Demand Acceleration | Rajiv Parikh

 

About Rajiv Parikh

Rajiv Parikh is the CEO of Position, an integrated digital marketing firm that drives brand visibility and new customer acquisition for technology-driven brands. Position² has operations in the US and Asia with clients from around the world. Their 200 person team combines advertising, marketing, product & technology expertise. The company is funded by Accel Partners.

Prior to founding Position² Rajiv held management roles at AltaVista, Sun Microsystems, NCR and AT&T. He earned his MBA from the Harvard School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from University of New Hampshire.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Rajiv Parikh. He’s a co founder of position squared. Rajiv, welcome to today’s show.

Rajiv
Well, thanks, Alan.

Alan
So Rajiv for the listeners share, can you give the background of you know how you came up to be where you are today?

Rajiv
Sure. You know, this actually started from a long time ago. Interestingly enough, my dream was always to be an entrepreneur, and to start my own company, even as early as middle school, I remember writing a paper where they asked, What are you going to do later in life, and I charted out this course where I said, I’m going to become an electrical electrical engineer, I’m going to then go to Harvard Business School, and then one day start a company. And a lot of this was fueled by I grew up in New Hampshire, my father was working at a manufacturing plant, and he would bring home articles of Fortune Magazine and Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. And I would just, as a person who loved to read, I would just tear them up. And I just really got into the notion of starting a company someday, and building it into something great.

Alan
So So you

Rajiv
started from there.

Alan
You got your undergraduate in,

Rajiv
I got my undergraduate actually in electrical engineering, okay. And I think I picked it because I thought, you know, that’s a technical thing. Yeah, you can learn by learning a lot about technology, you can do interesting things later. And, but while I was in it, and I, I did fine in it, I always had more of a desire to be on the business side. And my father actually encouraged me because he was more in operations, to go into marketing and sales. And even some of my summer internships were that way I went, I first did something in computer science. But then after that got, I was fortunate enough to find opportunities in marketing. And I just fell in love with it, the notion of taking a market looking at it, breaking it down, understanding who the customer was, who the buyer was, building the collateral for them and getting the message to them. So even while I was finishing my electrical engineering degree, I had my eye in that field. And so my first job actually ended up in technical sales for NCR, the cash register company that was in the computer field at the time, this was in the early 90s. And from there, learned how to take my technology skills and learned how to sell to large accounts. And at the time, it first started off with Fortune 500 Companies like GE GE t, and then eventually became insurance companies. And I learned all about this field I was a little less familiar with, but did pretty well at it. And at a certain point, I felt like it was and I had always had my mind, as I mentioned to you about going to Harvard Business School, it was just a dream of mine. I don’t know why it was maybe it was because of what I read in these magazines. And I just looked at the application over the years, and finally figured that I had enough experiences to apply. And about four and a half years in, I applied and I would think I was one of the lucky few to get in. And for me it was the thrill of my life to get into a place like that. I never thought well, I thought I could get there. But when I actually looked at the data, it was maybe maybe I was just there was a lot of hope. That got me there.

Alan
Well, what a combination of electrical engineering degree and then it actually if I if I understood you correctly, that’s your you were in sales.

Rajiv
I was I was in sales, I was in Field Sales for NCR in Connecticut, a very.

Alan
Very unique skill set engineer in sales in so it completely makes sense to then jump and get the MBA, jump and.

Rajiv
Get the MBA and then after that I joined Sun Microsystems i and the reason I joined them was I had gone on a trip I had always taken classes related to entrepreneurialism and product development. I felt that was a great, a great future of becoming that eventual entrepreneur. And so we took a trip out out west as part of a business school trip in 1997. And I just fell in love with the Bay Area I saw I was an east coaster, all my life, grew up in New Hampshire grew up and worked in New England, and just totally fell in love with what I saw out here that the companies were open. There was a lot of energy there was this openness to ideas and trying crazy outlandish sorts of things. There were people who were willing to fund it, there was great infrastructure around it. And I was still I was blown away that in January I could wear shorts sleeve shirt and still might not freeze, right? It was just a new, the weather was fantastic. And the people were amazing.

Alan
How did position squared come about?

Rajiv
Well, after that I went to companies like after sun went to a company called Alta Vista. That was in the search field, one of the first actually the first search company, a company that would index content and make it available to people in a non in a programmatic fashion. And after that stint, that was what I felt would be a good stint to do, because you’re going from biggest company to big company to now, a company that was up to 1000 people. And after that recession that came along the 2001 recession, I felt you know, Why hold back any longer, it’s time to go. So I went out and started my first company, my co founder, and that was in the area of medical devices. And that was to transform asthma. And after I started it, and raised some money from venture capital, folks, I realized that maybe I wasn’t necessarily cut out for medical devices. But I did love the entrepreneurial spirit. And I love the notion of changing the world. So after some consulting stints and some EIR stints fell upon search, again, I was helping a company to build their user audience was a mobile search company. And when I was doing work for them, I was one of the things I dealt with at Alta Vista was, when I ran the marketing group, it took me millions of dollars, or my team millions of dollars, and a lot of iterations to get an answer would take over a year to understand if your messaging was correct. If your segments were correct, if the messages were resonating with the salespeople were make able to make it effective. And so I was reintroduced to search because at that time Google had just come out with AdWords was around 2003 2004, when they came out with it. And that’s when I started experimenting with it for this company. And I fell in love with what you could do with AdWords because it allowed you to get answers really fast, you could look for what you could understand what people are searching for, which is expressing their intent to buy in a very direct fashion, you could place bids on it. And you could construct a cycle of iteration or a cycle of conversion cycle where a person would search, they would come to a page, they would see an ad, they would come to a page. And from there, you’d get them to sign up. And you could measure every single segment. And that really appealed to the engineering. Because I was just this I could tweaks we could tweak so many things and test so many things. And so that’s that was sort of the genesis of position square.

