Ajit Deshpande

Franco Caporale:

Hello, and welcome to new episode on the DemandGen Club podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Ajit Deshpande, Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta. Marqeta is the leader in modern card issuing and the fast growing unicorn FinTech startup as Marqeta Ajit is responsible for channels ranging from events, Account-Based Marketing to paid advertising, SEO, blog content and marketing operations. Prior to Marqeta, Ajit was at Stripe, where he was a growth strategy leader, and Salesforce, where he was the VP of Marketing Operations, as well as in venture capital. Prior to this roles. Ajit is an engineer by training and has been a Bay Area native for 20 years. So I'm really happy to welcome today Ajit Deshpande Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta. Ajit is really great to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ajit Deshpande:

Likewise, Franco nice to meet you virtually.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. Awesome. I want to start right away because I'm sure I have so many questions for you today. So you are the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta. Can you tell us more about you, your story, what's your role today? What does Marqeta do? And tell us a little more so we can understand about you.

Ajit Deshpande:

Yes, I joined Marqeta now four months ago, as you mentioned, I'm responsible for DemandGen. Marqeta is a part of this latest generation of FinTech startups, which are really changing the game in the world of finance and payments. The company is really focused on reinventing or payment infrastructure through open APIs and customization and a simple scalable abilities for different businesses to set up their card programs. That's Marqeta. The responsibilities that I have there as part of the marketing team are really eventually to create demand at the top of the funnel and pipeline for our sales teams. So, that's sort of the nutshell of what my responsibilities are. I've had a variety of different roles.

Ajit Deshpande:

My sort of first decade in the Bay Area was spent as engineer for the most part in hardware. And then I went to business school in Berkeley, and then this last decade has been mostly on the go-to-market side and within there for the most part in marketing. So this, this current role at Marqeta is the latest manifestation. But before that, I was at Salesforce for five plus years and I had a stint at Stripe all related to marketing and go-to-market broadly. So, that's me.

Franco Caporale:

What made you jump from the engineering side to the go-to market and particularly the marketing side of the business?

Ajit Deshpande:

So I think there were two transitions for me. The first transition was from engineering into business, and that was mostly driven by just the engineering side of it being pretty interesting and exciting, but in some ways, a little disconnected from the end customer as far as I was concerned. So I used to be a robotics engineer and I essentially designed optimized robots, but eventually those devices were used for additional production and manufacturing use cases. And then eventually the products came out and then eventually the customer used them. So I kind of always felt a little far off from the end use cases. And so for me, the business piece of it felt just more interesting and more exciting side, kind of use my time in business school to make the transition into business. And then six years ago, Salesforce hired me to join their marketing team to own the business planning function. And then from there on, I scaled up my hands-on knowledge and my involvement with marketing and that's continued to farm.

Franco Caporale:

And I see that you joined obviously Marqeta a few months ago and you went from Salesforce to Stripe to Marqeta, which is more and more startups. So what's the, how does your approach change as you go from a large company like Salesforce, to more of the startup, high-growth like Stripe and Marqeta.

Ajit Deshpande:

If you, as you go from smaller companies to larger companies, the complexity is much higher, but then also your role is much smaller as you go to a smaller company such as Marqeta, your scope is much broader. Your teams are smaller, you're more focused on execution. You're less focused on call it the strategizing or influence piece in the startup where things are much more in your control. You can execute faster. And also you can see the impact in a little bit of a better way in the smaller companies. Now that's not necessarily a knock on either large companies. What's the small companies. I think the key is each of these have their own unique, positive experiences associated with them.

Ajit Deshpande:

And really, as far as I'm concerned, really the move to marketer was not so much driven by the size of the company, but more really driven by the fact at least, or the belief for me, that FinTech is the next big thing that the disruption that's happening in the payment space, that disruption is not just a destruction of finance, but it is actually a disruption of business models. The way we might be charging customers will likely change. And FinTech is with it's consumption based model at the forefront of it. And marketer is at the forefront of it.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. And you know, obviously I see everyone sees  Marqeta billboards everywhere. And I'm going to ask you about that later, when we talk about your campaigns and your programs. So you are looking at your website, you're targeting pretty large brands. What is your strategy to engage and convert these large companies and they're all high growth companies. Do you have more of an ABM strategy and approach, or is it more of a combination with inbound and awareness type of strategy? What is, what is your model?

