#absolute chore of a gane

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Building Blocks: Kevin Cancilla, Senior Director of Marketing at Vindicia Talks Marketing Tech

1. Could you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to be the Senior Director of Marketing at Vindicia?

I’m a native of Silicon Valley and I’ve worked here in a variety of roles including marketing communications and product management. I’ve worked with startups and established companies in the software and tech space. I moved to Portland for ten years in search of a change in scenery and loved it, but was longing to get back to the Bay area.

One day a recruiter called me to check out Vindicia, and while I wasn’t involved in the billing software space, the opportunity to go after CMOs intrigued me. I realized my desire was to go after marketing professionals, as most of my career was spent going after the IT buyer. They say everything happens for a reason and it must be true, because I’ve been at Vindicia for nearly three years and loved every minute of it.

As the head of global marketing responsible for Vindicia’s demand center and corporate communications the day is packed; planning, directing the team from the marketing programs staff that we’re executing on our plan—it’s all about growing the business building the pipeline to ensuring the SDRs are enabled for success toward hitting their weekly, monthly SAL/SQL targets. Like an Air Traffic Controller, I have many touch points on a daily basis; from PR to exec mgmt. meetings assessing our market growth by targeted segments to jumping in, working our growing demands for Marketo and Salesforce. KPIs check is where the day begins and ends paving the way for our next move. I challenge my team to reach beyond their core role. We’re able to effectively produce an enormous amount that is purpose-driven both pragmatic and experiential. From our SDR Labs to getting innovative when it comes to ABM, I have an exceptional team that allows each of us to elevate our game – impact to the business.

2. Are you happy with the buy-in for Marketing Technology that exists at Vindicia? Do you think the investments being made are adequate or could be more?

We’re definitely always evaluating, testing and assessing our solution set

We utilize a variety of marketing and sales platforms, including Salesforce, Marketo and Avention. We like what we have: it gets the job done and allows us to offer the best possible customer service.

Are we done building out our marketing stack? No. There’s always a need for more content marketing tools. We’re building out the overall infrastructure for 2017 and as part of that, we are increasing our usage of Avention and other players to help with ABM strategy. There’s more work to be done to enhance ABM specifically, but overall operations are looking at other tools to help. 

3. What is the key problem you are attempting to solve with – could be 360 customer view, better customer experiences, crafting better journeys, full circle attribution?

We understood that accurate and updated data was the key to a successful ABM program, and we found the right technology partner to provide that data with Avention. In addition to providing us the best possible data, Avention also offers us integrations with Salesforce and other vendors that are part of our ABM technology stack. It’s the new capabilities Avention is bringing forward, like global contacts and building out this database, that are highly valued for our team globally. It’s key to our growth strategy.

4. What are some of the challenges your team faced from a technology & integration perspective?

Before Avention, we went through a process with prospects, but it wasn’t optimal. We received data that we had to roll back and pull stuff out of it. For me, ABM is too important not to get right.

5. What is your take on the massive explosion of MarTech cos across so many categories? Do you feel spoilt for choice or is it just more of a chore to evaluate additional options?

It’s absolutely a chore but it’s also a necessity. It’s how you get informed and how you keep your edge sharp.

There are a lot of people who probably don’t take inbound vendor calls, but I actually listen to their pitch. I always want to hear what’s involved in the marketplace, what’s a new trend and what’s effective

I take two to three meetings a week for the sole purpose of ganing technology insight. I value some of the forums and conferences to see what’s out there in the marketplace. In the case of ABM, I’ve always been doing account-based marketing. But it’s now the technology that’s advancing the whole ABM space.

6. What is the one area of investment you’d like to make in the immediate future from a marketing tech perspective?

There isn’t one particular investment I am focused on. Instead, I am looking at all the technology solutions that could be advantageous to my marketing stack. One area that I am looking to invest in is the next generation of ABM technology for 2017. It’s all about personalizing the content and tailoring the content for the audience, and I’m interested in seeing what technology will help me achieve this goal.

7. Build your own stack or buy into a pre-built martech cloud – what team are you on?

It depends – if the pre-built cloud stack can meet 80 to 90 percent of my objectives, I’m good with that. The beauty of building my own stack is that I get to pick and evaluate the players to meet our own needs at Vindicia. Ecosystem connectivity is key, which is why I vaue what Avention’s doing and why I value going to conferences to learn how things are evolving. When I started to deploy my ABM strategy, I quickly connected all the vendors I work with directly and Avention helped make that possible through easy-to-use technology.

Connect with Kevin

   This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor