Scaling Success in B2B Tech Marketing: Strategic Insights from Leadership
Join Rohit Akiwatkar as he unpacks essential B2B marketing strategies for tech, focusing on domain expertise and sales alignment.
In this insightful conversation, Rohit Akiwatkar shares his experiences and challenges in building effective marketing strategies for B2B tech organizations. He discusses the critical importance of domain understanding in marketing, emphasizing that a deep knowledge of the product and its technology is essential for creating successful campaigns. Rohit elaborates on the common hurdles faced during research, implementation, and measurement phases, particularly in understanding how to engage with CTOs and other decision-makers.
The discussion also highlights the importance of alignment between sales and marketing teams, outlining how both departments must work together to ensure successful lead generation and brand awareness. Rohit provides actionable insights on measuring campaign success through data attribution and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that are crucial for evaluating marketing effectiveness.
Furthermore, he shares strategies for generating high-quality leads, focusing on the role of sales enablement, targeted content marketing, and the creation of structured marketing funnels tailored to specific service verticals.
Rohit concludes by discussing the value of customer feedback in refining marketing strategies and the significance of building trust through third-party validations and detailed, educational content. Whether you’re in B2B tech or another industry, this discussion offers valuable lessons on navigating the complexities of modern marketing.
Rohit Akiwatkar : Director of Marketing at Simform
Rohit Akiwatkar is an experienced marketing professional currently working as the Director of Marketing at Simform. He specializes in creating marketing strategies for B2B tech companies. He has interesting career journey of 15 years where he started as an engineer at a power plant, then a financial analyst and now has been working in the marketing field since 10 years.
Madhusudan Nayak, Co-Founder & CEO of Worxmate
Madhusudan Nayak is a seasoned expert in driving organizational growth and execution through OKRs and self-governance models. With years of experience mentoring multi-billion-dollar organizations, product companies, and government agencies across APAC, the Middle East, and Europe, Madhusudan has successfully implemented strategies that have transformed industries such as IT, SaaS, finance, retail, and manufacturing. His deep insights and practical approach empower leaders to translate strategies into measurable success, making him a leading voice in guiding businesses toward sustainable growth and innovation.
Maddy N 0:36
Hello everyone. Today you know we have Rohit to our next series of podcast. We’re gonna discuss more on marketing strategies. So Rohit brings on board more than you know, half one and half decades of experience into various fields.
And he has been into marketing for more than a decade now and has been sort of seen an exciting journey that’s something which we are gonna talk about. He is part of Simform. Simform deals into AI and ML.
It’s more of a product engineering company.
Uh, Needless to say, that’s where the, you know, the industries moving into a AI and ML.
So that’s more of a exciting subject.
Welcome, Rohit to our podcast.
Rohit Akiwatkar 1:17
Hi, Hi thanks Maddy for having me on your podcast.
Maddy N 1:22
So Rohit, you know, why don’t you begin with a quick introduction?
You deal into a pretty exciting subject and I’m sure right, we’ll we’ll have a lot of, you know, interesting conversation today.
Rohit Akiwatkar 1:35
I have been into marketing since 10 years and currently I’m director of marketing at Simform.
As you said, it’s a product engineering company deals with Gen AI and software development stuff.
So journey as in, if I want to give a quick brief about how my journey has been so it has been somewhat interesting.
Roller coaster ride for me.
So I’ve been after graduation I was an electrical engineer working at a power plant.
Then I moved, moved to after my MBA did.
I moved to financial analyst role and now then, somehow financial and initial did not excite me that much, though I was very keen to do.
Then marketing struck.
Maybe as in by luck by chance.
And so I started doing some consulting projects and then I thought this is really interesting, which somewhere fits my skills, my abilities, my creative abilities.
So I thought to pursue my career into marketing and since then I have been into digital marketing.
I have Chrome from a very small team to a big team and.
The small team used to do only content marketing.
Now we have like we do a lot of things under the marketing right from content.
SEO, Social media marketing, ads.
Everything.
Maddy N 3:07
Fantastic, right?
So you know, I’m personally excited to learn more from you on this. You know, in this episode.
So begin with Rohit, right?
We’ll begin with a very basic question.
Straight.
One Is that you know?
I’m sure you must have built marketing strategies when you guys were hardly one or two people in marketing to today 30-40 plus team only in marketing, right?
Rohit Akiwatkar 3:31
Right.
Maddy N 3:32
It’s a it’s. It’s definitely a big number for any.
You know, kind of a product companies.
So I’m sure you have a lot of exciting stories to talk about. But you know, when you were building your marketing strategies right for the organization’s what were the common challenges you have faced and you know how you guys have overcome?
Rohit Akiwatkar 3:54
So there are challenges right from right from doing research to implementation to measurement said so that at every point we face challenges.
