Building Data-Driven Marketing Strategies: Lessons from Nexla's CMO

Hey, Harshit. Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here and chatting with you.

Yeah. Now, this is a question that I think a lot of people ask me when I introduce myself and my background. If you think as a CMO, in my background, I’m an engineer by training. My undergraduate degree is in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. I studied to be an engineer. My first job out of college was actually in manufacturing, and I was building electrical motors. I was trying to stay close to my education. That was how I even started my professional journey. But from there, when I moved to the US, at that point, I started taking on software development roles. I was a developer. I did this company’s website. It was a managed healthcare company back in Florida. I did their website, I managed their website. This was for their patient enrollment. But then I was also the system administrator. I also did their backups at the end of the day. Those days, we used to do those tape backups. I was responsible for backing up their data. I did pretty much anything technically for them. That was me. That was the one point of contact. But over the course, of my journey as a developer, the single point of contact for anything technology and all of that, I realized that my interest was less in actually developing things, building things, and building a database.

It was more than actually understanding the why. What are people asking for? What are people complaining about? If a patient cannot log in, what are the issues they are facing? The interactions from the end users and why they were asking for certain things, why should I build that certain thing to meet someone’s needs? Those were the things that intrigued me. And I say that was probably the journey. So it was not just one moment that I can say, Hey, it was a magical moment. But that’s the part where I realized that I enjoyed the why. I enjoyed understanding why I needed to learn things. And from there on, I went on to become a product manager. I was trying to build the features. I did my MBA. And then I got into truly understanding requirements and building features that users ask for. How do they work? How do they not work? And all that. But it’s during my product management journey that I found marketing because I think, at least for me, they went hand in hand. It was like, Hey, you’re building this product. You have these features. How do you market this?

So from driving traffic to people to look at my product, consume my features, conversions, and more signups. That’s what started me in marketing. Then from there on, it was the different aspects of marketing. How do I drive demand? How do I drive awareness? How do I get people engaged once they learn about my product and comcompanyow do I build an ecosystem with partners? There were lots of things, in my email marketing campaigns. Once I started in marketing, I just couldn’t stop. I was fascinated. The depth and the breadth and a lot of things that we have to do and the touches from a prospect to a customer, the different things we have to do. It’s fascinating. So I have continued my journey and I love every minute of marketing. And this is where I see myself continuing.

Yeah. I think I would, again, cheat a little bit here. Instead of saying one significant thing, I think there are a few different things that I’ve seen change throughout my marketing experience, how the landscape has evolved. Previously, if you think about it, and I think we talked a little bit about this, it used to be a long sales cycle. It used to be sales and in-person working with prospects, in-person handshakes to close a deal. Now, marketing has a very critical role to play. Have that engine, so your website, your demand gen, your events, your webinars, Everything that you do now have to cater to bringing that prospect, building their awareness, bringing their knowledge, and then converting them, getting them to sales, and then converting, continuing to convert them, continuing to educate them. Once When you’re a customer, you want to keep that loyalty, you want to keep that awareness, you want to make sure they are loyal, they understand how to use your product. There are so many different pieces. I think the evolution is from that largely, hey, marketing used to do something in a silo, sales used to go do something else in a silo to close deals.

Now it is a joint go-to-market motion. You have heard so many people now talk about joint go-to-market motion. Sales and marketing work together on everything, including who to target, including what activities we need to do. So that, to me, is a huge shift. And it’s also driven this whole, Hey, let us get our website to be a demand engine now. So sales don’t have to go figure out how to do this in a silo. And then that notion of that now that has also come up is personalized content. How do I personalize? I think you and I talked a little bit about it. How do I not just message generically to you, but if I know you’re this vertical and you have this pain point, how do I message you versus a different point, a different vertical, a different type? So that evolution of personalization also, I think, has been fueled by this, the engine, this joint go-to-market motion, and the reliance on digital. So I would say those They’re all intertwined, but they’re all some big trends that I’ve seen and changed over the last several years.

