Episode Transcript
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 0:16
Once upon a time, there were 10s of 1000s of makers struggling every day they built for hours and hours but didn't ship and did not earn enough income one day, the no code wealth podcast came to help them find a way because of this, makers became founders and live the lives they deserve. Because of that, founders live lives of abundance, freedom, and creativity. That's what I'm really all about. Hello, my name is Aziz and from being a poor boy born to a single mother in North Africa, with no opportunities, just sheer hard work, to failing multiple startups, yet learning a whole lot to barely escaping alive the war in Ukraine, even living as an illegal immigrant. I've lost everything twice. And now I'm rebuilding my life one more time. 1%. Today, sharing the wisdom of luminaries have interviewed on this podcast from Google executives, Goldman Sachs, the Financial Times Forbes, Technology Council, World Economic Forum, Harvard University, and even a priest from the Vatican church. Everyone is welcome, here. So let's begin. My guest today is xi Nahata. Xi is a marketing automation expert from India. He is an experienced marketing and inside sales professional, go to market strategies, and the Brand Builder Xi. How are you today?
Akshay Nahar 1:55
Hi, thank you for having me. I'm doing fine. How are you?
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 1:59
I'm feeling happy, optimistic, blessed and ready to have this conversation. And so I will begin with a very simple, I will ask you about everything. Can you explain to anybody? What is a marketing automation expert? What is a go to market strategist? And what is brand building just to simplify it in a very simple way?
Akshay Nahar 2:25
Absolutely. So see, you know, the very first thing you spoke about was marketing automation. So I believe marketing automation is something which, you know, does things on scale, with the help of certain tools or certain tricks that you play, so that you amplify the marketing efforts and take it to the larger audience in a shorter span. So that is how I would define a marketing automation person. The second thing that you asked was about being a go to market studies is to see what happens is, usually there are companies who have multiple products or one single product, now if they would want to launch that product, and it could be a hardware or software product. But if they would want to launch that in a particular geography or a territory with a defined set of audience, at times, even the audience is not defined, and even the geography is not defined. So how do you pick and choose which geography which audience which age group? And how does the personnel look like? And how do you communicate and solve problem for that set of audience, do testing with that sort of audience come back, iterate as needed, and then scale it? So that is what the go to market strategy will be? And of course, also defining ways to reach out to that audience. The and brand building is something like, you know, how do you how do people recall, let's say, if, in India, let's say if I have to book a cab, I will just say, you know, I want to do Ola, right now, which means I want to book a cab with Ola. If I want to do a photocopy, I will just say, Can I do this? That's how you know these bad brands are built, right? So it's the recall when the person recalls your brand, when the person is in that particular situation, or is looking out for some solutions. So that is what brand building is all about.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 4:27
Thank you. I have so many questions for you right now. And I will tell you, it seems to me all those things, or at least most of them are for people who already figured out their product market fit, because many startups really don't know what is the positioning or the brand or the thing that will resonate in the marketplace. So two questions, what's your advice for them in order to maximize the possibility and chance for them to find what their uniqueness And what people wanted the market that they are uniquely able to provide? And should they scale before they do that, or it's a waste of time to try to scale their marketing, before they have a message that is attractive to customers?
Akshay Nahar 5:15
So very good question, I would say, because a lot of companies I've seen, you know, struggling in this case, and even I had my own company 10 years ago. And, you know, I went through the same thing. But he, you know, scaling comes in place, I believe. And once you do scaling off, you know, that systems processes and the strategy, once they really know that, okay, these are 50 said, set of customers or potential customers to move I need to go after and now how do I take this 50 To 500 to 5000, I think that is when the automation and scaling up operations will come in place, but to find those initial 10 2050 potential user who are willing to pay by just seeing your slides, you know, that is the real set of validation for one. So you know, to sum this up, I would say, you know, first test this out on a small presentation with the potential users and buyers for your product, if they agree, and if they are willing to sign a check, then definitely there is some potential and value in what you're doing, or what you're trying to solve, and then figure out the scaling options. I hope this answers your question.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 6:31
It does answer it. And I have another question too. Which is this is entrepreneurship or trying to figure out the difficult part, which is product market fit so hard that actually, you know, like you are currently employed by a company, it's better to be an employee and safer because it's too risky to start your own startup? Or is it really like what many people in the marketplace will say that it's possible for everybody, it's not so hard. As long as you do the research, you can always find the market gap and product market fit. So with the statistics say that maybe nine and from every time businesses fail, do you believe that if people do it correctly with like an MVP, and correct research and all that they are highly possible and likely to succeed? Or that really, it's a game or something that is so risky, that it should be a side or a part time thing that people do while they have their day job and do things that bring them stable income?
