Can you walk us through the journey that led to the inception of Fintel Connect?

Like every great journey, it started with a problem. About a decade ago, Enterprise Bank in Canada approached us, seeking our expertise to manage and run their affiliate program. This marked our introduction to the world of financial services and affiliate programs. I don’t think Fintel Connect could have existed as a business specializing only in financial services back then. The changes in technology, consumer appetite, the way people use mobile phones, and the additional layers of security involved have allowed for the existence of digital account opening and loan origination systems. These advancements facilitate the power of Fintel Connect because we leverage all those things.

Being female-founded and female-led, how does Fintel Connect differ from other organizations?

The distinction, in my opinion, lies not in our female orientation but rather in our deliberate approach. Like many other businesses, not necessarily limited to this field, we place great emphasis on culture, team building, and making meaningful contributions. We are committed to making a difference.

How do Fintel Connect’s partner management technologies sort things out for organizations?

Our tool, Fintel Performance, offers scalability by providing a solution for financial clients who wish to access multiple affiliates without the need for custom handling. Additionally, it serves as a destination for numerous affiliates seeking high-quality financial products. Essentially, it is a classic affiliate technology that enables both sides to leverage their capabilities. However, our focus lies in catering to the specific and specialized requirements of the financial services niche.

As the world is turning towards AI, how do you plan to leverage it for your business goals?

We are already implementing it. We have compliance technology that leverages AI and machine learning to streamline complex processes and remove the burden of manual tasks. I often compare it to the evolution of calculators, which were once considered advanced technology but are now considered tools. Therefore, I believe that AI and machine learning should be viewed as tools rather than substitutes for intellectual ability. They allow us to leverage their capabilities and enhance our operations.

What organizational and business strategies do you implement to sail through economic downturns like the one right now?

The practicality of managing inflows and outflows of money must be closely monitored to ensure value is delivered. We aim to address real problems and provide meaningful solutions on behalf of our clients. This purposefulness in our relationship is not manufactured; it genuinely holds utility and impact.

How do Fintel Connect’s solutions stand out from the other rival products in the fintech space?

I firmly believe that our strength lies in the fact that we are part of the community and dedicated to serving the community. This distinction sets us apart from other solutions that may also engage with the financial industry but lack the deep immersion we have achieved.

What major disruptions do you foresee happening in fintech in the near future?

In my view, the trajectory of technological disruption remains uncertain, and it appears to be an ongoing continuum. We have not reached the end point yet. However, what I find intriguing is the intersection between fintechs, which focus on addressing specific and customized challenges, and their collaboration with banks, who operate as generalists. This dynamic presents a fascinating landscape to explore.

What advice would you give budding female entrepreneurs trying to make it on their own?

As an entrepreneur, I believe there is a fallacy in thinking that you can achieve success solely on your own. It is the community around you that plays a crucial role, whether it consists of your early founder team, business partners, or supportive friends. None of us truly embark on this journey alone. I do not know what it would be like to be a male founder because I am not one, but I think the key lies in recognizing your own strengths, being resourceful, and acting with intentionality.

Please share your journey in product management, especially with Tellius.

My journey in product management has been diverse, starting as a BI Analyst at Coca-Cola, then transitioning to a BI Architect role at KLA-Tencor. There, I developed critical expertise in data analytics and business intelligence solutions. I further broadened my knowledge as a Sales Engineer at Oracle, gaining deep insight into the market landscape and customer needs.

At GoodData, my career took a decisive turn toward product marketing and management, focusing on strategic areas such as market analysis, product roadmaps, and competitive positioning. This focus continued at Birst, where I took an active role in managing product lifecycles, defining go-to-market strategies, and shaping innovative solutions that delivered customer value.

Today, as Chief Product Officer at Tellius, I leverage my technical background, market insights, and customer feedback to drive our overall product strategy. The diversity of my career path helps me create products that not only meet but exceed customers’ expectations. Effective collaboration lies at the heart of my approach. By working in synergy with cross-functional teams, we ensure our products are finely tuned to meet evolving market demands and cater to the unique needs of our customers.

Tellius was recently named a Visionary for the second year in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for analytics and BI platforms. Which factors proved instrumental in this success?

At Tellius, we’re thrilled to be recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for analytics and BI platforms for the second consecutive year.

We build innovative features not just based on what’s trending but, more importantly, on how we can help our customers address their challenges and needs. But what makes us truly visionary is our strong customer attraction. We listen, we understand their pain points, and we create. We’re delighted that customers not only love our platform but are continually discovering new ways to imagine using it. We are committed to continually aligning our innovative mission with our customers’ needs, turning their pain points into our next big feature.

Since our inception, we have been seamlessly weaving AI augmentation into every aspect of our platform. This could range from subtle aspects like detecting data types to more visible ones like natural language-based data exploration, auto-visualization, predictive modeling, and storytelling. We believe that AI is not just an add-on but an integral part of the analytics process that empowers any user to generate insights at every stage.

The platform provides a greater degree of agility in analytics than anything on the market today. It enables a rapid analytics iteration designed to foster collaboration between creators and consumers. Our aim is to help users move from data to insights as quickly as possible.

What are your plans to reach a broader audience and capture newer markets in your vertical?

Our central mission is to democratize analytics with AI-powered decision intelligence, focusing on equipping companies with the tools they need to become data-driven. To make our technology more accessible, we are adopting a freemium model, which draws from a product-led growth (PLG) strategy allowing users to engage with our platform firsthand, fully experiencing its potential without any upfront investment. This model’s unique approach gives users the freedom to understand our platform’s capabilities, grasp its intuitive design, and then select a pricing model that aligns best with their evolving needs.

To reach out to newer markets and broaden our audience, our commitment to innovation remains unwavering. We continuously work to enhance our analytics workflow and are resolute in expanding data access to a wider range of personas within an organization. With our autoML feature, which is already fortified with a spectrum of industry-specific models, we are relentlessly expanding the options available to our customers. At Tellius, we’re committed to turning visions into reality, adapting to evolving market needs, and consistently delivering value to our customers.

Collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams is essential for growth. How do you ensure that they are operating at optimum levels?

