This episode features an interview with Jay Lee, CMO of Avalar, a $13B provider of cloud-based tax compliance automation for businesses of all sizes.

Tune in to the episode to hear Jay talk about:

• How to treat your website as an online newspaper.
• The importance of your backup marketing channels.
• How CMOs really feel about metrics.
  

‍Episode Quotes

“We are always trying to get a sense of what the spend is and then what the return is. In B2B, it's all about what kind of leads you are creating and all the different programs that you have and what kind of pipeline you're generating for sales.”

“A recommendation from a partner, ‘hey, you should use Avalara to manage your tax compliance in our system,’ that's enormous. We do a lot of direct marketing ourselves. But it's always better to have that trusted advisor or a system that you're already using to endorse us because you know that it's going to work and that’s what really matters.” 

“COVID happened in March and immediately the whole events industry shut down. That was a whole channel for us. It just went dark. If you're thinking about a multichannel approach to go to market and one of the main ones to your target audience gets shut off — what are you going to do? What we did was we leaned into all the other channels. We put up a bunch of webinars and started to get ourselves into the virtual world.”

“What's so great about marketing versus any other part of the company is it's where you're actually supposed to test a ton of stuff. So there really isn't any bad marketing campaign. Just as long as it doesn't cause any reputational issues or do anything that’s too strange.”

“Marketing should never say this: ‘We tried that and it didn't work.’ Because the world is always different today than it was yesterday... testing should always be a part of the budget.”

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