SalesTechStar Interview with Tim Norris-Wiles, Managing Director of EMEA at Habu

Data management and data cleansing processes need to evolve as B2B data trends change; Tim Norris-Wiles, Managing Director of EMEA at Habu has some pointers to share:

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Hi Tim, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about your (new!) role at Habu and what you are most looking forward to here?

I came into martech completely by accident, but I quickly fell in love with its rapid pace of change and the level of innovation. In amongst all that change I’d say there’s been one important constant in my career:  regardless of what the current buzz or headwind might be, I focus on translating complex technologies into business value for clients.

That’s something I am super passionate about; accelerating everyone’s understanding of new technologies and helping them to solve problems ahead of their peers. As Habu defines and evolves the data clean room space, I’m really looking forward to educating the market and uncovering new ways that data collaboration can have a positive impact on our industry.

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When it comes to establishing presence and expanding in a new region: what are some top sales practices you feel startups and upcoming tech innovators need to keep in mind?

I’ve been a first or early hire in EMEA for a number of amazing companies over the past decade or so. A common theme in the most successful expansions is that the new market team doesn’t actually feel like a separate entity, rather it is an extension of headquarters. You can only achieve this with great leadership from the top. Great founders like Matt Kilmartin and Mike here at Habu are so resolute in their desire to expand the core mission and culture, as opposed to treating internationalisation as a checkbox task.

On a local level it is all about planning and execution. You can actually do a lot with a little provided you have a robust market segmentation, you prioritise your efforts on areas of endemic success, and if you embrace one-to-many channel partnerships in order to cover more ground. That last one is really important for EMEA where the market is so geographically large and culturally diverse.

What can of data and measurement processes can help sales and marketing teams scale expansion plans more rapidly today?

Really interesting question! A lot of the data collaboration work that Habu is doing with B2C brands is now starting to emerge as a use case on the B2B side too. Suddenly you’re seeing a lot of overlap between Martech and Salestech requirements.

For example, much in the same way a retailer wants to use clean room as a secure method of sharing transaction data with key CPG partners, technology alliance and sales teams are now looking for ways to share pipeline and revenue information with appropriate peers to fuel faster growth and enable co-selling motions that are backed by data. The use case is fundamentally the same, and points to how big the overall market opportunity is for clean rooms in general.

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In what ways do you feel sales and marketing leaders today need to rethink their salestech-martech stacks to create a more integrated set up between the two?

We are going to see more tools and platforms bridge the divide between these two categories, driven I think by the evolution of B2C business models towards direct to consumer and subscriptions. As that continues there’s actually a lot that consumer brands can learn from high-growth SaaS companies for example.

As B2B data trends evolve, what are some thoughts you’d like to share on the future of data-driven marketing and data-driven selling?

 One of the biggest trends I am seeing today is that channel partnerships are evolving into multi-party, data-driven relationships. Just as we’ve seen media companies team up over the years to pool their audiences, you now see technology alliances emerging that go beyond technical integration and into areas like top-of-funnel collaboration in order to reduce customer acquisition cost.

A few thoughts on what Revenue and Sales leaders need to be doing more of today to align team and business goals?

 I think that it all begins with the customer actually. If you’re resolutely focused on understanding the evolving requirements of your customers, and on delivering value for them with your technology or services, then the other things should be natural by-products!

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