At Tellius, collaboration forms the core of our ethos. Regular stand-up meetings punctuate our week, with product updates flowing seamlessly to our marketing, sales, and customer success teams. This fosters an environment where each department remains in sync with our latest advancements, enabling them to work effectively. Additionally, the product and marketing teams provide weekly enablement content to our sales force, driving a culture of knowledge-sharing and mutual growth.

We have established a consistent feedback loop between our customer success team, sales, and product. This allows everyone to stay updated on key customer requests and issues, fostering a unified approach across all stakeholders. Additionally, our product team remains in constant touch with our key accounts, reinforcing our commitment to account health and customer satisfaction. At Tellius, collaboration isn’t just a part of our workflow; it’s the heartbeat that propels us forward, ensuring we remain attuned and responsive to our customers’ needs.

How does Tellius modernize customers’ data analytics stack while providing a better way to reveal insights?

We’re helping to usher in a new era of analytics in decision intelligence, moving away from the traditional business intelligence approach towards a user-friendly, AI-augmented platform. Our aim is to reimagine analytics as a Google-like experience—easy, quick, and intuitive. By intertwining self-service analytics capabilities with AI, we’ve built a platform that empowers everyone within an organization to tap into the power of data-driven insights.

Our secret sauce? A blend of features that streamline the analytics experience. Natural language search, auto-recommended visualizations, automated insights, and no/low-code data preparation tools allow users to generate insights within minutes. Add to this the power of our dual-analytics engine, which ensures rapid, accurate queries and insights. At its core, Tellius is not merely modernizing data analytics; it’s revolutionizing the entire path to insights, making it more accessible, actionable, and fundamentally beneficial for users.

How does Tellius help industries like Financial, Pharma, Ecommerce, etc., gain AI-powered insights?

At Tellius, we bring the power of AI to diverse enterprises, spanning sectors such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, ecommerce, CPG, and financial services. Our goal is to transform their data into actionable insights. Within the pharma and life sciences arenas, our AI-augmented analytical frameworks simplify complex data analysis, fostering more informed, data-driven decision-making in areas like market access and commercial effectiveness.

Similarly, in the CPG and ecommerce sectors, Tellius has been a game-changer. We’ve enhanced shopper insights and pricing strategies and even facilitated swift, ad hoc analysis for over a thousand users. In essence, Tellius harnesses AI to deliver practical solutions and shape the future of data-driven decision-making across industries. With Tellius, every business has the means to extract maximum value from their data.

Are there any new launches or newer versions of the current solutions that will augment the growth of Tellius?

With the introduction of GPT-powered Copilot, the evolution of augmented analytics takes a significant leap. Copilot strikes the perfect balance between the power of AI and the strengths of human intelligence by offering features like automated code generation, business-friendly metadata creation, and insightful bite-sized narratives that fortify your decisions.

In our recent upgrades, we’ve integrated a metadata view, a strategic addition aimed at establishing a context and promoting collaboration among users. In addition, we’ve rolled out multi-business view Vizpads, empowering users with a holistic view of insights across varied datasets. These innovative features are continually pushing the boundaries of our platform, ensuring it resonates with the evolving needs of data experts, analysts, and business users. Tellius breaks down the barrier between various personas and data, enabling them to find their own answers and unleashing a level of automation that traditional tools have struggled to match.

With innovation at the core of our business, one of our upcoming features allows users to gain insight into our product roadmap, offer suggestions, and actively participate by voting on potential features. This bridges the gap between the product team and the users, emphasizing the collaborative spirit we champion at Tellius.

How is Tellius’ AI-driven decision intelligence platform unique in the market?

Tellius stands out in the market by embracing three foundational pillars: next-generation self-service analytics, AI augmentation, and superior analytics agility. Our self-service analytical capabilities democratize data access, transforming every member of an organization into a data-driven decision-maker. With a simple, intuitive, and “Google-like” search interface, users can find the data they need without being data experts. Automated insights extract meaningful patterns from the data, bringing insights to light with a click. Our dual-analytics engine ensures quick, responsive queries even for the most demanding workloads.

Additionally, AI powers everything from our simplest functions to our most complex analyses. The seamless integration of AI not only amplifies the capabilities of data analysts but also democratizes ad-hoc data analysis. Tellius’ unparalleled automated insights offer key driver, cohort, and segment analyses right into the platform. Furthermore, our platform enhances organizations’ analytics agility by streamlining workflows and fostering cross-departmental collaboration. Thus, Tellius redefines not just how organizations interact with data but also how they can leverage it to drive actionable, impactful decisions.

Which trends are you focusing on that will drive growth in marketing and sales?

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT has marked a pivotal moment in our industry. These advanced AI models will significantly alter the landscape of analytics, and we are strategically positioning ourselves to harness their potential, focusing on these trends to drive growth.

To this end, we’ve developed ‘Copilot,’ an exciting addition to our AI-powered platform. Copilot embodies our vision of automating the journey from raw data to actionable insights, an approach that resonates powerfully with the market’s needs.

Copilot accelerates data preparation while removing the tedious, time-consuming process of adding metadata to datasets. It goes a step beyond simply auto-generating the code by also providing optimization, inline comments, and explanatory notes to make data preparation more efficient and less error-prone. Tellius Copilot extracts key findings, interesting patterns, and trends from your analysis, presenting them as simple, digestible information.

This confident approach to innovation, combined with the adoption of powerful LLM technology, isn’t just aligning us with industry trends—it’s propelling us forward as trendsetters in the realm of AI and data analytics.

What do you think the future holds for AI-driven decision intelligence and automation platforms?

The future of decision intelligence and augmented analytics is promising and dynamic. The convergence of data science and business intelligence is reshaping industry standards, and we at Tellius find this exciting as a forerunner in the automated analysis space. What we are seeing now is a powerful shift towards not just visualizing data but also enabling the automated generation of insights.

We’re at a pivotal moment in our industry’s evolution, particularly with the emergence of LLMs. Traditional players struggle to keep pace with rapid innovation, leading to ill-considered bolt-on services and even retractions. Implementing LLMs demands careful planning, given the risks—such as the ‘hallucination’ rate of up to 20% in popular models like GPT. However, we at Tellius are tackling these challenges head-on. We’ve incorporated the ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle, creating a safeguard against inaccuracies in LLMs. This exciting journey forward brings us to the frontier of industry innovation, and we’re eager to help shape its future.

