Reimagine Marketing By Lessening The Burden Of Repetitive Tasks With Natasha Sekkat
Marketing is important because it drives brand awareness and helps you build relationships with your customers. With AI in Marketing, you could achieve incredible results faster. Chad Burmeister sits down with Natasha Sekkat to discuss the role of AI in Marketing to bring sales and marketing together. Natasha Sekkat is the VP of Demand Creation at Acoustic. She talks about her vision and how companies use intelligence to allow marketers to get back to marketing so they aren’t just caught up in analyzing data. Natasha also shares the threat of AI to marketing jobs, including reducing the need for IT support to focus on higher-value work.
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Reimagine Marketing By Lessening The Burden Of Repetitive Tasks With Natasha Sekkat
I have a very special guest with me, Natasha Sekkat, VP of Demand Creation at Acoustic. It's not one of these crazy sites like Acoustic.io or anything like that. It's just Acoustic.com. I'm very excited to have you here. When I look at your website on the front page, it grabs you from the beginning. Getting back to not the basics but thinking bigger.
The tagline says, "We are re-imagining marketing technology by lessening the burden of repetitive tasks by connecting it all in a single view and by giving you more time to do what really matters, thinking bigger and putting yourself back into the work." What you guys have on the website is exactly the vision of AI for Sales and AI for marketing is who doesn't want to work in a higher value level of work and who wants to continue in those repetitive tasks like pulling data and doing analyst's research. I'm excited to dig into this with you, Natasha.
It has been really exciting to make the transition over to Acoustic and it's an older company but a newer company. All of the Watson Marketing assets were spun out with Centerbridge to form Acoustic and it's a really interesting use case too that we have to go on, even just from an organizational standpoint.
Watson can play chess and do all kinds of interesting things. It was only a matter of time that Watson could be under the surface of building marketing strategy and planning. I really am interested in digging in because it looks like digital marketing analytics. Personalization is an important aspect, automation, mobile, digital.
There are a lot of pieces of what it is you guys do. Let's go 30,000 feet deep before we get there. Think about marketing operations, sales operations. They have always been siloed. Now there are revenue operations in the CRO role. How do you envision the advent of AI for marketing? Does that bring Sales and Marketing closer or does that put a further wedge between the departments?
It's an interesting topic and this is a hot one, too. As you look at the technology landscape for marketing and sales, there are hundreds, if not thousands of different vendors that all have these point solutions and they are looking at, "I'm going to solve this one specific thing." It is actually a really good point because there is this natural sort of, "If you don't have strong executive alignment, maybe that's the way of thinking about it."
If you don't have strong executive alignment where there's a handshake between the chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer, the CEO is looking at the whole thing as revenue. You start to place these bets. You start to think about, "What does my marketing lead flow look like versus what does my prospecting and BDR organization look like?" You can very much get these divergent paths.
As I'm looking at it, my whole background has been sales but with the taste of marketing and then marketing with a strong taste of sales. I have been bouncing back and forth between the two functional areas. It's a choice that each company makes of, "Are we going to look at this as one system or am I going to just let it go and everyone can do their own thing," but I do think that this is an opportunity to pull the groups together.\
It’s a company’s choice to analyze one system or let it go.
A lot of conversations we are having, too, it has to be from brand awareness through the closing of opportunities. That's one flow. That's one customer experience with Acoustic, not the internal handoffs of who's on point for them, all the way through customer support. I do think there's an opportunity for us to be more planful and mindful so that our clients ultimately are experiencing one thing with us as a vendor versus multiple things.
Having run an almost 100-person team at RingCentral, I had 30 or 40 BDRs that were doing outbound. I had another 50 or 60 reps doing inbound lead qual. The challenging part for me is that we would bring in tools like SalesLoft and then Outreach eventually, and the rep ends up trying to become the marketing department is what I find out.
Entry-level college grads, we build out all the good messaging. Not just marketing features and functions but really good empathy-powered messaging. You give it to the rep and you say, "Here's what I need you to do. Go research and do the first two sentences that are personalized," and then you will get an A-plus. Gold star.
