With an experience of over 25 years in leading global marketing transformations and scaling technology companies, Van Diamandakis has worked for both startups and large enterprises such as Oracle, WebEx, Riverbed, and Sage. He has been driving meaningful financial outcomes for organizations he has worked with, including three IPOs and two acquisitions. At MarTech Pulse, we addressed him as one of the Startup Marketing Champions and got an opportunity to learn about his approach towards marketing and the future of the industry. Let’s take a look at his responses.
About Van Diamandakis
Van Diamandakis: I am an MBA graduate from The University of Iowa, and have recently moved back stateside to Chicago after a five-year stint living and working in Europe, based out of Dublin, Ireland. Before joining Firebrick, I was selected as the CMO five times and held executive marketing positions at Oracle, WebEx, Riverbed Technology, Sage Business Cloud, Joyent, and Persado AI. I have successfully led B2B tech companies through all stages: startup, scale-up, multiple acquisitions, IPO’s, and global.
As a proven Silicon Valley technology executive with over 25 years of operational experience that draws upon my track record in leading global marketing transformations, I drive meaningful financial events, including IPOs and acquisitions. I have been at the forefront of B2B technology marketing and have the unique ability to marry creativity, data, technology and leadership skills to build brand equity rapidly and successfully navigate tech companies through inflection points, accelerating revenue growth and valuation.
With my operational experience skill-sets, I add a strategic, global viewpoint to unblock the most challenging marketing problems. I have been a vanguard of advanced marketing operations, land/expand/freemium business models, blended sales channels, and building differentiated brands that customers love.
About Van’s company and its background
Van Diamandakis: WANdisco is the LiveData Company and the leading data migration and replication platform, shaping the future of data infrastructure with its groundbreaking LiveData Cloud Services. The company enables organizations to finally put all their data to work in the cloud, taking advantage of next-gen machine learning-powered cloud analytics platforms. It offers more robust business insights – at any scale, with zero downtime and zero data loss.
WANdisco’s LiveData Cloud Services keep geographically dispersed data consistent and protected, between on-premises and cloud environments, allowing businesses to operate seamlessly in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. With OEM and go-to-market partnerships (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and other industry leaders) as well as hundreds of Global 2000 customers – WANdisco (LSE: WAND) is igniting the Live Data movement worldwide.
One thing people should innovate for the marketing industry
Van Diamandakis: I encourage marketers to embrace machine learning algorithms and to practically apply them to their MarTech stack. The days of cold calls, form fills, and spam emails are over. There’s a better way to engage with your customers and prospects and meet them in the right place at the right time with helpful, thought leadership content and solutions to their problems.
One thing people should forget about the marketing industry
Van Diamandakis: Spam emails, form fills, cold calls, and wasting money on broad marketing programs that don’t deliver are the few things I would like people to forget about the marketing industry. Marketing teams need to forget about staying disconnected from customers and sales and delivering MQLs that sales don’t follow up on. Marketing can be a strategic revenue driver, not an expense. In today’s fast-growing technology companies, marketing, product, and sales teams work for hand in glove to deliver excellent customer experiences.
The area marketers should utilize data to make the biggest impact on customer experience
Van Diamandakis: Using AI and machine learning algorithms on top of a growing and clean customer engagement data set, marketers can get a deep understanding of their customers’ and prospects’ needs and wants. We can understand buying intent and reach out only to those customers who are actually looking for solutions to their problems with personalized messaging and solutions.
Transformation and innovation are key to any role; Van’s thoughts
Van Diamandakis: We never stop learning! I participate in weekly CMO virtual meetings with my peers to exchange ideas and best practices. My team and I read the latest and greatest books and case studies on successful companies and their marketing programs. We all speak to customers and listen to their feedback on our products and services. Also, we test, test, and test our marketing programs and create ways to continually optimize them.
Favorite B2B companies doing great inbound marketing
Van Diamandakis: 6Sense, Optimizely, Apple, Databricks, and Persado are some of my favorite B2B companies doing great in inbound marketing.
