Steve sits down with Riaz Kanani, Founder and CEO of Radiate B2B, to dive deep into his best strategies for winning in the world of B2B.
Riaz has over 20 years of experience in advertising and marketing technology, has previously sat on the DMA Email Marketing Council, and taught at the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing.
Listen in as Riaz kicks off the conversation sharing his firm’s “unplanned” foray into the U.S. construction industry. After warming up a shortlisted group of potential accounts in advance via company-target advertising, a two-month campaign resulted in half a dozen conversations across the third biggest construction firm in North America. Effectively, Riaz and his team had built a platform that can target an entire headquarters and, later, retailers, with advertising.
He then shares how B2B firms, big or small, can take advantage of ABM to target mature companies. Riaz also explains how larger organizations can distinguish themselves through building landing pages that drastically cut down the time and effort needed to get that first conversation with a potential customer.
Finally, Riaz offers his best practices for conducting nurture campaigns and discusses the importance of forging a strong relationship with prospects as early as possible, beyond simply building an overall brand.
Key Topics:
Connect with Riaz Kanani on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I am joined by Riaz. Riaz, welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Riaz Kanani: I'm really good. Thanks, Steve. Really good to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. For those of you who don't know Riaz is the founder and CEO of Radiate B2B, and I'm excited for him to come on and share some stories about winning in the world of B2B. All right. So, as you know, we start off the show by telling stories from interesting B2B marketers. The first story that Riaz is gonna share with us is about breaking into a new industry. So Riaz, take it away.
Riaz Kanani: Yeah. When we first started, we worked with a company, and actually, it's one of those situations where it was completely unplanned, right? We wanted to work very early on with companies that were in London, working with the sales force, ideally in tech, and they are more in Acton. Those who are in London know there is an Acton in London. But this was, unfortunately, Acton in Toronto or fortunately, it's a beautiful place, but a little bit far away from what we were looking for. But we got talking to them and realized that what they were trying to do was really interesting. It was really well. What we were trying to do as a business and what they were doing was trying to break into the construction industry in the US. Now, there's over a million construction firms across the whole of North America.
Riaz Kanani: And for those that know me or have seen me speak, I talk a lot about account-based marketing and this idea that you can take these select lists of accounts and nurture them, break into them, and then close them. The usual metrics are high average contract values, they close faster, yada yada, yada. It’s taken off hugely since then. So, that was the approach we wanted to take here. Now, the reality is if you've got a million companies inside your ICP, taking the ABM approach is not going to work. So, we need to figure out a way to narrow that list down and that's the first thing we did. We looked at the data and we worked out what we thought would be the best prime candidates.
Riaz Kanani: And we put together a solution that allowed us to basically warm these accounts in advance through company-targeted advertising. So, we would basically listen for the companies that we shortlisted and when we'd see them we'd place advertisements in front of them. And two or three months after this campaign going live, half a dozen conversations across the third biggest construction firm in North America. And what was great was they turned around and said, look, don't talk to all the satellite office plus and so massive ROI—great, brilliant.
Riaz Kanani: Now, what you don't know is, that was the first ever campaign that went out on our company-targeted advertising platform. So, within two or three months, we were cracking open champagne, running around doing cartwheels thinking we'd struck gold and it's amazing. And sure enough, that campaign was shortlisted for ABM campaign of the year and brilliant, great. But what was really interesting about that is construction firms.
Riaz Kanani: So, what we've done is we've built this platform that could target an entire headquarters with advertising. We target is exactly that scenario and so massive ROI and massive return. We then do a second campaign, which tasks to target retailers. Quickly, we developed the capability to then target and narrow down to the right type of person inside that company or what type of function inside that company. Very quickly we then were able to deliver advertising to pretty much any enterprise business without wasting tons of tons of budget. Thankfully, we could keep cracking open the champagne. But at least for that period of the second campaign, we were there scratching our heads and thinking “what have we done wrong?” type of stuff.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. so I'm gonna say a question about the construction one. You said with the ability to target a headquarters and feel free to reveal or not reveal, I don't want you to give away the secret sauce.
