and ears in the market. They They provide us with data, they provide us with not exactly data, but doing trends and all, and also provide us their input and their insights on how the market is going, how the process is.

We utilize that to hone our outbound content strategy a little bit. We have an EAB. We also thought leadership, of course, we write a lot of blogs, a lot of blog content. It’s very centric. We have to be very direct. We use webinars. In fact, we are planning one webinar for the UK market very soon. We are doing a lot of that. We write blogs. Eab, we do guest webinars. Our customers come and talk about it. So, yeah, I mean, thought leadership for B2B is very, very critical. But it’s not just about thought leadership. The right content in the right channel has to be very strong. For us, that has served very good. We don’t have to go in every analyst firm that we have to and get that. That’s one way of doing it. I’ve done that in the past. But here it’s more about going, seeking out those experts, getting their inputs, and really raise a focused on what our target market’s challenges are, and we try to solve them.

Retention, I feel, is very under-spect of, generally, IT services also and also for a lot of manufacturing products. It’s all about it. For us, retention is very important. In fact, we have customers who have been with us for six years, six continuously, when we started out. Of course, field now at that time, was a very different brand. Now, we have go-to-market is very different, but they’ve been there for years with us, some of our customers. The earlier version of field now was very different. We started with the mapping, GIS mapping facility, and then we moved along to different. Our GTM changed completely. We became more field inspection software rather than just GIS mapping. It’s all about retention, and we have a good retention rate. I would say we have a retention is one of the best We have seen. We rarely have, of course, market changes and there’s a lot of other things that involve. I think one of the things is if there has been a churn, it’s mostly because of the market changing, dynamics changing, or maybe that you’re looking for a more robust all-around solution around that. It’s never been because our customer service was bad or our customers, we never had any issue at all in our history.

It’s very important. Retention, again, like I said, the key to retention is create prompt customer service. I say for us, field of customer service is extremely important for us, and we have a great support team helping us out with every customer request because there are some areas of… Because it’s easy to set up, but some of the configurations are very personalized. For every customer of FIilder, we have customized their setup for them. Their data that they use, the tables that they use, the assets that they have are very, very personalized. It requires a lot of help from the support team, and we’ve always helped them there. That is, I think, the very important aspect always Always be there for the customer. Always have, I think that is the aspect of it. We are not like a Zomato where we will have reference code, referral codes, and we are trying to retain thousands of customers. That’s not volume-based. It happens. You If you use one customer in this game, it hits us very hard. We have to be very double-sure with engagement. Of course, the way we do that is we send them product features whenever they’re updated.

So you always have QBRs, quarterly business reviews with your customers, and tell them about usage, how you can improve, and this we prompt. Sometimes it’s just about the basic things that are very important. What a customer needs is very simply to summarize quick prompt attention to what they have. Sometimes speed off is very important. They need the best solution and solution which makes them feel happy about it and the right solution also, the knowledge, so that it can aware. I think that is enough, really. It might be simple to say, but trust me, how many companies struggle with it. We don’t really do too many things to retain customers. We just do the basics and whatever is required for us to keep them happy. I think that’s one of our strengths.

That is my number one key to success is I have never When I started my first role also, I read, devoured every book of marketing that was there at that time, whether it is Kottler, Drucker, you have David Murmanska, all these Dave Schaffe, Seth Gordie. I read voraciously and updated upskill myself because I did not study MBA marketing. I didn’t go through the conventional route where you do MBA marketing in a decent college. A lot of them don’t do. I went through that route and I think that is always I see these days it’s very easy. I use Notion these days. I find that a very good tool. I find it very helpful. What I do is I subscribe to a lot of channels. Of course, I get newsletters. I am subscribed on LinkedIn. Linkedin these days has newsletters also. I’ve subscribed to a lot of them. I don’t have time to read all of them. But what happens is I spend some time over the weekend or maybe half an hour. What happened earlier, I used to spend reading the newspaper in the morning. I have removed that time and I just spend When I’m going through my feed and bookmarking it on Notion, I have Notion on my…

And with ChatGPT and all that, it becomes a lot easier. I quickly, whatever I have to take bullets or I have to take points out of it, I just quickly summarize them using ChatGPT and Keeper. My file is big. I have digital file is big. I have all sorts of content that I have, facts, data, case studies, use cases, all these I’ve kept separately in Notion. That is what I do. There are a lot of sources. I don’t have one source. Linkedin is my number one source right now. Linkedin and X or Twitter. Those two are very big sources. Remember, earlier, I used to read blogs a lot. I used to use Google Reader a lot, and I used to… But these days, it’s really about… LinkedIn is just so much good with content. You subscribe to the right influencer or the site, so-called influencer or top leader and that. I learned more from LinkedIn by just following the right people on LinkedIn than earlier I used to. Of course, I don’t read too many books. I don’t have time for it this much. Earlier, I used to, but these days, it’s more about digital.