Can you tell us about your journey and what you look forward to in the new role as a CRO? 

I've always been interested in tech since I first attached a modem (9600 baud) to our home landline. I was in the first wave of internet start-ups trying to make sense of and leverage the power of the internet. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to be part of many different advertising and marketing technology areas, including mobile apps, email marketing, programmatic, personalization, and rich media. It’s been a wild ride. 

Everyone’s talking about the depreciation of third-party cookies, but cookies are not required to identify customers and prospects. At Semcasting, we are re-imagining identity resolution and first-party data onboarding with our patented technology. 

How do you approach revenue growth, and what strategies have been most successful for you? 

In plain language, ground zero articulates how we, as a company, can help our brand and agency clients and contribute to their bottom line. There is far too much “tech speak” in the industry, and frankly, I think it’s almost impossible for most marketers to wade through it all. 

Tell prospects how you can specifically help them. Then we can talk about the technology that supports that solution. 

Can you discuss any trends or recent changes in the industry that are impacting the business? 

Brands want to control their data. So, many brands are in-housing their data and programmatic operations. Capturing, expanding on, and leveraging your first-party data equates to managing your destiny as a marketing organization. 

There are a lot of former agency people who are now running corporate marketing teams. They are far more digitally savvy than the previous generation of marketers, who were more purely focused on offline channels. Today’s marketers also don’t want things to run “business as usual,” where agencies and tech partners take the lion’s share of the media budget without much to show.

 How do you align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth? 

Everything has to be focused on the needs of the client. We have to remove friction and waste throughout the entire process. Make the value proposition easy to understand, easy to communicate, and easy to implement. You need core metrics across the organization to make sure you are making progress from a sales, marketing, and customer success standpoint so you can measure sales and marketing effectiveness and customer satisfaction. 

The identity resolution market is expanding, so how is Semcasting planning to seize the opportunity? 

How many companies are claiming to resolve the identity issue? Almost every company in the space has some answer to the problem. However, only some are solving the core issues of scale and cross-platform acceptance. The identity resolution market may be “expanding,” but it is also becoming more of a bottleneck - full of misinformation and poor performance. 

Some solutions only work on one DSP, so that is very limiting. Other solutions are only based on emails or login users, which only reach 20-30% of the audience, so those also have no scale. Unfortunately, many agencies and brands are left with a patchwork of cookies and proxy solutions, hoping that something will change at some point. 

At Semcasting, we’ve re-imagined identity from the ground up with a mandate for scale across almost all U.S. households and businesses that works across all major DSPs. The critical difference beyond scale is agency and brand control. 

How do you stay up-to-date on industry developments and incorporate them into your growth strategies? 

Being in the industry for many years, I’ve seen so many fads that I view new technology cautiously. I listen to my smartest customers to stay updated on industry trends. They are constantly testing tech, and if you have an open and honest long-term relationship with clients, then you can trust them to tell you what is working, what is not, and what is interesting. 

How do you measure the success of your revenue growth initiatives? 

The end goal is revenue, but instead of revenue, you have to look at other measures- prospect engagement (meetings), prospect tests (opportunities), growth of the overall pipeline, and tests that turn into long-term contracts. Soft measures include how clients respond to the value proposition or do we clearly understand their priorities and fit into their top 3-5 goals that they want to accomplish. If something is interesting but never a priority to your prospects, you are not in a great position to grow revenue. 

How is Semcasting disrupting the market? 

Our identity solutions give brands back the control of their first-party data onboarding with transparent and better match rates, affordable costs, and faster time-to-market. Knowing who matched and who didn’t empower brand marketing efficiency. 

Semcasting adheres to the highest privacy compliance standards with HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II and HITRUST compliance. Marketers can measure frequency and attribution across platforms with our transparent audience-level understanding of matches and where ads are served. Our data onboarding match rates average over 85%, more than double the industry standard, and our integrations with DSPs allow audiences to be activated in minutes. 

What we’ve been able to accomplish is genuinely different and ground-breaking. 

What do you think about the future of First Party Identity Management, Audience Design, and Measurement? 

Overall, the market will consolidate and evolve toward direct brand control. The deprecation of cookies is not the end of the world; companies must re-assess the old cookie-based approaches to reach their audiences. 

How are first-party customer data and identity resolution solutions revolutionizing the B2B landscape and impacting customer experience? 

From a B2B standpoint, the focus is on identifying quality prospects across many channels while understanding the customer journey. Identity resolution in B2B is about the scale of reach and finding more efficient and cost-effective paths for decision-makers. 

The shift to permanent hybrid and remote work has blended consumer and B2B channels. Identity, done right, requires stocking the top of the funnel at scale with decision-makers wherever they engage. Semcasting helps B2B marketers transparently reach decision-makers and influencers. 

Can you describe your journey so far, and what key takeaways would you like to share?

While I work in Marketing now, I did not start my career there. For my first job after graduating college, I worked as a strategy consultant in the entertainment industry, advising companies on the best ways to navigate a constantly evolving technological landscape. This role helped me realize I wanted to get my hands dirty and work with emerging and innovative products! That insight pushed me to transition to marketing, and I haven't looked back since.

Since joining Customer.io, I have focused on getting to know our ideal customer profile, assessing the competitive landscape, and understanding current market trends. These insights have allowed me to revamp marketing's objectives and set clear goals for the year. I'm looking forward to leveraging what I've learned in past roles to mature the marketing function at Customer.io, better support our customers, and help the team deliver tangible business impact.

It's been just four months since you were onboarded as the CMO at Customer.io. What are you most looking forward to in your new role here?

While it has been a sprint these first few months, I've enjoyed diving into some critical business initiatives. For example, we launched our second product, Customer Data Pipelines (CDP), in April. It's been fun to be a part of a company leading the charge in customer engagement and communication. I've been impressed by the dedication and passion of the team, and I'm excited to continue working with them to develop innovative strategies that will drive accelerated growth and increased customer satisfaction with our expanding suite of solutions.

One of the things I'm most looking forward to is optimizing the messaging and position of our customer engagement platform. Customer.io has a unique offering that can transform how brands segment their customer base and customize their communications. With the right approach, we can reach new audiences and better educate them about the power of our solutions. I'm excited to be part of a company that is driving real change in the industry, and I'm looking forward to helping contribute to its continued success.

