Sushant Shetty is the Sales Director, India at Epsilon. Epsilon is a global leader in offering end to end integrated marketing solutions. It provides data intelligence and customer insights, technology including loyalty, email and CRM platforms, and data driven creative, activation and execution. Sushant heads India sales and is responsible for the India growth story. In this discussion, Sushant explains the state of MarTech adoption in India and shares his insight on how a company should go about implementing ABM in its marketing strategy.
There is a need for common KRA systems where both sales and marketing work towards the same revenue target, and that is why I am so much in favour of ABM: it helps to align them into one team.
Do you think that the Indian market is ready for marketing technology, in terms of infrastructure and need?
With respect to need I would say yes. CMOs and mid-level managers have seen what happened in developed countries. India is going from a developing to a developed phase and has always been known as the technology hub for the world. This is where a lot of CMOs and digital marketing leaders know what is required for their organisation. In a country like India where there is so much competition and a very high number of target customers, marketing technology helps to remove the clutter in the marketing process.
From the infrastructure point of view, I think we are still developing. Larger companies have better clarity and understanding of the need for the infrastructure in the next two to three years, as they have a more mature pipeline.
What is the checklist a company should have while evaluating a tool for their marketing?
It depends on the company and on the manager. What I have seen in India is that there are four to five key points that most companies typically consider.
- Understand what your most significant need is. Unless you know your pain point or your biggest requirement, you cannot target that area.
- Determine your budget, and the key business stakeholders, to have clarity on whether it should go ahead with the CIO, CFO or CMO, or whether some particular department is going ahead with the evaluation process, and whether they have complete buy-in from the stakeholders.
- Define the programme success rate. Marketing technology can be in the region of the unknown and you probably would not know what you will get. What a lot of companies are now good at is how they define their entire evaluation process. There will be many product companies portraying themselves as the end to end solution. It is critical for a company to have a proper team to evaluate this, and to give someone the responsibility to determine who the right vendor is. Many companies are doing it well: they appoint a programme manager who jointly reports into different departments and has access to departments under associates to determine the need, which is very critical.
- Set a realistic timeline for the implementation of the technology. What happens is you get into the process, talk to companies, and the entire contract awarding stage gets extended, which in turn affects your end timeline. Delays affect the vendors and the organisation as well.
- Decide how you evaluate the success of implementing the product. The presence of evaluation metrics is significant for MarTech success.
In our ABM survey, you mentioned that you have completely aligned marketing and sales. Can you tell us what difficulties you faced while getting both together, and how you overcame them?
The good part of being in a mature organisation is that both sales and marketing know the definition of where the company wants to be. I have worked before in companies where marketing and sales have been working in silos. It is also about how KPIs are defined in the organisation. Marketing is traditional in India, defined by how many events you sponsor and how many PR events you have done, while hardcore numbers drive sales.
There is a need for common KRA systems where both work towards the same revenue target, and that is why I am so much in favour of ABM, as it helps to align both sales and marketing into one team. It is important to have a weekly or bi-weekly joint call along with senior management input, to ensure we know where we are going and to bridge the gap. It is essential to have top management aligned with it, to have a well defined structure for how sales and marketing should operate.
To what extent should marketers be using ABM? Should they go all in?
In a company like Epsilon, which wants to push its brand across, not every marketing event is for sales. We have other business as well. In the future, I do not think that an organisation will have meaningful revenue without an ABM strategy. In one of the surveys, it was mentioned that ABM delivers the highest ROI of any B2B marketing strategy.
There are so many things that go along with ABM. We have limited marketing and sales resources, and that is why it becomes very important to bring these two aligned together. Another is the customer point of view: customers do not want mass communication but want it to be personalised. There are so many advertisements going on, and a customer will be attracted to those which are relevant to them. These are the reasons ABM is getting so popular over the years. I would not say you should go all in, but you can probably have 60 to 65 per cent of ABM in your marketing strategy.
What will be your advice to somebody who is planning to implement ABM?
I am very happy that a detailed report on ABM is coming soon. Some of the key things that I would like to know are what other fellow sales and marketing professionals in India think about ABM.
I would also want to know what difficulties they have faced while implementing ABM and how they overcame them. In the report, if it is possible for you to have a few CMOs who were targeted as part of an ABM strategy in the organisation, and whether they found that engagement more relevant than some other marketing strategy. It will be good to know what the end customer thinks when they were targeted.