Akshay Nahar 7:41
Questions to see, the way I look at this is, it's definitely not a part time, opportunity that you know, better, you don't do any better, you go back to your jobs. It's not easy. It is going to be difficult. It could be time consuming, where often startups, you know, people struggle is reaching out to their friends and family. And asking and checking with them. He I'm building something like this, would you like to use it? Of course, some of them will say yes, because you are asking you how many times a person has, you know, gone all out and asked where the person is not connected? Because that would give a real feedback, just between friends and families. I don't think the real feedback comes in. So that's my take on that. And when it comes to product market fit, yes, it has to undergo certain iterations and certain processes. Like we spoke about MVP, coming back to the drawing board, meeting changes, again, going back to the market and taking feedback. But you know, even in Job, it's not easy. The company that I'm currently employed, it's jombay. But you know, I'm working as an entrepreneur with the company. Because every day I face new challenges. Defining GTM is as good as you know, taking the product or starting a business from scratch right. Now, the advantage here would be we are already have a thought process of what product would look like, and who the target audience could be. But again, validation remains in place, right? So it's neither easier job if you are a marketeer. And if you are going to define the DTM Saturdays, it's as good as you are running your own company.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 9:20
It's very, very correct what you're speaking about. And let's generalize it to our audience who might be people who are inside companies building processes, who are thinking about automation, want to understand the benefit of it want to approach such projects and are thinking about possible mistakes. So let's say your company or any company comes to you wanting a marketing automation project. What do you focus on? How do you beginning how do you know you're automating the correct things? Not the wrong thing? And how do you think about it in this way?
Akshay Nahar 9:55
So I'll give you an example of current company Holland. Automation journey began two years ago, you know, pandemic hit us. And that was the time when we decided to go global. We were, of course, having customer base across the globe. But we decided to double down on the global markets. Now, what are the ways you could reach out to the potential global audience, right. So first, you will have to prospect people based on their persona. Once the prospecting is done, you will have to find out their human contact details like email ids, phone numbers, and other ways to reach out to them. Right? Once that happens, you need to engage that audience. And then you need to, like while engaging, you also build build your brand. And then you maybe ask for meetings and you know, try to sell or tell them what you're working on if this really solves the problem. So in all of this cycle, that's on my marketing automation journey begin. So I figured out a tool, which helped me prospect in bulk, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the best to live seen to prospect, if you want to go to the global audience, that is the tool to go with. And the second tool is apollo.io. In both these tools, I was easily able to prospect of what I had thought of my customer bases. And then to enrich the data, there are multiple tools available, like seasonal hire Lucia, which will give you the contact details of the audience that you want to go after. And then once the data is enriched, you do the bounce check of their IDs and phone numbers, and then you begin the process. Now to reach out to people on LinkedIn, you know, sending out connection requests, one, you know, one after the other doesn't help, right, it is going to be a lot of time consuming task. But at the same time, you need to personalize stuff on LinkedIn. If you don't personalize stuff on LinkedIn, and if you write generic, you know, messaging, it is not going to work. So while automate things to the best you need to understand and be careful, you're also personalizing things in the automation part. So when I send a connection request, I definitely make it a point to personalize the connection request. So then I use a tool called beatify, there's a tool called octopus, which will allow the person to actually customize the mutual connections name, the city, they are in the college, they went to the company they are working in, and you know, other filters. So this helped me to personalize my LinkedIn message. At the same time, the person would think, hey, this person has really done his own work before reaching out to me. Right. So that helps helped a lot. The second thing that we did was automation on WhatsApp. So WhatsApp as a channel we wanted to explore. So without WhatsApp as well, we can customize, you know, the first name, last name, the profiles, the phone numbers, the industry, the company, likewise. So these automation tools really helped us scale faster, reach out to the global audience, because we exactly knew what we were trying to sell to whom we are trying to sell, with a personalized approach. And the ROI for this was, you know, we did about it, in the in the span of eight to 10 months, we talked about 400 meetings within your audience. So that's the power of automation and personalized automation.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 13:27
Thank you. That seems very wonderful. And I want to ask you, because there are two schools of thought. One of them is like, they do what you're doing, which is prospecting with some personalization, some valuable messages before they ask people for a meeting, while other people which we spoke about brand building where they say, build your brand, raise awareness, stay on top of mind of people, and then when they're ready, they will come to you instead of you trying to sell so fast, and that sometimes it can take 192 days or more on average before in between the first contact with a person and brand building until they buy. Which one do you agree with? What's the benefit? Or the negatives of each one? Do you feel that even if you use all those tools to automate messages, that the benefits come after six months or more? Or is it quick? Or what's the role of brand bend building, etc?