Golden rule to succeed in marketing
Van Diamandakis: Remember that the MQL is dead. The next generation of account-based sales and marketing is powered by AI and machine learning. Thus, select the best accounts, know about them, engage in the right way with them, collaborate with sales, and track real stuff.
Impactful projects managed with marketing automation, associated challenges, and its solution
Van Diamandakis: I love to do marketing transformations. The first place to start is with the Martech Stack and in collaboration with sales and sales operations. Then comes agreeing with sales on taxonomy, the end to end lead management process, scoring, attribution, routing, and SLAs. Also, changing the thinking around legacy transactional MQL to look at it more holistically at the “Dark Funnel” using ML/AI to glean interest and buying signals at the account level in a true next-gen ABM and ABS model is necessary.
I believe aligning on strategy and process is first, which then creates a blueprint for systems architecture and identification of MarTech tools. My favorite MarTech tools are Salesforce, Marketo, 6Sense, Outreach/Salesloft, Drift, Optimizely, Qlik, DiscoverOrg, and Sendoso.
Orchestrating people, processes, and technology focused on delivering excellent customer experiences is the magic. It drives marketing by more than 50 percent of the sales pipeline and 3 IPOs and three acquisitions.
Skills that a successful marketer should have
Van Diamandakis: Today’s CMO must be both technical and creative, a born leader and inspirational storyteller, and should know everything about marketing technology at a deep level. He/she should be a strategic thinker, driving the GTM strategy for the company and aware of how to get the best creative out of the team. The Chief Collaborator should have the ability to effectively bring the management team and broader teams together and align against GTM plan execution.
The Chief Customer Officer should be able to speak in the voice of the customer while the Chief Innovation and Change officer needs to invent and drive new and more compelling ways of marketing with innovative product, positioning and marketing ideas.
Overall, the marketing team should be results-driven, analytical and data-driven, creative and design-driven, customer experience-driven, outgoing, outspoken, and be able to add a human touch.
Thoughts on the evolution of the marketing arena a few years from now with regard to some of its potential disruptions and transformations
Van Diamandakis: The future of marketing is happening today. In the B2B sector, it is powered by AI, ML, and other technologies. Marketing is highly targeted, personalized, measurable, and optimizable, which needs to be tested and learned. Also, in the future, marketing will be highly intelligent to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time in the buyer’s journey. Marketing will be highly entertaining, educational, creative, and relevant. And in a cloud/SaaS world, the product is the marketing and the marketing is the product. Thus, the CMO’s role will also get broadened.
The biggest challenge for companies while adopting a new marketing technology
Van Diamandakis: The biggest challenges for companies while adopting a new MarTech are the fear of lack of knowledge, inability to get the broader company, especially sales on board, holding on to the old ways of doing things and the lack of a strong and brilliant CMO to drive this change.
The most “SCARIEST” task
Van Diamandakis: Hiring and keeping the best people is a difficult part of my role.
Inspiration
Van Diamandakis: The ‘AI Marketing Canvas’ by Jim Lecinski and Raj Venkatesan inspired me lately.
Books or podcasts recommendation
Van Diamandakis: I would recommend ‘This is Marketing’ by Seth Godin, ‘Contagious’ by Jonah Berger, ‘Crushing It’ by Gary V, ‘The Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Influence’ by Bob Newbern, ‘Building a Brand Story’ by Don Miller.
Fun activities
Van Diamandakis: I love spending family time, helping my kids with virtual school work, afternoon walks, hiking, biking, tennis, and Netflix.
Five words that describe Van
Van Diamandakis: I would like to describe myself as the forever optimist, creative, curious, self-aware, and a country boy from Iowa.
Thank you, Van, it was a great pleasure getting to know you and get detailed insight into the life of a marketing professional. Also, thank you for enlightening us with information on what should be the ideal approach to work to become a successful marketer.
