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Streamlining Cloud Integration with Simon Peel, CMO at Jitterbit

In this interview Simon touches upon the need to question the integration of the ever-increasing tools while ensuring tools talk to each other; and why it's imperative to maintain a 360-degree view of the end-consumer, not just the prospects. Watch as he discusses how an API connects everything to everything and can work like a Swiss army knife

Ginger Conlon:

Hello and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s executive interview series. I'm Ginger Conlon, a Contributing Editor to MarTech Advisor and joining me today is Simon Peel who is CMO of Jitterbit. Welcome Simon!

Simon Peel:

Thank you Ginger, great to be here.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So glad you’re here with us today. We are going to talk about trends and opportunities with integrations and APIs which I’m really looking forward to because I think that will be a pretty interesting topic in this time of so much technology and so much data and trying to connect all the dots. But, before we jump into that, let's talk a little bit about Jitterbit, can you tell us briefly what is Jitterbit and what makes it unique?

A- Simon Peel:

Absolutely. Jitterbit is the API transformation company and essentially we connect all kinds of systems together, systems that are on premise, those that are in the cloud, SaaS based properties, and then we expose those as APIs so we can do new and interesting things.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. So, let's talk about integration and APIs. So, for marketers, I think, they often think about integration in terms of connecting their systems to maybe improve access to customer data and trying to create that holistic customer view. So, either within that or maybe in another area of integration and APIs, what is something that perhaps marketers overlook but if they started acting on would have the potential for making a really positive impact?

A- Simon Peel:

It's a good point. I think we sometimes forget how many systems we have as marketers. Having been doing this a little while, I was leading things when I brought in Eloqua quite a number of years ago and connected at salesforce.com and I thought, wow, that's pretty amazing, you’ve got two systems connected, maybe we added on one more. Just before we came on air today, I took a look at how many we’re up to, we now have 15 systems that Jitterbit to connect all the different pieces together and so on. So, from lead management and so on and analytics and also content and social collaboration, I know most of them but I don't even know all of them because clearly different people in my department will pick some of these up but everyone is familiar with things like Marketo and so on for the marketing components, but we also have Bizible and obviously Google Analytics but InsideView, WordPress, we use some Adobe stuff, Kapost, Slack, Zoom, loads of other systems as well. So,

I think what we tend to miss though as marketers is that there's now a tool or ten tools for everything, the question is, how do they work together and when are there too many tools out there because then it becomes something to manage and it becomes something that takes more time to manage than we get benefit from. So, I think the idea is to really pick the tools that you are going to benefit the most from and then make sure that they actually can talk to each other

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, that makes sense. Let's take a look at that from the other side in terms of challenges, because there are so many systems to connect, what is a common challenge in terms of these integrations and how can marketers overcome it?

A- Simon Peel:

I'm a great fan certainly of keeping things as simple as possible and so

what we've got to do is stay very focused on the end goal and the end goal is finding great opportunities that will close for our sales teams and generating lots of revenue and in turn obviously making our customers very happy

So, as we set these systems up and we look at all the things that it can track and all of the different metrics we can look at and so on, we should really focus the most on why we're doing that. So, is the goal to get into a new vertical, is the goal to deliver a new position, a message down to the market, is it to get smaller customers that are going to move rapidly through the pipe or high end customers that may take nine months to close and are going to need constant nurturing and drip cycles. So, I think, let's focus on who we're trying to attach to, who we're trying to deliver the message to and then worry about the tools themselves.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, earlier you had said that APIs can really help marketers get creative in what they can do, so, where is an area that marketers are perhaps underutilizing APIs or integration that they are capable of that if they started really focusing on that it could help their business processes or outcomes?

A- Simon Peel:

The interesting thing is, I look at APIs as a Swiss army knife or a way to connect anything to anything. So, what's interesting is a lot of the SaaS based properties today and the apps that we buy as marketers are either already connected or they can be connected relatively seamlessly. Now, that's for standard use cases, as you get outside of that it becomes more tricky, a lot more tricky, and then we start to get IT involved. But

the place where I think we can benefit the most is actually using our own data, our internal data, data that's already in existing systems

and as marketers we tend to think, nah, it's too difficult to get into, we're going to have to work with IT on long projects, they're going to want these waterfall projects, whatever those guys call it, and we'll never get our stuff done, so, we opt for much smaller, more rapid SaaS based properties. But sometimes what we can end up with is a great system with no data in it and who are our best customers, who are raising support issues and trouble ticketing issues that we should really be aware of before we start saying, hey, would you like to buy some more because everything's going so great at your company? So, it's that kind of thing and insight that we can get by accessing the internal systems. The issue is it’s just flipping difficult to do for most people.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Yeah and that's a perfect segue to my next question. Customer experience is such a hot topic and the interesting thing about customer experience is that it's not just what happens when a customer is having that direct touch point, a lot of times there's things happening in the background that impact the customer experience and what you're just talking about I think really is one of those things where when marketers have that better view of their customer, they can deliver a better customer experience. So, where do you see marketers maybe being able to use these kind of integrations and APIs to improve the customer experience, maybe in ways they didn't think about?

