Episode 38: Data-Driven Transformation to Unlock Revenue Growth| Ari Capogeannis

In the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve and Ari Capogeannis, Head of Revenue Marketing at Nvidia,  discuss the balance between traditional and new marketing approaches focusing on data-driven transformation. 

They delve into revenue marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), and people-based marketing, as well as the value of customer relationships and cultivating data for personalized experiences. They also share their insights on vendor lock-in marketing technology stacks, the complexity of B2B marketing, account journey analysis, decision-making units, exploratory data work, and actionable insights from data rather than relying on single points. Finally, Ari reflects on his first job in marketing and offers advice for marketing teams looking to identify the best strategies for revenue growth. 

Tune into the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast to hear Steve and Ari's conversation about data-driven transformation and the importance of aligning with other departments for a holistic approach to ROI.

Connect with Ari Capogeannis and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Welcome back to interesting B2B marketers. This is Steve, your fearless podcast host, and today I'm excited to have Ari on the show. Ari, welcome. 

Ari Capogeannis: Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.

Steve Goldhaber:  All right, cool. Let's give the audience a 60-second overview about who you are and what you've been up to.

Ari Capogeannis:  Definitely. I'm Ari Capogeannis. I run revenue marketing here at Nvidia. I came in through Cumulus where I managed. Demand generation inside sales. So my whole background's really a focus on revenue and essentially from the traditional siloed view of marketing, sales, being a service to sales, but now in the complex ecosystems that, that we're in, in the B2B world, recognizing that this, the revenue marketing concept is more of a revenue-generating machine and the, the lines between sales and marketing are blurred.

So I'm really stitching together the. Dev, b2b, B2C sides of the house here in a 30 year old organization on foundational aspects that are brand new here. So yeah, happy to be here and talk about it.

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. All right. So like we always do, we're jumping right into the case studies and the first one is something that marketers will just are never gonna stop talking about, and that is the balance of traditional versus new.

This one has. To do a lot about data and using that to kind of accelerate that transformation. So let's hear about the first case study.

Ari Capogeannis: Yeah, it's interesting. We're about now that the concept of revenue marketing, even the team name is Buzzwordy, right? There are whole conferences devoted to revenue marketing, and when you go to that conference, depending on who's there, there's a wide array of people with different focus is different team names and the like.

If we go back in time a bit too traditional marketing, you're really focused on, say, brand originally, and it used to be once you got into lead management, there was a lead folder and somebody handed that lead folder over to sales and said, I, I got a great opportunity for you. And that folder dropped in a filing cabinet of contacts for sales.

It's essentially why Salesforce is built the way it is if anybody's. Been in Salesforce and has the frustration of why when we convert leads to contacts does the lead object disappear. And how you've got the contact of the account level in time lead to account requires paying a vendor or some such.

Salesforce is built around that old school concept of the folder for leads is in the hands of marketing. And when they think it's ripe for sales and talk to, it ends up in the sales filing cabinet and then marketing wipes their hands up and they're done. So with demand generation coming to speed, early demand generation really was a focus on, Hey, we need somebody that.

They can dive into our data. And so they would hire an individual and that individual was the demand generation person and an individual was tasked with trying to come up with conversion rates and, and know how to manage spend to effectively use OPEX for the good of still marketing chess thumping on what they've done for sales.

That became big teams, and then we got to the point where in conferences you hear people talking about alignment day in and day out and, and came up, you know? It gets to be a cliched thing, almost like, yes. Okay. We mentioned you need sales marketing alignment. Now let's talk about this thing over here. In actuality, as you get into revenue marketing, it's really recognizing that you're no longer a marketer.

You are a business politician. You're somebody who doesn't say, I get the data, or, here's a canned report. You're somebody. You're an auditor. I, I'll say most people don't like our team in many ways being involved because you're messing with people's comfortable bubbles. Yep. And the larger the organization, the larger the comfortable bubble and the messing with the bubble is essentially trying to unearth the bad and embrace the bad.

Cuz it's much easier to fix the bad versus. Create a fifth wheel for the car, but it's really leading with the data and trying to educate people that you're trying to make them more successful, not point out the bad. So the jump to service to sales, in my early days, you have to find a way to sell it, right?

It. It's not, a marketer shows up and starts telling sales how to do their job. It just falls on deaf ears. But for the good of the organization, I started focusing on people-based marketing, which was basically saying, okay, instead of these, Wide swaths of brand or saying we're doing personalization or the buzzword that is a b M.

How are you leveraging your data to curate delightful experiences from an omnichannel perspective? And then from a data perspective, actually unearth who in that ecosystem is actually ripe for sales to talk to, whether it's inbound lead generation, or. You know, the global 2000 list sales thinks they're gonna target, you know, who's your target account?

