Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing with Business Growth

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Tullio Siragusa (0:18)

Welcome to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio, and in each episode, we sit down with a marketing expert to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. Let's get started. Today, I'm excited to welcome Ravi Shankar, who is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Denodo. With more than 35 years of global experience across marketing, sales, and technology, Ravi has helped shape the growth of some of the world's leading enterprise software companies, including Oracle, Informatica, and Siperian. At Informatica, he built market category that helped propel the company to $1 billion in revenue and played a key commercial role in Siperian's $130 million acquisition. Today, he leads global marketing at Denodo, bringing together everything from brand strategy and demand generation to AI-driven growth and customer advocacy. With this unique combination of technical expertise and business leadership, Ravi has a fascinating perspective on how marketing can become a powerful engine for growth.

We're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth, and I'm looking forward to dubbing in and see how it all connects marketing strategy to measurable business impact.

Ravi, before we dive in, I'd love to hear why was aligning marketing with business growth, the topic you chose to explore with us today, and what makes it so important right now?

Ravi Shankar (2:05)

That's a good place to start, Tullio. Quite often people associate marketing with building brands or generating leads, but truly like marketing influences revenue, customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. These sit at the intersection of having customers, the products that are being developed, the marketing aspect of it, like working with the partners, working with the sales and so on. So it's purely to me a focus on the growth of the entire company, the profitability and the customer value. So why this is important for me?

You look at it like right now, you would agree that buyers most often are more engaged with the company before they even, or I should say more aware of the company before they even engage with the company in a sales cycle. There's some statistic about 70 percent of the due diligence is done prior to them engaging with the company itself. Now, with the AI, it's even transforming it much more, making it easier for them to go and ask, hey, I have this problem, I need the solution, who would you recommend? Marketing becomes a much more bigger answer than what they used to do in the past, which is very siloed. It should be treated as more of a growth function, aligning for the end-day business, and it should be aligning it with the company objective. Company objectives are definitely revenue and growth.

That's why I picked this topic, because marketing should be viewed as a growth engine across the entire company.

Tullio Siragusa (3:42)

I love it, and we agree with you here on the show, because actually, just last week, I did a monologue where I talked about how the CMO has grown marketing.

It really has become the owner of the culture inside and outside of the company. You said something unique about the promise you make to the market, that if you don't have alignment internally on how you work, it doesn't land as genuine. People know because they understand that today. It's a bigger role now more than ever to be the CMO. The reality is you still get pulled between near-term results, campaign results and long-term brand building. That's the tug and pull that happens every day. How do I keep building authority while also generating immediate results for growth? How do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals and where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen still?

Ravi Shankar (4:36)

So in terms of the alignment, you're correct, that there definitely is a tension between the short-term objectives and the long-term brand building and focusing on one versus the other creates a lot of misaligned results. So if you focus more on the short-term and you're producing the leads that the sales needs to convert and generate the pipeline and then the eventual business from it, you are not building the brand or investing much in the brand and eventually you will see all the leads and opportunities go down. But if you focus purely on the brand building and put everything into the awareness side, then the sales kind of struggles in terms of generating the leads in the short-term and to be able to convert them to opportunities. So the key here is basically balance. So how do I kind of now accomplish this particular part?