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Goldhaber: How are you doing that? And I'm sure it's not just one simple thing like it's just geotargeting or we know they're in a certain building. Are you doing multiple things where you say, “Hey, there's five different ways, and when we add all these five different ways up, we know we've got 'them.” How does that work?
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, so in the very early days, we did test geotargeting as a way to do that sort of targeting. Honestly, it didn't work very well and we dropped it as an approach. What we do is really twofold. So, first, we use the network of the headquarters, which means that we can only really do this with mid-size companies and above. So their internet connection, we can see it and make decisions based on that. That's great, but it only takes you so far. Companies tend not to be static beasts. They acquire companies, they spin-off companies, and so part of the secret source of what we do is we're monitoring those changes and are able to incorporate those sorts of infrastructure changes on the flight.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. And I think it's interesting too, ABM, the philosophy has been around for a while. My experience when I've worked with clients is, that you need an organization that is almost mature enough and has a sales structure that's similar to that to fully embrace it, do you see that same thing? Cause I feel like some people hear your ABM and they're like, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't wanna choose 20 companies to target, that just doesn't seem efficient.” So, I love your thoughts on the maturity level of a company that embraces ABM or just goes, “we would never want to do that cuz we're just afraid to limit ourselves”.
Riaz Kanani: It's not for all B2B companies. So if you are a mature B2B business that is selling to SMBs or small companies, ABM is not a good fit for you at all. If you look at traditional ABM. So the theory that was set out a decade ago, basically, was good for a very small number of companies globally, right? The sort of IBM's, Cisco's, I guess big hardware companies selling multimillion pound contracts, those sorts of situations where you can pick 5, 10, 20 companies and you can allocate somebody to each of those targets if you’re a salesperson, a marketing person, and build programs off the back of it. It's logical when you've got that sort of size contract.
Riaz Kanani: For most of us in the real world, though, we don't have those sorts of size contracts on a day-to-day basis. So, modern ABM or scaled ABM, whether that's one too few or one too many if you take the different strategies that are set below it today, allows you to scale programs that really are sort of $25,000 annual contract value upwards. So you're dramatically reducing the minimum contract values and suddenly that means it's available to a huge number of companies. To your point about the maturity inside the business, I think there are really two points or two stages where ABM can really make sense.
Riaz Kanani: One is when you're really, really early. So when you're a really early stage business, where you don't have lots of customers, actually an ABM approach works really, really well. Because ABM approaches to bring you very close to the customer, allow you to understand the buying journey very, very well and that's something you need to do at an early stage to figure out how to scale your go-to-market over time. Most companies are not early-stage startups, so for those companies with $25,000 contract values and up, you do need a sales team, you do need a marketing team, and you do need them to be talking to each other. If those two teams are not working together, the ABM program never gets out of the gate.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that's a great point in that you have to be synced up. What I've done more ABM planning work, what I've always seen work the best is if you say, “look, months one and two are just marketing is gonna do their job. They're gonna buy the media, they're gonna find the people. Then months three, sales are gonna hit it hard.” Meaning, when sales start to do their outbound, whether it's networking, phone, email, whatever it may be, your engagement and conversion rates should be better because ultimately the person always goes, when the salesperson asks for the meeting or whatever it is, it's that have I heard of you or not, right? I think people like I'm working with- a client right now, where the strategy is run an email match program, hit those people hard for two months with advertising and marketing, knowing that month three it's that's where the force kicks in, and the thought is you get to that “oh yeah, I've heard of you guys, I've seen your stuff. Yeah, I'm open for a meeting.” I feel like that oftentimes is such a critical thing that companies get wrong is the sequencing of -- let marketing start and then let sales finish.
Riaz Kanani: Yeah. It is that two-way process. So, that account selection piece at the very, very beginning, shouldn't just be done by marketing. It should be done by sales and marketing and possibly even customer success if that makes sense depending on what your goals are for the program. And yes, you're right. We know that if you warm up companies with advertising for a response, an acceptance, or a call acceptance. But what's amazing is the next step, where we typically see a two to three X likelihood to take a demo and actually move further along the pipeline.