Alibaba. Okay, that's great. But they haven't shown any research behavior whatsoever around our, our products based on the keyword clusters that we're tracking. As you get that data in place and enable the sales organization, it's very much like Moore's product adoption. Life cycle. You've got your early adopters and then you've got the bell curve, and then you've got your laggards and then the people that are never gonna listen to you.

The people that are convinced, as long as they maintain their existing contact relationships and whine and dine them, everything's gonna be great. Yep. So early on with people-based marketing was really unearthing those advocates, is early adopters in the sales organization, making them win, and then having other people think.

I gotta get on board with this.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So let me, I'm gonna dissect the difference in account-based versus people-based marketing. Yeah. Are you removing, is it purely just the structure of the company so we don't care that these 15 people are in the same team, like make the distinction more clear for us?

Ari Capogeannis:  Yeah, definitely. Account-based marketing at this point in time with the technology that we have is really just better marketing. Or abm. Ari's, better marketing. Everybody should be doing AB M. Everything should be account flavored and relevant. You know, anybody hitting your ecosystem with a technology you have at minimum, just automatically.

We're trying to identify what industry they're in, what size the organization it's, and then relevant pain points curated in the text in there. Old school. Views might have said, oh, well that's abm, because the amount of effort required to do that involved a bunch of people curating content manually, and then targeting these 25, maybe five accounts within this particular industry, driving these manually put together experiences for them.

Now with the technology we have, everything's automated. It should just be automatic, so you're no longer really doing abm, you're just doing better marketing at that point. Point abm at this point, especially with the technology we have, it's recognizing that everybody in this decision making unit is of a a different staff, different role level, different pain point, and that those experiences and the offerings that you want for them to drive the water cooler conversation when they get together in the account are going to be different.

So people-based marketing's gonna say, you might be bubbling up in intent, but your keyword cluster showing your interest within this account. And you surging in driving that account. Engagement surge is gonna be different behaviors versus a staff level individual who has a bunch of time, let's say, to be downloading eBooks, white papers and doing trials.

You being the, let's say I, I just assumed you're a C level individual. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You look like it. That's how I roll. Strictly C level, sometimes D level, but mostly C. 

Ari Capogeannis: So the old, the old school really is okay because you didn't fill out a bunch of forums and whatnot. You've only got five MQL points. I used to liken this to early Dungeons and Dragons character creation.

You know, if you roll a 20, you get the wizard ability and if, but if you roll a five, you're a Bard and nobody cares about you, you're a five. But in actuality, you're a C level individual who is. Looking at saving money, making money, mitigating risk, and looking at thought leadership and brand preference and not filling out a bunch of gated asset.

Yeah. Versus the front facing warrior, let's say, that's going through all the forms and diving into the trials and whatnot. Yeah, so people-based marketing says, Those experiences have to be relevant to those individuals. And it used to be a lot of work, but now with the technology we have, you can scale and automate that.

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Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it'd be interesting. It's almost like a, what you're describing is kind of like, you have two models. There's the traditional abm, which is really just driven towards like, can I sell something this quarter? Yeah. But then the other model is what's the long-term value or. Opportunity of a customer. So like, is this person a director now who is gonna be head of it one day?

That's a good five to 10 year commitment. Obviously, sales not really concerned about that, but the marketing folks should be cuz that's, that's a long-term relationship to nurture. 

Ari Capogeannis: We have a developer community and early on it was a shoot to me, like somebody said, we know you have revenue in your team title, but you gotta understand not everything here is Revenue generating everything here is revenue generating.

It may be, as you mentioned, a long tail. It could be a student coming into one of our conferences where somebody would say, why would we care about the student population? Yeah. Where they're, they're engineering students that will be in the workforce. That if you've cultivated this brand preference and educated them to be top notch in the field around the products that we sell. You're building.

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Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah. Pipeline future. Yeah. It's interesting. So I'll share a story from a former CEO of whether they used to work with, would use the example in loyalty programs at an airline and someone had traveled for 20 years, they worked their way up to the highest level and everything about that model would say, this is the most important person to our business.

They've given us all this money that the highest level. Then you have someone else 20 years who just started their. They're a road warrior, a salesperson. They've just started their career. They don't have any status, they don't mean anything to the company. And the two stories were essentially the person who fit the best model.

You didn't know that they were retiring next week, so you were treating the person who essentially met nothing moving forward very differently than the person who means everything to you because you've got 20, 30 years ahead of you when it comes to sales. So it was just fascinating how. Data is very sexy, but many times, like it's not forward looking.

It's strictly backwards looking. Yeah.

