MarTech Edge Interview with Mark Pinard, Chief Marketing Officer, Pipefy

Welcome, Mark! What challenges or obstacles did you encounter during your marketing journey, and how did you successfully overcome them?

The biggest challenges have always been around developing a deep understanding of buyers and how to build effective programs to target them. Every company, every product, and every opportunity I have had in my career has been based on what I have successfully done as a product marketer. But with each new opportunity comes a new product and a new audience to sell to – so you are basically pressing the reset button every time.

This is a big challenge as it takes time to develop that knowledge, and when working with a new team, it takes time to be able to best support them. I will tell you, though, that for me, sticking to what I know has worked in the past. Even if you don’t know the buyer, you can still apply the frameworks and structure you have used in the past to develop it.

At the leadership level, coming in with templates and examples of success can be very inspiring to your team as it provides them with a roadmap; also, tangible examples of how these templates succeeded can provide a level of energy that the team may have been missing.

How are you leveraging your extensive years of experience to develop a winning strategy for Pipefy?

By implementing the battle-tested frameworks and templates I have developed over the years of my career, I am developing a winning marketing strategy for Pipefy. For me, being a good leader is about being down in the trenches and being part of the team. My extensive years of experience just means that I have more scars and a deeper understanding of where the land mines might be. Sharing this knowledge with the team through these battle-tested frameworks and allowing them to put their own approach to it is a recipe for success.

How do you ensure a unique and distinctive approach with a no/low-code platform, and what factors contribute to achieving error-proof execution?

Understanding your buyer, their needs, pain points, what they care about, how they consume information, how they make buying decisions, the list goes on and on. I started my career in sales and have always lived under the mantra “everyone is a sales rep”, and this comes by deeply understanding and caring about your customer. Every vertical, business size, etc. requires a distinctive approach to how you target them; no two customers are the same. By deeply understanding your customers, you can then tailor your message, tone of voice, content, etc., based on what you know they consume (research, whitepapers, LinkedIn, blogs, video, podcasts, webinars, case studies) on your distribution channels (social, paid, etc.) they are utilizing to learn and make decisions.

With that said, nothing in marketing is ever error-proof; it requires multitudes of testing to get it right. You need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable because things will undoubtedly fail. But if you aren’t failing, you aren’t learning. Learning allows you to optimize your playbook and ultimately get to predictability or, as you say, “error-proof.”

What are the key benefits and advantages of utilizing Pipefy's customizable analytics feature?

Simply put, the fact that you can customize them. When it comes to process management, every single business has a challenge that is unique to their business and will have unique analytics requirements. With Pipefy, we put the power in your hands to customize the analytics based on what you are looking to monitor for process performance gains. Whether it’s ticket SLAs or employee onboarding time, you have complete flexibility to track what makes sense for your business. Sneak peek, Pipefy AI will now make that even easier with the ability to ask it anything regarding your processes with an instant answer.

What upcoming advancements and innovations can we anticipate from Pipefy in the near future?

We are always looking for innovative ways to improve the efficiency of process management, and AI will be game-changing for us. The ability to have best-in-class processes automatically built for you, just based on Pipefy's understanding of a few data points about your business, will be revolutionary in two ways. First, a tremendous amount of time will be saved by having a process already built that can be custom-tailored to your particular business needs and pain points. And second, it will provide the ability to deliver real-time analytics at your fingertips, regardless of what you are looking for. Need to know how long, on average, it takes your procurement team to process a purchase request? Done. Need to know how many of your sales reps have hit their quota over the last four months? Easy. Whether you are a department leader or a citizen developer, AI truly changes the landscape of no-code process management, and we’re really excited about it.

What, in your opinion, are some crucial considerations and potential challenges that arise when implementing AI in marketing practices, and how can these be effectively addressed?

When it comes to marketing, AI does not replace the level of experience required for proper execution. It can provide direction and make some of the marketing challenges a bit easier by providing different perspectives, but there still needs to be a layer of understanding to complement it. Like in process management, AI can be used to help fill your biggest gaps in execution or efficiency. For instance, you need to get sales emails written, but your content team is at capacity; AI can help at least as a starting point. It will definitely change the way we work, but I’m very skeptical it will replace the level of experience required to execute marketing at a really high level.

How do you approach and leverage technological shifts to your advantage in your business strategy?

Being in SaaS my entire career, I embrace technological shifts as the advancement is designed to make our lives better in one way or another. But with that comes a balance of having too many solutions to solve too many things. You can overwhelm yourselves with too big of a tech stack because the layers between what each of them does or does not do become blurred. I relate it to kids on Christmas morning, who love seeing the abundance of presents under the tree, but once they unwrap them, they are overwhelmed with what to play with, and something always gets left behind.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs who are venturing into the marketing industry and aiming for success?

Don’t be afraid to fail, as every failure is an opportunity to learn. Also, have patience; marketing is not built overnight, it’s a lot of tiny steps to get to a place of predictability, and even once you are there, it changes overnight. Being lean and agile with understanding takes time, but it will pay you huge dividends in the end. I have seen too many marketers in a startup trying to build an empire overnight (even done it myself). They hire a huge team, buy a huge tech stack and throw a lot of money at different things because it’s what everyone else is doing. Don’t make that mistake; take the time to understand your target audience, how they make buying decisions and use that as the foundation to build your marketing strategy.

What is your vision for Pipefy for the next five years, and what strategies do you have in place to achieve these goals?

From a marketing standpoint, it’s having a predictable marketing playbook with error-proof execution; from a company standpoint, it’s being the most innovative no-code process management solution on the market. We don’t want to compete in the industry; we want to change the landscape of it as a whole. As for strategies, it's doing what we are doing today, keep testing, keep learning, and keep applying.