Scott Holden
DEMAND GEN VISIONARIES
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EPISODE
1
How ThoughtSpot Became a $2 Billion Unicorn in 5 years
Hear which marketing channels Scott considers "uncuttable" and why he thinks Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is the key to success.
The world’s most innovative enterprises use ThoughtSpot to empower every person in their organization, from C-suite executive to front-line employee, with the ability to quickly uncover data-driven insights. With ThoughtSpot, business people can type a simple Google-like search to instantly analyze billions of rows of data, and leverage artificial intelligence to get trusted, relevant insights pushed to them as answers to thousands of questions they might not have thought to ask.
INDUSTRY
High Tech
FOUNDED
2012
WEBSITE
www.thoughtspot.com

Scott Holden is the CMO at ThoughtSpot where he is responsible for product marketing, demand generation, content marketing, PR, AR, and events. Prior to ThoughtSpot, Scott spent seven years at Salesforce running a number of marketing teams, including leading marketing for the Salesforce1 Platform, Sales Cloud, Chatter, Industry Marketing, Customer Marketing, and SMB Marketing.

Previously, Scott ran the Transportation & Logistics team at Walmart.com. He began his career at JPMorgan as an M&A investment banker, covering Technology and Healthcare companies.

Scott has an MBA from Stanford University and a BA from Colgate University in economics and philosophy.

Episode Summary

Marketers perform all sorts of important functions, from brand campaigns to assisting PR. But if a marketer isn’t filling the pipeline, nothing else matters. According to Scott Holden, the first and most important duty of a demand gen marketer is to know their numbers, answer to them, and be able to explain why they are where they are. Because if you can measure, then you can manage and grow.

Key Takeaways

  • Any good demand gen strategy will include a segmentation plan. It’s impossible to have a good demand gen strategy that focuses on all potential accounts equally.
  • LinkedIn is quickly becoming an uncuttable channel for many demand gen teams because of the way that it allows them to target specific accounts.
  • While the cancellation of in-person events has been a blow for many B2B marketers, it can be an advantage for those who realize that senior level execs are easier to get access to than ever.

Quotes

The number one job for a marketing leader is pipeline creation. If I'm not hitting my pipeline target for the sales team, nothing else matters.
We've got hundreds of campaigns running at any given point of time. Marketing these days is an all out, guns blazing affair.
Segmentation strategy is critical, but it just doesn’ fly at all if you don’t have sales bought in. If they’re not ready to segment accounts, and narrow the focus to a reasonable level, then it won’t work.
It’s the golden age of data. In particular, being able to pull data from nontraditional sources together and analyze quickly across them is crucial.

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Episode Transcript