Riaz Kanani: And so the advertising serves two things. Advertising can be persuasive. I think what it does is it builds that level of trust or that level of awareness that just says, “you know what? I want to find out more. I'll have the discussion.” Unless they're in the market or unless there is a problem for them to solve. The reality is you're not gonna magically suddenly turn them into an opportunity. But the nice thing about the advertising as well, especially the display-led advertising, which is obviously brand-led. You're able to identify the companies that are willing to have that conversation earlier than almost anything else. Because it's brand-led and ideally you're telling that sort of story that seeds the conversation. If it's an interest to them, they may or may not click, but they'll research and turn up on your website.
Riaz Kanani: And we know over a quarter, typically 20 to 30% of the companies that you target will magically appear on your website. Then the sales team has now got the ability to pick up the bat and continue the conversation.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I love earlier when you were talking about even getting customer success in on that meeting. There's a funny quote, I forget who said it, but it's something like there's no such thing as a bad client, only a bad lead. The ability to get further down in your business to say, “Look, we have 10 clients, seven are amazing, three are not a good fit, so we're not gonna bring more of the three bad clients in.” So it's that, “how deep can you go into your business model to then replicate it?” And that to me is a mature marketing organization where you have the customer success, people almost upset, like don't you dare target these people because we do not wanna bring them into the company. It's just not a good fit.
Riaz Kanani: Yeah. Yeah. The bigger a company gets the more siloed they tend to be, and successful companies are the ones that manage to maintain those lines of communication across departments over time. It's solely just making decision-making better.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Awesome. All right. Number two. We're getting into another story now. This one has to do with personalization, it's always the dream of any B2B marketing organization. It's “we're big, we've got so many people, but how do we create a more authentic and one-to-one relationship?” So tell us about your second story.
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, this was a brilliant technology company, and to be fair, I shouldn't just pick on this particular technology company, cause we've seen a few different types of companies do this. Where this idea with ABM, especially, ABM really draws this out really, because it's all about putting the customer at the center. When you put the customer at the center, you know a lot about the company, you know more about it than you would do typically. You want to be able to personalize the work that you're putting in front of, the messaging that you're putting in front of them, and for anyone who's built ABM programs, you know that the trick to making a successful ROI-positive program is to know when to invest.
Riaz Kanani: Investing too early can mean a lot of wasted investment because the numbers don't really shift. When you're at the top end of the funnel, the number of companies inside your market, that are in the market, is a relatively small number in the scheme of things. So we have the ability to personalize advertising right down to the individual company. So you could do, “hello, New York Times!”, or “hello, AT&T!”, or whatever, right? In your balance, we've actually had a client do that, but that's a different story. Most of the time drawing out that sort of explicit call to action, you've gotta be very careful but you could personalize banners to the same industry. So if you're talking to someone in finance, you're presenting to them a finance case study, and so on and so forth. But in this case, what happened was that the companies wanted to personalize the banners down to the individual company. Fine, we can do that. When we drive them to a landing page, the landing pages were also personalized to each company so every company got its own personalized landing page. Now, the challenge with doing that is that it's a lot of work to maintain, and anyone who, again, when you build ABM programs, it's not about list number one, right? It's not about the list that you create on day one. Four weeks down the line, you're starting to iterate on this list, right? Your sales guys are picked up the phone, they're not been in the market for three years, and we're not gonna keep working on them.
Riaz Kanani: So we switch them out. We've got a new company in, well, suddenly I've gotta go and build all this personalization, personal landing pages for this new company. So the cost of that investment is huge. When in reality, what we know is that when you put advertising in front of somebody, it's like an email. When you send out an email, what's the percentage of people who actually even open the email, and forget about clicking on a link? It's if you're doing well, it's in the mid-forties, maybe 50% sort of level, and maybe it's 10% of that click.