Ari Capogeannis: I can see from the vendors I work with, the ones that nail it from that perspective with customer success, I have key vendors that I consider foundational technology that some of them I've been working with for the better part of eight years. And we have a really solid report at this point.

But you know, let's say by in CrossFit they call the old people masters athletes. So let's say I'm a masters athlete, you know? Sounds cool. It just means I'm old. Yeah. Gray hair. Right. Whereas all the people being wh and dined and educated and, and romanced are all my freshen career individuals by these technologies.

You can see it. They get that they're building their long tail pipeline. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Anything about the first case before we jump into number two?

Ari Capogeannis: Not so much. No. No. I, I'll suck away time if I get back into talking about people based Smartsheet.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, so let's jump into the second one. This is vendor lock.

It sounds like a product that you've, you can buy at like an automotive repair company. I need some vendor lock, please.

Ari Capogeannis: Yeah, it's a it's a sister company. A LifeLock sign up. That's right. Protect ourselves. You know, you go to a conference and you'll see, say a VP or CMO or anybody standing in front of an amazing tech tax line, you know, the, the, the pitfall of some conferences or presentations where people are talking about how great.

They are and how great their company is. And here's our tech stack, and it's almost budget boasting. You're looking at this amazing thing and it's been put together in a shoots and ladder style graphic and wow, I really suck. And then you meet people from that organization that say, yeah, it doesn't work that way.

It's crap. Most of this stuff doesn't work. But it looked really cool on a slide and. You know, we all want to brand build. We all wanna look good on a slide more often than not in, in anybody's tech stack. 75% of it, let's say, isn't really championed by anybody. The fact is, as much as marketers talk about, you need to align around the data.

Aari a CEO, E O of Grati in a conference, a refocus conference, I think it was last year, said every marketer needs to be an analyst and anyone who isn't. Is going to fail. The fact is in marketing that the group of people that are actually data friendly or feel okay with data and don't panic when they see a bunch of data on a spreadsheet is still a tiny percentage, and really it always will be, but you need to find ways to actually champion the data, champion the tech stack.

I think too many of us get the budget. And we get sold on a piece of technology, especially in the intent data realm and predictive analytics. And we think, I'm just gonna flip the switch on this. I don't know what it does, and it's just gonna do its thing. For the most part, people don't know what it does cuz it's either a lack of a technical side of the brain, or just time.

How many people have time to dive into something for hours and hours and hours and really figure it out? Yes. You know, you've championed technology. When you get to the point where we're asking the customer success individual questions and they can't answer it. You now know more about that product than they do, or more often than not, that is a milestone you will hit if you're truly championing the technology with almost any product in your stack.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The stacks are crazy these days. You could almost, this idea popped into my head. You could almost create a technology. That sole purpose was just to monitor the stack and see utilization levels just for head of marketing or head of, you know, it to say these six platforms aren't getting utilized.

Let's cut 'em. Yeah. You know, and, and it's just that if, if we're not gonna use them, don't use 'em. But it's, it's often hard to know that you don't have your pulse on the, on the situation of are they actually being used? Yeah.

Ari Capogeannis: It's, it's usually around renewal time and then somebody has to show the ROI internally.

And then a good customer success person from a vendor might come in and start trying to push adoption six months before the renewal, the fifth. And, and you're like, okay, this is. Crappy, but to the vendor lock concept, intent data, you know, isn't the financial SaaS round for a number of years and early in intent data, we went with this vendor and said, okay, here's the quadrant you're gonna use.

You know, A one s call them now D four s don't call them at all. I still use a similar matrix internally, it's concept for another day. It's fantastic. I love it. I love this whole predictive realm of prescriptive, but early on you put all the, the marbles into that bucket. If it says Call 'em, we call 'em.

If it says, we don't, we don't, because we had a team of say, 20 inbound SDRs, 10 outbounds. The inbound were required to make 40 to 60 calls a day. You're really having to pick and choose with a high volume of inbound that we had who to reach out to. So we had this situation where the model was based on who you traditionally sold to.

We traditionally didn't sell much in Columbus, Ohio for whatever reason. Sorry, Columbus, Ohio, there's a 500 person trucking company knocking at the door wanting to buy huge contract on deck. Nobody's calling them because the model puts them as a a D three because we don't sell to Columbus, Ohio, and a couple other factors there.

By putting all our faith into this technology and just flipping the switch into on mode and going with that, we had these deals that were just sitting there at that point. By data dumpster diving your records, applying that model plus some sanity checks. Okay, let's, what if we pulled away this? What if we pulled away that, let's see what's on deck.

