SalesTechStar Interview with Jim McHugh, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Mperativ

Jim McHugh, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Mperativ chats about the importance of having an improved end to end visibility of every customer journey in this catch up with SalesTechStar:

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Hi Jim, welcome to this SalesTechStar chat! Tell us more about Mperativ and what inspired the platform? We’d also love to hear about your recent announcement on coming out of stealth mode! Tell us, what’s in store?

I co-founded Mperativ alongside former Kinetica CMO and ForgeRock SVP of Product Daniel Raskin, and former Salesforce principal software architect Paul Bryan. Mperativ was born out of our collective frustration with building custom data infrastructure from scratch in order to quantify our teams’ contributions to revenue. It’s a nightmare to try to connect data across the customer journey, which causes misalignment across revenue-facing teams on what’s working to drive growth. In fact, our Trends in Revenue Operations research found that 85% of B2B executives surveyed can’t clearly map the value of marketing spend to revenue, while 74% of marketing executives are still using spreadsheets to create insights with the hope of alignment. We set out to eliminate the pain of wrangling operational data in order to link marketing activities to revenue results.

The Mperativ platform shifts organizations to a new opportunity-centric data model that creates a single view of the customer journey across marketing and sales. This aligns marketing models with sales and finance, allowing for common success metrics and a joint understanding of the most effective pathways to growth. And as a SaaS platform, customers simply connect to their CRM systems to obtain instant visual transparency into their demand engines. The days of the previously required endless customizations are behind us.

Now that we have exited stealth, we plan to utilize our recent Series A funding to expand the company’s data science, engineering, sales and marketing teams. This will ultimately accelerate the development of our platform, and unite revenue operations strategy across go-to-market teams.

Why is it crucial for organizations to have access to richer data across functions today and how is Mperativ solving this?

B2B marketing has long focused its tools, terms, and success metrics on generating and converting leads, but the rest of the business only cares about opportunities and revenue. With marketing models disconnected from the rest of the business, executives struggle to obtain rich data that reveals the impact of their initiatives, and to uncover trends across the whole customer journey.

The new Mperativ opportunity-centric data model creates a continuous picture of the customer journey and connects the data narrative about how revenue is generated across every touchpoint. This makes it possible for all revenue-facing teams to identify meaningful signals and trends, while establishing a common language and clear understanding of their revenue engine.

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How can B2B teams today make better use of a 360 degree view of their operations and processes to boost revenue? 

Businesses often face barriers due to differences in departmental perspectives on what drives revenue and what doesn’t. Even if they can see the complete picture of their operations, these differences hurt their ability to pull the right levers for driving revenue in a coordinated and effective manner. B2B organizations need to employ a revenue-centric approach that aligns all functions of the business on common metrics. This is the key step to bridging operational data silos and divergent outlooks on the most effective actions for boosting revenue.

When revenue-facing teams can achieve a unified view of their demand engine and align on key success metrics, they are able to uncover previously obscured trends and better identify the impact of initiatives across the entire customer journey. They can analyze components of initiatives in detail – from industry segments to campaign effectiveness to customer cohorts, and more – to see what works, what doesn’t, and how to drive continuous improvement.

Complete visibility must be coupled with complete alignment. Teams that achieve this can create more meaningful and lasting customer relationships, promote better cross-departmental collaboration, and drive customer loyalty and retention. These all contribute to revenue growth.

In turn, how can all of this also enable better customer journeys, what should sales and marketing teams keep in mind here?

The vast majority of B2B buying decisions are made by buying groups, often cross-functional, and not by any one individual. Yet the traditional B2B marketing structure usually passes off individual leads to sales which turns the lead into an opportunity. The experience for the customer will be far improved when sales and marketing teams understand that while an individual can drive a B2B buying decision, they are rarely making it alone. Accepting the importance of the buying group earlier in the process will mean sales and marketing teams are on the same page as the customer. This will reduce unwanted pressure on individuals to act as a ‘wedge’ for the sales process and create a more consultative experience that both sides will welcome.

What are some of the key trends you envision for this marketplace for 2022?

 In 2022 we will see a need for marketing and finance departments to work much more closely together. Marketers will realize that a stronger connection to finance teams is the only way to ensure the long-term success for marketing initiatives.

There are marketing leaders that collaborate with finance, but by taking responsibility for the financial return on their marketing activities they can create a stronger connection to finance teams and ensure long-term success for marketing initiatives.

Organizations will also come to realize that meaningful insights from machine learning for marketing and sales will not be beneficial until they are based on bi-temporal data that records both what actually happened along with what was recorded at some point in time. This extra context for how data evolves over time will prove vital in deriving patterns and predictions for specific outcomes of marketing initiatives. This opens up much more insight into the demand engine than relying on snapshots in real-time from CRM and marketing automation systems.

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What are a few martech and salestech / revtech predictions for the new year that you’d like to highlight?

The pandemic brought current marketing metrics into question after marketing budget cuts contributed to collapsing pipelines for some companies while moving in unexpected ways for others. As a result, in 2022 we will see a new realm of marketing science focused on connecting directly to marketing to revenue results. This will drive better and more quantifiable connections to how marketing budgets can drive business outcomes.

In the next year, it will also be necessary for revenue operations teams to strategize and create unified fronts within the company to bring sales, marketing, and customer success into alignment. Current revenue operations approaches that focus solely on sales-centric models fail to capture the power of the demand engine, the promise of revenue operations to unify the business, and achieve complete visibility across the entire customer journey. 2022 will unveil the increasing need for supporting revenue operations infrastructure and technology that can look across every touchpoint of the customer journey, from initial engagement to conversion and beyond.

Some last thoughts and takeaways before we wrap up?

I’m excited to be working with an awesome team at Mperativ on solving this real pain point that we have lived with for many years. We’ve built a platform that I would’ve loved to have before spending long nights manually preparing data in spreadsheets, or battling to get across to executive peers how my team was influencing the bottom line. We’re looking forward to bringing these capabilities to marketing leaders and helping to make them rockstars in their business.

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