I’ll start probably with Nexla. We are a startup, and I would say an innovative startup like Gartner, you go look at our mentions, we get a lot of mentions by analysts, even though we are a startup and we don’t yet qualify to be in the magic quadrant. The fact that we appear in market research documents, the fact that we appear in hype sites, just testifies to the innovation, right? So what are we? We are a data integration platform at the core of it, but there are tons of data integration platforms. So what we do, our model is a little unique. Our goal is we want to make data available to anyone, in any format, anywhere. You plug your systems and connect to Nexla. It could be PDFs, connect us to SharePoint, connect us to your Excel or Google Sheets, whatever, any format, your external, or internal data sources. We can make sense of it, can have your metadata, and we create this unique thing called products, data products, virtual data products, or next sites. I think that’s one of our unique selling points, if you will, because these logical data products think of cubes, right? If you look at a Rubik’s Cube, those little cubes.

So you can create as many data products as you want. So say I want Harshit, you’re an external agency I work with. I want to give you one level of access, one set of dimensions that you have access to. Say an internal data analyst team, they needs to do a more detailed analysis. I’ll give them a little different access. I can still use the same data. I can give everybody access, but I can work out the access. I think that is one core and one key aspect that we have. And then the other and this comes a lot in our Gen AI use cases, we can do structured data and unstructured data. So you don’t have to worry about what you have. We can work with any model. We can show you the difference with AI models. We can send the data to any vector database. But really with Gen AI and data now becoming the pretty crucial aspect, we are already ahead of that forefront that we have thought through some of those needs, some of those pain points. And we have already Gen AI customers. We help with this whole next set and then help people with access to data, any format, any place, anytime.

Also our Gen AI use cases, we help people be ready for Gen AI. You can launch your apps into production. Don’t have to be set in POC. I feel we have several different aspects that are different from other people in this same space if you will. We tackle a whole lot of different problems people come up with. Now, From a marketing strategy perspective, we are a startup. I think if you think about our cycle, your startup cycle, the first goal is awareness. How do we get people to know about us? How do we get our analysts to know about us? A lot of the marketing cycle so far has been building awareness. It has been events, summits, webinars, and analyst relationships. It’s been a lot about those one-on-one relationships with a lot of prospects. I think as we are evolving, as we are evolving now, the next phase is changing that media mix a little bit. From awareness, now we can get people to consider and go into, Hey, I know this is the solution that’s going to meet my needs. So focusing on that media mix, focusing on that marketing mix, things like SEO, things like how do we get more people to our demos, how do we do paid campaigns?

So there are lots of things that are top of mind now. Not rocket Not science, but account-based marketing. So there are all these things that we are trying to focus on to get to that next level.

Again, going by that same notion, that user journey, getting them from top of the funnel, getting them from awareness, bringing them down to consideration, and then they’re ready to, Hey, this is the product that I This is a solution that matches my needs. So you’re bringing them down the pipeline. So I look at marketing KPIs also, and this is every place that I go to, every place that I work. I look at the metrics in a similar way. What is starting from, Hey, How many visitors? So we launch a campaign. We are going to launch a campaign now shortly. So everything from there, the baseline is, How many visitors are we going to get? How many people of those do we think are going to engage and say they want to talk to sales? From there, how many people are going to go into an email campaign? What would be the engagement rate for those emails? The open rate, the click-through rate. How many people might go actually into a sales queue? How many will be part of the pipeline? So I look at everything from top-of-the-funnel metrics like visitors, page views, engagement time, and session time, all the way to what’s the pipeline that we have built.

How many of those went on to be close ones? And then what’s our return on investment? One key aspect project that I love to look at is for every dollar, how much pipeline are we able to build? And for every dollar, how many close wins are we able to get? And we constantly need to keep improving upon that. So the baseline right now is what I have, and I’m trying to build on all of that.