What do they end up doing? They end up going in and hitting send all button. What I realized after doing that for 2.5 to 3 years is that if you can't beat them, join them. I don't need you to send those emails anymore, full stop. Maybe a few one-offs here and there but marketing now should own the lane of marketing messages and sales messages.
To me, that's a big shift because if you think of it, it's a combination of zeros and ones. If you put something in writing, do I want to have an entry-level college grad who has no idea how to write yet or do I want someone like Natasha and her team who knows exactly, and by the way, powered by AI? The AI can know specifically beyond a reasonable doubt what gets the most clicks, what gets the most replies and those kinds of things.
It is interesting because, depending on how you frame that, there's scope creep on both sides too. One of my big a-ha moments was enjoining around ABM and we need to identify who are some top targets that we are going to go after. Sales clearly have their toolkit of you can use LinkedIn Sales Nav, you can ZoomInfo, you can get names, you can do the Outreach. To unlock the value there, there has to be some level of marketing touch, whether it's in direct mail, whether it's in nurture and drip campaigns are getting broader across the organization to different buying groups.
That's the other interesting piece where, in my head, it has to all be one system that you are building, which means there has to be a handshake because you are going to have marketing, feeding the Outreach and SalesLoft systems for your sales reps to send stuff. You also should have sales involved in some of these marketing decisions relative to targeted ABM campaigns. You can't have one without the other but it is. There's a definite convergence that's happening and the companies that figure out how to do them as one activity, not disparate. I think those are the companies that are going to win.
We have started working with a gentleman named Rich Blakeman, who was the former SVP of Sales from Miller Heiman. When we first met with him, he saw exactly what going on in the market and said, "What you are doing with AI for Sales and Marketing can help to pull that together." I think this is interesting. Let's go a little more ground level. If I look at the different quadrants, digital marketing, analytics, when you started going through the onboarding and the training, in those first three weeks, what are a couple of amazing a-ha moments where you said, "I had no idea AI could do this?"
For me, it comes back to the platform. When you think about marketing automation systems so much of it is about, "I have this point solution that does this and this point solution does that." There are these natural ties between, "If I'm building an email campaign, how do I want the content to play in and do I even have the statistics on good content versus less good content?"
AI In Marketing: As you look at the technology landscape for marketing and sales, thousands of different vendors are looking for solutions to specific problems.
When you think about personalization, you think about, "How do I personalize this message to this specific buyer based on their persona or based on their industry?" There are these pieces that historically we have had to ask sales reps to figure out or we have had to ask marketing people. It's so easy to get caught in this analysis paralysis of, "What should I actually do," and you are checking all of your disparate systems.
That's the vision that Acoustic has as a company. How do we use intelligence and how do we build this platform where we allow marketers to get back to marketing? We allow them to get back to being brilliant and have been creative and that is human nature because otherwise, you are just caught up in the data, which is important but can we leverage AI? Can we leverage technology to do those pieces so that marketers can be marketers?
I'm playing around with a two-week free trial that does some personalization stuff on the website. I met with the web designer and we are rolling out a new website here soon. What this tech does is it will look at the person's name, title and company they work for. Right on the first page, it can say, "ScaleX and Company ABC." It can put their logo in. This was an offshore company because they used a YouTube video with Donald Trump.
It had this cool YouTube video of Donald Trump holding this image and it had the ScaleX website on half the page and then it said, "Chad, I think this is cool." It had the ScaleX in writing and it pointed next to the website. Moving it around, it wasn't jerky. It looked like it was literally written on this thing he was holding. That's $99 a month.
For an agency model, it's $299 a month for as many customers as I want to deploy this to. I'm just doing the math going, "Think of the level of AI-powered content management." What does that mean? I have another customer called Motiva.ai. I have another customer who does SEO. We are putting an HBR article that I would like to definitely have you guys featured in.
If you think about it, there's an analytics team and the reporting team that typically does this thing, and then there's MyCMO and there's VP Demand Creation, all these different resources. I have to imagine in companies that you work with, they may look at it like, "I've got this team of 24 marketers. Maybe I can go down to twelve but that's scary." How should they look at it in terms of leveraging AI effectively and does it have an impact on people in your company?