It unearthed this treasure mind of opportunities that we're just sitting there waiting for somebody to reach out to them, a time strapped inbound SDR team to reach out to them. So wherever I've been from that point forward, no matter the technology, you recognize it. There's no canned report. There's no steady state.

It's constant iterations of slicing and dicing, and, and I've had people, anytime I've started Fresh ask, well, why do you need access to that data? Can you tell us what you need? Maybe we can put a dashboard together for you. As soon as you're stuck in one dashboard or just one canned report view, you're slowly getting stale and missing something over time and, and being affected by that vendor lock.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: I mean, do you think maybe people do fall into the vendor lock trap because, It is so complex that it's just a pain in the ass and you can't really do your job because your job is just constantly juggling the tech stack. Do you see that or are there other factors?

Ari Capogeannis: Yeah, I think it's a combination of things.

I think when you go, you know, pre covid, when I went to a lot more conferences and you had the expo floors, you'd look around the floor and see 50. Solutions, 50 vendors basically kind of selling seven solutions, and it's a Venn diagram, and depending on your budget, you're picking and choosing. We're in an era now where everybody wants to be the one revenue platform that you need.

But if you look at all those vendors, they all have a foundation in something they were excellent in, and now they're trying to add in the buzzwords into the platforms. Oh, now we have intent data. Now we have this. But they don't quite all do it as well. And so based on your budget, you start picking and choosing, well, I'm gonna take this vendor cuz they're good at intent.

I'm gonna take this vendor cuz they're, they're a great buying center. Take this vendor. They're great for personalization. Every one of those vendors has their own dashboard to monitor your metrics and how it's doing, which is why we look for APIs and, and then try and pull that into Tableau, which is a huge effort, a lot more budget to do that.

A lot more people power to do that. So if you are, as you mentioned, a much smaller startup with some healthy, you know, series A funding and you buy from these 3, 4, 5, Six vendors, you're not gonna have the time or the wherewithal, but I think in essence, a lot of people forget about the foundational aspects as you buy all these glitzy machines.

Let's say you're on Marketo, your world really should still be dumpster diving the Marketo data and seeing what the health of that ecosystem is, regardless on what those. Vendors and platforms are telling you Yeah,

Steve Goldhaber: with intent, you know, it's such a sexy area, but so oftentimes, maybe I'm the old curmudgeony marketer when I just say, why don't we just ask the customer?

Like, yeah, have the salesperson just have a conversation? And not that you, not that the question becomes, are you gonna buy in the next six to 12 months? Can you tell us? But other questions that are more relationship oriented that just have a salesperson go, all right, this person, nothing's happening for a year.

That's your intent. You know, I think sometimes marketers, Don't wanna build those relationships with the salespeople because maybe they've had challenges in the past to say, oh, the salesperson now has gotta enter all this information in somewhere. So yeah, the curmudgeony marketer meets the lazy marketer in, in a, in an epic showdown.

I think

Ari Capogeannis: with the technology we have, marketing almost becomes non-existent if implemented correctly. You know, we're at the point where a lot of these technologies are owned by marketing, but exist to enable sales. So then, you know, You have the conversation with finance. Well, who owns the budget? You know it's for sales, but marketing's managing it.

There's a lot of automations where we can create a button within Salesforce on the lead record that you have an Gmail individual totally anonymous, come in, they have a conversation cause they've requested contact from sales. They have a conversation with the inbound s. D r Inbound, s d r identifies them as a company in, in this employer range, this revenue range, this industry, competing technologies that they're looking at.

And we've curated omnichannel experiences for each of these use cases. And all that S D R has to do is click a button on the lead record or choose from a pick list. And save it. And then the automation triggers all that performance market, what we would traditionally call performance marketing. Yeah.

Didn't involve a marketer whatsoever. Just involved a revenue operations person to set all this stuff up. Now again, as you mentioned, that takes somebody taking the time to figure out how to champion interlock of all these platforms to create that cohesive experience and in championing with sales internally, your best bet honestly is not even to mention the vendor names and just stay real high level and say, Hey, this is happen.

We're gonna create these wins for you.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. It's just call in the marketing box. Everything belongs in the marketing box and there's wires coming in and

Ari Capogeannis: out. That's how it works. I don't even like, I don't even like say marketing anymore. I've gotten to the point because most of my focus is really enablement of the sales organization.

So I don't even refer to as marketing technology. It's revenue technology now. Cuz I still run into people that will say, use the phrase, oh, that's a marketing thing. That's a marketing tool. Well, it's intent data. Identifying within your target account list who's ripe right now to reach out to. It's, some people just don't wanna hear it.

Steve Goldhaber: 

Yeah. All right. Let's jump in case study number three. We've talked a little bit about this one. This is the focus on accounts. Yeah.

