The Life-Long Customer

Empowering Your Marketing Strategy Through Data - with Christina Kyriazi, VP of Marketing, Ekos Software, Inc.

December 06, 2021 Revenue Rhino Season 1 Episode 111
The Life-Long Customer
Empowering Your Marketing Strategy Through Data - with Christina Kyriazi, VP of Marketing, Ekos Software, Inc.
Show Notes Transcript

Data-driven marketing can mean a ton of things. It can be the super extreme: AI and advanced analytics that you get into accurate hardcore data. It can also be as simple as metrics reporting. 

I don't know how you can be a CMO or Head of Marketing these days without being a data-driven person. In my mind, what I've found is that you have to touch everything across-the-board to be successful. Everything moves so fast that you have to make decisions very quickly. If you don't make the right decisions, it could have a lot of repercussions. Data helps you do that.

Data can be a few different things. It could be conducting market research, insights about the markets, your competition, customer analytics or segmentation, bringing some intelligence about your customers to the business, conducting surveys. It could be product analytics, looking at what works in your product and what doesn't, what makes your customers tick, and how can you amplify that?

It could be setting benchmarks in the industry. It can be something as simple as business metrics or marketing metrics, like how many leads did we bring in? How many converted?

- Christina Kyriazi, VP of Marketing, Ekos Software, Inc.

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Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The LifeLong Customer Podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. 

Ice Artificio: 0:24
And I’m your co-host. Ice Artificio. 

Brad Hammond: 0:27
Today, we have Christina Kyriazi from Ekos. Christina, it’s really nice to have you on.

Christina Kyriazi: 0:32
You too. Thanks so much for having me.

Ice Artificio: 0:34
Yeah, Christina, thanks for hopping on. We'd love to know more about you and your company, Ekos. I hope I’m saying that right.

Christina Kyriazi: 0:40
Yeah, yeah. It’s Ekos. Right.

Ice Artificio: 0:42
Perfect. So first off, can you tell us more about yourself, your story, the whole marketing journey that you've had or anything before that?

Christina Kyriazi: 0:51
Yeah, absolutely. So right now I'm the VP of Marketing at Ekos. So I manage everything marketing and the business. And I've been here for about two years. I manage a team of six folks, very talented marketers. And we're a business that is very high growth software startup here in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Before Ekos, I've actually done a couple stints at other technology companies here in Charlotte. And that's where in the last 10 or 15 years, I've actually found my niche in technology. And this is what I've decided I'm going to dedicate my career to. This is what I love doing. So I'm very excited to have found another software company that I made home here in Charlotte.

I actually have a very unique, I don't know, it's very unique, but a kind of a different path into marketing than I would say most typical marketers might have had. But as my bio kind of mentioned, I’m very data-driven marketer, so I started my career in analytics. I actually have an economics background. I was never aiming to go into marketing. It just kind of happened accidentally. But I started my career into insights analytics at a big publicly-traded company. Then moved a couple of times and then finally found my niche into marketing for B2B software startups. So here I am.

Ice Artificio: 2:08
That sounds like quite a jump from economics and then marketing. I'm sure there's a lot of stories out there. What would you say is the craziest marketing initiative you've done in the past?   

Christina Kyriazi: 2:20
Oh, God, I don't know if this is crazy, but it was crazy how it all unfolded. So a few years ago, I worked for this company. We sold IT services to CIOs at large enterprises. So our software or I guess IT as a Service was quite expensive product, and we sold to a pretty sophisticated clientele. So I was hired onto the company to do insights analytics. So research kind of acted as like the beginning of strategy, I guess, for the company. 

And one of the projects that I was given early on was trying to figure out where is there going to be a great opportunity for the company to expand into, so kind of finding that- those verticals that we had a natural product market fit and figuring out how we're going to expand into them. So I did all this research, super nerdy stuff, nothing too interesting, presented internally, had sort of my key takeaways.

And then at some point, I said, okay, we need to do a secondary research step, where we went out to the market and we actually surveyed about 300, I believe it was, CIOs in the healthcare industry. So we kind of identified that was going to be our niche. And we got all those insights. It was all supposed to be an internal project.