Alan
Okay, so Rajiv, I need to take a quick break, visiting here today with Rajiv Parikh, Rajiv, and he’s the co founder of position squared, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here today with Rajiv Parikh. He is a co founder of positions where they have actually been the first segment we had set the platform for how you began to move into positions where with looking at AdWords searches and what we continue on from there.

Rajiv
Yeah, I got really excited by it. So I kind of put some pieces together saying I wanted to start a company that could make a big difference for people to help them more effectively buy or more effectively help them connect with their customers. And so with that, kind of put the pieces together saying I could create a company like this that’s in my favorite area, which is business and marketing. Combine that with analytics and engineering. At the same time I read that book, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and said, Wow, there’s all these things going on in Asia. Maybe we put all those together. So I call us investors and sort of put the whole thing together with the ability to offer marketing services to companies ranging from startups to large companies, but having a delivery team that was based in the US as well as in Bangalore.

Alan
How does physician square differ from other marketing companies?

Rajiv
The way we differ is that we look at the entire capability of what we call demand acceleration, which is how do I build that demand? Today in today’s market, instead of being sold to people like to buy, about 70% of people, according to various surveys, like to find, like to find, learn about you, before you learn about them, you’d like to research those things. So it’s up to you as a company, to put your content in places where they might consume it. And that may be and blog articles and videos and various media sites, and you want to help them understand that entire buying cycle. And that’s what position square does, we look at demand acceleration as combining the overall strategy, the whole buying cycle, the whole what we call buyers journey, and putting together the content for you, by taking your assets and turning them into videos, infographics, ebooks, we then promote it for you across paid advertising, Google, Facebook, various media sites, and then manage the infrastructure. So your website, what we call your digital present your mobile sites, as well as the marketing infrastructure of your marketing automation system and sales automation system. So we bring that together as a whole solution for all sorts of clients that range from post series A to Series B types of companies in Silicon Valley that have scaled up to unicorns, to divisions of large companies.

Alan
So when you have when you’re looking at your acceleration, digital acceleration platform, yeah, walk me through the process of what a new customer would go through with you.

Rajiv
Right? So that’s a great question. And customers various, some work with you on a piece of things, or holistically. The whole idea is to help these companies connect with their customer, right, or their their prospects. So we map the buyers journey, we look at who the buyer is the economic buyer. In many cases, there’s a person that has writes the check, there’s a person that uses whatever capability you have, there’s the person that recommends it, in many cases, especially if it’s a large sort of business to business deal. And we map those, what would they want, we map what the competitors are doing, and come up with the right messages and work with the client to develop a content calendar for them. And then how to promote that across the objectives that they’ve established. So we work back, if there’s a certain level of sales they’re trying to generate, through these types of marketing efforts, we then work back to understand how much content we need to live to deliver and across what networks we need to deliver it for them.

Alan
So what are some of the common mistakes made in content marketing?

Rajiv
I think what we find a lot is that with, especially with a lot of the b2b tech firms here in the valley, they put out white papers, and they saw a lot of people develop products, and they put up these very technical white papers. And then they expect people after they dot read this white paper to become a lead, and they’re going to send their salespeople after them. And those salespeople will chase them through emails and calls, when in fact, that person has just simply consumed a bit of content that looked interest interesting. First of all, they may have missed targeted them. Because it’s a very technical paper, they didn’t leave them gently download, found the process by offering maybe a 32nd video or one minute or three minute video to some infographics. And then they want to, we want to when you’re looking at that whole process, you want them to consume content, really raise interest, you have the right group qualified, and then had their salespeople last, that whole notion of scoring them through the process.

Alan
So Rajiv, I need to take a quick break. And visiting here, Rajiv Parikh is the CEO and co founder of position squared, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back visiting here today with Rajiv Parikh. He is the co founder of position squared. And we’ve been talking about content marketing and digital platforms and I want to move back to common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to marketing.