Ari Capogeannis: I'm at the point now where, you know, I've always said, beware the marketer that goes into an organization that has a playbook and throws that playbook down on the table and said, this is how we're gonna do it.

You know, honestly, I. You need to spend a quarter, two quarters diving through the existing processes and the date and seeing what's working, what's not working. I still fall victim to the playbook. I have preconceived notions on what are best practices. I have preconceived notions on inbound performance marketing and really identifying within an account who's raising their hand on the website.

Right now, the complex ecosystem that I'm in right now has traditional siloed realms. There's a developer realm, there's a B2B realm. And there's a B2C realm. And again, developer might say, you know, we don't drive direct revenue. Don't bother us. Well, you're not doing a developer community cuz it's fun, you know, there's a reason you're doing that.

The B2C realm, somebody might say, what, what does the off the, the shelf storefront have to do with the B2B sale over here that's in the millions? Well, if I have five accounts, And within those accounts I've got decision making units. The decision making units are comprised of a mix between developers and then sales conversation, relevant folks, people with authority, budget owners are the ones that are gonna speak to the need and timing versus the tire kickers.

On the developer side, if I looked at five accounts and the decision making unit members and I identified across those, which of those members were heavy B2C purchasers for the, you know, maybe their lifetime, cuz we're. We're a very old organization, I can immediately know which are the softer door openers for the sales organization to actually go after, cuz they're gonna have brand preference, they're gonna be fangirls and fan boys for our brand.

But really the complexity of that ecosystem is we don't, I'm no longer in a realm, and I think most B2B is like this. I'm no longer in a realm where somebody comes in and pointed a widget on a shelf net new name. Opportunity. We're really at the point where we're looking at the account and that account engagement involves really tying together everything from decision making unit members before they knew they wanted our solution, but identifying that they had brand preference might be TOC users that are fresh.

Into this B2B ecosystem and then identifying traditional realms where we, we just didn't measure before, like our developer community and who's surging on precursors of, of Dev before Rev, for example. So it's a new frontier. It's scary. It's like I'm a brand new marketer, net new named opportunity. It's still something I look at from a plumbing perspective, but from a marketing ROI perspective, I will almost throw an attribution out the window and basically looking at, let's say, If I had $10 marketing spend for a quarter, what came about on the other side, regardless of what I did with it, I used a buck for an event over here.

I used $2 for Facebook performance marketing over here. I took Steve out to lunch with a dollar. I don't care at that very high level if I can identify all things the same. In this day, next quarter, you and I are having this conversation. No change. If I put $10 in, I should know I should get this out. And then I should know based on touches and contact coverage, how that affected at the account level, and then the decision making units that cross pollinate across Dev, B2C and b2b.

The scary part is when you start looking at account journey analysis, which is, you know, another buzzword. We need a great visual to see what the anatomy of the deal looks like. You know, we have a zillion accounts in our system and I put three people on an account journey analysis slide, which looks really pretty in the end, and there's all these boxes of touches between B2C and Deb and everything, and you can see correlations.

But the amount of legwork required to do that for one account and then somehow look at this slide and come out with an actionable insight where somebody says, okay, now I know to put my right foot forward instead of my left is the difficult part. So we're looking at how to take that data. And basically automated as much as everybody wants to pretty slide in the end, it's data.

You don't need the slide, you should be looking at automations. So we are looking, not looking, we're, we're using a, what we call a propensity to buy model. At this point, it's basically, I didn't even wanna say it, it's kind of a buzzword right now, but, Im ML you there? I said it. But we are in this world now where we need to work smarter.

You know, we've got to the point where, as we said earlier, we're not vendor locked anymore with one vendor and one intent data point. We've recognized the fact that like a stock port stock portfolio, we have to diversify our intent data. And the more I can diversify, whether it's multi-vendor intent data points, it's onsite traditional marketing, old school lead scoring, it all matters.

And it all bubbles up in this diversified pool of data to identify where you are in marketing this wise. Where it gets complex is, okay, how do I identify your involvement as a, as a C-level individual versus developer versus brand preference and b2c? That is a lot of work for anybody that's an Excel fan, like I am still, I sadly enjoy noodling on my pivot tables and, and, and pulling data from a bunch of random sources, but is a lot of work just to create one presentation to say, aha, look what I found versus something.

From a data perspective that can be day in, day out, just prescriptive saying, Steve, you're not a data person. You're not gonna champion the tech stack. But yeah, there's a slide that gives you three bullets and tells you what to do today and don't, and what to keep doing, what to stop doing. Yeah. You

Steve Goldhaber: know, I do enjoy a good sheets Yeah.

