MarTech360 Interview With Shravan Siddapurkar, Senior Director, OpsRamp

“The Marketing automation landscape looks more diverse and crowded every year. That is why having a marketing automation strategy has become a necessity.”

Hi, Shravan, can you walk us through your professional journey so far?

I graduated with a Business degree in early 2000, and was offered a Sales Operations position at Oracle. I loved working, interacting with sales departments and was exposed to products and Sales function. After working in a Sales Compensation role, I switched to Marketing Operations and focused more on Marketing Technology and Database Management, spent good 12+ years before moving to VMware where I was tasked to setup a Global Marketing Operations team operated out of India and Costa Rica. Managed multiple roles at VMware including Business analysis and Reporting, Marketing Strategy and budgets. After a successful 6 years at VMware, April 2021 I moved to OpsRamp a SaaS based IT operations Management solution provider Head Quartered in San Jose, California. Currently, I manage Global Marketing Technology, Strategy and Operations from India.

What sets OpsRamp apart from the competition?

OpsRamp’s modern, SaaS-based platform provides comprehensive IT operations management (ITOM) from discovery to monitoring to remediation and automation in a single, unified solution. Unlike legacy ITOM providers or point monitoring tool providers, OpsRamp uniquely provides enterprise IT teams and service providers; E2E Full stack Hybrid Observability,  Service centric AIOps, Multi-tier, multitenancy, Proven Reliability and intelligent Automation.

How, according to you, have marketing technology and marketing automation changed the entire marketing landscape?

The Marketing automation landscape looks more diverse and crowded every year. That is why having a marketing automation strategy has become a necessity. Prospects interact from various channel and come with varied parameters into our database. Understanding this customer journey is the key and hence majority of companies are investing in good Marketing automation tools. This will help us to collect, engage and respond to their needs and ensure they flow smoothly through sales funnel.

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Do you think that CRM and marketing automation when used together can maximize marketing benefits due to their combined strengths?

CRM and Marketing automation are two of the most powerful tools in any business’s arsenal. Integrating these two provides better business intelligence to make uniformed strategic decisions with respect to prospects and customers behaviour, engagement which helps in understanding customer lifecycle. One unified data set helps manage prospects firmographic and demographic details instead of toggling between multiple tools when not integrated. And the most important benefit/advantage of  integrating CRM and marketing Automation is to be able to track cross-department workflows where sales, marketing and services teams can have regular conversations about strategies to turn prospects into customers.

Are Targeted Marketing campaigns sufficient to drive brand awareness and demand?

While there is no magic trick to increase brand awareness one of the most important aspects to improve this KPI is to utilize Target Audience. Marketing campaigns are most successful when you target the right audience who are actually looking for a product/solution you offer.

What is the role of the Marketing Operations team in today’s ever-changing marketing needs of organizations? And how have marketing operations evolved?

One of the underappreciated roles in most organizations is Mops. Most people think MOps role is just sending email, cleaning up Marketing Automation and CRM tools. Many forget to realize that this role is evolved and is responsible for Marketing tech stack, ensure these tools talk to each other via complex integrations, creates and maintains active database, automate repeatable tasks, optimize costs,  meet campaign deadlines, implements multi-touch attribution, constantly adjust Lead routing rules, combat email spams and many other such tasks.

Marketing Ops will continue to occupy a central role in the overall marketing discipline as the prime factor to streamline marketing processes and be a strategic partner to the Head of Marketing and Revenue Operations.

How is ROMI useful at an organizational level? Does it help in making business-related decisions and in optimizing marketing efforts?

Marketers face many challenges today, including high growth expectations, strong competition and the digital and social media revolution. Embracing ROMI as a discipline can help build strong brand and generate demand in most efficient way. ROMI gives the possibility to know success or shortfalls of our campaigns. It helps us make strategic decisions and future investments on channels that are performing best.

As MarTech is growing in power and popularity by the day do you think these new technological advancements are creating a skills gap when compared to the traditional marketing disciplines?

The role of marketing has become increasingly technical and data-driven. While traditional marketing skills with focus on product positioning, communications and creativity still remain relevant, employers are increasingly looking for professionals who understand analytics, can code and know how to use marketing technology tools. The current marketing skill set that is in demand is a combination of qualitative, quantitative  and technical skills.

Could you name some platforms/tools that you use for marketing?

Eloqua, Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot, SalesForce, 6sense, Tableau, DemandBase, Google Analytics.

Do you have any words of wisdom that you would like to share with the budding marketers out there?

Make sure to focus on building a well-rounded skill set that helps you deliver results. Marketing is very diverse, and having proven experience across multiple disciplines with a clear articulation around how you can move the business is valuable. You can always specialize later, but you’ll be a better marketer if you get some varied experience.

Thanks, Shravan!