Ajit Deshpande:

Let me just quickly orient you on the business that we are in as a contextual piece. As I mentioned, we do card issuing. We are the leader in modern card issuing. So if you think of a typical payment transaction, you have two main entity. You have the merchant that is accepting the payment, and then you have the customer or consumer that is making the payment. In an online card transaction, the customer would likely use physical or virtual cards, for example, that are issued by a financial entity to the customer. This financial entity could be a bank, or it could be a corporate institution. And to Marqeta works with these issuing institutions in order to do a variety of things including card issuing for physical virtual cards, card processing, which really is the issuing side of the transaction. And then also just running the entire card program, which is to run the entire application around our transition and just managing the entire program on behalf of that entity.

Ajit Deshpande:

So that's Marqeta's role in the process. And so just by the very nature of it, the companies that we partner with, the companies that are our customers, these companies tend to be very large entities. So our customers in this sense would be our prospects would be the big banks, the tech giants, digital banks, commerce disruptors. Instacart for example, is a customer. DoorDash is a customer. Squared is a customer. All these companies process lots and lots of money. And Marqeta is the entity that is doing it for them. So, as a result of just the part of the business that we plan our customers to the point exactly tend to be very large customer. So really the universe or the number of companies that we are looking at in terms of prospect partnerships is not a whole lot. So we focus very much on an ABM style, high touch approach towards converting these prospects into customers.

Ajit Deshpande:

So that's our overall approach. Now, the hope of that is I think a pretty logical just thought process that flows from the nature of this business. We have the divergent images the team that I'm responsible for. And then we have the business development and sales team, which are also eventually responsible for the conversion of the prospect. We partner extremely closely and the partnership really starts from the highest level where we decide which prospects we want to go after, which is eventually the accountant list selection. And we do together collaboratively based off of criteria, eventual objectives that we have for dimension. So that's starting point for us. And then often then we also have based off both inbound channels where new companies continue to come to the website, fill out forms either as a response to our website organic or as a response to our paid ads. There are companies that come in and disclose themselves and we discovered them and interestingly companies with interesting use cases.

Ajit Deshpande:

Those companies as well as just companies that are similar to our existing customers are similar to the prospects that we know that we want to go after those sorts of companies that comprise sort of beyond the really top named account list. There is a second target list that we have which we've also continue to expand, which is sort of our second target account list. So we really, as we go from there really top accounts and then further into a broader target list, and then even further into an inbound list, we really use a continuum of marketing approaches at the highest level. We have very personalized ABM programs. And then in the middle, we have vertical specific use case specific semi personalized customized marketing programs. And then at the very bottom of it, we have mostly digital and online centric approaches to having companies come through and request to talk to us.

Ajit Deshpande:

It's a whole spectrum for us. And then across the spectrum, we work very closely with the sales team. So every step of the way, as I mentioned, we do account selection together with them. But then we have programs where sales is doing outreach in response to whether it's intent data that we see in the third-party world or in response to anonymous visits to our website, that we can identify across each of the stages of the prospect conversion aspect. The sales team will be doing some sort of outreach. And the Demand Gen team will be doing some sort of targeting where the rich targeting through LinkedIn ads retargeting off of online visits or physical gifts or engagements, high touch networking activities, event based engagements, et cetera. All of these webinars, we do all of these together very much in tandem with our sales teams.

Franco Caporale:

And what do you think of all these channels you just mentioned. Which one do you think is moving the needle more than the others? Obviously, the having to play all of these channel together is what makes ABM so powerful. But if you have to look at that and see, what do you think is really driving a lot of the results?

