Katrina Wong
Leading a $3.2B Twilio Acquisition
Katrina dives into the details of the Twilio acquisition, why she believes cold-calling is going away, personalization strategies that actually work, and the strategy behind the account-based marketing beast she’s helped create at Segment
Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that helps companies harness first-party customer data. Our platform democratizes access to reliable data for all teams and offers a complete toolkit to standardize data collection, unify user records, and route customer data into any system where it’s needed. More than 20,000 companies like Intuit, FOX, Instacart, and Levi’s use Segment to make real-time decisions, accelerate growth, and deliver compelling user experiences.
INDUSTRY
Internet
FOUNDED
2012

Katrina Wong is a true marketing expert with 15+ years in a variety of customer-facing roles including marketing, go-to-market and revenue growth for both B2B and B2C SaaS / Enterprise software companies. Katrina is currently the VP of Product Marketing and Demand Generation at Segment, which was recently acquired by Twilio for $3.2B. Prior to Segment, Katrina worked in marketing leadership positions across a variety of large organizations and other start-ups, including Salesforce, Taulia, Hired and SAP

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Katrina Wong, VP of Product Marketing & Demand Generation at Segment, which was recently acquired by Twilio for $3.2B. Katrina has more than 15 years of experience scaling growth and leading world-class marketing teams at companies like Salesforce, SAP, Zuora, and Hired.


On this episode, Katrina dives into the details of the Twilio acquisition, why she believes cold-calling is going away, personalization tactics that actually work, and the strategy behind the account-based marketing beast she’s helped create at Segment.

Key Takeaways

  • Cold calling shouldn’t be your main outbound prospecting strategy.
  • Start relying on first-party data vs. third party data sooner rather than later.
  • It’s a good thing to have healthy tension at your company and between your different departments.

Quotes

“A big part of our demand gen strategy is integrated marketing. It may sound obvious, but it's really the tight coordination and the sequencing of your marketing efforts. You always want to center that around a central theme. That way we're ensuring that our main message is threaded through all of our marketing efforts and our marketing campaigns don't come off super disjointed. The beauty of this is when you get that right, I call it the two plus two equals ten effect: each marketing effort layers and amplifies survey results. It really does work, and you're able to get better results with less effort overall.” 
“The important thing is it's not just the product demo and the technology, it's identifying with other marketers what they're looking to solve and what their challenge of the moment is. That type of conversation and peer to peer learning and knowledge sharing extends beyond show-and-tell.”
“I think most outbound prospecting these days is being warmed up in some way, shape or form by marketing and all the content we put out there. And each marketing engagement becomes a signal. It's a clue and it gives us insight on the intent of the prospect. And so I don't know if true cold calling exists in the same way as it did years ago.”
“The ongoing conversation in the market is around how to rely more on first party data versus third party data And so there is this movement where as marketers we want to do what's right for our customers and consumer privacy. That's something we respect.” 

Episode Transcript

Episode Highlights

*(2:08) - Katrina’s first job in demand gen

*(3:00) - What marketing at Segment looks like

*(4:20) - The Trust Tree

*(6:50) - What Segment is and who their customers are

*(10:00) - Technical vs. functional leaders 

*(13:08) - How Katrina views Segment’s website

*(14:10) - The Playbook & the Most Uncuttable Budget Items 

*(15:30) - SEM/paid social tricks

*(18:00) - Product demos in person vs. over Zoom

*(19:15) - What legacy marketing tactic is fading away 

*(22:50) - Katrina’s favorite campaign over her career

*(26:30) - Insights around personalization

*(29:30) - Katrina’s most memorable dust-up

*(30:44) - What it was like getting acquired by Twilio

*(33:08) - Quick Hits

Sponsor

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Links

Segment’s blog

Twilio’s Signal Conference

Follow Katrina on Twitter

Connect with Katrina on LinkedIn

Follow Ian on Twitter

Connect with Ian on LinkedIn

www.caspianstudios.com