What's your approach to driving growth, profits, and resilience in the current economic downturn?

To succeed in challenging times, I try to drive the team toward customer-centricity, data-driven decision-making, and agility.

Customer-centricity is foundational for success because it helps us focus on what matters most with our core audience. By really understanding our customers' needs and challenges, we can develop innovative solutions that help them address their "hair on fire" issues and exceed their expectations around what our product can do for them. In an ever-evolving economic environment, it can be difficult to discern how the market is changing. By taking a data-driven approach to decision-making, you can identify trends and build conviction for your decisions more quickly, maximizing the impact of any marketing investments. Finally, marketers need to be able to adapt rapidly to stay ahead of the competition. The ability to pivot strategies and tactics in response to new trends and market conditions is crucial for success.

Last year, Customer.io launched its Essentials plan enabling startups and small teams to engage customers on mobile and web apps. What are the plans for this fiscal year?

The response from the market to our Essentials plan has been very positive, and we have seen strong growth since it launched. As we look to the future, we are exploring new ways to drive more awareness of this offering and reach a wider audience of teams who could benefit from a robust set of tools at an affordable cost. Also, we want to continue building this plan's value proposition and have a rich set of new features that will be available in Essentials in the second half of the year. At Customer.io, we believe every team should have access to a customer engagement platform to support their business, so we will continue investing in our Essentials plan to support this belief.

How do you stay up-to-date on the developments in marketing automation, and how do you integrate them into your platform?

Staying up-to-date on the latest developments in marketing automation requires a proactive approach. First, I constantly monitor the latest news and trends by following popular thought leaders on social media and reading industry-specific publications/blogs. Additionally, I participate in a few professional associations and community groups to connect with other peers in the field, participate in discussions, and learn what they are seeing & hearing. Finally, I try to speak with our customers on a regular basis. This first-hand feedback is very insightful and helps me understand what is signal vs. what is noise.

At Customer.io, we take a very customer-centric approach to product development. Therefore, a strong, collaborative relationship already exists between myself and the product team. When I develop key insights, I communicate with the appropriate product leaders to integrate those takeaways into product development efforts. Given my role and understanding of our ideal customer profile, I want to ensure that the company stays competitive and meets the evolving needs of its customers.

You introduced Customer.io Data Pipelines (CDP) very recently. Can you shed some light on how it helps companies connect customer data to their tech stack?

Although data management can be a headache, we believe having access to good data is essential for modern marketers to deliver personalization, multi-channel targeting, and product integration. Therefore, we launched Customer.io Data Pipelines (CDP) to help companies connect their customer data to every product in their tech stack. With CDP, teams can easily unify their customer data without writing a line of code. Additionally, our solution keeps your data up-to-date with "out of the box" support for the most common destinations (i.e., Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot), so you have consistent data across the tools you rely on most. Finally, by seamlessly integrating with our current messaging product, Customer.io Journeys, our CDP allows companies to build a unified view of each customer and create memorable interactions across mobile and web using push, email, in-app, and SMS channels.

How do you measure the ROI of your marketing strategies?

Our focus is always on delivering value to our customers. To ensure that we align our resources on the most important initiatives, the marketing team at Customer.io uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. This process helps clarify how we will measure success and who will own the delivery of the results. When we define the measurements for those Key Results, we use a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics to determine the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Finally, we set up dashboards based on our OKR metrics to monitor real-time performance across our various team meetings/syncs and complete a formal review of performance at the end of each quarter. By tracking key performance indicators in this way, we can identify areas of improvement more quickly and optimize our marketing strategies to serve our customers better. 

What do you think about the future of customer-engaging marketing automation platforms?

The future vision for customer-engaging marketing automation platforms is inspiring! As a marketer, you are always looking for ways to customize the customer experience because you know that this will drive more engagement. With the proliferation of customer data, the advancement of existing tooling, and the rapid evolution of new AI technology, marketing teams will be able to deliver more personalized and relevant interactions to our customers than ever before! Therefore, companies should focus on investing in platforms that share this future vision and streamline their ability to deliver increased personalization across the entire customer journey via powerful automation.

You have vast experience as Bank of America SVP & LiveTechnology’s Chief Client Officer. How has your transition to the current post of COO at LiveRetail been?

During my 28-year tenure at Bank of America, I primarily worked in Corporate Marketing and Marketing Technology. I found great satisfaction in creating innovative MarTech solutions that addressed complex issues within the marketing organization. Many of these solutions focused on improving processes and workflow, ensuring compliance, and supporting localized marketing efforts across approximately 4,000 banking center locations. As part of the development process, I was involved in every step, from ideation to implementation.

Transitioning from the “client-side” to a “service provider” at LiveTechnology was an exciting but natural progression, as Bank of America’s customer-centric approach has always been ingrained in me. What I enjoyed most about the transition was the opportunity to serve multiple clients rather than just one corporate marketing department. I take great pleasure in providing support to our clients and feel a sense of pride when actively engaging with each and every one of them.

My experience managing Marketing Technology at Bank of America played a significant role in shaping LiveRetail’s direction. Supporting localized marketing for large brands with multiple locations was one of our core features, similar to Bank of America. However, LiveRetail also extends its support to franchise brands, retail brands, manufacturers with multiple retail locations, as well as small businesses, thus broadening our reach.

In this fast-paced era where the approach to administrative and operational functions keeps changing, which technologies do you rely on?

Businesses can benefit from leveraging technology to streamline administrative and operational functions, improve efficiency, and maintain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business environment. At LiveRetail, we’re in a unique position because our parent company, LiveTechnology, is a SaaS development company, which means we’ve created most of our tools in-house.

Our proprietary project management system supports our agile development process, team collaboration, client onboarding, and routine tasks and deliverables. One of the most powerful features of our tool is that it allows me to track our deliverables and monitor our progress in real-time, at the project level, team level, and even down to the individual responsible for each task. I can view our deliverables for any time period—deliverables for today, this week, the month, the upcoming week, etc. This gives my management team the ability to make sure we have the resources needed to hit all of our deadlines.

