Predictions for a hopefully better new year

Executive Producer Ben Wilson sits down with Lauren to discuss her predictions for 2021, including the evolving interface between digital and brick and mortar, how to connect when in-person meetings aren’t possible, the future of data, and what some of her personal predictions will be in what we all hope will be a better year than 2020.

About the guest Lauren Vaccarellois an award-winning marketing executive with a track record of accelerating revenue growth for the fastest-growing SaaS companies in Silicon Valley. With a strong background in demand generation, she excels at building scalable, integrated campaigns that leverage cutting-edge marketing techniques. Although performance is at the core of who she is as a marketer, she believes businesses need to tell compelling stories and build a brand if they want to own a category. Lauren also co-authored the highly regarded books “The Retargeting Playbook” and “Complete B2B Online Marketing.” She has held executive leadership roles at Box, AdRoll, and Salesforce. She was a member of the Google Tech Advisory Council and is a popular speaker at industry events such as ad:tech, South by Southwest, ClickZ Live, eMetrics, and the Online Marketing Summit. In 2014, Lauren was honored by the San Francisco Business Times and named to their list of “Influential Women in Business.”

Quotes

“This was the forcing function for every single business to lean into digital. I even think about, all of the restaurants and there’s so many restaurants that are impacted by this. I was speaking with a friend about this who had worked for software companies specifically for restaurants, and what they had mentioned to me was sales are up and I went, how are sales up? I thought the restaurant industry has taken such a big hit, and it was, ‘Well now all of these restaurants that never really had to care about digital, they didn’t really have to think that much about takeout or touchless ordering.’ That has to happen.”

“It’s really similar on the marketing side; both marketing professionals and IT professionals have had to adapt more quickly this year than probably any other profession. And it’s this ideaof don’t rely on your laurels; adapt, pivot as fast as possible for marketers, especially enterprise marketers who really heavily relied on in-person events, field marketing, that one-to-one interaction that’s gone, but I don’t know a single marketer who had a quota reduction because this year we all had to keep driving demand.”

“I want to say in 2021, it’ll be a little bit lighter, it’ll all be easy. It hasn’t happened yet in 2021. Maybe it will, but it’s just going to keep going, and the added complexitythat’ll happen in 2021 is optimistically the second half of the year we’ll be able to see each other in person again. So now IT professionals and marketers now have to go, ‘We knew the old world, we pivoted, and made this new, fully remote world work. Okay.’ Now you have to make both work and they have to work together.’”

Links

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn | Follow Lauren on Twitter

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