jim sinai

Meet Jim Sinai, CMO at Vanilla and former marketing leader at Salesforce. During his 8 years at Salesforce, Jim worked on various businesses including Salesforce Einstein, Salesforce Platform, AppExchange, Data.com, and Salesforce Industries. In this episode, Jim shares the lessons he’s learned from his biggest projects at Salesforce and how keeping a beginner’s mindset has helped him succeed.

Quote

“If you’re not rooted in the concept of a beginner’s mind, your projects will fail.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(1:56) - Ohana Origins: Meet Jim Sinai 

*(7:29) -  What Does the Ohana mean to Jim?

*(11:53) - What’s Cooking: Jim’s Current Role at Vanilla

*(19:45) - Future Forecast: What’s in Store for the Salesforce ecosystem?

*(19:07) - Advice for Aspiring Marketing Leaders

*(22:22) - Lightning Round!

Sponsor

Inside the Ohana is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links

• Connect with Jim on LinkedIn
• Connect with Dan on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Vanilla
• www.caspianstudios.com

This episode features an interview with Jim Sinai, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Procore Technologies, a global cloud-based construction software company that recently went public at an approximate valuation of $9B. 

Prior to Procore, Jim held numerous senior leadership roles across 8 years at Salesforce, including leading the launch for major product rollouts of Salesforce Platform and Salesforce Einstein. 

On this episode, Jim unpacks the intersection between product marketing and demand gen, the hardest challenge facing modern marketers, the future of webinars, and much more.

Key Takeaways

• Every product marketer must think like a CMO. Messaging is important, but messaging for an entire audience is more important.
• Whenever you have a disagreement, the answer is not going to be found inside the four walls of the building, it's outside with the customer.
• If you're a CMO and you're not willing to learn how the demand gen systems work, you're not going to be CMO for very long.

Quotes

“The best demand gen leaders out there can do product marketing. I've seen them do product marketing, and they all have the same attributes in common, which are stakeholder management and alignment. At the end of the day, what makes for great campaigns and great demand gen is when you have the sales team and the marketing team focusing on trying to say the right message to the right people.” 

“All good campaigns are really just about trying to get eyeballs back to your website where you're trying to convert things. We have this mantra at Procore in our marketing team that the website is our most important asset. And we put all of our attention to make sure that we have all of our merchandising on the website.” 

“Just think about how your buyers are humans and they want a really delightful experience on the website. [Maybe] that's integrating a chatbot...One of the things that I think is fantastic is when you don't have to talk to a salesperson to book a meeting with the salesperson. I want to talk to sales and I want to talk to them either now via chat or I want to pick up the phone. Giving the shopper that channel is really important.”

“Whenever you have a disagreement, the answer is not inside the four walls of the building, it's out with the customer. So the person who has tested it the most is the person who will likely have the winning argument in a dust-up.” 

“If you're a CMO and you're not willing to learn how the demand systems work, you're not going to be CMO for long, unless you have a phenomenal demand gen visionary as your right hand..” 

Sponsor

Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links

World of Concrete Conference

Procore is hiring! 

Follow Jim on Twitter

Connect with Jim on LinkedIn

Follow Ian on Twitter

Connect with Ian on LinkedIn

www.caspianstudios.com

We hear all the time that marketers at their core are storytellers. And there’s no better way to sell your product than to put a story behind it. But what if your product is not really a product? What if the product is simply just analytics? How do you brand that experience? Jim Sinai was presented with that very challenge when he helped launch Einstein, Salesforce’s A.I. for CRM, and he said there were two key things that stuck out about that experience.

“There's two actually really important lessons for all the marketers out there. One, research is important, but having a gut and a conviction is also important. Marc had this instinct that it needed to have a persona and it needed to be identifiable and it needed to be something that people could look at and grab onto. The other was that you've got to pitch the story. You can't tell the story when you're trying to sell someone on something that it's right or wrong, you can't just tell them why, you’ve got to go into pitch mode as though you're talking as you're selling the story to the press.”

While Jim is fond of his days at Salesforce, he’s now the SVP of Marketing at Procore, a company that is making waves in the construction industry by helping companies get things done quicker, but most importantly on time. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jim dives into what is making Procore stand above its competitors: including how to best understand and relate to your customers, and why every marketing strategy needs to start by identifying your unfair advantage.

Main Takeaways

• Know the Language: When you’re doing vertical SaaS, especially in an industry such as construction, it’s important to speak the language that your customers can understand. Instead of simply telling your consumer you have A.I., tell them how the A.I. benefits them.
•  Customers > Logos: Successful businesses are built on existing and returning customers. This is why it’s incredibly important to continuously maintain a high level of customer service. By creating brand loyalty, and really working to gain a complete understanding of who your customers are, you can then use that knowledge in messaging and marketing tactics rather than relying on flashy logos or branding.
• What’s Your Unfair Advantage: It may sound like Marketing 101, but one of the most important things a marketer can do is gain an understanding of what their unfair advantage is in the marketplace is, and then exploit that unfair advantage to win the trust and loyalty of customers.

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Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. 

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