Although we have developed most of our tools in-house, we do rely heavily on Zoom, which has been a game-changer for our fully virtual company since 2022. Zoom allows our internal teams to collaborate seamlessly, even allowing us to whiteboard just as if we were in a conference room. We have also found Zoom to be an efficient way to communicate with clients, with video calls replacing traditional conference calls, giving us more face time with our clients around the globe than ever before.

What, according to you, is more critical: cost-reduction in budgets or time savings in tasks?

It depends on the specific situation and priorities of the organization or individual involved. Both cost-reduction in budgets and time savings in tasks can be important factors to consider, but which one takes priority may depend on several different factors.

In some cases, cost reduction in budgets may be more critical. For example, if an organization is facing financial difficulties or working with limited resources, reducing costs may be necessary to keep the organization afloat or to ensure that critical programs or services can continue to operate. In this case, reducing expenses may take priority over time savings in tasks.

On the other hand, if an organization is under pressure to increase productivity or to meet tight deadlines, time savings in tasks may be more critical. For example, if a team is working on a project with a tight deadline, finding ways to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently may be necessary to ensure that the project is completed on time. In this case, time savings may take priority over cost reduction.

Both cost reduction and time savings can be important factors to consider, and the best approach may involve finding a balance between the two.

Tell us how the LiveRetail platform helps drive engagement & sales with lower CPMs for brands.

Based on our experience at LiveRetail, we have identified three critical factors—targeting, response, and spend—that help drive lower CPM rates.

First, it’s essential to ensure that all social media ads are hyper-targeted, including both location and audience targeting. Ads using broad targeting criteria tend to compete with many other ads, increasing CPM costs. Hyper-targeted ads, on the other hand, don’t compete against national ads, resulting in lower CPM and CPC costs.

Secondly, localized content is crucial in driving engagement, given the “buy local, support local” consumer movement that’s gaining momentum globally. In-market consumers respond 2-5 times more to ads showing their dealer, city, town, or neighborhood. However, creating localized content can be a challenge for businesses, as agencies charge exorbitant fees for custom ads. For instance, creating customized ads globally for all of Dunkin Donuts’ 11,300 locations would require a team of one hundred designers and cost a fortune.

Lastly, it’s been our experience that one hundred ads at $50 each perform significantly better than spending $5,000 on one ad.

What, according to you, is the essential aspect of managing a corporate budget?

The essential aspect of managing a corporate budget is to have a clear understanding of the financial resources available and to plan and allocate those resources effectively. This involves identifying the company’s financial goals and objectives, forecasting revenue and expenses, and creating a budget that outlines the expected income and expenses for a specific period.

To effectively manage a corporate budget, it’s important to regularly monitor and track the actual performance of the company against the budget, making adjustments as necessary to ensure that the company stays on track to achieve its financial objectives.

Additionally, effective communication and collaboration between departments and stakeholders is critical in managing a corporate budget. This ensures that everyone understands the financial goals and constraints and can work together to make decisions that align with the overall financial strategy of the company.

How do you effectively organize all the teams to be coherent and ensure the operations between them run smoothly?

Assembling highly effective cross-functional teams is no easy feat. It requires clear communication, a clear definition of roles and responsibilities, proper delegation of tasks, and effective collaboration. Here are a few things that I have found to be useful in fostering coherent operations:

Define goals and responsibilities: Clearly define the goals and responsibilities of each team and how they fit into the overall project or organization. Make sure each team understands their role and what is expected of them.

Communicate clearly: Ensure that communication is clear, concise, and consistent. Make sure that each team understands the objectives, timelines, and expectations. Encourage open communication and foster an environment where team members can voice their concerns and ideas.

Establish internal processes: Set up clear workflows and processes for each team to follow. This helps ensure everyone is on the same page and knows what is expected of them.

Delegate tasks effectively: Delegate tasks based on team member strengths and expertise. This helps to ensure that tasks are completed efficiently and effectively.

Foster collaboration: Encourage collaboration between teams. This helps to build relationships and trust between team members and ensures that everyone is working towards the same goal.

Monitor progress: Regularly monitor progress and provide feedback to each team. This helps to ensure that teams stay on track and can adjust their processes if needed.

Remember that effective communication and collaboration are key to success!

Can you explain an instance when implementing new or upcoming technology helped the company?

The implementation of additional AI tools, such as ChatGPT, into LiveRetail’s internal processes and client-facing tools represents a significant shift towards increased efficiency and productivity. AI tools have the ability to perform repetitive tasks quickly and accurately, reducing the time and effort required by employees. This not only saves time but also drives consistency and reduces errors while freeing up employees to focus on more complex tasks.

In addition to improving internal workflows, AI tools can also have a significant impact on client-facing tools. Automating certain parts of our content curation process, such as copy recommendations, will reduce the need of the clients or their agencies significantly. This can lead to increased scalability, speed to market, and reduced production costs, ultimately driving higher revenue growth/margins.

Overall, the implementation of additional AI tools represents a major step forward for LiveRetail. By leveraging these technologies, the company can work more efficiently, scale more quickly, and provide a better experience for both its employees and customers. 

What tips would you give the other COOs or VPs struggling in the current economic downturn?

In today’s economic climate, businesses, both big and small, are facing unprecedented challenges. As a startup, LiveRetail is no exception to these difficulties. To navigate this environment, we recommend several key strategies.

First, it’s important to re-evaluate and prioritize frequently. Focus on the essential aspects of your business and consider cutting back on non-essential expenses. Building a rainy-day fund can also provide a safety net in uncertain times.

Secondly, be adaptable and open to change. It may be necessary to pivot to new markets or implement new strategies to respond to changing circumstances.

Thirdly, communication is crucial. Keep your team informed of any changes that may impact them, and provide clear and transparent communication to avoid confusion and uncertainty.

Fourthly, maintaining a positive company culture is essential. Recognizing and rewarding achievements, providing opportunities for personal and professional development, and showing appreciation for your team’s efforts can help keep morale high.

Lastly, seeking expert advice from consultants and influencers can be valuable in identifying new market opportunities and accelerating growth. Remember, while the current economic climate presents challenges, it also presents opportunities for innovation and growth. Through adapting, innovating, and investing in our team, we aim not only to withstand the challenges of these difficult times but also to enhance our ability to make a positive impact on the communities, clients, and customers we serve.

Looking at the current market scenario, what do you think lies in the future of the marketplace & what is LiveRetail planning?