Ajit Deshpande:

I would really say that in the world of ABM, it is very hard to pinpoint one channel as a winning channel because in the end it's a journey and there are multiple decision makers and the sales cycles are pretty long. So really what we are looking for is not so much a specific channel that we target, but more so in the journey that we put these prospects through so that is the right approach. Now, in terms of if you were to think of where the engagement really is, the heaviest, I would say that it really happens on your website quite a bit, as it pertains to marketing. If we, for example, are engaging with the top accounts that we'd love to convert into customers, we will provide customized content paths for employees or entities belonging to that IP address when there was a website that is an engagement piece that I would say is an always on piece, because that will be a part of every ABM journey that happens.

Ajit Deshpande:

That's one piece I would say the second piece is there will be some sort of in-person outreach by the sales team or the BD team for each of those accounts. And when that outreach happens, the goal for marketing is to help customize that outreach in the best way possible, personalize that. So in our case at market use Engagio, which helps us consolidate all responses for a given account so that when we are triaged into any of these named accounts that we know what engagements have happened and that allows us to personalize to the best extent possible the conversation so that we can get those things going on the right foot. So those are a couple of things that really I would say matter a lot.

Franco Caporale:

And What are some of the metrics that you measure from the ABM perspective?

Ajit Deshpande:

So, as I mentioned, we do use Engagio at Marqeta to just consolidate all engagements, not just for marketing but also for the sales teams. So actually that is a starting point. Now we looked at using engagement minutes as a representation of influence, but at Marqeta we are not really focused on that anymore as of right now. And I would say the reason for that is because eventually minutes are pretty much a attribution that is based on some upfront estimation of what the value of an engagement is. So for example, if someone clicked on a display ad, it is a certain level of engagement where someone came to a virtual event or your webinar, it's a different level of engagement. And really the outcome internal manager is a function of what you assign to each of those things. And we have come to realize over time that that doesn't necessarily represent the true influence that we have.

Ajit Deshpande:

So we, I think are looking at it as of today in a more, I would say, basic or existential way, which is, are we engaging with the right people? So what is the number of engagements that we have with the right people? And are we engaging with them in the context of more realistic sales discussions? So we are looking at what touch points we are having. And then often that we have an objective in terms of having them go through a journey where a number of key channels should have the right touch points with the right people.

Ajit Deshpande:

So we are very much looking at it in terms of pounds. And off of that we are determining if marketing is influencing the deal or not. Now having said that influence eventually is just a metric of success for the marketing side of it, right? The real metric for us is, are these named accounts eventually converting into opportunities for us. And so we look at a goal of engaging with at least 80% of all of our opportunities in fairly significant manner from the lens of marketing. So we kind of look at it that way. And the qualification is for us based off of, like I said, touch points that have good quality on the right decision makers.

Franco Caporale:

And some of your campaigns that are obviously very high touch, right? How do you manage that? Do you have any other technologies other than engagement for the tracking part that helps you deliver to those programs and kind of do it at a scale, I assume, because you're not going to do it for each single account separately. So what is helping you and what is kind of your tech stack on ABM side?

Ajit Deshpande:

There's a number of different elements. Of course sales force is a key because that is the fulcrum is for the sales side of the business. For the BD side of the business. Sales force is a key ingredient where all the accountant contact activity is being tracked, especially down funnel of the lead being generated. Sales force is the key. We use HubSpot to house all of our campaigns or leads are tracked through HubSpot. That's the second piece, as I mentioned, Engagio is a key piece of what we do between HubSpot and Engagio and Salesforce. Those are for us, the three norms that we use to achieve multiple different end goals. Salesforce tracks all of the sales outreach, HubSpot tracks our campaigns and Engagio sort of bring all of it together to give us a view of the account. To those are the three cores.

Ajit Deshpande:

And then around those we have multiple deployment tools we have in the world of ABM Terminus for targeted outreach, but we are doing online engagement we use Terminus, we use PathFactory on the website to enable customized journeys for accounts that we identify as important to us. And I'm sure there's a couple other tools that we use across the board to make this all happen. So the key for us is for all of these systems that are deploying our campaigns and deploying our outreach, all of these systems need to be able to talk to each other connected in sync with each other, for the journey to come to view, Bombora, I think that's one I didn't mention views intention data from Bombora to also determine which of our top accounts is engaging on which of four key topics. And we use that to prioritize sales outreach also on a weekly and monthly basis. So across all of these, we kind of try to do the best we can for personalization and outreach.