I'm definitely not going to be the expert opinion on this because I'm still ramping but a lot of the work that we are doing now and we are thinking through our go-to-market and we are thinking about how are we going to approach the buying group? This was actually an active discussion with one of the consultants is exactly your point.
When you think analytics, typically, that's actually owned by IT, whether it's a smaller organization, maybe it's a little bit different but on average, that's an IT function because it's analytics. You might have data scientists that are involved with it. It's a pretty robust platform or discussion that's happening. On the other side, in a completely different silo, you've got your marketers who are coming up with these big ideas and campaigns they want to run or things they want to do with the website.
There's this natural organizational chasm between what is good for IT and what is good for marketing, where sometimes they align but very often, they don't align perfectly. Part of what we are looking at too is, are we really selling to the IT department? Are we selling to the marketing department? Are we selling to both? How do you tell this story and how do you weave this vision that you can actually have both?
AI saves you time so that you can do what really matters, thinking bigger and putting yourself back into the work.
Marketers can get the data that they need to make the right decisions. IT can have the tools that are sophisticated and do the work that they need to be done in the way that they need to do it. I do think that this AI, the investments that are made in the platforms, that's the answer. One of our flagship products, Experience Analytics was known historically as Tealeaf. It was one of the best of the breed. It's known for its analytics capabilities. It's very much IT-focused. How do you unlock that value for the marketing teams as well? That's the hot topic now that we are looking into.
What's cool about this technology is that it can be funded by growth and revenue, and it's not a do more with less. That happens to be a side benefit but at the end of the day, you don't have to say, "IT department, we are going to need two fewer resources to free up the $200,000 to buy the system." It's more of a, "We are going to actually increase sales by $3 million."
If it's a cost of $50,000, $200,000, whatever it is, you are paying for it with the growth. It's an easier conversation than with IT. "We are 90 days into the program and it looks like we are going to see the $3 million increase. We don't need as much of your time, therefore, good news. I'm sure you have got 87 other projects."
There are plenty of things for them to keep busy with, for sure. That is a good point too, which is when you are selling, having come from more of the self-storage background and hardware systems, they are important. There's uptime and clear value that comes into play but having now made the switch into this new industry and this new segment, and by definition, the reason you market is that you are trying to increase your revenue.
There are direct ties we are talking about on that funnel. I think it does make some of these IT investments that conversation look and feel a little bit different because it's not so much about resiliency, disaster recovery but it's, "Are we going to invest in Outreach to the market? Are we going to grow our customer base? Do we want to accelerate even the funnel, accelerate the pipeline and the deals that we have in the funnel? How can we partner with marketing to get those things done?" A lot of that comes back to MarTech and this stack that we have been talking about?"
As I go through your LinkedIn profile, "Sales, Program Manager, Global Director, Inside Sales Center of Excellence at EMC, 12 years at EMC and mainly sales roles. Sales Development at Turbonomic, VP Demand Generation at ClickSoftware, VP Sales at Panera Bread." That's where I saw you at the Women in Sales with Lori Richardson in Austin. Now you are VP of Demand Creation. Back to college, what was your passion there? How did that take you to where you are?
It didn't at all because in college, I went to Penn and Wharton and you either were an investment banker or you were a management consultant. Those were your two options and if you did anything, except for those two, people thought you were weird and there was something wrong with you and you weren't smart, driven enough or something.
I actually went the management consultant path. Straight out of school, that was my role. Through it, though, I was very lucky. My projects were primarily working with venture capital-backed companies, startup companies, looking at their go-to-markets, looking at product feasibility but it was all more sales and marketing-related projects. It was pretty cool because I’ve got this taste very early on to, "What is sales? What is marketing? How can you use these to grow your business?"
AI In Marketing: There's a vision of AI for sales and AI for marketing that seeks to know who doesn't want to work in a higher value level of work and who wants to continue in repetitive tasks.
It's not just about the process, the procedures and everything but it's how do you really grow? I'm one of those stories of someone who literally just fell into it. I upsold a second consulting engagement to the CEO and didn't even realize what I was doing and then ended up getting recruited by one of my clients in a marketing role actually.