A- Simon Peel:

I think as marketers we tend to have a 360-degree view of the prospect and so, when we follow them we know what they do, we know what they like and we know how often they come to our sites and so on and we attach lead scores and other metrics so that we know that they're getting better, closer and closer to becoming someone we can send to the sales team. But we often forget about the 360-degree view of the customer and we tend to think of that as something that, well, that's a technical thing for the technical guys or for customer support to worry about post sale and I think that's the area that we can really improve on. So, when we are targeting our existing user base, then really knowing a lot more about what's going on with them, not just from a what did you buy perspective or when did you buy or from a graphic information about the location or the types of verticals and so on, which is often what we focus most on, we need to know are they happy, how long have they been a client, did they attend the recent user groups or not, what sort of things have they been asking the tech support people recently and what are the hottest burning issues and so on. So, that can really help marketers because as you probably know,

the biggest trend now is not just do one on one marketing but a whole account based marketing, so, you've got to understand what's going on in these accounts and that often is trapped in the internal systems

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So, related question but let's get into the weeds a little bit, when you have something like account based marketing where it's more complex and there's a lot of process wrapped into the marketing, every marketing has a process but some are more complex than others, how can these integrations and APIs help improve processes, maybe smooth them or make them more efficient or effective?

A- Simon Peel:

I think the beauty of APIs is that when done right you can effectively look at any system and any data inside the enterprise and pluck just the pieces that you need. So, you might have SAP but I don't need all the data that's in SAP, I just need to know when I ask the information about this one specific company, go and gather how many support calls they've had recently, whether we think they're trending towards purchasing more or it has been quite some time since we ever engaged with them, go and pluck the essential information and bring that to me and APIs enable you to do that because in the old days, it used to be when they wired together a system and transfer all the data from one to the other or you don't do anything. APIs and, what I call, micro services allow you to be able to take just what you need in real time and grab that, make an assessment on what to do and then go and execute a business process based on it. So, much more agility and to marketers, this is magic, this is the stuff we've always wanted, we've got the tools to deliver the messages to the right people at the right time, who are the right people at the right time, especially when it comes to existing clients, and now we have that.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

That's excellent. So, let's wrap up with a look forward. What are you excited about in two areas, one, in the market in general, is there a trend or tool that you're excited about and looking forward to, seeing what happens with it over the next six months to a couple of years and also, within Jitterbit, any new features or upgrades we should know about?

A- Simon Peel:

So, something that we're playing with ourselves and actually starting to make use of is AI and using artificial intelligence to help marketers because there's so much information thrown at us right now and often it has to be analyzed and looked at in real time. So, we are employing some very interesting AI at the moment which essentially tries to predict who is going to buy the product before anybody else has really looked at this. So, it goes and takes a bunch of predictive type of information but it's also analyzing every single customer we've ever had who has ever bought anything, there are patterns, how fast they bought, not just demographics but how long did it take to make a decision, how long was it until they came back to buy more, then it breaks it down by region and geographies and even down to the sales person that sold it as it watches different sales people have different success levels, so, this is way beyond lead scoring. So, what's really interesting is we have a lead score in the system that Marketo will bring forth and now we also though have this other score, the AI score, which predicts whether a deal is going to close or not and it's very interesting to look at it on the same screen in Salesforce as we're doing forecast calls with the reps and the reps have now started looking for that number and they basically stack rank their daily task list based on it. So, it's starting to work and its started to predict much more accurately than before exactly who's going to buy. So, I think more and more of that through sentiment analysis and many other things that AI can do is what's really going to be exciting for us going forward.

Ginger Conlon:

That's really awesome, I love that. I’m sure your sales people really appreciate it as well.

Simon Peel:

They certainly do. So, this is what's given Jitterbit the idea of, what if we could do this for every kind of interaction because being a company that connects stuff together, we can connect into all these systems but what if we could almost think of it as a pipe with data flowing through it, if we could just pull the pipe apart a second and splice it and say, why don't we just take some of that data and send it out on Google as an example and then let the data continue flowing down that pipe. So, we can find some very interesting things by doing that and so we're productizing that. So, as far as Jitterbit is concerned, not only do we get the benefit of this to begin with and really start to see how we can use it, we've actually productized it as well so that others can start to do the same.

Ginger Conlon:

It's excellent. Well, Simon, thank you so much for all the great information today.

Simon Peel:

Thank you for the opportunity.

Ginger Conlon:

So glad to have you here with us and I want to thank everyone for watching as well and be sure to check out Simon and I had a great conversation about the skills that it takes to succeed in marketing today on another video, so, I hope you'll check out that one as well and also, visit MarTech Advisor’s YouTube channel and perhaps subscribe to that to see other executive interviews and thanks again for joining us.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

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