Kyle Lacy is the current SVP of Marketing at Seismic. Kyle was formerly the CMO of Lessonly, which was acquired by Seismic earlier this year. He is a 3-time author, sought-after conference speaker, and strategic advisor to multiple companies. He also has experience leading marketing teams through successful IPOs and acquisitions, and in marketing leadership at ExactTarget and Salesforce.

On this episode, Kyle opens up about the experience of the recent acquisition, how he’s had to adapt his demand gen strategies across companies, and his advice for a winning ABM stack.

• One of the most important parts of demand gen is the alignment between marketing, product, sales, and customer service. 
• ABM is a strategy not a tactic. It’s also not a specific piece of software, it’s a stack.
• Your website is your storefront, brand, and identity. Your website needs to be, at the minimum, just as good as the product you’re selling.

“A very important part of demand gen is the alignment between marketing, product, sales and customer service.”

“I don't hear it talked about a lot. It's like one of those things like email marketing's dead or direct mail is dead or whatever. Like you have to invest in all of it. It has to be a holistic demand gen strategy and a lot of times people over index in paid or SEM and under index on search and organic.”

“Your first investment should be with a person that's done it before. I think a lot of times people hand ABM to a marketer. You really need somebody that truly understands how to do an ABM strategy because it's a strategy, it's not a tactic. And then you've got to buy the software to help support it. And really, it's not a specific piece of software. It's a stack.”

“The website is your second most important product. I don't think a lot of marketers think that way and that you should be investing almost the same amount of time and energy and making your website powerful and easy to use. Just as much time your product team is spending on the product you sell, because it's your storefront. It is your brand. It's your identity. Part of my philosophy, this also applies to demand gen, is to actually follow D2C or retail brands.” 

“The best thing about marketing is that it really doesn't change the fundamentals of how you sell something, the experiences of a product. I think we're going to discover that simplifying the buyer's journey is going to be more impactful, simplifying a lot of things. I think that we, as marketers, tend to over create sometimes. And I think we're going to look back a year from now and see that we have taken lessons from the leading brands today and have applied them.”