In order to remain competitive, it’s essential for marketing strategies to include a localized marketing component. However, this can be challenging due to the high production costs associated with traditional agency models. It’s important to remember that localized content leads to more relevant content, which in turn drives higher response and engagement rates and ultimately results in increased sales.

LiveRetail is well-positioned to support companies and brands with their localized marketing strategy by providing innovative solutions that utilize AI and other technologies to simplify localized marketing and advertising processes with localized ad production, enhanced targeting, and personalization. LiveRetail is committed to investing in these areas and expanding its offerings to meet the evolving demands of the market.

Congratulations on being appointed as Chief Marketing Officer at Eccentex. What are you most looking forward to in your new role here?

As soon as I joined Eccentex, I started to learn about our products and services, and it seems our offer is really great, and we have many happy customers. So, I have nothing to fix, and this is very good news. My first priority is to gain more visibility in our competitive market and attract new audiences based on new messaging. In the past years, Eccentex mastered how to position our products and services to technical buyers, and now I want to do the same by creating simple but powerful messaging for business buyers.

As a CMO, what’s your approach to planning marketing strategies?

My marketing strategy is all about simplification, visibility, and awareness. In our SaaS market, many companies fall into the same trap by creating far too complex offers, too technical messages, and complicated pricing structures. This limits the potential buyers to quickly understand what they’ll get and how much it will cost. I prefer to introduce our solutions to our customers and prospects in short, easy-to-understand terms and sell them through simplified pricing.

How do you wish to implement marketing best practices at Eccentex?

Unfortunately, marketing is not an exact science. There are no magic tricks that work in every company, especially if you have a limited marketing budget. As we learned from some marketing gurus, 97% of the marketing budget never converts, so the “only” challenge of a CMO is to figure out which 3% does. Luckily our conversion rate is industry-leading already, so the question is not how to convince our prospects to consider our solution but how to let them know we have these great solutions. We can’t build a brand that is known by everyone, at least not in the short term, but we may be able to leverage the recent trend that Gartner described—as it seems B2B buyers are getting more open to considering less-known, smaller brands as long as they can expect lower-cost and higher-value solution from them. I can’t reach out to all potential buyers without wasting 97% of my marketing budget, but I may spend our marketing budget more efficiently to influence how they can find us.

How does Eccentex help transform customer service journeys and digitize back-office workflows?

Eccentex solutions are truly unique in the SaaS market because we can help our customers satisfy competing, sometimes controversial, KPIs at the same time. Increasing customer and employee experience at the same time while you need to decrease your operation cost does not sound like an easy task. Automating workflows without sacrificing the easiness of using human-assisted services sounds similarly challenging. The good news is this is not difficult if you use the right product, which is built to automate, digitize, and simplify complex processes based on the customer-experience-first approach. And we have that product in use for many customers across multiple verticals with a proven track record.

You have recently spoken about focusing more on hyperautomation & case management. What are your plans for the same?

Hyperautomation—as a concept—is like a system of systems. We automate components (like workflows, business processes, and customer engagements), then put these automated micro-engagements into a system that can orchestrate the entire customer journey across the business automation ecosystem. Customers can benefit from shorter response times and quicker resolutions through self-service portals and hybrid-assisted (AI/human) services, while brand employees are equipped with all the data and tools they need to resolve customer requests in the quickest and easiest possible way.

In the ever-changing CX landscape, please tell us about your methodology for promoting the new CX transformation.

Customer Experience is probably the most demanding technical capability today’s software vendors need to satisfy. Demands and expectations are changing rapidly and evolving across all innovation components that exist in the market. Solutions that are considered industry-leading can be outdated based on a single shift of customer preferences. Whatever solutions you have, the ultimate capability that can allow you to follow these changes is flexibility. No time for coding, no budget for year long IT projects, no patience to wait for developers to come up with a new release that supports the new demands. Having a platform that can be adjusted by the users itself is the key to adopting these changes instantly.

More than ever, enterprises are inclined towards a low-code platform, so how does AppBase® stand out?

Our AppBase® platform is designed to support all possible development concepts and tools, from absolute No-Code/Low-Code to Deep-Code methodologies. It can even enable business users to create their own solutions without IT knowledge based on intuitive drag-and-drop graphical designers. However, if you need to add some more complex steps or non-standard procedures to your application, a business analyst can quickly add these elements based on standard code snippets. When you need to do something really special, the platform also supports standard code libraries to add your customization by using computer programming languages like C#.

Amongst the looming economic disruptions, what are your forecasts about the technological landscape change and the major focus points in the fiscal year for Eccentex?

Our new platform capabilities are in the final development phases, and I think we can announce them soon. Our new offer will pull together all the latest features and product capabilities in one solution bundle that can enable our clients to hyperautomate their business process automation and customer engagement needs with an end-to-end customer journey focus. As I see it, this new offer will enable our future customers to radically speed up their digital transformation initiatives with lower cost and effort.

What do you think about the future of low-code platforms and customer service journeys?

I think even with the decade-long experiences we have, predicting the future of low-code application platforms is not easy in this market. We already have capabilities similar to ChatGPT, where the AI is able to substitute quite a lot of human work, e.g., in content authoring. We have our “Builders” that can write code on behalf of an IT engineer from graphical process representations, so we feel we are already shaping up the future.

Can we even further automate how our customers design and implement and make their business applications easier? Yes, for sure, we can; however, we can’t be sure about whether certain things will happen just because the trends are suggesting that. We do not want to put all our bets on something that may or may not come. That’s why we are developing our platform in a way that can be flexible to adopt all potential changes that the future may bring.

From your experience as a CMO, how do you wish to implement business best practices at Sensedia?

When I joined the team and looked to introduce best practices, I found it most effective to share how those practices were relevant to the company. Sensedia has a rich growth mindset. The company invests in education, leans into a learning culture, and already adopts many best practices. My task is to connect the dots and customize new practices to fit Sensedia’s needs and goals.

When implementing any new process, there are three phases: crawl, walk, and run. In the crawl phase, I brought in third-party strategies and offered case studies to help the team determine how adopting new practices would look at Sensedia. As we moved to the walk phase, it was better to show than tell. For example, we held a nurturing and progressive profiling workshop to learn how to better reach and understand our ideal customers. Next, I worked hands-on with the team to draft content, personalization strategies, and, ultimately, implementation. 

