Tyler Lessard is the Chief Marketing Officer at Vidyard. He is an engineer by trade but got into the marketing world about seven years ago and developed a real passion for the B2B marketing space. One thing that fascinates him about marketing right now is how data-driven and analytical the field has become.
At Vidyard, Tyler gets the best of both worlds; he gets to run a marketing organization within a marketing technology ecosystem. Vidyard offers a video platform designed to help marketing and sales professionals make the most of their video content in terms of both distribution and analytics. This data-centric approach to video marketing helps improve lead quality and pipeline velocity.
Before I dive into my favorite parts of the interview, check out a few fun facts about Tyler.
Favorite book?
Tyler has young children who prefer for him to make up stories. He enjoys it because it forces him to activate his creativity and figure out ways to incorporate his kids into the story. He told me it’s the one part of the day where he can sit and let his mind wander.
If he had to pick an actual book, though, it would be The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon.
Favorite Twitter accounts to follow?
Ann Handley – Head of Content at MarketingProfs
Joe Pulizzi – Founder of @CMIContent
If he wasn’t a marketer, he would be a…
Professional golfer — but it’s worth noting that he followed up by saying that he really just wants to be tech marketer because it’s so much fun.
You can view my whole video interview with Tyler Lessard here:
Smarter Marketing with Smarketing
Vidyard practices what they preach by ensuring they build a sales and marketing organization that operates as a cohesive unit. Both departments share the same goals and technology stack to ensure that everyone is aligned. Another way that they facilitate this is by having weekly meetings with their “smarketing” team to ensure that the two teams work together as a single unit.
Sales and marketing alignment in many organizations is a challenge for a number of reasons. One is the absence of data to understand what works and what does not.
This allows marketing to show the sales what is working (and what isn’t). Similarly, the sales team is able to give the marketing team concrete feedback about how those activities impact revenue.
Focus on Revenue
Vidyard has worked hard to build solid marketing and sales machine — also known as their revenue engine. The head of demand generation and revenue operations aptly carries the title of Revenue Engineer. Vidyard’s MarTech stack is comprised of a CRM, marketing automation, and a variety of point solutions to help them accelerate growth. They use these tools and the data they gather with them to target leads and run campaigns.
The next frontier for Tyler’s team is improving their predictive marketing capabilities so they can prioritize the thousands of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) each month. Now that the company is maturing, they plan to grow their enterprise sales team and get smarter about account-based marketing to improve the quality of the target accounts they are going after. The biggest challenge, though, is figuring out how to expand their reach to get in front of those accounts — which involves investing in the right account-based marketing tools.
Funding Round
One byproduct of raising a round of capital is that technology vendors will immediately begin calling you trying to sell their solutions. The silver lining for Tyler is that he gets to see all of the marketing tech available on the market. “Every day I’m seeing emails on new [marketing] technologies. And the cool part is that every one is interesting,” said Tyler.
The company plans to scale rapidly this year but is challenged with prioritizing their tech purchases. They’re also investing in the right people to make sure they get the most value from those technological investments. Their smarketing operations team is expanding, and it’s charged with optimizing business processes and ensuring that the revenue engine continues to work.
Generatie Buzz
Vidyard is currently in the process of building momentum and educating the market about a their MarTech category. “PR is incredibly important especially when you are building a new category,” said Tyler.
I can also attest to the fact that public relations is no easy feat. Vidyard has an agency partner that helps them build stories to pitch to the media, and they’re looking to further develop their in-house capabilities in the future.
What do you think about Vidyard’s revenue-focused approach to marketing? Do you share any of their technology challenges? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think. And if you want to learn more about the marketing technology available for B2B companies, browse the Account-Based Marketing Cloud today.