So if we talk about why, let’s say we are doing some kind of research to for campaign ideation, what kind of campaign should we go about?
So the main roadblock that happens is domain understanding.
Domain understanding is particularly difficult in B2B tech because because because because we are not the consumers of what we are selling.
So if I talk about late save it, I’m going to mark it my Azure services capabilities, but I don’t consume a short so I don’t know about cloud.
Maddy N 4:39
Yeah.
Rohit Akiwatkar 4:41
So I know cloud to an extend that I use Gmail that is on cloud. Social media is on cloud.
That is fine, but if I’m going to sell it, I have to have deep knowledge about it.
So how does cloud technologies work?
Rohit Akiwatkar 4:56
How do CTOs perceive this technology? And then we have to create the campaigns. So even if you’re like your marketing concepts are 10 on 10, but if your domain knowledge is 5 out of 10, your campaign is going to be 6 out of 10.
So that’s how it works.
So this is something very important and to overcome domain knowledge I think.
So companies take a so companies should take a standard.
They should have a good onboarding process of when sales and marketing people who are not.
Maybe not into B2B tech industry.
They should have a. They should be given a good onboarding process.
Understand. What are the teams?
Organizations, capabilities, services, and.
Then, as in regular training, should be imparted and even in our marketing team, we do.
We do have a very long onboarding process and.
Training processes. Whenever there is a position change or new capabilities are added by the organization we we have some kind of a monthly or at least two weeks training program. So they understand what are winning capabilities, how to pitch them in the market, how to how to do.
The go to market strategy about it.
Maddy N 6:16
Right.
Rohit Akiwatkar 6:16
And yeah, so next I can think of is sales and marketing aligned.
So at times we see that marketing goals are different and sales goals are very different.
Maddy N 6:24
Hmm.
Rohit Akiwatkar 6:31
So let’s say sales are more towards like closing and bringing revenue. While sometimes marketing goal is to goal is more towards branding, creating a brand and.
They somehow get detached from the revenue or actual revenue.
So and and they just try to increase engagement, try to get as many leads as possible.
But what kind of leads you are bring?
Are they just e-book downloads or are they high intent leads?
So that’s that’s the thing.
So there is.
There should be an alignment.
Between sales and marketing.
Maddy N 7:07
I think.
Well, said, Rohit.
Right. Because they go hand in hand, right?
I mean, they really have to balance and it’s not that, you know, marketing is like into North Pole and sales into South Pole, right?
Maddy N 7:19
It won’t make sense.
It won’t work probably.
Whatever marking does marketing would be able to contribute to sales, right?
So a very valid point here, right?
But nowadays we see, right?
I mean, you’re part, you’re at the, you know, marketing head and you know.
Nowadays it’s all digital marketing, right?
Anything happening is digital marketing, right?
Rohit Akiwatkar 7:38
Right.
Maddy N 7:39
So I we find that, you know, there’s a traditional way of doing marketing and now things are moving towards digital marketing with more innovation happening constantly, right.
I mean, even from an AI standpoint nowadays, you’ll see.
Rohit Akiwatkar 7:52
Right.
Maddy N 7:52
Everywhere, right?
So how do you how do you balance it out right?
You know, in fact, when you have to go back and study a lot of data points, right?
So how do you ensure that you know this is more effective? So for your organization?
Rohit Akiwatkar 8:04
I think when it comes to campaigns and.
Measuring the campaign success.
So attribution takes takes a usual, and so it is easy to say that what you can measure that only thing you can improve.
So that applies everywhere.
So in marketing, campaign measurement and data is really very important.
So how do we measure?
It is like so, attributing how the lead or traffic is coming on your website or what kind of things.
Contributing to that success.
So at times, companies really don’t know what is happening, what is working for them, even if even if companies are growing and they do a lot of activities from from ads to blogs.
As in Google ads everywhere.
All the things they are doing sponsorship, but they are not exactly sure of what is working for them.
So that’s where I think database attribution is is required and so we we do that through.
Maddy N 9:02
Yes.
Rohit Akiwatkar 9:12
So we do that through HubSpot or CRM what we use through Google Analytics, you can enlist traffic and there are also other softwares that help you in understanding the data points.
Maddy N 9:26
That makes sense.
So I mean extending into this portion rate, I mean I’m sure you referred about, you know if you have a data, it becomes easy for to measure and understand how things are trending in the market.
So how do you define the success of?
You know marketing, right?
So your marketing strategies that you’re applying, is there any specific criteria or metrics that you measure and that in terms of helps you in, you know driving your marketing strategies?
Rohit Akiwatkar 9:51
Right,right so at a very high level.
I think every organization or marketing department should have revenue based APIs.
So what is bringing in business for the organization that should be?
That should be the real metrics that you should try to try to understand.
But those are like revenue closed one deals and how many sales qualified leads your marketing efforts are generating?