I was like, "Great. I'm going to be a marketer for the rest of my career." We would go to events and come back with stacks of business cards of all of the different things that people wanted to buy from. Finally, the vice president of sales pulled me aside and said, "Natasha, I think you should be in sales, and let me walk you through what that even means." It was through mentorship, that was how I ended up on the path that I ended up.
If you would bring those leads in and I can see the other side of that pancake, which is, "Here, sellers, these are deals. I guarantee you. I was at the booth. This guy said, he's buying next week," and one year later you look in your CRM, one phone call, no deal. The frustration there said, "I need to take this all the way down the funnel.”
That's where you have had this line between sales and marketing. What I think is interesting about your move now is that you are passionate about the marketing side. You were forced to go down the sales funnel because of those problems that you talked about and there's probably money and other things that drove you too, like the rest of us.
What you are seeing with what's going on with Acoustic, IBM Watson, Motiva.ai, ScaleX and all these AI things, they can now hold accountability further down the funnel to where you can now knowingly, "When it goes into that engine, I've got this tool called Balto Software that we are toying around with."
I can actually push out a talk track to all the reps in my organization so that they go buy the right discovery, the right opener. Just like you A/B test in a marketing role, now you can A/B test with human dialogue. Now, you can play the strategy that you have always liked to play and you don't have to play on the other side of the sandbox.
I enjoy playing on the other side of the sandbox, too. There's something about the thrill of the kill that's really exciting too in revenue attainment. The way that I envision it is it's one system. It's everything from, how do you position yourself in the market, get your name out and educate people. It's not just about pushing, which marketing in the past, there were a lot of, "We are going to throw spaghetti against the wall because any impression is a good impression."
I was like, "Not so much," because by the time leads come over to sales, they now are having to pivot and having to figure out, "What is actually the use case? What is the problem we are trying to solve based on our industry? What insights do you have been the reasons why someone would decide to do anything?
Never mind, "Go with your solution." A lot of what I think, as I have danced back into these marketing roles and even to a certain extent in some of the selling roles, it's having one combined strategy. You have to go back to the beginning of your messaging. Are you thinking about things in a way that's going to be compelling, not just to get click-throughs but to actually form opportunities for people to buy from you, which is different? It's not exactly the same. It's not exactly the thing.
There is an opportunity to pull the groups together for AI in marketing.
An example there, I do The Sales Experts Channel. The webinar will be broadcast to 200 to 1,000 people who will see this. Of those, how many will be potential buyers of AI for Sales? It’s so far pretty small. MyCMO is going out and writing content on Facebook that is very specific to the business pain, the emotion of solving the problem. The pipeline is the problem that sales leaders need to solve, especially in the world we live in because you have just had a balloon pop, you've got to solve for the trade show business and all those problems.
He writes it up in a very meaningful way. There's a script for this that marketers and salespeople can use. We've gotten 33 signups and he mapped it to the audience on Facebook. He goes, "Don't worry about the customers. For your whole ICP concept, we are going IC Persona, not Ideal Customer Profile. 40 to 64-year-olds, they follow Elon Musk.”
They also follow Salesforce.com and there are 3 or 4 other filters. I'm like, "I'm going to trust you, Nick, on this." I don't know if I buy it but 33, when we go down the list, if you look at who are the companies they work for, it's eye-opening. Out of those 33, I suspect we will sign 2, 3, 4 deals. Of 1,000, we may sign 0 or 1 deal. That's the beauty of this whole deal.
It is and just thinks about that because not too long ago, that would have been you as the Head of Sales thinking through like, "Who do I want to sell to and who do I want to get my message out? I'm going to try to drum up phone numbers and email addresses. I'm going to spend all day cold calling and prospecting to try to get in touch with these people that don't know why they want to talk to me."
They are going to be pissed off because I ended up with their day versus the pull. It's much easier to pull a rope than it is to push it.
That's a great example of arguably the work that he was doing for you is historically, actually, sales would have done. Some portion of that through targeting and prospecting but those people probably feel so much better about this experience because like you said, they were pulled into it versus you, pushing them into it in a different way.
Last question, Natasha. Obviously, you have had an interesting and awesome career. A lot of people would go, "I wish." It's funny, as the person living in that body, you are like, "What did I do?" Thinking back to when you were younger, you don't have any parents or your pastor, teacher, all these people influenced you.
