MarTech 360 Interview With Margaret Wise, Chief Growth Officer at ClickDimensions

By Krutika Parmaj On May 18, 2022

Could you tell us about your journey in MarTech?

I started my career in the very early days of CRM (pre-Salesforce!) and eventually found myself in the last frontier of CRM, in how to leverage Marketing. I became very passionate about Customer Experience and the role Marketing Technology played in CX. I remain very passionate about how the buyer journey has changed and how B2C experiences affect the B2B buyer journey and experience. I’ve had the opportunity to experience the shifts organizations are forced to make in creating digital and personalized experiences that align to a buyer driven experience vs a seller driven experience and support companies in adjusting their strategies and technology to support these shifts.

What challenges did the Covid-19 pandemic pose for your marketing team?

At ClickDimensions, we live by ‘We are Who We Serve’. We have the same challenges as are our customers and partners. Face to face conferences, shows, and meetings, helped up build our sales pipeline, and we cannot rely on this in the same way moving forward. We have also experienced the impact of the accelerated shift to digital buying. We understand the challenges our customers face around creating relationships digitally, making buying decisions across a larger team that are remote, and a significant shift in marketing budgets. Like our customers, we are also working hard to create segmented and personalized communications that are relevant to the buyer’s intent. We are evolving our marketing strategies to a buyer-led journey, vs a seller-led journey. We are also focused on a strong content marketing strategy with an emphasis on a customer friendly tone of voice throughout our content.

What sets ClickDimensions apart from the competition?

As mentioned before, we truly adhere to ‘We are Who We Serve’. We understand our customers and partners. This understanding powers the investments we make in Customer Experience. Every customer has a named Customer Success Manager. Every partner has a named Partner Manager. We have an accessible Support Team. We have a Professional Services Team that is affordable and accessible in- line with our software costs. We are laser focused on business outcomes and helping our customers quantify the benefits of their investment.

How do you envisage the B2B MarTech vertical evolving, in the years to come?

This is such a great question! We believe the evolution will be around proving investments in driving Revenue growth, versus Marketing. As marketing teams mature, they will look at full-funnel economics, incorporating top, middle, bottom funnel as well as retention and expansion. Whether you are a product or a services provider, you are looking at recurring revenue as a measure of enterprise value. MarTech is quickly evolving to focus on revenue technology vs top of the funnel marketing. For most organizations, the first step is focusing on marketing and sales unification, and then taking full funnel analytics into consideration.

As a marketing leader, what are your thoughts on how ROMI and its use as a metric to define success?

I really think of this as an investment in revenue return, versus thinking about marketing investment. Marketers have to be very careful about relying on vanity metrics versus how they are impacting revenue. There is always talk about how does the CMO get ‘a seat a the table’. The key to this is understanding how Marketing is influencing operational financial targets of revenue and retention. When Marketing leaders have leapfrogged the vanity metrics and talk about revenue influence and retention and expansion influence, they will leapfrog the ROMI investment.

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

I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink’s “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others”.

I’m also a fan of David Priemer’s “Sell the Way you Buy”.

I think ultimately our own consumer buying experiences help influence how we buy professionally and I think this is often overlooked in the B2B world. We want to experience relief that someone understands our problem, we want to feel comfort that we are in the hands of experts, we want to feel validated that we have made the same choice as others, and we want to show proof that we made a good decision.

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

I think Alex Gobbi, Amanda Wemette, Lindsay Nelson, Amanda Johnson, Lisa Fiondella, are all great marketers- I could give you a great list!

Could you name the Top 5 apps/platforms you use for marketing?

ClickDimensions 😊

What are the key ingredients that make a successful marketer, in this day and age?

It’s very important that a successful marketer is revenue oriented. I love that fact that I am ‘Chief Growth Officer’ and that has a material effect in eliminating traditional siloes between marketing and sales. A successful marketer is focused on a modern buyer journey and aligning to that through a design of 1:N marketing automation and 1:1 sales automation. A successful marketer understands the power of technology to scale and automate a strategy that aligns to the modern buyer journey and orchestrates responses to interest signals by curating content that helps them progress a buyer to a readiness state, resulting in revenue and supporting retention and expansion, whether product or services.