Yeah. I’m actually in the process of retention, working through, and nothing elaborate in terms of it’s not a huge campaign, but what are those touches that we should be doing? Right from When someone signs a deal and they hand it over from sales to CSMs, what is it that we need to do? What is the checklist? Including, Hey, maybe something, welcome, thank you, email, and a little kit. I’m working through building all of that as an example. Then when the onboarding is complete, what should we do? When should we be touching them and asking them for a reference? But how do we keep them informed? The product webinars that we do, the deep feature webinars. When do we invite you? Who do we invite to those webinars so they can get value from their product usage? We work closely with the CS team. But again, in the spirit of a startup, I’m building those touches to keep that engagement going and I have a few pieces in place, and I’m trying to build upon more of those.

Yeah. So the channels are, again, nothing should be surprising. There are a mix of channels. There are a lot of events because we are a startup. So we do go to events because that’s a great way for us to drive awareness, to meet CXOs, to meet analysts. So there are quite a few events, especially in the data space, because we are a data integration platform. So that is one huge aspect. And then we did a lot of webinars, and we did our digital summit. We did our virtual data integration summit. This was a couple of months ago. Huge attendance. We had thought leaders from a lot of different companies talk about, generally, their pain points and the trends that they see with data Data integration, data operations, data monitoring, all of that, and then Gen AI because that’s top of mind now for everybody. So virtual events and then organic SEO. That has been a huge part, of the bulk of our traffic that’s coming to our website today. Is organic, and is driven by SEO, and several keywords. But now bringing them to conversion, that’s the next part that I’m working on. And then we have done on and off.

We’ve done some digital campaigns like PPC and LinkedIn. And my goal now is to resurrect some of those and have them as an ongoing campaign. So we keep people informed. We are top of mind. And once we have some of these, then account-based marketing and air cover for those people who are researching and who are thinking about this, how do we make sure they see relevant information at the right time? So that will be the next phase. I’ve always been a believer in crawling, walking, and running. So I’m trying to be in between call and walk right now and get some of these pieces in place.

I think this is a classic problem, right? I don’t think there is a perfect solution. Yeah, there is this whole notion, right? Everybody can go down a rabbit hole when we start talking. I’m sure you have heard this many times. There’s always this first touch, last touch attribution to, Hey, did I bring the lead or did sales bring the lead? Where did this lead come from? For me and marketing now, it is multi-touch attribution. We have to. When I say multi-touch attribution, it is not saying, Hey, pipeline divided by 12 touches and give equal credit to all the 12 activities. The way I think about it is a journey, a user’s journey. Say you and I talk, I’m in the market for an agency, an e-commerce digital agency. You need to now build my level of knowledge. You need to understand my pain points. You need to then say, Hey, why don’t you come and consume these two pieces of asset, or I have a relevant webinar for you, or meet me at an event? We have to do several things. We have to keep touching that person multiple times or a buying committee. In some cases, actually, in many cases now, you will see that it’s not just one person making that decision.

In our case, what we have seen is, Hey, the data The CXO might be thinking they have this problem and they want to look at a solution like ours. But the people that are implementing it are data engineers. We need to make sure that our content, what we have on our website site, including our navigation, resonates. People can find the right information. They’re able to find that right proof point. Hitting them with the right information, and the right messaging at each time in the channel that they consume. But it’s not this one touch. Hey, I do this one time, first touch or last touch that’s going to help. In one of the data studies, I looked at all opportunities in the past year. This was a couple of companies ago. When I looked at the attribution, the larger the deal size, the number of touches we needed. Because hey, the larger the deal size, you also have that time frame and you need to make sure that you’re engaging with your prospects during that time frame. So you’re not losing them. They are not getting lost in a meeting, and we want to keep that engagement, the education continuing through that 8, 9, and 12-month cycle.

So I noticed that the bigger the deal cycle, the more enterprise deals needed up to 20 touches. Smaller mid-market, commercial, I would say mid-market deals, 10 to 12 touches, commercial deals, less than 10 touches. So it’ll tell you when you look at the data and when you look at the number of touches that marketing has to do, it tells you that people need constant support, education, and awareness, and they need to keep finding more information about the company.

