Interview with riaz

Influencer Interview With Leading Advocate for Account Based Marketing – Riaz Kanani

Hello Marketers! In today’s interview, I had the opportunity to speak with Riaz Kanani, CEO/Founder, Radiate B2B (Shortlisted: 2019 ABM platform of the year and Emerging vendor of the year).

Riaz is a leading advocate for Account Based Marketing, a newly resurgent strategy for B2B marketers that due to technology innovation is set to disrupt the way B2B marketers design and execute their marketing plans.

He spent most of his career and covered these at building advertising/marketing technology companies globally and helped to build the current best practices for B2B Marketing in the UK and Europe. Riaz speaks on advertising, marketing, and scaling businesses and carried these at some of the largest marketing events globally as well as on the BBC and ITV.

Riaz Kanani, How Did You Become Passionate About Account Based Marketing? What Made You Create Radiate B2B?

I have always been deeply interested in psychology and technology. It is probably why I ended up in marketing in the first place. Understanding people helps marketers understand their buying experience and increasingly this has become broken in B2B Marketing.

Content is generic, often low quality and buyers are increasingly turning to independents to understand a market and yet the platforms available did not help solve this. Account Based Marketing is an excellent marketing strategy that dramatically improves the buying experience and I created Radiate B2B to deliver this experience at scale.

So, How Did That Lead to Your Specialization in Account Based Marketing?

When we first started Radiate B2B, I would regularly be told account based marketing is a bit niche. Fast forward to today and everyone is talking about account based marketing. We specialised in it because we felt that we could scale the strategy in a way that will power the entirety of a company’s pipeline and transform the way B2B marketers do B2B marketing.

What Tools and Tactics Do You Use to Measure Results from Account Based Marketing?

Unsurprisingly, we use our own platform to identify the right accounts, level of engagement and to show early buying intent as well as building awareness by delivering advertising to specific companies – what we call account based advertising. That allows our inside sales team to spend time speaking to the right companies and then deliver further advertising to accelerate the account through the pipeline. We then use Hubspot to manage the pipeline and co-ordinate the orchestration of our ABM campaigns.

As an Account Based Marketing Expert, What Are Some of the Challenges for You When it Comes to Business Growth?

We work with fast growth and mid sized companies who sell to enterprise which makes many account based marketing techniques feasible but we are not a large company with massive contract sizes so it is not economical to execute full one-to-one account based marketing campaigns early in the pipeline. We offset that by being clever with our ideas and execution so that we continue to drive business growth.

So, What is Next for You?

These are the early days of scaling account based marketing and the definitions themselves are still being defined. We are beyond the earliest experiments now with many companies now adopting account based marketing programmes. What I find most interesting is that the way marketers think after adopting account based marketing changes significantly and that is going to result in very different B2B marketing platforms in the future. It is an exciting time if you are in the business of building B2B marketing platforms.