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[Jon] Hi I’m here with Scott Vaughan. He’s the Chief Growth Officer of Integrate and Scott and I were just talking about data. Data decays, Scott, at two to three percent per month at the contact level.
Make it very hard for sales and marketing productivity. What are you seeing in terms of an account based marketing strategy with data right now?
[Scott] Well, if you’re gonna do an account based strategy like that, data is everything. You need the account intelligence, you need to be able to build out that buying committee and the contacts. And we’ve got a massive data hygiene problem. We’ve got one in our existing database that we’ve compiled and spent a lot of money to build, so we have to get clean, but we also have one that we’re spending a lot of money on demand dollars from all these sources to bring data in, and frankly, with all the direct integrations and just pushing in lists and all those things without validation, without governance, it’s killing the database even more. So you’ve got this investment in your expensive tools like marking animation, CRM, your data warehouses, and you’re pushing bad data in, and so it’s just compiling. So we are seeing those that have a get clean, clean your database, and stay clean, putting a level of governance and ability to comply at the top, as that data comes through, is really helping demand marketers and leadership focus on driving more value, focus on creating higher conversions, and then being able to do better targeting. That all adds up to more pipeline, more revenue.
[Jon] And who do you see owning the initiative for data governance? It’s a great point about data, and really important point that sometimes people miss, but who do you see as the owner in the organizations that you target?
[Scott] So, revenue ops, which can be sales and marketing or sales or marketing, is really sit at the center. CMOs know they have a problem, even sales leadership knows they have a problem, but we try to work with marketing and sales ops to help drive those conversations. And know that there’s an answer. Because it’s not just, clean your data’s not a big initiative, you tell your CMO that, where’s the revenue? Well it’s a step to be able to go then really increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the investment of your people’s time and everything that you do.
[Jon] Makes sense, and you just recently got promoted to chief growth officer from CMO, what kind of trends, how you feeling about that, what kind of trends are you seeing there?
[Scott] I’m a little overwhelmed, in a good way, we’re a high growth software company so what we decided to do is put somebody in place who pivots and connects sales, marketing, product and customer success, and be able to apply specific account plans and strategies against those, our top 25 customers, using a rough number, our highest potential prospects, and then bringing to bear all the resources, including our technology alliance partners, like Marketo and Bombora, LinkedIn, and then our solutions providers, those are the folks that work on the front line with our customers. So it’s a really exciting role, it’s strategy, but it’s building again. After CMO for five years here at Integrate and building the brand and the initial demand channels, it was time to hand that to somebody else who could do great work at the next level of scale, and this allows our company to have a really intense focus on growth.
[Jon] With the average tenure of a CMO of 18 to 24 months you’ve more than doubled that.
[Scott] I beat the odds. On the data, I survived.
[Jon] Congratulations on that, that’s no small feat, and I guess last question, outside of Integrate, what do you like to do for fun?
Well, lately a lot of hiking and exercise, trying to get that mental health and capacity, that’s been more and more trying to work that in. You know here we’re in Scottsdale, it’s beautiful, trying to get out and about and get that activity going, that’s been the thing I think I’ve added and focused on the most outside of work.
Awesome, well thanks again Scott.
You’re welcome Jon, great to see ya.
Great to see you.
Alright.