Everything is digital. I have a Kindle where I always, when I’m traveling and all, I use Kindle a lot. But really, LinkedIn is an axis, are my two biggest sources of getting good content out there. I also have that there’s something called as Google Reader. I don’t know if people don’t know if you remember Google Reader. We used to have that RSS feed. So earlier I had subscribed to those feeds a lot. These days, sometimes I have the relic version of Google Reader called Old Reader, where I like that RSS feed because I’ve customized such a way that based on category, the right content also comes. I don’t use it that much. But my Notion and my ChatGPT and my LinkedIn and all is what I keep. You have to podcast. Yes, we’re doing a lot of podcasts. I find them good when I’m walking my dog or jogging or outside Side, especially it’s stuck in traffic these days. I just listen to podcasts and there are so many good things. I think that it’s very interesting times. Podcasts and LinkedIn and all give me enough. You have to. Because what I’ve realized is in three Three months, if you don’t, it’s so fast, so dynamic that sometimes these days I feel three months, if I’ve not upgraded myself or upscaled myself, I feel I’m a little dinosaur in this world.

I feel like that it’s so fast the world is now, and you have to. If you think that you learn something three months back, forget yours. Three months back, you’re already something new has come, some new tool has come, and you’re already back. It’s very difficult now. If you’re a marketer, you have to just Every week, you have to just keep on upgrading, reading, writing, listening to podcast. Otherwise, you’re dead. This is one advice I have. You will be dead. I mean, we could survive earlier with years. Okay, fine. What we did in 2009, you could still do in 2010. But the thing is 2023, what you did, by the end of 2024, it’s already become obsolete. It’s like that.

Well, I would say that AI is obviously a big trend that’s happening. I think that one thing that has changed is a few things. What worked five years back, I’m beginning to realize they’ve changed a lot. For example, in demand gen, you have your traditional route of you have a form and then you have created a landing page with a form and you get an asset at the back end of it. It could be case study, it could be any great guide. You’ve created all that. It’s the old market HubSpot school of marketing demand and then you get customer to come and fill up the form and then they fill it and then you put them into the marketing nurture, email lead nurture from any of these marketing automation tools. But that’s been the conventional playbook. Then MQLs, you get MQL marketing Now, putting qualified lead is what you get. Then you convert those MQLs through lead nurturing through emails, other channels. It has been the traditional playbook that I have been grown on. But I had to change that playbook dramatically now. It is not about that. Playbook sometimes doesn’t work. The The concept of an MQL might have changed.

For example, people are saying, do you need a gate of home? Why not let them consume content? Then with the ABM tools and with analytics in place, you can actually measure the engagement. You want to read the content, don’t gate them. Then you nurture them through other channels. It could be now with WhatsApp and OTT, chat platforms and direct messenger channels. You have website as a channel, you have slack and a lot of other channels, what you call dark social, slack and telegrams of the world where a lot of conversations happen, internal teams. It has changed so much. I think the traditional playbooks are being rewritten. I think it is evolving. Three trends that I see, which I feel that as a manager, if you’re a young marketer, if you want to transition to a marketing leader, If you’re a young marketer going out, I think you have to leverage AI for sure. You cannot say that I don’t know and leverage AI well. You realize that AI is also your partner in crime. It is a competitor to you because somewhere down the line that AI could replace you. You have to make AI work for you and use it and become a AI.

That’s one thing. But if it’s a leader, there are three things that I feel are going to be a big trend. Ai-enabled management. How do you manage a team using AI? How do you manage remote teams? That’s a new skill that I’m also learning because only in the last three years, I’ve been managing or working with remote teams. That’s different. But here, when your team is completely remote, that requires a different way of managing people. I I learned, I think I’m trying to learn that I have become slightly better at it now. But now that with the pandemic and all, remotely, how do you manage teams? Because things are very different when you’re working remotely, when we’re working face-to-face. Things are so different. You don’t have that personal connect and you’re not able to create that. Your rapport that is required. Some people like it, some people don’t. But how do you manage remote teams? The third really is about the new cultural shift that’s happened, what you call Gen Z. I’ve been leading teams for 10 years, and I see the change in the current generation. Some of it I absolutely love. Some of it I don’t want to get into that, but there are flip sides to both of it.