Riaz Kanani: So you're talking about a bit about that 20 to 30% every quarter stat. Well, let's say you're targeting a hundred companies, 20 to 30 companies are gonna magically appear on the website, but 70 to 80 will not. So the question you always want to be asking is, “is the work for that extra personalization worth it? How many of those people who actually even clicked through came?” One, the personalized landing page is very good, and personalizing websites is even better. But really it's all about what stage are those target companies at and then adjusting accord.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think that there is so much work involved in the personalized landing pages, the value to me in the analytics, when you see something where it's like, “all right, on the company, number five, we've had three hits on that landing page. So unless they shared it with another friend or something which is unlikely, we know they're engaging. I thought–
Riaz Kanani: That's right.
Steve Goldhaber: I used to run my business on HubSpot.--
Riaz Kanani: Yep.
Steve Goldhaber: --And, I've been on the marketing end of a HubSpot campaign where I clicked on an ad, I went to a HubSpot-driven landing page, filled out my information that then connected to their list, and I remember sitting in my office one day and getting a phone call from someone. He was like, “Hey Steve, it's Rick. I saw that you were just on our website, do you have a couple of minutes?”
Steve Goldhaber: And I as a marketer, one– I was a little freaked out. Two, it was kind of so well executed because they knew I was on a page where I was leaning forward researching, and he was like, “I saw you were on this page, which means you're probably thinking about that. What questions do you have about that?”--
Riaz Kanani: That's right.
Steve Goldhaber: --I was just like “I'm leaving right now because it doesn't get me better than that”, you know?
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, because that's the right way to do it. It's not investing the time in the landing page to personalize it to the individual. It's about building the right and relevant content on the landing pages that appeal to that type of person and then it's automating the process. Really, it's making sure the information gets in front of the right person who can then take an action, then have a conversation with you that is relevant. When we integrate with HubSpot, I had exactly the same experience. Because we were integrating with HubSpot, I was looking at one of the features on their website, and we're a partner, so they know exactly who we are. Within about five minutes, I had an email in my inbox going, “saw you in–”. That's the key to automation and AI, it’s actually making the legwork of the individual, just reducing that legwork, right? So I don't need to go and search through pages to find out, what did he look like? How much time did you spend looking at it? You don't need to know and you don't wanna be doing that, you just wanna know what this is or this is what you need to know.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The other thing and this isn't specific to HubSpot, but what's great about the analytics when you get down to page level consumption, is you know someone goes onto a site, they look at four pages, you see that they looked at the tech vertical case study on the website. Now, your salesperson is now in a position not to just introduce themselves and say, “Hey, I saw you on the website. Can I meet with you?” The first action becomes, “Hey, I saw you on the website, you were looking at this case study. If you like this one, there's actually another one that I think you're gonna enjoy. I can give you the 15-minute version of it.”
Steve Goldhaber: And sometimes I always encourage people, not even say, “This isn't a pitch. I'm not gonna give you an overview. I will walk you through the 15-minute case study of this other thing because I think you're gonna like it.” That's just different, you're not a salesperson anymore. You are helping them make a decision. I think that's something where it's okay for salespeople to put on their customer service app, the first one or two interactions. Then, once you've earned that trust, then you can kind of talk shop, you know?
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. The whole world of sales has changed dramatically. You know what exactly you're talking about, there are just those little tidbits of information that allow you to have a relevant follow-up that isn't, “let's jump on a call and have a demo”.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Speaking of that proverbial call, the ultimate, “it's all about the meeting and getting time”. We're gonna jump into our third and final story. So, take it away. It's all about getting some time with prospects.
Riaz Kanani: When we built Radiate, it was all about marketing, the changing face of marketing, and how ABM was going to help drive that change. But what we realized very quickly was sales development drives enough successful calls from that to create meetings or blast out however many emails, none of that works anymore, right? I mean we've gone from three or four years ago, seven emails to get a reply, it's something like 11 to 16 today. If you haven't burnt half your market, by the time you've got to the 11th email, I'd be shocked, right? So those sorts of techniques just don't work and you've gotta be much more clever about it. Alongside that, one of the things that we do is identify anonymous visitors on your website, who invert a website, and obviously Gartner and for forest have since then now come up with research that talks about the amount of time spent with all vendors being something like 17%. Even if you are optimistic, you've shortlisted down to two or three. You're now talking about 5% of the entire buying cycle spent with a single vendor. You know, it's not that long ago that half the buying cycle was spent with a vendor and if you go back to the beginning of the internet, which is twentyish years ago, it was 95% of the buying cycle.
