MarTech Edge Interview with Jasper Lenz Radeke, VP Marketing, North America, CleverTap

Hello, Jasper! Could you share some key insights you’ve gained throughout your marketing career?

In the 12+ years I’ve spent in B2B SaaS Marketing, I’ve seen time and again that building relationships with your audience over time is the only viable way to long-term success. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to switch a critical component of their MarTech stack on a whim. Growth “hacks” and pure conversion-focused plays only take you so far. Instead, the main role of our marketing function is to create opportunities for our teams to build personal relationships with our audience at scale. In other words, as the leading Customer Engagement Platform, we need to practice what we preach to our customers.

What marketing challenges are specific to the North American market, and how do you address them as the VP Marketing, NA of CleverTap?

North America tends to be a focus area for many companies, so the competition for share of mind is quite high. Audiences are inundated with messages and have learned to become skeptical, sophisticated buyers. More often than not, they look for the best, not the cheapest, solution. But once a decision has been made, they can move quite quickly – and expect much more agility than, for example, buyers in Europe. Ultimately, it comes down to breaking through the clutter, building trust, and then providing exceptional service. Marketing plays a central role in all these three functions.

What sets CleverTap apart as the preferred customer engagement platform for companies aiming to optimize their customer lifetime value?

At CleverTap, we believe that disparate point solutions create disparate customer journeys. That’s why we built an all-in-one platform that combines the intelligence a business needs with powerful tools to put this insight into action. By providing an integrated solution for analytics, product experiences, and lifecycle marketing, we create an environment that encourages synergies between marketing and product teams. The results are not only improvements in operational and cost efficiency but also in the resulting customer experience.

The second major competitive advantage we have comes down to the granularity and volume of customer data we can store and process. Our proprietary data layer powered by TesseractDB™ lets CleverTap customers build truly personalized customer engagement strategies and user journeys that span their entire life cycle.

In your three months with CleverTap, what notable changes have you introduced to the marketing strategies?

A lot of our effort has been focused on building better relationships with our customers and potential customers. Face-to-face interactions are a key component of this strategy. To execute this well with a globally distributed team, we have introduced new processes and concepts – we want to be known as the experts in building better experiences. We are also working on our approach to providing meaningful content. Our audience is sophisticated buyers, and it’s important to show that we value their attention by providing interesting, relevant insights.

Can you share instances of how you’ve applied your strong analytical skills to resolve complex marketing challenges?

An analytical mindset is critical to many aspects of marketing decision-making, from determining the right metrics to define and track success consistently to effectively running digital campaigns to making informed choices on positioning and messaging. But the most interesting cases are those where analytical thinking only gets you half the way, and you have to mix it with intuition. Marketing is full of gray areas and unknowns – you rarely have clear “wrong” or “right” approaches to solve a given challenge. For example, the usual B2B SaaS customer journey includes multiple touch points that may include a mix of events, content, paid media, and other channels. Each can be independently measured to a certain degree, but it is often hard to prove the aggregate impact of integrated campaigns that combine all channels. Making decisions in the face of this uncertainty means that you have to look at data where it is available while ensuring that it doesn’t obscure the big picture.

How do you plan to navigate your role at CleverTap going forward?

“We are the largest Customer Engagement Platform globally and have a distinct technological advantage, thanks to innovations like TesseractDB™, RenderMax, and most recently, Scribe. Within North America, our market position as challengers aligns us with digital thought leaders who need to outsmart and not outspend their established competition. We need to stay hungry, flexible, and smart when it comes to positioning our products, reaching our audiences, and building relationships with them. To succeed, we need to rally our global team and provide focus, set a high bar for our marketing output, especially content and experiences, and embrace new technologies like AI. In this context, I see myself as a contributor who provides guidance, facilitates conversations between different internal and external stakeholders, and helps create alignment between them.