Akshay Nahar 14:28
Well, I will not make a statement of you know, automation works fully. It definitely works partially but partially is to actually go dig deep into your audience persona. And try different approaches which are not scalable. So non scalable approach is something that one should really look for. It's not always the automation and going and calling the ground faster than works. So I would say should be a hybrid approach, where we actually go slower, we go a bit slow on let's for example, in There's a certain geography where I don't know the personnel of the audience I want to go after, you know if the HR heads are the decision makers there, or if the psychologists are the decision maker there. So this is in the context of what we do at jombay. So we are a learning and development company. And we work with corporates for their lnd interventions. And we also have a platform for companies that they can use. So, going geography, by geography, and then figuring out in that geography, what is the person that really works? First, you will have to do some groundwork manually, and only then set up automation to scale the office instead. So that is the approach that I've been following. Again, it has helped quite a lot in the past couple of years.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 15:43
Thank you. And what do you see is the future of automation with all the new technologies coming? Like the AI writers, more artificial intelligence, understanding all those things? Where do you see them going? And do you believe that there will create a lot of competition for every lead, because more people will have access to powerful tools.
Akshay Nahar 16:08
So definitely, that is going to happen. And that's where I see the world is moving with, you know, artificial intelligence coming in automation, personalized automation, and hyper personalized automation with the AI layer is something that, you know, even I'm looking forward to, but at the same time, like I mentioned earlier, and and keep repeating at the risk of repeating this, some bit of personal groundwork, now in a non scalable way, still helps that I think, will not go away ever. Otherwise, people may not find the right fit for their product or their offerings.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 16:47
Thank you. That's really, really useful. And what's your advice to businesses who want to find someone who is a marketing automation expert in order to know if that person knows what they're talking about, compared to someone who says big words, but they don't deliver the results? See, first,
Akshay Nahar 17:07
you need to understand why automation. So if you have a defined problem statement on you know, hey, this is my worry right now. And that's where can automation help me? So that's one, once you identify the actual problem statement, then let's say going after, and finding out which are the those tools or companies who would help us get there, then, of course, using their tribal origins and checking if you know the tools really solve the problem, and what is the ROI or what is the outcome that one would like to see, by automating things. If the tool gives the correct ROI, or the requested or required ROI, then I think it's fair to then go on pricing and see if that is affordable, is not any figure out a different tool to automate. So I'm in for businesses. So for businesses to really decide and define the automation tools and strategy. This has to be an approach, I would recommend.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 18:13
Thank you. This is so interesting. And if people want to learn more about you or from you are to connect with you, what are the best websites or social media for them to do so. And I'll write your LinkedIn in the episode description.
Akshay Nahar 18:31
Absolutely. The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn, I'm pretty much active on LinkedIn. So, Elena in terms of certain websites to effort, there are tons of tools, but in the interest of time, I would recommend a couple of tools right now, which will help people automate, drip refine for LinkedIn messaging, personalized LinkedIn messaging octopus to send connection requests in bulk, which is similar to typify, but typifies in AirWatch version of octopus and then signal hire and Lucia to find out contact details Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to prospect and set up email sequence. One could also use software's like yam which is Yet Another Mail Merge a simple Google Chrome extension or mail tracker to send out emails and track them on where they are heading towards. And then, HubSpot is of course the tool that people can leverage to, to set up their end to end fatherland leads. tracking mechanism.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 19:33
Thank you. This is a great and thank you, Xi. It was my pleasure, my honor, my privilege, and I wish you a great day. This was really good.
Akshay Nahar 19:44
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much.