Riaz Kanani: So we've really gone to the other extreme today. What was meant was you're no longer able to just rely on somebody coming up to your website and filling out a form. That's so late in the process that the competitor who's built a relationship with your prospect has already got such a head start on you that you're way on the back foot.
Riaz Kanani: And that made us look at the data that we were collecting, start to see, and build partnerships to see, “What can we bring together to actually help sales development teams?” To prioritize who they talk to, and of course today, intent data is a well-known phase today. If it's not at the top of the hype cycle, it's certainly approaching it today. But this idea is that you listen and look at behavior at a company level to figure out who might be open to a conversation. It's not about lead generation. It's very much about who's willing to have a conversation that I can start to build a relationship with, to your point, about a 15-minute summary of another case study, it's that approach.
Riaz Kanani: And I'm completely anti-the ebook. They sound great, but how many people actually ever open them? Because they're basically 10 white papers stuck together and most of us don't even read a single white paper, let alone 10. So the point here is that the sales development person is driven by the number of meetings that they can arrange. So how can you figure out and improve your conversion to meeting from the call? Using that data, what we end up doing is prioritizing. Prioritizing behavior across the internet caught on your own website to say, “look, these are the companies that you should be talking to”. And when you do that, in this case, it was a SAS technology platform, they saw a 3x increase in the number of meetings that they generated right off the back of using that data. What that meant was, that you can combine that with advertising, combine that with sales development, and nurture to then drive more opportunities over time.
Steve Goldhaber: I'd be curious to get your take on this. So, the salesperson books a meeting, and let's say it's a week, week, and a half out. One thing that I see, not enough marketers doing is having that nurture campaign that goes backward from the meeting date, right? Because most people will say—
Riaz Kanani: Yes
Steve Goldhaber: -- “I booked a meeting today, that's a week and a half out. I'm gonna customize my presentation and my selling, or my marketing starts in the meeting.” I don't know why more people don't back it out to say, “Alright five days before the meeting, this is what I'm gonna send, this is what I'm gonna—”. There's just such a huge opportunity missed because it's just this, “Well, I'm not gonna bother them until the meeting.” Sometimes I've recommended things for clients where you can tell that story before the meeting so that the actual first meeting is more of a conversation that's not even a “Let me get the slides out and present”. It's an “oh yeah, you've already consumed some of the content, let's just do a work session”. Way more good things have come out of work sessions than capability presentations.
Riaz Kanani: I've never been a fan of a presentation, sort of hiding behind slides. Where it's all effectively prescripted and no matter what the prospect says to you, this is what we're gonna do next. The reality is people are different, some people want to jump straight into a demo, they wanna see the product, and they can understand it because of that.
Steve Goldhaber: Other people want to understand the case studies and what the return is like, and yet other people wanna know how does it all connect together? How does this work? So, if you can do things in advance that help you to know which approach should we take on that call, then great. I think it depends on your sales cycle a little bit and what your product is, but if you can't do that, you sure as hell can do it in the call itself very quickly, right at the top.
Riaz Kanani: “What are you trying to gain from this? What do you need?” Ask the right questions to allow you to deliver winning off a script or they have to have multiple scripts in effect.
Steve Goldhaber: I always like to start my–when people ask for the traditional capability presentation–in the half-hour meeting, I'll try to get through it in three minutes to five minutes. Because if you can't tell the story of your company in three to five minutes, you're not good at what you do. I try to get knock it out in five minutes and say, “Let's focus on what your issues are.”, right? It's the classic pain discovery, some people call it–I had a good friend at LinkedIn who called it– “We just wanna drag 'em through the glass”.