And at some point, someone kind of said, why don't we turn this into content? And that's where I started working with [tree? 0:03:21] marketing. So this whole thing spun way out of control in a very positive way. We actually did a whole marketing campaign around it for healthcare IT, published a state of the industry report that I was the author of, and I was able to actually kind of become a thought leader in an industry that I had nothing to do with before. And I learned a ton out of that.

So all of a sudden, I found myself doing interviews with international publications that specialize in healthcare IT, speaking on panels and events with experts from Cisco and other large IT companies. And all I realized was that all people want to know is what are their peers doing? So that was a huge lesson early on in my career for me. And I've actually applied it to many other companies where I've worked. And it's a very, very successful sort of tactic that you can do, a strategy you can take in implementing your marketing strategy.

Brad Hammond: 4:34
That’s amazing.  

Ice Artificio: 4:35
Yeah, and it's really amazing. So, let’s zoom into Ekos, you said you were working with a team of six, right? That I remembered, right? Yeah. So that must be very exciting because you have all these great people behind you, and then you have your own objective and everybody's moving in their small parts. So what does the marketing space look like in Ekos?  

Christina Kyriazi: 4:55
Yeah. So I've hired a few different people in different specialties. And it kind of spans the entire gamut of marketing, everything from communication to content, as well as an events person, you know, someone that manages digital marketing and demand generation and someone that manages product marketing.

So we kind of try to align the team to the whole funnel to make sure that we have someone working on each stage of the funnel and that we can actually execute really high-performance marketing campaigns. So that's how the team is set up. We're highly, highly collaborative and cross-functional group, and we're kind of the communicators of the business.

So I try to make sure that we have good relationships with our counterparts in sales and product, customer success, even, you know, sometimes engineering, support folks, as well as the leadership group, because I think marketing kind of sits at the heart of the business and has a lot of influence across the board.

Brad Hammond: 5:48
Love that. So let's dive into today's topic, which is analytics and data-driven marketing. We understand you have a deep background in analytics and data. And we'd love to just dive into how you utilize that background and how you look at it as a marketer now and look at your marketing initiatives through this lens. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what analytics looks like in a marketing context. And then we'll just dive in and ask you specific questions.

Christina Kyriazi: 6:18
Yeah, that's a perfect start actually, because I think data-driven marketing can mean a ton of things. It can be the super extreme, you know, AI and advanced analytics that you get into true hardcore data, or it can be as simple as just, you know, metrics reporting.

In my mind, what I've found is that you really have to touch everything across the board to be successful. And that honestly, I don't really know how you can be a CMO or Head of Marketing these days without being a data-driven person, because everything moves so fast that you have to make decisions very quickly. And if you don't make the right decisions, it could have a lot of repercussions. And I feel like data kind of helps you do that.

So in my mind, data can be a few different things. So it could be conducting market research, insights about the markets, your competition, bringing in customer analytics or segmentation, you know, bringing some intelligence about your customers to the business, conducting surveys. It could be product analytics, looking at what works in your product and what doesn't, what makes your customers tick and how can you amplify that?

It could be setting benchmarking in the industry, and I can talk a little bit more about that. And it can be something as simple as, you know, business metrics or marketing metrics, like, you know, how many leads did we bring in? How many converted? You know, pretty typical stuff.

Some additional things that you could be looking at, I think, once you get into a little bit more advanced stuff, is can you do tests and learning? Can you test certain things? And can you leverage data, run regression models to figure out what works and what doesn't work? Or what has correlation to each other and how to drive more results with similar, you know, resources for the business.

So it really can mean a lot of things. I think a lot of people let the word data kind of take over and be very overwhelming. But in reality, you can start small and kind of build upon it and leverage other people for their expertise to be successful with it.

Brad Hammond: 8:06
Very cool. Thanks for that overview. And for the other B2B marketers out there listening today, where can they start when it comes to becoming a data-driven marketer?  Maybe let's start with the basics and break down some of those concepts and then talk about some of the things they can start to add on later when they see success in that. 