What are the biggest challenges faced by SaaS companies during current economic disruptions, and how do you plan to tackle those?

Most private companies are focused on high growth right now, and Sensedia has been growing at +40% year over year, so we fall into that category. When raising capital and finding funding, there’s money to be made, but to investors, efficiency metrics matter, especially in an economic downturn. The challenge comes when companies strive for high growth while simultaneously driving to remain efficient. For Sensedia, that means upping our digital marketing game, continuing Work Where We Belong—our thriving virtual work environment, and getting creative and scrappy with our demand and lead generation. Foremost, we’re investing in customer and prospect experience. Sensedia places lead quality over quantity, and we optimize the touches—looking at the source and deep lead analysis instead of throwing money at the top of the funnel to get a high volume of leads and see what sticks.

How does API management help enable businesses in times of economic downturn like the one we have now?

Every business is unique, with different data sources, partners, and platforms. Managing APIs is becoming more complex, and a hybrid approach is critical for agile business strategy. API analysts have told us it’s becoming more important that API management technologies support the full life cycle of APIs, enable a well-governed API development process, meet distinct organizational needs, and be adaptable. Businesses must embrace a hybrid approach to their API management solution by adopting dedicated technology components to compensate for limited or missing capabilities in their current API management suite.

As companies become more connected, open, and complex, there’s no such thing as best-of-breed in API management. We’ll see hybrid platforms that take a full lifecycle approach providing different offerings for different needs. One size no longer fits all. Sensedia is the most efficient and value-based solution out there and a recognized leader in API Management Solutions.

Sensedia focuses on helping our customers become more efficient through agile architectures and better integrations by ensuring enterprise-grade API governance and an outstanding developer experience while working to meet their unique needs. Our customer journeys could include a combination of improving agility and efficiency by enhancing their consumers’ or partners’ digital experience, connecting ecosystems for new business models, modernizing legacy data and systems with greater cost-effectiveness, and realizing new revenue streams through open finance options.

Sensedia’s expertise guides customers on their journeys to deliver products and new experiences faster and better, positively impacting revenue, customer acquisition, and loyalty. It can be challenging to adapt to ever-changing markets and technology, and innovative businesses look to us to speed up their integration process. By working with Sensedia to build an agile architecture, companies can shift swiftly, simplifying the connection and adoption of new tech. When our customers rely on Sensedia as a strong strategic partner to manage their API platforms and microservices, they are more productive and better able to focus on a strategy that seizes the moment and advantageously leverage change.

Finding the right API management strategy gives companies an edge to be more responsive to market demands and improve resilience. Companies trust Sensedia to help them unlock data and technologies through APIs to drive better experiences and bring in new revenue streams and heightened customer loyalty.

Name three critical aspects of Sensedia’s products/services that act as a competitive edge for the brand.

Adaptive Governance

APIs are everywhere and can present a security risk if not governed properly. Sensedia has the edge by providing our customers with adaptive governance. Our platform creates a well-governed, flexible, scalable API strategy without slowing innovation.

Developer Experience

As companies build private or public ecosystems, they open up innovation and share data with partners. Many businesses struggle with complex API management platforms. Sensedia excels at streamlining and simplifying the developer experience while keeping security robust.

Open Capabilities

Sensedia’s global experience in open banking and open insurance, coupled with our expertise in bringing best practices into companies to create Banking as a Service (BaaS) or embedded insurance, makes us unique. Sensedia has enabled open strategies that increase revenue. We have years of expertise connecting ecosystems, and we provide an exceptional onboarding experience that accelerates innovation. Sensedia’s Open Finance Solution includes consent management and centralized configuration built upon industry-recognized standards, allowing quick API wins in weeks vs. months. The solution also includes Ignition—expert services and a playbook to configure and rapidly adopt the most critical API technical standards.

What processes do you follow to ensure the marketing, sales, and customer success teams work hand-in-hand?

Sensedia involves the right players in collaborative planning. We’re incorporating consistent messaging across teams. APIX, Sensedia’s annual customer conference, held online and in-person each June, is now the world’s largest API event. At APIX, departmental walls come down, and the whole company focuses on the customer experience.

Sensedia has recently announced the launch of SPIN, a global distributor partnership program. So, how is it benefiting technology, service, and distribution channel companies?

API management market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.5% through 2031. As a high-growth company, Sensedia helps our SPIN partners build their ecosystems by working together to solve the big needs of driving more efficient architecture and better integration for more adaptability. Partners can join us at APIX to gain exposure beyond their borders. We’re co-marketing and co-selling to jointly grow our customer base.

Sensedia has over 90 organizations as partners, so how do you plan and execute channel marketing initiatives?

We’re marketing to partners, with partners, and through partners. Ninety sounds like a lot, but we’re in the very early stages of this initiative. We’re excited about these strategic partnerships and working with partners across the globe through a combination of co-marketing and co-selling. Sensedia has been recognized for our global leadership and for playing a key role in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions. Sensedia is activating marketing across all prongs of a partner strategy so that through partners, we can equip, empower and enable efficient growth globally.

What do you think about the future of API Management Systems?

APIs are everywhere. We’re seeing interest from new industries like AI-based Cyrano, leveraging our efficient and scalable API platform to innovate their customer experiences. AI is only one of many technologies that can benefit from APIs. The future is APIs and beyond—more modern integration platforms that offer businesses expanded composability and agility.

Sensedia supports microservices and service mesh along with API strategy to help composable businesses build once to eventually build many. The right strategy simplifies change and improves managing broader integrations. APIs will be relevant in many business architectures, and modern companies will require APIs to be more adaptable, resilient, and efficient.

What marketing tips would you give the upcoming marketing leaders grappling to make their brands stand out?

Be the master crafter of your position and message. Be the chief unifier and work across departments. Look at product launches and customer success holistically. And don’t be afraid to fail. Try, test, learn, and adapt. Things are changing fast, so it’s a growth mindset or no mindset.

As leaders, we work for our teams; they don’t work for us. Yes, we need to set the vision and strategy, but then we need to get out of their way and let our teams shine. And when setting the strategy in this fast-paced world, interactive planning works better than big marketing plans. Have an annual vision and strategy but make shorter plans quarterly or monthly to move forward. Reevaluate your strategy often. Ask, “Is this ideal customer persona right? Are metrics realistic?” Businesses seek more agility, and marketing leaders should too. We must learn to adapt and be flexible—more like scrum masters.