Steve Goldhaber: Meaning we want to ask them enough questions to understand what their pain is for them to go, “Oh my God, I've got all these issues now. Now that I've articulated my pain, you can solve it.” So, those capability meetings--
Riaz Kanani: It's no different. I think to your point there, it's funny because one of the things that I love to do is to build products. At least one part of me is a product guy. The danger for me is always to talk to a lot of people, we talk a lot about the future, where markets are going, and what's going on. So in my head, I know exactly what I wanna build, right? But that's really dangerous. It's no different in sales. It's like you think you know what the problem is because you hear it day in, day out, this is your problem. Well, actually it's not. If you don't open your ears, you don't get the nuance that allows you to create what would be an average product, because it's a jack of all trades that sort of hits the high notes but doesn't hit everything else.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Awesome. So, thanks for sharing the third story. We're now gonna get into a little bit more about you. I'm just curious to know how you got started in B2B. What was it like when did you first kind of go, “You know what? This is actually really interesting stuff. I'm gonna focus here.”
Riaz Kanani: So, I had zero plans to start in B2B. In fact, I had zero plan to get into marketing which is where my core is today. I knew that I loved tech and I knew that I loved psychology, so the study of people in essence, right? And I was lucky in that I was online before earlier today, about what's going on with the internet, where it's going, what the new developments are, what the discussions even were, and you could even take part in them if you wanted to. So, I understood what was possible with the internet. So I started off going into companies and basically helping them figure out how they should adopt this new thing called the internet without ever realizing that what I was doing was marketing.
Riaz Kanani: As far as I was concerned, it was just business, right? It was just figuring out how you could take advantage of this new paradigm that would transform the way they did things. That's how I started, I built video advertising networks and video advertising came last. We exited that business to a company called Silverpop, and for those that don’t know, Silverpop was one of the big marketing automation vendors and one of the companies that it had acquired was a company called V.
Riaz Kanani: So whilst I was experiencing B2B from a CMO marketing director's perspective of what are the B2B tactics, techniques, strategies, etcetera. What Vtrans (29:44) did, just like Marketo and HubSpot today, was all-around marketing automation, right?
Riaz Kanani: What are the techniques to put content in front of your buyer, score them, and figure out the right time to put them in front of sales? So I was able to be right at the start of that new way of doing B2B marketing. That's how I got into it. I did that for about four years, I guess it was something like that.
Riaz Kanani: Then I said, I was gonna get outta Martech. I was gonna get outta building new startups. I was gonna stop traveling so much. It lasted four years, it felt like a decade. But I lasted four years and then I set up another ground in professional knowledge, basically, it's different, so for another time, but we shut that down after a couple of years, basically accepted it was a marketing problem, set up the radio, and got back into B2B Marketing. Actually, having said I was gonna stay away from martech (30:40), it really was one of the few things that would persuade me to come back and it was this idea that the way we do B2B marketing is going to radically change.
Riaz Kanani: The stuff that we talked about and implemented 10 or 15 years ago with the Marketos, the HubSpot, and the Silver Pops. I just don't think it works today, this idea that you can wait until someone turns up on your doorstep and you can nurture them to a close just doesn't really work properly.
Steve Goldhaber: One thing that's interesting you said I wanna touch on is you described it as early on you didn't even think it was marketing and it was just how you do business, and I feel like as a marketer starting my career which started in the late nineties, not a lot was expected out of marketing, and marketing was almost more advertising, right? There was more advertising in the world than marketing back then. It's funny how every year I feel like the shoulders of marketers get heavier and heavier because there's more expected out of them. I'm reminded of when I had two roles where I was head of global digital marketing for Fortune 500 Companies, my biggest challenge was I'm in charge of everything that's digital at a company. I'm running the entire company. I can't be in charge of everything that's digital. I feel that sometimes it's the blessing and the curse of marketers today. The blessing is everyone wants you to help. The curse is I can't focus on anything because I've got 50 things going on.
Riaz Kanani: That's right.
Steve Goldhaber: I guess again, it's weird. I've been fortunate for the industry that we are doing more, but it's always that challenge of, “man, back when I started, it was a campaign and you'd run two campaigns a year and no one would really talk to you.” It was like you reported up maybe to the CMO or the CEO, and they would make decisions. It's so funny how marketing and advertising were such an island that no one understood. Now, the marketers are in more meetings than they'd ever wanted to be, you know?