As you said, when you went to college, you either did this or this. It was like that drives you in a direction. If you take all the world filters that were put on overtime, what is it that when you were younger where you said, "That's what I love to do?" When you connect those dots to what you are doing now you are like, "That makes a heck of a lot of sense."
It's funny. Very early on, I was told I was bossy and I stood up businesses at this swimming pool of people making friendship bracelets and selling them. I had my network of sellers and the whole lockdown on our pools. I have grown out of the bossy a little bit. At least, I hope so.
AI In Marketing: AI in marketing cultivates brand awareness through the closing of opportunities. There's an opportunity for us to plan more and be more mindful so that our clients ultimately are experiencing satisfaction.
I was sitting by one Panera rep on the team in Boston and she may have used that word.
It's like, "I can't believe her." I was destined to do what I'm doing. I always had that natural inclination to having a vision, how do you get people aligned and people assembled to execute on the vision. Without even knowing what the words were, I was always passionate about selling and marketing. It feels good where I'm at.
Thinking about that, I'm going to give you a challenge. That is, people started telling me years ago, "Chad, you could be the CEO of that company." I was always like, "Hold the line." Responsibilities of being the top dog, taking on money, growing in people's livelihoods and all of that. I have a feeling that if you fast forward the tape 5 years, 10 years, maybe 2 years, if you like to do that, because I do, too, we used to have kids over to the house. We would watch the Holyfield fight. I'm very good at directing traffic and ultimately the title CEO is the ultimate traffic director.
It will be very interesting to see. That's the question that I haven't enjoyed as much as, "Where do you see yourself in 2 to 5 years?" I feel like my career has been so fluid and I have been blessed with good mentors and good employers. A lot of it, too, is just seeing problems that you have the skills or you have the desire to solve and how do you advocate for yourself to take on more. That was really my career at EMC. It was a lot of just building new roles for myself and moving into things. We will see, Chad.
There was a guy, Jesse Feldman. He was a rep on my team, he sat across from me and he's like, "I noticed your son has the same birthday as me." I don't know how he found that out, maybe Facebook or whatever. He said, "I just want you to know, someday my goal is to be sitting in that chair. I want your job." He worked really hard. He ended up not getting the job at that company but he did get the job as Director and then VP of Inside Sales. Mentors matter and all you have to do is have the vision of what you want to do in the future and then just do it.
It is about visualizing. I'm super passionate about women in sales and how do we break through some of the misperceptions? I know you are a huge champion as well but that's the other element too, is being in the role that I'm in. It also can't just be about me and my path. It also has to be, "I must pull others with me too." It's always nice to hear those types of stories because it is true. People helped us to get where we are so how can we help others and how can we find opportunities or even just the sounding boards for them as they are going through their careers. That's the other piece of it, too.
I think the change in this market is you need to be more human. As a male in America, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. It's taken me time to learn what EQ means and to learn that stuff. If the world has turned the advantage now, the advantages to people with high EQ, not high IQ, where IQ used to matter more in the past, it's an interesting time for women in sales and it's amazing.
You do the same thing you have always been doing. The world changes 1 or 2 degrees and all of a sudden, things change. I'm really happy to see folks like yourself, and then what's the new one? Women in revenue is another one coming up. Very exciting. Natasha, it has been fabulous talking with you. I really appreciate your perspectives. I wish you the best in your new role at Acoustic. Remember Acoustic.com. Check it out. This stuff is for real. If you are not using AI in marketing, you probably should be talking to Natasha.
Please, fill the funnel. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Thanks.
Important Links
Rich Blakeman – LinkedIn
LinkedIn - Natasha Sekkat
About Natasha Sekkat
Senior ‘Smarketing’ leader with 20 years in Marketing, Sales, Channel and Operations in the IT hardware, software, and SaaS spaces. Experience targeting SMB accounts to large Global Enterprise accounts directly and through partners via digital channels, sales development and field marketing. Strategic, collaborative global executive with a passion for organizational and people development, as well as a track record of standing up new organizations, transforming teams, and driving growth in pipeline and revenue.