Slash Excel experience. And I remember I've had jobs where we were trying to move the needle on brand preference or awareness and. It was like nine to 12 months of my job came down to taking data and looking at it in the document and being nervous cuz I was just like, my last year all comes down to, did all these things move this number up by at least, you know, five, five points.

I had to, I paused, I took a minute and reflected on everything that had happened, and then I was like, all right, bring the data in and it, and it was a good outcome. So I was happy with that.

Ari Capogeannis: It's a tough one too, cuz you'll find a lot of marketers want to find the one data point that says something good happened.

Yeah. And, but did it actually affect business or did you. Do nine months to 12 months of work here, but the industry took a crunch and it was totally outta your hands. Yes. But in the end of the year, everybody goes, oh, you're abm, or whatever you want to call it. Your program you're running didn't do anything.

Yeah. Well, it probably did, but there were factors out of your

Steve Goldhaber: control. Yeah. It's the, I call that the bleeding less success metric, right there is is it would've been a lot worse. If we hadn't done anything, which is even, even more skeptically met by anyone, especially in sales. All right, let's, I'm gonna jump into q and a.

How'd you get started in marketing? Tell us about your first job.

Ari Capogeannis: Yeah, that's an interesting one. My very first job, if we want to go way back as a marketer, was working at a bakery shop in eighth grade, and I had to get people to buy pies. I. And I, you know, what do they call it? Drinking your own champagne.

I ate a lot of pies. Yeah. But I realized I really liked interacting with these people. And you can identify individuals that wanted bread off the sail rack, which you should never buy, or some of the, the sweeter things. But fast forwarding, I've really always been interested in a little too much, considered myself a Renaissance person, wanna learn everything.

And I was in a small military contracting company where I basically was. Everything from sales to marketing, to it, to janitorial. We did outsource anything. I used to go up on the roof to unclog the drains with a tie on. Right before meeting our Japanese customers, we were trying to close a sale on. So within there though, I started really finding a love for brand and digital experiences and I started after college and, and essentially coding homegrown e r P systems for semiconductors.

So I had a bit of the technical background coding wise, and around the time that I was in the military contracting space and focusing on the brand flash existed. Anybody ever remembers Flash? It was, oh man, jettison, because the whole security whole aspect to it, the security hole aspect to it, made it totally fun to

Steve Goldhaber: code.

There was a great battle between Steve Jobs and Adobe. Yes, right. It played out a year or two, and then finally, finally Steve won. He kept

Ari Capogeannis: saying, flash is dead. Flash is dead. But Flash was that first moment where I was able to tailor personalized experiences to people. I was able to, you know, based on points and clicks that I could actually capture in server side documents, total security loophole, to be able to do that or surf what they were doing, I could actually curate dynamic experience for them and I loved it.

I got really into it. Yeah. I started doing that on the side because we're military contracting company and the contracts came and the contracts didn't come and, and that was the, probably the diving board into my wanting to focus more in that realm. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I worked for an agency a while back. And we worked with pretty big brands and for solid three to five years, I mean, flash was the majority the, of the, of the stack that we worked in because you could just create these beautiful experiences.

We were doing it right when Rich Media was kind of a thing. You know, we went from 35 K as our file size to like, you know, 200 megabytes. It was like, oh my God, I don't even know how we're, we can do this like, We need more. And then it got up to like, you know, well just stream anything you want. Like who cares?

Yeah. How much memory is in the actual unit. Just embed it once people start

Ari Capogeannis: interacting with it. Awesome. Awesome Technology. Sad it died. Yeah. But what do you,

Steve Goldhaber: What gets you excited, right? Like if you, if you were to go in next week, all your meetings get deleted by some. Hacker who is using

Ari Capogeannis: flash though, that gets me, that gets me excited.

All my D meetings being deleted, that gets me excited. Yeah. What are you

Steve Goldhaber: gonna do? A one week sabbatical? What are you gonna do on that? Actually, I'm

Ari Capogeannis: doing that week after next, so I'm gonna be somewhere where I basically framed it as I'm out of office on a trip, but not really. I'm actually bringing my laptop and I will be data dumpster diving, and I know that sounds geeky and weird, but if you really want to champion your ecosystem, it really takes just splunking.

And I have a serious, serious passion for, that's splunking. I, I don't know if you'd call it puzzle solving, cuz you don't know what really, what the question is. You don't, you don't know

Steve Goldhaber: what's there. Yeah. You're in a, you're in a exploration mission. Exactly.

Ari Capogeannis: And so it's a matter of, again, lots of Excel sheets, lots of reports, lot of data splicing, unearthing, cool stuff that.