Riaz Kanani: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's huge. It's huge, isn't it? There's the talk of the team marketer, which, if you do a search for, you'll find this diagram, which shows you all the different parts that make up marketing today, both offline and online and to have a head of digital, as you say, look over a huge SWA of that just doesn't make sense.
I mean to be honest, in my view today, yes. You have your PO and your channel specialists.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I agree looking back, I think the organizations needed that head of digital because they needed to be pushed. But today it's a different world where if half of our marketing team doesn't think digitally first, that's the bigger issue. We have to put digital into everyone instead of just like a czar that helps everyone. So that was my—
Riaz Kanani: You needed that transition.
Steve Goldhaber: --That was my realization. I think this is an obsolete position eventually. Is there a global head of email marketing 15 years ago? No, I hope not. Let's talk MarTech for a little bit, this could be a big tool or a small thing. What's a tool that you found yourself in love with? It could be anything, productivity, data, you name it. What do you like?
Riaz Kanani: In some ways I struggle with this when I was younger, in fact, to get my hands on it and see what's the potential of it. I had any number of favorite tools back in the day, whether it was the launch of Google Analytics, right? Where suddenly you have the ability to really get decent information for zero-cost type stuff. This sort of product-led initiative where the interface is almost as good as the consumer counterparts, right? I meant that there are a lot of tools out there that are great today. I'm a big fan of HubSpot. I think they've come a long way, especially their UI over the years. There are still some challenges there in terms of how they scale and how they work for different stage businesses. But I love that it gives you a lot of capability for very little effort which is a good sign from a tool. We're heavy JIRA users. JIRA, for those that don't know, JIRA’s a really useful on the product engineering side. The amount of flexibility that we get or how much JIRA spreads across our organization shows how good a product is. It really is just automating so much of what we do. Then maybe one that's a little bit random and I wish other companies, and other competing platforms would actually implement this, we share sales emails inside channels, we bring marketing campaign data right in automatically into the marketing channel, and it just means you can create conversations off the back of all that in real-time that just spurs innovation and spurs ideas. That ability to bring data to the front, which I guess given I'm pretty data-centric, is why I am such a big fan of Slack.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Okay. One final question before we wrap up the show. Look back at the career that you've spent. If you were to give advice to someone who was just starting out, what's the thing that you would recommend that it wasn't so obvious when you just got started out, but looking back, you're like, man, this is what I would tell my younger self if I had to do it all over again.
Riaz Kanani: Younger me was running a thousand miles an hour, rarely took holiday, and never really stopped to look at what we'd achieved. Partly that's because I was lucky in that I wasn't really working, right? I was building something I loved, I was building something I really bought into, and so I wouldn't advise myself to go and take more holidays, which I know is the advice most people give today. Don't get me wrong, there is a need to take a break, need that so much at a younger age, and I think the more I think about things today, the more I do that today. But I think the interesting thing for me is in your twenties, especially your early twenties, you can afford to make a mistake. You can afford to try things and not have an impact on your later career.
Riaz Kanani: I think from a lot of people today, there's this feeling that I need to succeed and I need to succeed now. So that would be my advice for people more generally, which is to do something you love if you can because there are plenty of people who can't because of their circumstances. I think that's the thing people always forget. It's easy when you have the ability to do that but take a risk.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I like that advice. I think if there was a chart for risk, it would be high risk early in your career, midcareer you need to be making more calculated bets that are more kind of sure things at the career level, but I think that's great advice. All right, well, I really enjoyed our conversation. If anyone wants to get ahold of you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
Riaz Kanani: I live on LinkedIn, so the best place to get ahold of me is to connect on LinkedIn, so find me on LinkedIn and drop me a message. There's RadiateB2B.com, there are contact pages there, and you can get hold of me by that, as well, but LinkedIn is the best way I will see your message. If you message me then.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. Thank you, Raz. Thanks for joining the show--
Riaz Kanani: It’s really, really good to be here.
Steve Goldhaber: --All right. Have a great one. See you.
Riaz Kanani: Thanks, Steve.