Christina Kyriazi: 8:24
Yeah. I would say the number one place where you can start is your customers. When I first joined Ekos, actually, we didn't even have a very good enterprise CRM system. So I couldn't run any reports on who our customers are, where they are, what do they look like? It was like we were flying blind. So I quickly brought in a CRM system. We organized our data. We connected our systems together.

And I was able to kind of run some very basic analytics. You know, how many of our customers are a certain size? Who's our ideal customer? Who tends to churn more? Little things like that that are very easy to find or should be very easy to find, I think, can be huge value adds to the business because insights from those things can have influence into your product strategy or the sales strategy, the customer success strategy, everything across the business. 

So that's always a very good place to start. It's also very powerful because who wouldn't care about the customer? And you kind of get everyone's mind share once you start talking about the customer. So great first step.

Second step, I think, is always looking at pretty typical marketing metrics. Looking at, you know, are you tracking your leads? How many are converting? What are their sources where they're converting from? What's working, what's not working? How are they converting into sales? And then how does that all tie into how you impact the business sales? I think a lot of marketers kind of find themselves in the corner because they can't tie themselves into sales results.

But if you manage to do that and you can show the value of marketing through sales, then I think you have a very powerful seat at the table. That’s what's been happening at Ekos. We have a great counterpart in sales that really believes in marketing. So we work really well together to implement strategies that really helped us grow.

Brad Hammond: 10:08
Love that. So as you're diving into this and setting all this up, is it best to just get your hands dirty and like open up spreadsheets and do all this? Or do you want to rope in like data scientists or getting certain vendors on board or how do you approach them? 

Christina Kyriazi: 10:23
So it depends on the size of your business, but I would say unless you're a multi-billion dollar business, please don't touch a data scientist for a while. If you're just getting started, open up Excel or Google sheets and drop in some data, do some basic pivot tables, run some reports. And that should be more than enough. When I first started at Ekos, actually, it was great., ‘cause I started right before the holidays in 2019 and, it was December and the office was actually dead.

So I had the privilege of actually being in a super quiet office and just being able to dive in, download all the data, start running pivot tables and analyzing things and not being bothered or distracted by other things that maybe would have happened if it was a normal time of the year. So that really helped me accelerate my knowledge in the industry and kind of get onboarded a lot faster and get some initiatives started much, much faster than I would have otherwise.

Brad Hammond: 11:22
I love that. So as you start to run some of these initial numbers and see the data and look at some of these metrics, could you give us some examples of things you might look at and then actions you might take as a result of learning some of this data?  

Christina Kyriazi: 11:35
Yeah, absolutely. Great example is running some analysis on the size of the customers or where your customers are located, depending on your business.

Pick the top two things that you think are most important and start cutting the data in those things. I will warn you, sometimes we just have to go out there and find data manually. So for example, for our business, it was- we target manufacturers. So we had to go find data on, you know, how many barrels of production do our customers make each year. And that's how we segment them.

So once I was able to append that data into our customer, you know, CRM data, I started cutting in many different ways and created segments. And then we were able to say, okay, it seems like most of our customers are in this segment. So there must be some natural product market fit for that segment. Let's dive deeper and see why, maybe talk to a few of those customers and kind of start formulating some hypotheses there.

Next step was the opposite. You know, why are we not doing well in this segment? Why are we over or under penetrated in certain segments? Why are certain customers churning at a faster pace than others? Is there an issue? Can we talk to them and figure out can we improve it, or should we just really not be going after that segment at all?

So a lot of those insights actually helped us a ton in staying focused and creating a business strategy, not just a marketing strategy that helped us identify where the growth opportunities were and focus our resources there, and actually helped us back out of certain things we were doing before that were just not yielding results.

Brad Hammond: 13:03
Interesting. And then what does the process look like when you learn some of these things? You uncover it, you take action. What is the process of involving maybe the CEO or the board or reporting look like? And how do you go about doing that?

