Founding Father of Marketing Automation - Anurag Khemka

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared and host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Anurag Khemka, the founder of MarketFirst and a pioneer in the marketing automation and marketing operations industry. Today, we will be covering three main areas with Anurag. Marketing automation, how has it evolved over the last 20 years? Marketing operations, is it a strategic or tactical position, function and career path? And third, what is the future of marketing technology? And what are the most important skills required to succeed in marketing operations in 2020 and beyond? Anurag, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Anurag Khemka** (1:21)
Thank you, Ray. I'm glad to be here. You know, it's been a very, very interesting path that I have had. I started as an engineer. I'm an electrical engineer, to be precise. And then I came to US., did a computer science masters, and then joined a networking company, Ungerman Bass, which was a leader in the computer network industry, and was doing their software product development, network management development, where I kind of started to have a lot of interaction with the marketing team and sort of develop my interest into marketing automation. And I started a company called MarketFirst back in 1996 And that was a very first marketing automation company. It took the concepts from internet databases to solve the problems for marketing in terms of your communication, engagement, lead funnel, things like that. And then MarketFirst was pretty interesting overall, had a pretty good run growth in a new nascent market.
And then with the 2000 market crash, the market kind of withered there. But then we got sold to another company called Pivotal, which was a CRM company. And later on I started RightWave. And the whole idea with RightWave was to go a step forward from SaaS to Mass, which we called Mass, which is a marketing automation and service. And we can talk about that a little more, but over time that RightWave has become a marketing operations excellence and marketing automation, ROI related solutions and services company. And that's where I am now.

**Ray Wright** (3:04)
Well, Anurag, let's go back a little bit. So you're an electrical engineer by schooling, became a software development at a US networking kind of infrastructure software company. And then you founded the first generation marketing automation company. What was it specifically that said, man, I think this marketing automation thing can be really big and had you leave a secure job with a larger company to launch your own company.

**Anurag Khemka** (3:31)
So I kind of stumbled into it. So at Angarman Bas, UB Networks, I was the architect of their network management platform. And so there used to be a big, large trade show back early in 1990s called Interop. And Angarman Bas, being a networking company, used to go there. And the Inter there is kind of related to Internet in some ways. But it's really the inter-networking, networking between companies and between things. That was the genesis of that trade show, as well as the Angarman Bas being a pioneer into networking. So we built a network management platform, and I got the opportunity to travel with marketing folks a lot at that time, going to different trade shows, presenting that network management platform, the vision and how the networking is becoming more virtual and things like that.
So I got the opportunity to travel with marketers. So many marketers became my friend, and that is where I also realized with my engineering background that marketing is investing so much money, so many dollars, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes a million plus on a trade show, and they have nothing to show for it after a few months. So one of the trade shows that remains my big memory and the basis of MarketFirst, we went to Interop, we spent over a half a million dollars, we did a very successful show, came back with what everywhere in the company was, praised at more than 2,000 leads. And then fast forward three months and I asked my marketing friend, hey, what happened to the 2,000 leads? I don't see companies bottom line move much, and the top line move much. And he basically said, oh, we gave them to sales. So I kind of investigated more and realized that there was no lead management system, nobody knew about those leads, those are somewhere lying in somebody's file somewhere. But the VP of Sales has no idea, VP of Marketing had no idea, and that's what the genesis of thinking about, hey, what if we do a software for marketing? And at the same time, the internet was taking off. And this is, I'm talking about 1993, 94, time when Netscape had just become public, and internet was changing the way people do business, marketing at that time was primarily focused at the event management. They will do trade shows, they will do some brand management, but really weren't involved in a interactive communication with your prospects and customers. Internet was coming out with a totally different way of interacting and communicating with the people. And I kind of realized that, you know, internet is probably the ultimate response medium that marketing would probably want to have. And so there were many factors coming into play. I got this vision in terms of what if we take internet, we take databases, and we build a system for marketers where they can actually interact and communicate on the website on a one-on-one manner with their audience, but also all the interaction is stored and provided as a leads, which can be followed up. Today, that all looks very basic, but at that time, nothing of that existed because marketers only had a spreadsheet as the maximum technology tool that they ever used. We started with that vision, and then MarketFirst came along.