How to Think About the Relationship Between Brand and Demand Generation with Lisa Sharapata

– Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing where we interview the world’s leading growth marketing minds in micro, three-minute, value-bomb sessions. We go across the board, folks. We talk search, we talk social, we talk data, we talk copy. We’re growth marketers here and I’m super excited to be joined by Lisa Sharapata today. Lisa Sharapata’s a very impressive individual. She’s currently VP of Marketing at MindTickle, a platform that helps revenue leaders accelerate ramp time and improve performance using data-driven readiness to develop winning sales teams. Before that, she was running best of breed teams at Teradata, Aprimo, and most recently 6sense. I’m super excited to have you here, Lisa, you are the type of unicorn that we love here. Welcome to the show.- Thanks for having me, Chris. I’m excited to be here.

– Well you have a really interesting background and now you start on the agency side, really on the graphic design side, and then you kind of reinvented yourself to this acquisition and demand gen leader but you’ve got this really interesting brand influence too. So you’re sort of the yin and the yang in the world, where, a lot of larger orgs anyway, are separated still between brand and performance. But you have a really interesting way to think of it. So how do you think about the difference between brand and performance in your mind? Or how did they, or maybe you don’t, maybe you think about it in a more holistic way. How do you, how did you make that transit…? Just tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to be the ninja that you are.

– I started in the agency world, like you mentioned, and on the creative side of things and really quickly got frustrated because, just looked at this like arts and crafts department, go change this font, I don’t like this color, make this bigger, make this smaller. Can you try this new picture here? And like, well, why? Who’s the target audience? What’s the goal of the piece? What’s the business purpose that you’re trying to achieve? Changing this font is not going to fix that or this picture, whatever. So I really started to get to the kind of the essence of the strategy behind things. And I see it all working together. And in large organizations, you mentioned, that have like a brand team over here and a performance team over here. I mean, I just, I can’t see them thriving. I’d love to see some examples of where they really are because, to me, brand drives demand. And it is the entire experience that you are creating that is your brand. It is not your color palette. It’s not your logo. It’s not your cool pictures. It’s what people say about your company when you’re not there. That’s what you’re going to tell somebody else about who my company is, and what they’re all about, and what your experience was with them. That is really your reputation and your brand. I started really starting to work in house in companies and looking across the entire life cycle of the customer and saying, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve? Where are they in their journey? Are they just starting to do research? Are they further along comparing companies? And how do we bring them along, right? How do we onboard them?” It’s the entire journey. I want to be able to understand what buying stage they’re in in the upfront and offer value each step of the way. Once they’re a customer, I want them to have a great experience onboarding. I want them to feel like the love, right? I want to send a welcome kit. I want to make sure that their first couple quarters they’re hitting their objectives. And then I want to be able to talk to them, and do a success story with them, and feature them and highlight them, and have them become champions for my brand. I have not seen it work well if you’re not thinking holistically, and you’re not thinking about the entire experience you’re creating and how that’s all going to come together to drive growth.

– Lisa, thank you very much. This was super insightful. I love what you guys are doing at MindTickle. Let the audience know where they can find you if they want to learn more about you or MindTickle.

– Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. So Lisa Sharapata. You can backslash Lisa Sharapata on LinkedIn and then our company’s mindtickle.com, all one word. So pretty easy to find me.