May not be that actionable or at unearthing new things. It, it'll be really good for my focus right now again, is, is that account activity and, and, and automation therein and, and bubbling up correlations. I think it was, correlation does not equate to causation, but I'm not gonna do it justice. Yes. But if there's no correlation, then it's a move point.

I

Steve Goldhaber: love the whole correlation versus causation dialogue. The best example. I've always heard is a stat that says, Hey, people who do the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'm clearly referencing some old research because we don't print that anymore. But back in the day, oh, we found out that if you do the, the crossword puzzle, like you are infinitely more smart than like, 98% of the general population, cuz you need to be challenged by doing the crossword puzzle.

And then there'd be the people who would just start doing the crossword puzzle. It's like, no, it doesn't, it doesn't work that way. You don't be, you don't become smart af you know, two issues of the of the New York Times.

Ari Capogeannis: So I don't do the crossword and I sucked at math in school to be honest. It's just that I have a serious passion.

For probably banging my head against a brick wall. And you really need to do that when it comes to escaping vendor lock champion your data championing the tech stack. Yeah. And finding those wins in there versus just assuming that everything being a steady state is gonna be good for the org.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I, I don't think enough marketers are doing what you're describing.

You know, you refer to it as like, datas splunking. And my guess is they don't go there because most marketers are wired into like, here's a problem I need to solve. I'm working on another campaign and it's gotta take a pretty good culture of a company to sudden. Kind of embrace the like, yeah, leave him alone for a week.

We don't know what he's doing, but we, you know, we trust him, obviously. Is that a good, I mean, is it culture at your company that's making it happen or you're just saying, no, this is how I roll. Like it or not, I will do this and I know that it will produce results? The culture

Ari Capogeannis: varies. Organization.

Organization. Some will afford more time for that than others. Everybody wants. To see some sort of something produced out of it. You know, I, I tell my team all the time, my dad used to say this, actually, we're not building Cadillacs. We're building Fords. And the fact is, the more data minded you are, we have actual data scientists on our team now, which is huge.

That's a huge marketing thing. Now, data scientists that are engineers by trade and A I M L ml, they're perfectionists. There are people that will disappear for a year and tweak and tweak and tweak and be like, oh, we can't put the model out there yet. Ah, yes. I don't know. It's only about 80% accurate. We have nothing right now.

An 80% accurate model around propensity to buy is huge. Ship it, get it out the door. I fall victim to that too. This, this sabbatical where I'm gonna be a spelunking and noodling on things. I might decide, ah, I didn't find anything that was the a plus plus just earth shattering thing. But in actuality, I'm probably gonna produce a bunch of data.

It's hard for me to talk politely about it. That will enable individuals and I have to, I dunno if it's pride. I don't know if it's. It's not perfectionism not perfect, but something has to tell you, just, just get it out there. People need this. Yes. And you're looking at a view that people don't have. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Here's, here's another example of like extreme sabbaticals. So I had a client, really well known, big tech company, and my second or third time I, I go to the client's corporate office, they take me into this part of the building and never been in there before. And there's just offices, like large offices with two, three people, no rhyme or reason.

Right. And I was like, What's going on here? What, like there's all different branding summits, like more hardware. Like I have no idea what's going on here. And they were like, oh, they're here for their, like, I forget what they called 'em. It was almost like their year journey sessions. And they essentially would just find really talented people.

These were more engineers. We're tech, you know, engineers, and the premise of them working for this company was you can work in a bubble, we'll fund you for a year, and you have to tell us what you want to do. So like at the beginning of these journeys, you have to have a little bit of a focus. So you're trying to solve this problem or you're trying to build tech that does that.

And they had no accountability until the end of their year. And that fascinated me because they're just, you know, they're just betting on the jockeys and they just kinda said, Hey, let's have all these jockeys out there, and one out of five probably will come up with some cool stuff. We don't know what it is, but they're just good bets.

You know, I, and yeah, that's the only organization I've ever seen that it was that EZ Fair about. Let's just let people explore and see what happens.

Ari Capogeannis: It stinks for those other four jockeys.

Steve Goldhaber: Yes, and who knows, like, that probably is a lot of stress too. Like you, you come into it not having to, to report to anyone really until your year is up.

So that there's also probably like a weird management philosophy there of like, no, don't manage them because then they'll self-manage by just. Knowing you can't after year say, yeah, nothing. I didn't really do anything.

Ari Capogeannis: I think it takes a unique individual. There are a lot of people that I think the predominant amount of people might be, okay, I got a year to coast, I gotta figure something out by the end of the year.

Whereas for some other individuals, including myself, I'm probably my own worst critic. I suffer from the Bell Jar Effect old book or anybody where I'm convinced all eyes are a meat and I have to produce something and it's gotta be great. It's gotta be great for the organization and every day it's almost talking through it.