Rajiv
Now there’s so there’s so many of them, but I think the easiest thing, the way to look at it is is that it’s really understanding what you’re buying or does and, and how they go through that entire process. So, as we talked about in the era of content, common content mistake is putting out something technical and expecting someone to buy when they after they download something. Another major issue on the, on the, on the side of how you measure what they do, it’s you want to measure where are people coming from, and what are where are people today. So a lot of people focus on their website, on the physical website, the 13 inch screen and that people have in a laptop, when more than 50% of the audience has gone to mobile. And when you’re constructing content for mobile, people want to create these beautiful, rich pages. And the issue with mobile is that if the mobile user is much more directed in what they’re doing, and they have much less patience, so you want to make sure your content comes in in less than three seconds. Otherwise, every second grader, that person is like likely to bounce or move away from your content. So you want to make sure that those load times are fast, you want to do a lot of test and iteration. And there’s some great platforms like Optimizely, or within, within email platforms, see ability to test, try different messages and try your main message that works 50 or 60% of the time, and then try new messages for that other 50% of the time. Right? That’s a major issue.

Alan
I imagined Rajiv and in this in this industry, you have a lot of do it yourself versus saying, Well, hey, I can do it all myself. And, you know, why do I need a content marketing firm? And, you know, walk walk me through the process of of, you know, how do you get that do it yourself, or to really understand the value of using people with higher expertise and in processes?

Rajiv
Or frankly, Alan, we wait for them to make mistakes. So it’s when after you get burned a few times, we’d like people who’ve been tried something a few times, they’ve realized they’re having an issue, and then they need help, because then they are more likely to understand what you’re going to be what value you’re going to be offering to them. So we walk them through a process typically where we sit them down over a 45 minute interview, understand their business, understand what’s working and what’s not, so that we can help recommend a solution. So we look across content, we look across their advertising efforts, their ad tech efforts, and then their martech efforts and see, are they invested in the right platforms? Do they have the right skills? Where can we potentially or someone else complement them in terms of what they’re doing, because if they’re great in a particular area, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, we really want them to be, frankly, if they’re there, we want them to be good at their product and their market, and how and understand how things are working in terms of where their business is going. And then we can fill in all the other pieces with them.

Alan
So yes, should accompany trying to be utilizing every social media marketing effort, you know, through Facebook or LinkedIn, or how do you how do you walk a person through? Okay, this is what you should view as social marketing and you know, the best value for you?

Rajiv
Yes, I mean, that’s a really good question. Because different social networks work for different people. If you’re a b2b firm, LinkedIn is a great place to go. Right? If you’re a consumer firm Facebook is that doesn’t mean exactly, you know, each one is exactly each thing. So it’s great to try a bunch of them. Have a test period, set aside a budget to test usually, you want to set about set aside about 20 to 30% of your budget to test different things and make it work now the first thing that most businesses should always be on is on Google and Bing search, right? Because that’s when people when they have intent, that’s where the first place they’re gonna go. And that’s probably the easiest low hanging fruit after that, yes, try Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks to see what works. And then see, and then make them work across each other what they call retargeting. So if somebody does a LinkedIn search, you can retarget them on Google search, or if something works really well on Facebook, make them work back and forth, so that you can get them to the right point.

Alan
I’ve noticed in the social media realm that a lot of money they want to pay to play. But then there’s also some other venues like I don’t think LinkedIn allows video to come in on their their site. How do you work with, with these social media platforms? Because they’re constantly changing algorithms, right?

Rajiv
And that’s the hardest part right is they’re always changing what they allow you to see what they allow you to advertise how they allow you to advertise. Either you have to be on top of it or you ask ask experts or read up on it, and that’s usually the fastest and easiest way. There’s so much happening in all those places. That that’s why we have a full Time 200 person staff all over this.

Alan
How often should a person design their user interface?

Unknown Speaker
That’s been increasing dramatically. This used to be once every three years. Now I see folks, right after they finished, the first one finished a new website redesign, they’re already on to the next one. And because there’s so many different ways in which someone can touch you, with your website, your mobile site, with tablets, with different pages on Facebook, and LinkedIn, and through multiple social networks, you’re always you’re always doing something. It’s really amazing

Alan
In this ever changing world to it seems like the whole venues for how people are finding you are constantly in emotion.

Rajiv
That’s right, who, whoever knew that a hot thing to do now would be to take a picture of yourself, but a funny filter on it and send it to someone. And that’s what our kids do every day on Snapchat.

Alan
It’s a different world, isn’t it with this younger generation, the older ones still learning how to work a mobile phone, the younger ones are or.

Rajiv
I thought it was important to be connected to my kids on Facebook, but half the time they’re on Instagram. So who knows. But the cool part is there’s so many ways of reaching people. And it’s very easy. These networks have made it very easy to try them and get on to them. And then and then try different things and see what works. And so it’s really about making sure that you’re open to all these metrics and tying it all together with the right technology.

Alan
So Rajiv, a person wants to contact position squared for more information, how would they do that?

Rajiv
Can simply reach out to go to our website, position two.com. Or send an email to sales at position two.com. And that’s an easy way to get in touch with us.

Alan
I have been visiting here today with Rajiv Parikh. He is the co founder and the CEO of position square. Thanks for being on today’s show.

Rajiv
Thank you, Alan, for having me.

Alan
We’ll be right back after these messages.

 

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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