Christina Kyriazi: 13:16
Yeah. I like to be very transparent and spread my data nerdiness to everyone. So I kind of have a multi-step approach. Usually, I've actually found that another data-driven person is usually the CFO, like cares a lot about stuff like that, or the Head of the Sales. So I try to align with them as much as possible to make sure that they're getting this data. But I usually try to share any kind of insights with the leadership group, you know, anyone that reports to the CEO first. And that kind of helps us spread it across the board. Everyone has access to it.

And then I'm huge at democratizing data and insights in the business. So I don't think we should be hiding anything from anyone. So we actually arranged company meetings where we would have, you know, sit downs with employees, and we'll kind of go deep into the data and analysis and tell them, this is what we're noticing, and this is what's happening. 

And people would actually take that and turn it into a million other things that turned positive for the business. So it's all a matter of how do you get it in as many people's hands as possible, as quickly as possible, but in a very digestible way? So it's a challenge, but I would say communication and being clear and concise and centralizing things as ideal as it gets.

Brad Hammond: 14:26
Yeah, totally. And do you take like that raw data and present it in a deck? How do you get it out there?  And for maybe some of the folks that aren't as into data, how do you tell that story and tell the story behind the numbers? 

Christina Kyriazi: 14:38
Yeah. So at a very basic level, I'll just kind of back out from the very beginning. I usually take data, put it in an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet. I run pivot tables, clean out the data, run pivot tables, and then I start creating charts or visuals to represent the data. I never just present raw data ‘cause I think that can be very overwhelming to anyone. But I always have an intimate knowledge of the raw data to make sure as people ask questions that I can answer the why behind a lot of the trends.

So I'll usually create a presentation that kind of walks people through a story. So do not just paste charts into a presentation and hope people interpret it. You always have to tell a story. So think about what your story and narrative are going to be as you’re presenting the data and think about how you can encourage people to also think about that narrative even more. You can pause and say things like I am noticing this trend. What could that mean for our customer success group?

Let them kind of go off and figure it out. Or, you know, I'm noticing this trend. The next step we will take is dive into customer interviews and figure out why this is happening. A lot of times, you may not even know why it's happening or what it means. And it's okay to say, we'll go talk to customers, or we'll go do a more deep dive and analyze more and come back with an answer. 

Brad Hammond: 15:56
Love that. And I think everyone probably gets excited when the story is positive. We sold this lot of more product and all this. But I'm sure if those times happen where it's maybe not positive and it's like, oh no, like the data's not looking good. How do you handle moments like that? 

Christina Kyriazi: 16:13
Yeah. So in every software business, there's always churn, right? And usually, people don't look at the churn ‘cause it’s so- it's a negative thing. You don't want to look at it if it's not really impacting your business. Or even if it is, you might not know it, you just kind of push it aside ‘cause it's easy. It’s gone, and it can have a lot of negative implications.

So I find that once I start analyzing churn, churned customers, customers that have left for customers that are unsatisfied or dissatisfied or diving into, you know, satisfaction or NPS surveys, it does start to become a little uncomfortable for folks.

And I always just have to remind people that data is power and knowing what is happening is putting a lot more power in your hands than not knowing it or ignoring it.  Because at the end of the day, it's still going to have the same impact on the business metrics, whether you want to face it or not. So you're better off acknowledging it and doing something about it than ignoring it completely.

So. It's a tough conversation to have often. I mean, the CEO is the business owner. They might even be shocked at negative feedback from customers or churn numbers or just something unexpected that they just didn't know. It might really hurt them personally because they've thrown, you know, blood, sweat, and tears into this business. And they're realizing, oh, well maybe this thing's not working in some way. We need to fix it.

So that's always been the hardest part. And I just always kind of tried to keep calm and make sure that we're addressing the issues and moving on. 

Brad Hammond: 17:39
Totally. So you mentioned something that was really interesting and that’s sometimes you have to collect this data manually. I think everyone would love for there to be a tool and let's go pull the analytics report and it's all done. But tell us a bit about how you go about collecting that data manually. Are you literally going out and get it all? Or do you like typically rope someone in to help you do some of that work? What does that process look like? 

