Utilize data and become better at reading data: Tom from Treasure Data

Tom Treanor realized the power of digital marketing quite early in his career, and he went on to start his own marketing consultancy. In this episode, he shares his journey from starting his own marketing consultancy to becoming the CMO at Treasure Data, inspiring many with his data-driven approach.

Introduction

0:31 After getting my MBA from Wharton, I had done management consulting, and then eventually spent almost eight years at Hewlett Packard or HP.

0:40And I had a lot of great experiences there, but I realized I didn’t really have a specialty.

0:45 I was kind of a jack of all trades and doing well there but really wasn’t advancing.

0:52So, I realized that marketing and digital marketing was something that was going to be growing in the future and this is like 12 to 13 years ago, I realized it was just going to continue to be skyrocketing.

1:04 So I started to learn and get really deep into digital marketing and it ended up starting my own marketing consultancy.

1:14 I did that for three years, left HP, and did that for three years and eventually started working, moved on, and started working for some startups in the marketing space.

1:23So that’s kind of started to build up my skill set and work for Reich and meltwater and some other companies as a digital marketer.

Understanding data

1:37 I mean there’s different phases of course when I was running the consultancy, I utilized data a lot to show progress with clients to understand where they’re at and to you know, measure, you know what content was working, etc.

1:55So I was using data all along. When I worked for Reich, I was using reporting to really understand what was successful in our marketing, what we’re customers doing, you know what we’re conversions like. So, that was great but we had a lot of silos so I look at one report and I think wow be great if I could mix these two reports together to get the real insight.

2:23But that was always a struggle.

2:25Then the third phase was here at Treasure Data where we pretty much get any report we need.

2:36So it’s been kind of different phases of data discovery and getting more value out of the data.

2:43So that’s where I’m at now

Integrating data into campaigns

2:47 Basically, at Treasure data what we do is our customer data platform is able to ingest the data from all our different data sources like Salesforce which has their own reporting, but we can take it from Salesforce, from Marcato, from the tableau, which is our ABM platform from google analytics, etc, we can put it all in this one place and as well as kind of internal metrics about you know customers and we can put in one place and then I can create reports in any way and then utilize that for campaigns.

3:22So that’s where that’s how we can do kind of segmentation or personalization but we can also see the impacts of those campaigns.

Solving challenges with data

3:34 One of the challenges was where do we focus our energy, in the early days, when a—so one of the things we really want to understand was our different verticals like where should we spend the energy?

3:50So using all of the data that we gathered, we did a lot of reporting on which verticals you know, reacted more to the marketing, which verticals converted better, which verticals converted faster and we’re really able to pinpoint which verticals were more most attractive for us and then which verticals we should save for later.

4:16And so we, you know, we continually refresh this analysis but that helps us really kind of focus our sales are hiring or you know a lot of our energies on the right verticals for us

The go-to metric

4.30: Things like intent data is very interesting for us.

4:38So knowing what companies are showing intent for us specifically, our products specifically or for topics related to us or even competitors is very, very powerful for us.

4:56And then another piece of data that’s very important is the customer journey.

5:02So we can see the account level of journey and really understand what are the interactions that they’re having, Are they kind of spiking in terms of interactions?

5:13And then there’s the kind of the full funnel metrics that we get in terms of conversions and you know, going all the way to close to close one.

5:24So you know, kind of looking at that, that whole journey for each account.

5:28So those are some examples of metrics that I spent a lot of time with.

My favorite tools for data insights

5:36 I use a lot of tools like SEO tools for keyword insights or traffic tools for like analytics, google analytics and others for that. 

5:47But really the majority of my time is spent looking at custom reports within treasure data based on like I said based on mixing our CRM data, marketing automation data analytics data our internal data about the customers and you know those different reports to really understand the pipeline things like the pipeline velocity, other trends you know pipeline sources like what organizations and what campaigns are delivering that pipeline.

6:21Where I spend the bulk of my time these days.

My two cents

6:28 Again think about the creativity part of marketing.

6:32 Think about how you’re gonna stand out from the competition.

6:37 Next is think about really understand the customers and you can use both data as well as qualitative insights to find out what the customers really want.

6:48 So you can both study what the customers do with data but you can also talk with the customers and we really understand their needs.

6:57And then third is you know utilize data and become better at reading data and collecting data and using it for your marketing again both to measure the results as well as to propose like what’s the next thing you wanna do next campaign

PS: The interview was taken when Tom was serving as the CMO at Treasure Data.