Franco Caporale:

And as a kind of last topic that I wanted to touch with you is obviously your relationship with the sales team being in demand generation and especially being so focused in Account-Based Marketing. How do you work with them today? Do you have like a, I don't know, weekly meetings, do you have like a tight relationship and processes? And another question is where do the SDRs report, and why do you think they should report into marketing or sales?

Ajit Deshpande:

So the SDR team at Marqeta reporting to the sales team, and I know that there are other companies where the SDR team reports into marketing. I was at Salesforce before and the SDR team that reports into sales. I actually don't have a strong point of view on what the right spot should be, because eventually whether it is, I would say that the Demand Gen team and the SDR team, they are the glue that connect marketing and sales together. And eventually in that sense, they could be in either spot and do just fine. That said, when we think of the relationship between marketing and sales broadly, I think there's two aspects. Number one is in a world where large accounts and long sales cycles are the norm such as at Marqeta. I think a lot of it is really much about orchestration. For that, you need a very strong positive relationship of accountability with the B team and the sales team.

Ajit Deshpande:

And that's what I would say my key focuses. So you asked about, do I meet weekly with them or not? And I would say, in fact, it's far more frequent than that. We probably have across my team and myself, anywhere between five and 10 serious touch points with our sales partners. And we then correspondingly consolidate all of the intelligence and figure out the right next steps on our side. And then BD and sales will engage with us on the flip side and talk about priorities on an ongoing basis. So it's a very tight relationship. And I would say truly successful dimension org would likely have such a relationship with sales that really internal marketing metrics should be deemed almost irrelevant from their perspective. So when we talk about marketing influence, it is really more of a way for us to measure and quantify our success, but their success is eventually just real pipeline and real wins.

Ajit Deshpande:

Our goal is to really own that our goal is to be accountable for that number. And so when I talk to sales, for example, we talk about influence as a wave for us to measure success, but we do really talk about eventually their number. Are they hitting their number? Are we getting them the right number of marketing qualified leads at the low end? Are we partnering with them on the most important accounts? Are we positioned appropriately? All of those things happen on an ongoing basis for us. And I would say that is where, you know, whether we succeed in our metrics and goals or not. I think that's where the partnership matters.

Franco Caporale:

And as a one last takeaway of this, if you have to leave us with one recommendation for companies that are getting started in their ABM journey, what is something to keep an eye on or something to implement right away? What is your advice?

Ajit Deshpande:

I would say an ABM journey only needs to be a holistic journey, which means you cannot do it in a half, partially focused manner. So to speak. I would say for any companies, the oral thought process would be, first of all, know yourself, which is what is your product? What is your competitive advantage? Who your right customer profile is? That's number one. Number two is to then identify which company is meet your ideal customer profile definitions, align across your go-to-market teams. Number two, number three, then figure out how best to engage with them. And really it boils down to the right person and the right offer at the right time. Like everyone in marketing knows in principle, who are the decision makers in those companies, what are the kinds of offers or engagements that marketing can put together that will entice the prospects into those discussions, and then to provide all sorts of air cover and collateral and context to the BD teams as they engage further.

Ajit Deshpande:

So for any ABM strategy to succeed, whether it's an ABM strategy, that's focused on just exactly one account or a strategy that is focused on multiple accounts within a given vertical, the team has to do all of these things in order to get to success, right? And the last piece, which I think people should never discount is ABM is never a fast game. ABM is a slow game where success might take months or quarters. So the important thing is to be patient. The important thing is to not give up if we are not getting successful engagement in certain ways. And the important thing is to continue to evaluate what is working, what is not working, and then in a collaborative fashion to keep trading and to keep updating until success comes and with a good strategy and more importantly, a good product and a good selling motion, success will come. And that is really the nature of ABM.

Franco Caporale:

Ajit it was absolutely great to have you as a guest on the episode today. Thanks again for joining us. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Ajit Deshpande:

Great. I appreciate it. Likewise, Franco, great to talk to you.