BC Startup Sales Podcast – Elements of Successful Product Marketing with Grant Halloran (OmniSci)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Grant Halloran, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at OmniSci (formerly Map D), to discuss “Elements of Successful Product Marketing.” OmniSci offers an advanced data analytics platform by combining the capabilities of software with GPU hardware. By bridging the gap between CPU and GPU computations, the platform allows users to utilize and interact with big data analytics on an accelerated scale.

Grant Halloran currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President at OmniSci. In addition to his role at OmniSci, Halloran has an impressive history of leadership at other successful SaaS companies. He was previously Chief Marketing Officer at Anaplan, an advanced platform for enterprise planning, and served as Global VP & GM at Infor, the world’s largest private B2B software company. He also co-founded and built three companies: ProductBank, Brand Manager, and Orbis. Notably, ProductBank was recognized as an award-winning SaaS business in the advertising industry. When Orbis was acquired by Infor in 2012, Halloran led its integration process and continued to build the company’s growth.

On this week’s podcast, Grant Halloran first discusses the importance of an effective customer acquisition strategy. According to Grant, sales teams should really know the customers they want to sell to and why the product matters to buyers. Moreover, Halloran says that momentum matters. Once a strong momentum is established, product marketers should double-down on their efforts.

Next, Grant talks about transitioning from Anaplan to OmniSci and notes changes in his marketing strategy. He mentions that OmniSci’s close relationship with developers helped form a more competitive and technical marketing angle. Grant also offers his insights on what the biggest change in product marketing has been. Before, product marketing was very technical. Now, it’s become much more business oriented. Additionally, there’s a greater emphasis on bringing in marketers with deep domain expertise. Finally, data now plays an important role in marketing. Sales teams can implement customer data platforms in their strategies, allowing them to understand behavioural signals and act on those insights.

After speaking about these changes, Grant explains some common pitfalls in marketing execution:

1. Poor Integration of Marketing Strategies. Product marketers need to be 100% integrated within the company. Specifically, sales teams should understand the value proposition of the company and its core material. It’s important for companies to design training programs that enable marketers to credibly and confidently talk about their products.

2. Not Taking Enough Initiative. Sales teams need to see themselves as more than content teams. There needs to be more emphasis on marketing as a driving factor, not a reactionary one. This includes having the initiative to step into leadership roles and thinking strategically about what the team needs to nail down on.

3. Staying in the Office. Field oriented marketers are often the most successful salespeople. Simply put, marketers shouldn’t be sitting in the office all the time. They should also be spending time out and about with customers, adding value and learning from that process.

In regards to a team’s marketing methodology, everyone should be on the same page. Sales teams should be willing to experiment with different approaches to figure out what works and what could be better. Finally, creating good content and developing a presence on social media is crucial to a campaign. Towards the end of this week’s episode, Grant discusses some misconceptions about B2B SaaS marketing and offers some final thoughts for listeners. He concludes with a last piece of advice for marketing teams: think carefully about which audiences you need to reach. Then, try to balance your team between business and technical salespeople accordingly.

If you liked “Elements of Successful Product Marketing” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!