It's probably not good psychologically, but

Steve Goldhaber: yeah. It sounds like a future episode of Black Mirror. I don't know if you watch that. Yes. But yes. Great show. That'll be a good episode is like following three people with their year and what they did. All right. Now I have to contact the producer for blackmail.

On that, on that idea, what's one thing that drives you nuts? Like if it happens in a meeting or a presentation, where are you at right now? Where're, like I, I'm calling BS on that. I, I can't handle these things anymore. I

Ari Capogeannis: think that, I feel that conversations we're in a space now, society. The, the data we have, the technology, the technology that we have, there's data around everything.

There's database. Decision making to be had around anything. When you're in a meeting in B2B to be in a number of meetings where there are serious decisions being made and there's not one data point brought up, not one data view brought up to me that that's. The most frustrating thing. It's usually a combination of either fear of the data or fear combined with deaths.

Just how things have always been, or egos, you know, basically saying this is how it's gonna be cuz I, I say this is how it's gonna be and nobody battling that versus saying, Hey if we do this, we're gonna take a, a huge hit. Best example. There was somewhere once where A C M O came to a web individual and said, let's take this demo experience button off the homepage, cuz it sucks.

It's not even demo. It's a five minute video. And so they just go and do it without looking at any data or anything. It turns out that that demo dries 30% of their inbound marketing qualified leads every month. Crappy or not. Yes, sorry. It, it's driving 30% of your lead volume. You convert your highest converting lead volume on the sales side of the house.

But you know, the decision making, there was a matter of C M O saying to do something and no data involved whatsoever. And yes, we'll just go ahead and do it. That frustrates me. Yeah, that makes sense.

Steve Goldhaber: All right. I've got two questions for you before we wrap it up. First one is gonna be go back to your first job, not the pie job.

The pie job is actually gonna be my last question. As a heads up, but your first legit job in marketing, what would you tell yourself, knowing what you know now? Like what would you do differently? What would you not worry about or focus on differently?

Ari Capogeannis:  First legit job in marketing. Knowing what I know now, I would've, I would've got to know the sales side of the house a lot better.

I. And the rest of the organization, I would've aligned more with finance. You know, the end all, be all aligned, tie across the organization's revenue, whether you're looking at booked or or RevRec. And so I would've tried to align better with finance and how finance is actually looking at the ecosystem and then work backwards accordingly for our view on in r o I within marketing versus getting caught up on attribution at every single little channel level.

It's our focus now that alignment with finance. Yeah. But the, the sales alignment, getting beyond our, our box. I'm a marketer, so I'm gonna do marketing things and I, and I do marketing functions and I stick within marketing. It's not good.

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Final question and legit, it's about pies. So you are now, or we together are now going to market those pies.

What would you do? So you're in your hometown bakery, you've got a thousand pies to sell in a week. How are you gonna sell those pies?

Ari Capogeannis:  I get cheap labor and to have people stand on the street corners with samples, that's what I would do. All right. All right. Sampling. I used the storefront example in one of my early people based marketing presentations where it showed, it was a cheese shop that I found a stock image for, and it showed a, a woman out front with.

Samples of cheese and she's basically bringing these delightful experiences to people, varying cheese flavors, and identifying what's resonating people with what's not and really offering them this swag. So it's a matter of getting beyond the brick walls and getting that experience in front of those individuals to entice them to come in.

Whether, you know, they Coca-Cola within arms reach a desire whether they know they wanted us or not. It's always there and they're aware. All right.

Steve Goldhaber: Now here's a wrinkle. The city knows that you did not properly file a permit to get your pie samplers out on the street corner. So all those folks are in jail now.

You have, you have to have a backup plan. How you gonna sell those pies?

Ari Capogeannis: I do myself, get out there with the pies that basically come by for your freebies. I'm gonna be making a lot of pauses. Lot of flyers, but I feel like the business might be going under based on some litigation around all the The kids.

That's right. Yeah,

Steve Goldhaber: that's right. We'll turn this into a financial exercise of how to best write off the pies as a loss and then recoup that somehow with a loan from a bank. All right, Ari, I really enjoyed the conversation today. Definitely. I love that you've been in the, in the trenches. You see the tactical side of it, yet you understand the big picture.

I love that you don't care about your title. You're a marketer, not by title, but in, in mindset just to help grow businesses. So I, I think that's a, that's a great outlook on life as a marketer. So thank you for joining the show, and thank you for all the listeners for tuning in. Again, looking forward to bringing more episodes to you of interesting B2B marketers.

Until next time. Take care everyone. 

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