I think e-commerce, will again be a completely different nuance. You might need to create a sense of urgency sometimes. When you see, and I did this when I was working through a shopping cart abandonment, those explorations. Sometimes you say, Hey, someone meant and added stuff. They didn’t complete the transaction. Give them an offer. Say, Hey, 5%, 10%, and you have seen all this. That’s a different type of buying cycle. But again, you have to touch them. You have to give them the right information and support at the right time.

I think I mentioned ABM a couple of times. We do have some solutions in place, but I think the first phase for me is getting that intelligence who is on our website and searching for us because not everybody is going to fill out a form, and who is searching for us outside? Trying to get those signals, and then who do we now prioritize and target from our outbound campaigns? That is one priority. We have something in place, but I think, again, the spirit of crawl, walk, run, I want to make sure we’re maximizing what we have in place. We have some AI tools. We do build our models to write content, say, webinar invites, or we want to do something else. So we use OpenAI We do use models to help us with content so that it can go do personalization. There is going to be that human touch. We don’t want to just send people content that AI writes. So there is that human element. But really, I think what I’m trying to hone in on is personalization, the balance, but using AI because we can’t scale, we can’t keep writing, I can’t write one email for you and then one email for someone else.

So the human AI balance to personalize our messages, to personalize everything that we do for our titles, for our verticals, for our events, or different types of things. I think that is one main thing that I want to hone in more on with the team, the the next few months.

Yeah. You have seen a lot of different leadership styles, right? So it is not about coming in and saying, Hey, you have to do this way because this is how I want to do things, right? A lot of it is collaboration. A lot of it is ideation, right? So I do like to have the teams ideate. So the campaign that we’re going to launch, I did want the team to ideate and come up with, Hey, what are the things we How should we do things differently from what we did in the past? So it is getting that empowerment, encouraging ideation. I was working with the designer today as an example. So part of it is defining what we need, but the other part is saying, Hey, you tell me how best can we accomplish this? So I asked him to show me variations, and he came up with best practices. Hey, this is what I have seen. These are some of the best ways to type in this UX stuff. And this is the designers. So really, I think it is everybody has something that they bring to the table.

Everybody needs to contribute, or they can contribute their ideas. I don’t have perfect ideas. Everything that we have may or may not work. Being open to A/B testing. One thing that I am big on, and I think this is my engineering background has helped me a lot, is data. I look at everything as, Hey, Let us try to do an A/B test. Let’s use data to determine. What happens then is that subjective, Hey, I think I should do this because I think so, goes away. We use data, including my ideas. I might have ideas. We use data to say, Yes, should we proceed or should we not proceed? It doesn’t have to be an elaborate A/B test. Sometimes it can just be talking to four people, showing them a couple of things, and asking them to pick. Other times it could be an A/B test where you measure the outcome putting data in the mix for me has been a huge way to bring this collaboration because it takes away the subjective confrontation and other things that you see sometimes.

Yeah. So for me, I think it’s about the results, right? So I’m an adrenaline junkie, and for me, it’s not jumping from planes and climbing Mount Everest. For me, it’s about, hey, how can we do? We have a lot of things we need to do. Whatever it takes, if I have to write copy and if I have to get up in the morning and do a spreadsheet, if I have to do some analysis, if I have to build a Salesforce dashboard, I will continue doing that. So one part of me that keeps me going is the fact that marketing and the depth and the things that you can do from data to content to the different tactics, your media mix. So there’s so many things. There’ll never be a dull moment. How do we engage with customers? What’s the latest blog we can write? There are so many things. So that is one aspect. The other aspect is that closed loop with sales and looking at every improvement we make, how is it bringing in more traffic? I’m looking at my… I always trend data. I look at month over month. Hey, doing this, did we increase or did our traffic increase or did we see something else?

