MarTech 360 Interview With Deb Wolf, Chief Marketing Officer at Integrate

By Krutika Parmaj Last updated May 5, 2022

Hi Deb, could tell us about your journey in MarTech?

I’ve been in B2B marketing for over 30 years. I started out on the ad agency side of things as an account manager, then after about 10 years, moved in-house to PeopleSoft. From there, I worked at Commerce One during the early dot com boom (or bomb depending on how you look at it), Notiva, and Mercury Interactive running advertising and brands.

Then, I had the opportunity to work at Workday very early on, which was my first foray into demand, and the heyday of MarTech in the mid-aughts. We were very early Marketo customers, Google analytics users, and also Integrate customers. At Workday, I built, scaled and grew the corporate marketing organization from me to a team of 120, and from its early growth stage through the company’s IPO in 2012, and to nearly $1B in revenue.

From there, I also worked at Lookout, BetterUp, and now Integrate. I joined Integrate two years ago as a three-time customer. I bought Integrate at Workday, Lookout and BetterUp. I had followed the company and been on the customer advisory board.

Today, I’m so proud to lead an amazing group of world-class marketers at a company that is truly providing value to B2B marketers around the globe. We recently launched Precision Social, which rounds out Integrate’s cross-channel offering, and enables Cross-Channel Insights to bring all the data from various channels together into one centralized platform.

Cross-Channel Insights is a big reason why I came to Integrate two years ago. I knew that Integrate with its many channels could be the MarTech solution that moved from a tactical exchange of data to a value-driven exchange of data. Every marketer in the world needs data that tells them which channels are performing best and where to invest next. With Integrate, B2B marketers no longer have to piece this data together manually – we finally have it all in one platform.

In your time as a marketing professional, how has B2B marketing shifted and what are the main challenges in today’s omnichannel world?

B2B marketing has undergone a huge shift in the past 30 years. When I started my career in advertising in 1989, we were making black plate changes to print ads that took a week to complete and cost the client thousands of dollars. Demand gen consisted of filling out a business reply card. Literally nothing was connected yet. Digital marketing, demand, marketing ops, MarTech – none of this really existed until about 20 years ago with the advent of marketing automation. And ABM didn’t gain traction until about 5-7 years ago. Today, there are nearly 10,000 MarTech vendors in Scott Brinker’s MarTech Supergraphic, which is a testament to how much change B2B marketing has undergone since the first MarTech Supergraphic in 2011 with about 150 vendors.

Today’s B2B buyers are self-sufficient and demanding. They want their B2B buying experience to feel more like what they’re used to in their B2C lives. Our buyers are not on a linear path. They’re consuming content on multiple devices across various channels. They’re reading news sites, asking for advice on social, comparing notes across review sites, browsing blogs, glancing at emails, and attending in-person events and webinars. And they have higher than ever expectations of being heard, known, and understood. We’re tasked with reaching our buyers with the right message at the right point in their buying journey and it can feel like a moving target.

How would you define the importance of activating, governing, and measuring campaigns across channels?

The key to B2B marketing today lies in our ability to activate across channels. We all have target account lists generated from ABM and intent vendors or even our sales teams. But what do we do with those lists? We need to understand how to activate these lists across social, content syndication, digital ads, in-person events, and webinars, and reach our buyers on those account lists in the channels where they are.

We also need to have marketable and compliant data to execute impactful campaigns. That’s where the importance of data governance comes in. Consider if you have the wrong business email or the wrong name – you’ve lost your opportunity to reach your buyer before you’ve even started. And not only do we need to have the right data to reach the right buyer, but we also need to adhere to privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA and others – or risk 7-figure fines.

Finally, measurement is the cornerstone of a high-performing marketing team. Measuring across channels allows us to get better at our jobs and understand where to put our marketing dollars so that we can refine and improve our approach and defend our spend.

How do you see a cross-channel, precision demand approach co-existing with ABM, intent providers, and sales lists?

A cross-channel, Precision Demand Marketing approach works in conjunction with ABM, intent providers, and sales lists to create a more precise and personalized buying experience. Target account lists generated by intent vendors, ABM solutions, or sales priorities, fuel Integrate’s Demand Acceleration Platform to return tangible results across the marketer’s entire demand investment.

As a Business Leader, what the one piece of advice you would give to those who aspire to the C-suite?

Invest in your teams. Listen deeply, care personally, connect on a human level, and build psychological safety on your team. There’s nothing more important than creating a positive, resilient, trusting workplace.

Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read?

Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Could you name one other marketer that you would like to see featured here?

Sara McNamara at Slack; Heather Berggren at Cisco; Leslie Alore at Ivanti

What are the key ingredients that make a successful marketer?

Marketers today need to be incredibly curious. To reach their buyer in a way that builds credibility, provides education and answers, and engenders brand loyalty, marketers need to understand the challenges their buyers face and address those challenges concisely. Marketers are faced with an overwhelming number of demands – have an always-on strategy to attract new accounts, build an account-based strategy to penetrate our top accounts, use intent data and peer review sites to illuminate the way, deliver opportunities we can connect to real revenue, etc. To create omni-channel, buyer-driven campaigns that connect to their buyers, marketers must keep the buyer at the center of everything they do.

Thanks Deb!