The Biggest Opportunity for Spreadsheet Marketers with Rico Andrade

– [Chris] Welcome everybody to another episode of Three Minute Marketing. I’m your man, Chris Mechanic. This is the show where we interview the world’s leading growth marketers in bite-sized three minute micro interviews to bring you value bombs of a tremendous awesomeness. Today, I’m super excited to have Rico Andrade here from Celigo. We were just talking before the show. There’s some really super duper interesting things going on. Let me tell the audience just a bit. So Rico currently, VP of marketing at Celigo which is this really cool integration platform as a service IPAS Rico says that this is going to be a household name just like, you know, all the other CRM, this, that and the other soon IPAS which enables the pipes of different datasets. And in a really interesting way, which you’ll hear about previously Rico was on the agency side. He was with Transvideo Studios doing work with a lot of the biggest, you know, tech players Google, Apple, Facebook, Intuit, eBay, the likes. So, so it’s really interesting. I wanted to talk about your agency perspective now on the in-house side, but the question that I have for you here today, I talked to a lot of brands. The biggest brands are, are they’re ahead of the game. You know, there, many of them are already leveraging AI and automation to, to its fullest possible extent but the vast majority of marketers even even many large brands are still in this kind of manual and analog kind of data entry phase. You know, definitely if we fast forward 10 years from now there’s going to be a lot more automation. So I’m interested to hear from your perspective, you know for that spreadsheet marketer right now what are some possibilities that, that I-PAAS or or integration platform as a service or Celigo can can open up for these, for these marketers? Like what are some things that they can do with Celigo that they current couldn’t do before? And like, what do you think the, you know fast forward three, four, five years from now what are things going to look like from that perspective?

– [Rico] Most marketing applications have a native integration to Salesforce, right? And because Salesforce is just the behemoth in the industry, and for the most part, if you’re in marketing, if you don’t have something that works natively with Salesforce you’re going to have a hard time selling stuff. However, there’s two things that happen, you know first is not everybody is using Salesforce or they’re just not using standard applications, per se. There are many other CRMs, smaller CRMs or whatever that people might be using, you know, that don’t have as many applications that natively connect to it. And so to be able to expand the amount of applications that you use with that one application that is not Salesforce it’s easier to, you know, instead of building everything from scratch to leverage a platform.

– [Chris] So it’s kind of like Zapier, maybe, or Xavier

– [Rico] But it’s, it’s Zapier is a, is a good analog but Zapier is more on the individual user. Whereas typically speaking Celigo is more at the business level. It’s, we’re talking about the whole underlying data of your CRM, the whole underlying data of your, you know accounting and finance versus, you know me trying to do just my personal email to personal spreadsheet or something like that.

– [Chris] Right, right.

– [Rico] Does that make sense?

– [Chris] Interesting. So I do agree with you. I think that the world is very spreadsheet heavy. This kind of in a way almost sounds like a data warehouse or a data lake in a way.

– [Rico] No, so the data, so we are, we’re the pipes we’re not the data warehouse itself

– [Chris] So you’re not storing it anywhere. You’re just, you got the pipes you can selectively.

– [Rico] Yeah! So a data warehouse is often a piece of the solution, right? But you have to get the data into the data warehouse in the first place. And so to get the data in the day or if the data warehouse is the right place is, you know an IPaaS is a great way to do that where you’re using the platform to bring in all these different data make any transformation, whatever, put it in the data warehouse and then use it with, you know BI analytics tool or something like that.

– [Chris] So I totally agree that we live we live in an analog world right now you know, even on the agency side, there’s still things that we do manually that we’re, you know working night and day to try to automate, but most all of our clients are living in that spreadsheet world. And I’m curious, like when you I can tell when you’re talking you have a vision in your mind of this future state, right? But what is a spreadsheet driven marketer to do to like is there some non, non overwhelming, or non-intimidating way to like move in that direction that you can think of?

– [Rico] Let’s say even if you are a spreadsheet marketer, right? And you want to get the information into the spreadsheet and you love the spreadsheet or whatever that’s another use case in which an integration or iPaaS can help with because you can connect the data from the underlying data source into the spreadsheet, you know? So that it’s a value’s something like this. So, so Salesforce does have integration native integrations with Google ads, Facebook, and some others but it doesn’t with the Taboola is of the world of the Outbrain’s and native ad platforms among other types of niche or third, third tier platforms.

– [Rico] Right.

– [Chris] So Celigo I could use, I could use Celigo to connect to Bula with Salesforce and fire a conversion into Bula when something in Salesforce converts into an opportunity with this stage, for instance.

– [Rico] Exactly. Like that’s a perfect example. Yes.

– [Chris] Awesome, that’s frigging awesome. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. We are at time here. Tell everybody if they would have more questions for you if they want to reach out how can they get in touch with you?

– [Rico] You can send me an email at rico at Celigo.com or I’m always available on LinkedIn as well. Pretty easy to find me Rico Andrade at Celigo.

– [Chris] My man. Well, thank you very much Rico it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. We’ll talk soon.