It’s a difficult generation, especially after the pandemic. Things have changed completely. People’s mindsets, what they want, what they work life balance, all that. The way you manage the current generation, the cultural shift, those are the three trends that I’m seeing. If you want to be a leader now, you have to manage all of these three very well. How to use AI to manage, how to manage remote teams effectively without letting productivity go down, and how to manage the Gen Z’s aspirations and their ambitions and their skills. It’s a different generation, I would say. They’re born. I think that those are the three trends I’m seeing. If somebody can nail that, all the three, I think they will be very good in the next five, six years. They will probably be up of the game. If you’re still stuck in the old-school ways of things, we struggle. I’m trying to learn that, friends. Also, playbooks are changing. Playbooks for Traditionally are changing. I think one thing is that people are going leaner now. The other trend is they want leaner technology stack. When they don’t want too much of technology which is pretend leaner technology stack, leaner teams, and not a very heavy leadership and execution team.

The execution team, the leader, should also execute marketers who are attribution for revenue. Earlier marketers were enough. When I started my career, if I gave a lead, it was enough. Mqls, my KRI was, give MQLs, that’s enough. If you’re a marketer starting out, you think you’re still in the MQL world, you’re gone. You have to directly now think about revenue. Marketers have to think about revenue and top-line and bottom-line cost for the company. So earlier it was not that much. Marketers now will be questioned. So there’s a lot of trends there. Some technological, some cultural, some a little bit of political, some process-related, lots of economic, lots of trends I cannot cover all, but these are the few trends that I think are going to be very critical.

Sure.

Don’t put me troubles.

Start of my career? Oh, my God. You call rapid fire, but you can pose such deep question. Well, advice is keep learning. Never think that you have learned enough. There’s always somebody who learns more than you. You cannot know everything, but you keep learning every time. Every The thing that you do is to be a learning curve. Learn, then you can earn a lot more. That’s been my principle. These days, it’s very different. People think of earning, then learning. But learn first, you will automatically get into a great earning mode. Every experience, every project, every people you meet, every conversation you have, think of it as a learning experience. You should be like a sponge. I think that sometimes I did that, sometimes not, but be like a sponge early in your career. Absorb everything. Then you’ll develop filters to filter out what you have. It’s not a rapid fire, but I know. Sorry, you for a second. Okay.

Given a chance, I will not use any social media. I would have to just abandon every social media, but LinkedIn, at least for Or maybe I’d say YouTube. Yeah, not only LinkedIn, YouTube. Because it entertains, it headpoints, so I would probably use YouTube.

What marketing tactic work. Oh, my God. There’s so many, man. I don’t have anything that is… I mean, what is bizarre? I don’t know. Bizarre.

I think the cred ads, right? I like that. The cred ads, I think they always… I don’t call them bizarre, but they’re very creative and hit sometimes, are not poetically and very cheeky, very going with the current generation and the way the current generation is right now. Not very poetically correct, in your face a little, but cheeky humorous. I like that. I wouldn’t find it bizarre, but When Anil Kapoor says in that ad that they can’t afford me or something like that, it shows that how the generation has changed. I found it very good and it worked. It was risky because conventional playbook says you play up things and all here they were very, very natural. I don’t call it bizarre, but very, very different way they did it. I love creds ads these days. Yeah, that was something amazing.

I think a little bit of procrastination. I want to get too many things done, but I can’t get everything done. But you are trying to learn that it’s not because I’m lazy or anything. It’s just that I want to do many things and not all get done. So then it didn’t get done. I sometimes have to push, not just here. So a little bit of procrastination and also a little bit of wanting I think it’s perfect. Perfectionism, I’ve learned, is not very good when you are growing in SaaS. I’ve learned to channelize it better, but initially, I used to be like, get everything perfect and then start. Those things don’t work in the current startup world. You have to be very nimble and agile. Those are the two things which… I mean, it’s a double it. What are your strengths are, weaknesses, nothing like that. A little bit of procrastination at times and a little bit of perfectionism at times. So it’s a double it.

My last Google search was ways to keep your kid busy when you are on a holiday and when you don’t want to give them an iPad, I don’t have the problem. But this was the prompt I had. When you don’t want to give them iPad and TV and ways to keep your kids engaged, when you have work and when you don’t want to give them iPad and your wife is out of town. That was the last prompt. Last It gave me some very bizarre- What did it say?

It gave some games that you could do and all that. It told me that you could create some games that they could play. You could just set them up. Or it gave some sites of some online games they can play. It was not very good. I said no, without the iPad, it didn’t say without the internet. But anyways, that is how it was. That was one problem. The current prompt I used was I’m running a webinar right now, so I want to just build that entire webinar strategy. I use that. Those are two. One is professional, one is personal. Is that what you’re looking for?

Wonderful, Arshit. Thanks for inviting me and hope it was not able to provide you with some stuff which you could take home. Enjoyed it. All the best to you, Arshid. Yeah, have a great day.