As a woman in tech, tell us about your journey so far.

Growing up in Pomona, California—the town where my parents settled in after leaving India—I learned at a young age that I needed to bet on myself. I had watched my parents struggle financially as my father tried to make his various business ideas work. I was motivated to earn my allowance from potential customers instead of my mom and dad, so I created my own business when I was about 11 years old.

From that point on, I was eager to learn how to grow a business—in every way, shape, and form. When I was in school for my MBA, one of my professors gave me a profound piece of advice: “Business is simple. It’s about increasing revenue and decreasing costs.” Twenty years later, and with three tech companies under my belt, I’m still actively learning and growing my business, Contentstack, into what it’s meant to be.

How has the Contentstack product development journey been till now, and what changes you see in 2023?

Prior to Contentstack, I co-founded Raw Engineering to help enterprises manage digital transformation in the early days of cloud and mobile technologies. My team immediately realized a significant pain point for clients was integration—giving way to the creation of Built.io—which my co-founder and I sold to Software AG down the line. Shortly after developing Built.io, my co-founder, Nishant Patel, saw the need to develop a modern, API-based Content Management System as part of this same transformation.

Once we solved the integration headaches, we found that the source of enterprises’ pain was now their infrastructure. To deliver unique digital experiences, enterprises needed to be liberated from legacy all-in-one suites. The only thing that would give the creative freedom that brands needed was a headless CMS and composable architecture—so Contentstack created the solution.

Product development trends should always align with customer needs—and direct value for time and money spent on software. Looking ahead into 2023 and beyond, this means

1) speed of deployment and delivery through integrated front-end hosting,

2) more AI-powered services to speed content creation and intelligence,

3) automation, or the ‘glue,’ between various composable services in the content ecosystem, and

4) an increased focus on low-code, visual editing to enable business users to create and publish content faster.

Contentstack got significant funding for an omnichannel boost, so how do you see things changing?

Following our Series C funding, we have been focused on helping customers, prospects, and partners on their journeys to go composable. Our ‘Go Composable’ initiative provides practical solutions for global enterprises to select and integrate best-of-breed technology into composable architectures for digital experience creation. We combine innovative technology, dedicated expertise, and ROI analysis tools to accelerate the customer journey and overall experience. As a part of that initiative, we have created a back-end to front-end solution so teams can meet the demands of their business faster.

Please explain the Composable Digital Experience & how it helps deliver the desired customer experience results.

Contentstack’s broader Composable DXP vision is to radically simplify the creation and delivery of digital experiences via AI and automation technologies. The vision embraces Contentstack’s core ‘better together’ foundational elements—Headless CMS, Marketplace, Automation Hub, Launch—from the back-end to the front-end so teams can meet the demands of their business faster.

Which trends in the industry are you focusing on that will impact marketing and sales?

The most important focus areas align around delivering real value to our customers. While some trends are hype, others provide a return on time and investment. For example, integrating OpenAI into the Contentstack platform has shown existing customers how they might speed up the process of creating and delivering relevant, timely content to their end users. When the platform delivers real value, marketing and sales impact is a byproduct, and the business grows.

How do you align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive organizational growth?

The biggest thing we do to align sales, marketing, and customer success is to have overarching goals across the company that everyone strives for—and reinforce these goals over the course of the year so there is never any question about our North Star. We get there by empowering teams to make decisions and build processes to achieve those goals.

Sharing company goals transparently—and measuring progress along the way—empowers everyone to align with the North Star as a key contributor. It’s pivotal to create a culture of empowerment at your company, but that culture doesn’t just happen, despite everyone’s best intentions. Leaders have to enable it with systems, structures, and transparency.

Which is the most critical pain point your product has been solving?

We’re helping our enterprise customers move from expensive, hard-to-use, monolithic systems to composable architecture. Without composable stacks, their businesses won’t be flexible and scalable enough to respond to changing customer and market demands—those are the pain points we’re solving for. The rigid nature of monolithic technology hampers business’ and tech teams’ creativity and productivity. But we also understand that the move to composable can be perceived as complex, so our ‘Go Composable’ initiative provides customers peace of mind—and a human touch every step of the way.

Do you foresee any product, marketing, and technology challenges in the Composable Digital Experiences?

One of the biggest challenges our customers are working to overcome is the notion of ‘accepting the status quo.’ No individual, team, or organization should accept that; we should all strive to break the barrier of what we’ve accepted as the status quo to create better, more efficient solutions.

We’ve made incredible strides in the industry over the last few years to help companies embrace composable and challenge the status quo, and we’re going to continue doing just that.

What do you think lies in the future of Composable Digital Experiences?

As the adoption of composable architectures becomes more mainstream, it will become easier to adopt, with heightened expectations, around ease of use, automation, integrability, and ‘citizen development.’ Effective data management will also become critical to the success of composable digital experiences, with organizations leveraging AI and machine learning to derive insights from their data to deliver relevant and useful content to their main audiences and channels.

What makes Contentstack stand out from its competitors?

At Contentstack, we help companies worldwide create digital experiences, like websites, mobile apps, and e-commerce sites. We help them do it super fast, manage it all easily, and ultimately help them make and save more money. What sets us apart as a company is our ‘Care without Compromise’ DNA which comes from having originated as a services company where our mantra is that we won’t let any of our customers fail. This extends to our company culture as good humans who will constantly stay ahead of the market and do the right thing. Our culture is built on strong values rooted in community, integrity, and care.

In addition, Contentstack has the highest innovation velocity in the industry, with over 350+ releases per year. In a SaaS delivery model, you benefit from these product updates instantly. That means no more tech debt, always being on the highest security level, and the latest functionality at both your tech and business teams’ disposal every single day. And best of all—over 50% of our functionality releases stem from customer requests, so you have a direct influence on the future of Contentstack. This approach has led to the most ‘first, best & only’ initiatives among our competitors with solutions like Automation Hub, Launch, Live Preview, and Multi-cloud support, alongside our industry leadership as a founding member of the MACH Alliance, advocating for best-of-breed composable technology that is Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless.