How Best To Start Up With Marketing Startups. Another criteria for CMOs should be that the CTO or the CIO should absolutely adore the software company just as much as the CMO does. “The CMO should make sure that any vendor provides full access to the data, that you're actually the owner of all of that insight and that data. When the SILA tool launches within the next couple of months, it will be a natural progression to enable corporates to more swiftly identify trends and potential partners in the startup space.With more than 10,000 companies backed by venture and private equity investment in the US alone, SILA has been engineered to navigate early-stage startup activity in any industry and across multiple sources of data. For a lot of these startups, the reason they often start with the SMB rather than enterprise solutions is because they just get killed in the implementation process and in the length of time it takes. Its objective has been to build and cultivate strategic partnerships for the future. If the project works, it is then scaled into a partnership. In simple terms, The Unilever Foundry connects start-ups with Unilever by inviting them to solve problems experienced by Unilever brands via a challenge posted online. If the pilot is successful, Unilever will then look at whether it would create efficiencies or effectiveness to roll this out throughout the business – they call this ‘scaling up’. As new players, tools and processes increasingly become available, it's becoming easier to find and work with the right startups for any organization's marketing needs and challenges.
Startups continue to influence how we go to market, disrupting the status quo and demonstrating more efficient, more effective, more sustainable ways to connect with the customer. What better way to kick off the new year than to try something new with a startup operating in the marketing space. But where does one start? How do you find the right partner? How do you establish a level of trust? Experimenting is all well and fine, but how can you make the most of a new relationship in unchartered territory?
Here are three views to help marketers navigate this confusing territory from: a successful marketing startup, a facilitator/enabler, and a leading house of brands.
Meet , a startup that launched in 2014 which can now boast a healthy roster of A-lister clients including Coca-Cola, IBM, NBCUniversal, Gap, Bayer and more. Beckon offers omni-channel data management and performance analytics which it markets as “the source of truth for marketing”.
, founder and CEO, attributes Beckon’s success and fast growth to the pedigree of its team, “We are built by marketers for marketers. Many other tools out there don’t speak marketing.” In fact, 32% of Beckon’s team joined the firm from marketing jobs; 46% from engineering/tech jobs; and 14% from data science/analytics – which is captured creatively on Beckon’s .
Another secret to Beckon’s success, Zeszut says, is that the company sets a very high bar: “If you want to sell to the world’s best brands, you better be one yourself.”
Zeszut’s advice to marketing leaders looking to explore working with startups is three-fold:
- Peers of marketing leaders all have function-specific software. “The head of sales doesn’t call the IT department and say ‘hey, could you build me a little access database that allows me to track my customer contacts?’ No, there’s software that is specific for that function. The reason I say this is because I think it gives CMOs permission. If you look at everyone else around you, they’re not calling IT and asking for IT to come save the day.” Zeszut sees the industry as moving so quickly in that direction where function-specific tools, marketing-specific tools for marketing, should absolutely be the way that to think.
- Another criteria for CMOs should be that the CTO or the CIO should absolutely adore the software company just as much as the CMO does. “We like to say that we are as beloved by marketing as we are by IT. Put these vendors through security, controls, all of those sorts of things. Have the CTO and the CIO involved to make sure that they are vetted, and they should have veto power over anything that looks like it is not absolutely rock solid for your enterprise.”
- The last piece of advice is around full data portability. “The CMO should make sure that any vendor provides full access to the data, that you’re actually the owner of all of that insight and that data. Should you choose to go in a different direction in the future, there are some players that are on the small side that haven’t invested in those types of features, so this is a very important point.”
McKinsey has been running its bespoke Innovation Bootcamps for…
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