I think these three KPIs are very important to understand your as in marketing goals are being achieved or not.
Other than that, I can say that.
Rohit Akiwatkar 10:32
So let’s say if you’re doing a branding based campaign, then sometimes sometimes the leading metrics such as what kind of engagement you are getting, what kind of traffic you are getting from search and such social media campaign. These are also important.
That helps to understand.
If the branding is going in the right direction or not.
And and all these culminating efforts, we should also try to track.
Your brand reach.
So as in the best metric I could find is.
Just yes, as in what is your brand’s keyword volume on the Google search?
And that should show an increase year on year.
So it would be very slow as in for us it has been very slow.
It is a B2B business.
So it takes time to build a brand.
It’s not like a B2C business like Zomato or Blinked you to a kind of viral campaign and you are keywords volume just shorter.
You are trending on Google. That doesn’t happen.
So we have to consistently monitor. So we consistently monitor House informs Brand keyword has been doing. How are people searching for more or how what kind of results they are getting.
Then there is a whole thing about online reputation management.
And share.
Maddy N 11:50
Right, right.
So I mean keeping that in mind, right?
I mean, you referred about sales, qualified lead and so lot of companies is a very common challenges. Most of the companies faces challenges in generating leads, right? Because when only when leads are generated that that is when this metrics would make more sense for them, right? But if.
Rohit Akiwatkar 12:06
Right.
Maddy N 12:12
They’re struggling to generate leads. Probably this metrics may not be, you know, right now they haven’t yet reached to that stage.
So what strategy that has effectively worked for you in terms of generating leads?
Rohit Akiwatkar 12:24
Private, so I would.
I would like to answer from a startup or a or a small team perspective, let’s say so.
Maddy N 12:31
Sure, sure.
Rohit Akiwatkar 12:32
So first of all, in the initial phase, sales team and marketing teams both are small in B2B tech.
In the first period, it is mostly sales, so sales lead as in there is a strong.
Business development representations and the sales team.
So they would take your product or services to the market. And I think at that stage marketing’s goal should be towards sales enablement.
So giving them the right sales material and right information so that they can market or sell the product services in an efficient way so that that takes. So that is all about.
Building good case studies. Having a good.
A home page.
It is conversion based if if an audience comes on the page, they should understand what is the value proposition.
How well different from your competitors.
What are you providing extra for the customers?
And they should see the value benefits feature benefits seem very clear.
And similarly they should have specific if you are trying to build different services trying to market different services then you should have several landing pages for those particular services.
I think initially that that should be the main agenda of the marketing team and as as there is some kind of traction and at the same time maybe simultaneously you can start working on your content marketing strategy.
Maddy N 14:09
Right.
Rohit Akiwatkar 14:09
So if if you are focused on a very.
Very specific target. Let’s say you are building software for finance companies, banking and finance sector. So and even in that you are into just.
Open banking sector, which is like a trend in the at the moment. So so that is very specific.
So you can build specific content strategy around it.
So.
So you should build marketing finance for for this particular service vertical.
So right starting from, let’s say top of the funnel, you should have very clear education based blogs and the social media marketing should also reflect the same things. What we are talking about on the blogs then in the middle of the funnel you can have.
Have comparison Bush with their competitors or how you are better than your competitors. Those kind of content pieces would help.
Would also help these for the sales team to differentiate your value. Then at the bottom of the funnel you should have.
You should have good landing pages and all the sales material as I told, so you should have a very structured marketing funnel.
For those, and similarly, if you have different service verticals like what we have at sync form, we create different funnels for different services.
So we have like we have a separate funnel for product engineering. We have something for cloud engineering. We have different kind of funnels for Gen Al, ML.
So each funnel would have to use top of the funnel, middle and bottom stages and very specific content pieces for those.
Maddy N 15:59
Right. Right. Technology, right.
So you know, I mean it’s like as you referred about, right?
Having more landing pages reaching out to the, you know, the customers, your target customer base, thereby educating them and you know then realizing the value that you can, you know bring to the table, right.
So moving on, right?
I mean, how do you basically see lot of the feedbacks that you receive right?
I mean customers, let’s say you know one way is like, OK.
We are in the, you know, the one side of it wherein we are trying to acquire customers constantly the.
Rohit Akiwatkar 16:27
And.
Maddy N 16:29
Because when you acquire customers, you also continue to gain lot of feedback from them for your product, right?
Which also feeds lot of insights back to you in terms of you know, how I’ve heard about it. What is that?
I learned what I like. What I did not like and what not, right.
I mean, you keep getting lot of feedback, so how do you apply those feedbacks in building your strategies back?
Rohit Akiwatkar 16:43
Right.
Yeah, that that’s a very interesting question. And I have very interesting scenarios for those.
So.
