This episode features an interview with Dave Dabbah, CMO of CleverTap, the leading AI-powered customer engagement and retention platform.

Dave has been leading high growth marketing teams in Silicon Valley for the past 20 years. Prior to joining CleverTap, he led marketing at Agora, and he currently serves as an advisor and board member for several Silicon Valley startups.

On this episode, Dave details his strategy for building a growth brand in the B2B space, the unique challenges of being a global company and evaluating international markets, and why it’s your job as a marketer to always make things memorable.

• It all starts with the most basic principle: Know who you’re trying to sell to. What exact problem are you solving for them?
• You probably need to be doing 10X as much ABM as you’re currently doing if you’re trying to grow at scale 
• Whether it’s in product naming, branding, re-designing, re-branding, coming up with taglines, etc. it’s your job to make it memorable

“Targeting lighthouse and strategic accounts is different than targeting the mid-market. [I’m a] big fan of ABM, but my take on ABM is there are different levels of ABM…If you're trying to build your business rapidly, and you're also trying to grab some portion of market share in a specific market, you need to do 10 times as much ABM as you're currently doing in order to really grow at scale.”

“In a B2B business, it becomes important that every potential brand, whether or not they're a potential customer today–they could be a potential customer tomorrow or a potential customer 36 months from now–is aware of [your] brand. And the only way to really do that is to make sure that the brand is getting in front of as many people as often as possible without annoying them along the way.”

“One of our biggest challenges globally is how do we keep the brand fresh? I’m a big fan of having large PR teams that are able to help a company expand pretty rapidly in a specific market…My experience has always been that the best way to grow a global brand is to grow it with leaders on the ground in those spaces and in those markets.”

“My take on PPC is different than a lot of other marketers in the B2B space. A lot of other marketers in the B2B space would simply say to you, ‘what's the return on investment for the amount of money we spend on our pay per click ads?’ The truth is if you just look at stuff like that, then you would probably stop spending money on PPC ads. What it really comes down to is brand recognition. You want people to see your brand and think about your brand…a large portion of our PPC budget is really just billboarding. It's providing us a significant amount of brand recognition, which you need to do time and time and time again in order to really build a growth brand in the B2B space in a lot of the markets that we're in.”

“My personal thing is to always try to make things memorable. If you don't try to make things memorable, then you’re not doing your job as a marketer. And when you look at a bunch of the B2B brands in the marketplace, how many of those would you consider to be memorable?”