Christina Kyriazi: 18:03
So it depends. I've done all of the above. It depends on the volume of data and how clean it is, where we get it from. So at our current business, we're very lucky. There's an industry association that provides us with very standardized data so I can do quick VLOOKUPs, paste any data into my spreadsheets, then anything that doesn't match exactly, manually look it up. There's not millions of records. There's maybe 15...2,000 records.

So it's fairly easy to do it manually that way. I've also worked in businesses where there might be millions of data points. And at that point, you got to go find a data aggregator out there or someone to help you clean out the data or find a clean version of the data that you can append it in the best way possible into your existing data sets.

So my first job, for example, Family Dollar, obviously millions and millions of consumers use them. And we had connections into Nielsen or IRI, and those are big data conglomerates that collect a lot of insights about the business, and they can give you directional ideas on where the market's going or what your customers are doing. So it doesn't always look perfect. You're not going to always find every single data point. But if you can get a good enough mass of data that you can start analyzing, it'll at least give you directionally some good insights on where you should be focusing. 

Brad Hammond: 19:22
Totally. And once you get this basic setup, you get everything in place and maybe you've done some reporting and had some conversations. What are more advanced things that you can start doing? 

Christina Kyriazi: 19:32
Yeah. Where it gets really powerful, I think, is when you get into the predictive and that's where more advanced data science comes into play. You might need some smarter folks than me to come and do analysis. So I think the market is headed that way. But it's not necessary to be that sophisticated in order to grow. So do not bite off more than you need or you can handle. It is okay if you cannot do the super advanced stuff. But if you do need to, I think it can give you some very powerful nuggets and can make your business much, much more focused in certain ways.

One example is at the previous company where I worked, actually we had a super smart man in-house. He was a data scientist, and he was actually able to create a model and a data analytics engine that took all of our customers transactions and kind of benchmark them against each other and gave us prediction on, you know, this customer is going to grow in the next six months. This customer is at risk of reducing in the next six months.

And that really helped us focus our efforts in those customers, for example, that we're going to be reducing the next few months to see if we can bring them up, and also replicate the success of the customers that we're going to go up and up in the future. So those are things that come with more advanced analytics, but it's not a do or die kind of thing. It's a- can be a differentiator in the market for you. 

Brad Hammond: 20:55
Totally. I like that. Not only telling the story of the past but predicting what's going to happen in the future. Very cool. Well, as we're wrapping up here, if I'm a marketer out there listening, I'm going to really be focusing on our data-driven marketing and process and strategy. What are some of the landmines or traps I should avoid? Where can I get hung up on certain things?  

Christina Kyriazi: 21:17
Yeah, I would say the number one thing, the number one trap that people fall into with data is only looking at the data and not the whole picture. So data sometimes can be, I don't want to say deceiving, but depending on how you collected it or where it comes from, there could be other things that are not included in the data that you're not considering.

So always take a step back and make sure that you're factoring for the human factor. Bring in some insights directly from your customer's mouth. Always interview people and make sure that you're getting some of those qualitative insights into your quantitative analysis, because those could actually give you a much, much richer picture than pure data, quantitative data alone. So that is a trap that people fall into.

And then number two is not really focusing on a goal. So I see this happening a lot in marketers and they’re kind of all over the place. But you have to be focused on a goal. Your company, either trying to grow, maybe they're trying to cut and be more efficient. Depending on where they are in their growth cycle, there might have different goals. 

So always align yourself to that goal and make sure that you're focusing 80% or 90% of your effort there because you can very quickly become very irrelevant to the business. And then you're just not going to be successful. 

Brad Hammond: 22:30
Well, it's been amazing to have you on the podcast. Any last words of wisdom or advice as we're wrapping up here?

Christina Kyriazi: 22:38
No, I would say always remember the customer is the most powerful person in the room. They're more powerful than the CEO, the board. They have the last word. So always go back to the customer and get insights from them. It's never too late, and it's never repetitive. You always have to talk to the customer. So the closer you are to the customer, the more power you probably have. 

Brad Hammond: 23:00
Great advice. Well, thank you so much for joining today and sharing all your wisdom and insights with us. Really appreciate it.

Christina Kyriazi: 23:07
Thanks guys.

Ice Artificio: 23:07
Thanks Christina.