So whenever customer visits our offices or when we have some kind of interaction, forward interaction with them about testing and stuff. So we always try to understand as in what what efforts of marketing led them to convert or what kind of yeah led them to convert. So so.
One set of question was told me that.
That they don’t read about what is on your website, so they don’t take into consideration the first party contain pieces that goes out. They would rather trust on the third party teams.
Let’s say what kind of previews you are getting.
What kind of cache blocks you do on other websites on on good as in good educative platforms?
Maddy N 17:48
Yeah.
Rohit Akiwatkar 17:48
Those kind of validations give them. Give them trust that this is a reliable company.
So from these insights we restarted to double down on our like reviews getting reviews.
So we tried to formalize review taking process.
So whenever we have customers, we the CSM team and marketing team, they do a joint campaign and try to get reviews on different platforms.
Maddy N 18:17
Yeah.
Rohit Akiwatkar 18:17
So that is one thing and another set of customers told that we converted because we thought there’s a good expert through your content.
So if you if you see someone’s blogs so they are very, very educative and very detailed structured.
So if you if you read any kind of how to build something using cloud technology, so we write from end to end so and with the buyer persona or the.
For the person whom we are writing for in line so so it is very detailed and sometimes sometimes customers come to us or an inbound lead comes later that we want exactly how do you have structured or how do you have written?
So this was also a good validation for content marketing effort that we should keep on writing such educative blogs and solution based blogs.
For our audience.
Maddy N 19:17
Right now I think it’s a very valid point, right?
I mean, if I have, you know, read something and that has, you know, kind of built my confidence towards what I have learned, right.
I mean it’ll.
I mean some for me it’s like I would see you as a leader in the industry and probably I can even recommend you, right.
Maybe I think.
Yeah, we don’t we. There’s no other way of measuring it.
But yeah, I think you are absolutely right. If your content generates that level of a value.
Yeah, you.
It’ll help you in acquiring more customers in making your.
Content more relevant to the target audience.
Keeping that in mind, Rohit, right?
What would be your advice to you know the B2B? You know marketing leaders right now, one who are trying to kind of establish their product in the market they want to, they have a passion, you know, excitement to go out in the market, acquire customers establish.
Brand in the market, right?
So what would you recommend? As you were part of Journey, right?
Rohit Akiwatkar 20:16
Right, so so even I wanna so I’m I would say I’m a leader completely leader at the moment, but I can answer in terms of terms of mid-level manager or someone who is starting their journey or someone who’s at a mid stage manager level and how how they.
Can think about campaigns.
So maybe I would say as a career advice.
It is very important so that that you acquire different skills along with what is your core skill and there is a concept of T shaped market.
So in at shaped marketer, you get a broad level understanding of lot of verticals in marketing.
Experience. I started my journey as a content writer, so predominantly I was writing content so.
So content writing then, then it’s sitting on your blog.
What to do about it then you understand?
SEO. So you can you can rank your content on Google.
So content SEO then how to use social media marketing to promote your brand.
So social media and then ads. And gradually I took an addition.
Google ads and a lot of other platforms.
Then came account based marketing. As you move forward.
So I got broad level understanding of local skills.
To be honest, I find myself lucky because I was of one single single person marketing, so I had to do it.
By not by choice by chance. So that gave me a that gave me a push.
Maddy N 21:50
Yeah.
Rohit Akiwatkar 21:54
So if you are, if you are in in an established formalized environment, then it is difficult to like to get a broader understanding. You have lot of work in your own vertical.
So at the moment try to try to hit your goals in whatever segment you are and try to get learning from courses or whatever you can get you.
You can talk about through cross functional teams. What kind of work they are going to try to understand, and then maybe then create a broader understanding and have a very deep understanding of what your course field is. Let’s say you are in two content marketing, so you should.
Know end to end.
Of how to research topics, how to do content research, how to curate content, how to talk with domain experts, how to get insights from them, and how to write the content.
How to edit the content?
What inspired persona? What is?
I what is your company’s ICP? All these things fall under the content marketing vertical, so try to be an expert in that.
Get a broad level understanding of other things.
I think that’s that’s how you can gradually move forward.
Maddy N 23:10
That makes sense.
I think these are all some very valuable, you know, suggestions in addition to people, those who want to start start thinking about how can do it and they do it even if they know how to generate a content, right.
I think that could be a great starting point for them and not really worrying about, you know what?
I need the entire battalion in my team to, you know, start driving marketing.
Rohit Akiwatkar 23:30
Right.
Maddy N 23:31
Right? So thank you so much Rohit for all your inputs, right?
I’m sure you know it’ll help companies. You know those who wants to.
You know, promote and brand their product out in the market and acquire their customers.
So thank you so much for your time.
Rohit Akiwatkar 23:44
Yeah. Yeah, it’s yeah.
Thank you, Maddy.
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