Every improvement that we see, for me, that’s a huge win. Looking at the results, looking at the collaboration between sales and marketing and that trust between sales and marketing, I’ve always gone into organizations and I’ve always seen there is a broken trust, there’s a broken bridge between sales and marketing. Seeing that trusting relationship where they say, Hey, I know this is what you have given me, and I know this This is how I’m going to go and target this prospect, and you help me win this deal. It was a collaborative effort. I think that’s the part that for me, at the end of the day, it’s a result, right? Win this together. So any deal we’re closing together as a team and seeing that teamwork, but the results that show up, for me, those are the things that keep me going. And that’s really why I’m in a startup because I can get to experience all of that. Yeah.

I think we have talked about being in data integration, and we are seeing Gen AI so much in our use cases as well. I think for marketers, especially, I think it is that balance. You asked me earlier, that you had a question, Hey, what are you using? Because you don’t want to get an insane number of tools and have them do a lot of different things. And your content can just be crazy. It won’t be personalized. Ai and hallucinations. Ai thinks it’s given you a really smart answer, but that might not be the smartest answer. I think for us, balancing that human, how do we use automation? How do we use AI to make things easier for us, to make us progress more? I think for me, that the biggest challenge is balancing and augmenting what we can do with AI because there is a ton of value that AI provides. It’s just harnessing and leveraging it the right way.

Sure. Sounds like fun.

What is my last-gen AI prompt? Okay, two days ago, I was trying to personalize. This was a very small in-person get-together with a few key folks. I was trying to personalize attendees and registrants versus non-attendees. I was trying to personalize a communication that I wanted to get out to them. I built a model so I can use this again for future users. That was my last exercise two days ago.

If I could swap roles with any other department, I would say it would be customer success. For me, I don’t think I can sell. I can help sales, but that takes a whole different genetic composition. But CS helps you understand your customer. So not just the prospect, but it helps you understand and touch those customers in different ways and support them. I’m always impressed by what they do. So that’s who I would swap with.

If I could increase my marketing budget tenfold, I would look at my Martech stack. Because I told you, the whole notion is what can we automate, what can we do to get efficiency. So I would augment my Martech stack. I would love to get a more robust account-based marketing solution that works for say and sends marketing. And then a couple of AI solutions for the team. Social media, maybe some help there, something with demand gen, getting your pages up and running quickly. I know I experimented with a couple of solutions like that before, but those might be some things that I would probably get. Of course, everything else, I would probably put into driving demand because I think you do need more budget sometimes if you’re a startup to drive demand.

That is a Good question. I think everything has its pros and cons. If it is just one, I would say it’s LinkedIn. It’s still not quite. I know X is our Twitter. X sounds strange. I know Twitter is still popular with technologists and stuff. But I feel like LinkedIn still has a balance of professional content and a balance of people using the right titles, their right industry, and verticals, and talking about relevant problems. I would say in LinkedIn unless things change drastically.

Personal level, too. I spend more time on LinkedIn than I spend on all the other platforms.

If I write a blog, if I write anything, I try to put that first on LinkedIn.

I can boast a bizarre tactic. That’s interesting. It could be any company or it should be from my experience.

Okay. I think it is the most bizarre then I would say, I was influenced quite a bit by this. It was Atlante’s marketing strategy, and that shaped some of my early marketing. They never had sales initially when they started. It was the whole notion of messaging to your technical persona. And then self-service, everything self-service. They want to get the product self-service. They want to set up self-service and learn self-service. So everything was self-service. And they were wildly successful, and a lot of companies tried to replicate it. So I would say, and you can see now, a lot of companies have been doing that more and more. Of course, no org actually can go with, Hey, I’m not going to have sellers, but they just did this as a marketing approach. No sales, no sellers, and they were widely successful. So I think that was bold, and it worked well.

No, thank you for having me. If people want to connect with me, they can find me on LinkedIn or go to next. Come to read more about what we’re doing in the data integration and Gen AI space. But thank you. I appreciate. This was a fun conversation. Thank.