MarTech Interview with Jason Lyman, Chief Marketing Officer at Customer.io

Jason Lyman, Chief Marketing Officer at Customer.io discusses the various marketing metrics and measurement models that marketing leaders should focus on in today’s performance driven marketing era:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jason – tell us about your marketing journey and more about your biggest marketing inspirations as of today. Why did you decide to venture into marketing? And what are you most looking forward to in your new role at Customer.io?

Before transitioning into B2B technology marketing, I worked as a strategy consultant for L.E.K. Consulting for four years. At the time, we advised many Media and Entertainment companies who needed help understanding how burgeoning technological advancements (i.e., online streaming, smartphones, etc.) could be leveraged in their businesses. When I saw the role that new technology could play in a company, I knew that I wanted to work more closely with these products and help end customers understand the power of innovation.

I believe that Customer.io can be one of those transformative products for Marketing and Growth teams. In my new role, I can’t wait to change perceptions of the power of our customer engagement platform and help educate prospects and customers on the impact that our solution provides.

Enhancing marketing processes and getting the most relevant martech and related martech best practices is part of any CMO’s role today: tell us about your methodology here.

It is important to start high level and determine where you want to focus your marketing strategy. With those guardrails in place, you can tease out the tactics required for that strategy to succeed. These tactics will drive the scope of capabilities that must be supported by your MarTech stack. Then, you can select optimized tools to meet your needs. I have found that this approach will unlock increased efficiency from your MarTech spend and avoid frustrating your team with tools that don’t quickly provide the functionality you require.

As a marketing leader who has to justify marketing spending and strategies while analyzing attribution/measurement models constantly: what do you think helps to make this easier and more goal-oriented?

It is crucial to break metrics down into two types: cockpit metrics and engine room metrics. Cockpit metrics are typically the core outputs to assess business health that are inherently cross-functional and harder to move in the short term.

Engine room metrics are input-focused measurements that help you get a quick pulse on marketing tactics, so you build conviction on your current trajectory or identify where potential issues might exist before they become a problem.

By structuring your metrics in this way, it is easier to identify engine room metrics that align with the tactics that each team member is driving. As a result, they have a straightforward way to assess their performance and address any issues that arise. Additionally, you can avoid rewarding performance that does not translate into business impact by ensuring that cockpit and engine room metrics are exceeded.

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What do you feel today’s CMOs miss out on when creating plans and strategies?

CMOs must remember that any effective marketing strategy requires you to make tradeoffs. Teams tend to focus more on what new investments they want to make or how they plan to augment existing efforts.

However, the more challenging question to answer centers on what you will not do as a team. Without trade-offs, there would be no need for choice and thus no need for strategy because any good idea could and would be quickly imitated. By being clear about what activities are out of scope, you will have an easier time laying out your plan, prioritizing the work your team must deliver, and differentiating your approach from other competitors in the market.

Can you take us through some of the martech you have often relied on over the years to help drive impact?

Best-in-class marketing is customer-centric. Therefore, I seek out MarTech tools that help me better understand a user so I can deliver a personalized message that directly aligns with their needs.

Before joining Customer.io as their CMO, I was a paying customer of their solution and depended on their platform to execute this tactic. I really valued how easy it was to connect different data sources so I could build out a clear profile of my users. Then, given that these insights lived inside their platform, creating segments and automating interactions was painless. I could effectively deliver customized messages at the right time and through the right channel.

A few common misconceptions about the role of the typical B2B CMO you’d like to dispel?

I am always confused when people assume that CMOs are not data-driven leaders. While it is true that Marketing has a creative component to its work, our success is measured by our impact.

As a result, a CMO’s decisions must be informed by data. The market landscape for B2B software continues to expand, so CMOs must leverage product analytics, user research, market trends, and past performance to gain an edge over the competition.

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