The FINITE Ambassador programme marks an important moment in FINITE, when we’re able to elevate our members and champion them to be B2B marketing superstars.
That’s why we’d like to introduce Kartik Krishnan, New Markets Expansion Lead at Beamery, very first FINITE Podcast guest and expert in deal-based accelerations for B2B tech and SaaS organisations.
What is deal-based acceleration you may ask? Read Kartik’s interview below to find out why this term is a useful differentiation from ABM and the challenges surrounding it right now.
Hey Kartik! Glad to have you as a FINITE Ambassador! To kick off the interview, could you please tell us a bit about your background in B2B tech marketing?
I’d say my big break in marketing came when I did the first ever FINITE podcast way back in 2018! 😉
On a serious note, having started my career as a digital marketer at Google, I did my MBA at Judge Business School, Cambridge and since then have been a fairly passionate B2B marketer.
Passionate about B2B marketing you say? (Well perhaps not compared to this crowd but many others!) Yes, there’s a decent amount of budget spent on enticing one company to buy for another. Lucrative and stable as a B2B contract often is, I believe doing it smartly, efficiently and in a way that generates win-win scenarios is good for me, the businesses concerned, and the world at large!
The first FINITE Podcast will forever remain a great one 😉 What’s your favourite area of B2B tech marketing currently and why?
ABM. At its heart ABM is about aligning business needs to create value. No company should be on another’s ABM list when there isn’t meaningful synergy and value creation. Then the programme’s execution becomes about validating and ensuring that both can see the value and subsequently demand capture – sounds easy and powerful, but of course not always straightforward to do.
But done well, this should be almost zero waste (‘net zero’?) marketing – that often quoted marketing line of “half your marketing spend is wasted” can be upturned!
Net zero marketing… it’s the dream… What are the most common challenges you see B2B tech marketers facing this area at the moment?
Seeing and telling the meaningful story of value creation, getting sometimes jaded (think about the number of emails the average senior decision maker at a business gets from solutions) and suspicious buying teams (not just one person) to see that potential and then to jump through all the hurdles of creating a long term relationship, takes time.
And that is not what typical marketing KPIs afford you.
But the question I urge marketers to ask themselves is if they had a stack of chips, how much of that stack would they bet on a few (ABM has to be a quite targeted) deals coming through – you have to hope these are big deals – and how much would they want to do broader demand gen? If the answer is they don’t feel confident about the value alignment to bet a large chunk of the stack, it’s not worth doing.
A simple but often overlooked concept! Where do you see this area of B2B tech marketing headed next?
Even tighter alignment with sales and CS to the point where ABM marketers can influence product roadmaps, positioning and hence impact deals right from initial conversation through to retained revenue.
In between all this there is a new and exciting art of deal based marketing or acceleration – particularly pertinent in Enterprise sales deals when the potential value has been identified, but it just takes a lot to get everyone to see it that way.
A new and exciting art indeed! What’s your favourite tool at the moment?
I’m going to one up my fellow Ambassador Kylie and say Google Sheets (she said Docs!).
While I also love the latter, the former is the place I make lists, collate data and act on all of it.
With the ability to import from multiple sheets, work collaboratively and put in almost all formulas you would on the incumbent, it trumps that old vanguard of productivity – Excel.
[One tool that almost combines the power of the two and then has other use cases to boot is Notion, but enough about productivity tools!]
Google sheets is becoming a classic. To end on a high, tell us some fun facts about you…
I went to 10 schools throughout my childhood (didn’t get expelled – just moved around a lot). We’ve just adopted a rescue doggo, and I’m an avid follower of c. 8 different sports, much to my family’s chagrin!
