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Meet Anthony Kennada
Anthony Kennada (https://www.linkedin.com/in/akennada) is a very savvy and talented B2B marketer. He was an early employee at Box and now leads the marketing team at Gainsight (http://www.gainsight.com) (which last year grew revenue 357% (http://pando.com/2015/02/05/gainsight-grows-revenue-357-percent-as-customer-success-becomes-a-key-focus-across-the-enterprise/)and acquired clients like Adobe, Angie’s  List, Citrix, Eloqua, EMC, GoToMeeting  Marketo, WorkDay and many more). Anthony and the Gainsight team have generated demand from an essentially new "Customer Success" category of software.

Anthony's work has been published in Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2013/10/24/what-justin-timberlake-can-teach-b2b-marketers/), Fast Company, Entrepreneur (http://www.entrepreneur.com/author/anthony-kennada). He's a LA Lakers fan, enjoys pick-up games, photography and is happily married to the former Miss Arizona, Brittany Dawn (https://twitter.com/BrittanyDawnCo).
Press play and get ready to learn from a top B2B marketing leader: Anthony Kennada

 

Can you describe the #StartupLife?

Gainsight's CEO Nick Mehta (https://twitter.com/nrmehta) often reminds Anthony: "You don't get too many opportunities like this one in the lifetime of your career."

The people you work with are more than just your co-workers and the early startup culture really becomes part of who you are. The lines between work and life balance seem to go away but you’re OK with it. Then as you get older you realize that there is more risk and you typically have more at stake.

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How did marketing contribute to Gainsight's 357% growth in 2014?

Thought leadership. Thought leadership has been tightly-integrated into Gainsight's content marketing strategy.

Events. Gainsight hosts an annual conference for the customer success industry called Pulse. The conference brings the "Customer Success" community together every year to exchange best practices, success stories, case studies and of course, networking. Gainsight started Pulse in 2013 with 300 people and tripled attendees in 2014. This year they're expecting over 2,000 attendees and will have speakers like: Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball), Keith Krach (CEO of Docusign), Mikkel Svane (CEO of Zendesk), Lew Cirne (CEO of New Relic) and many more. Click here to learn more about Pulse 2015. (http://www.gainsight.com/pulse)

Gainsight also hosts summits and VIP events for chief customer officers, customers, prospects and partners. Anthony says that these programs have contributed significantly to Gainsight's pipeline generation and brand lift.

Webinars. Gainsight does an average of 5 to 8 webinars (http://www.gainsight.com/customer-success-resources/) per month.  They create webinars that are product specific, buyer stage specific and educational webinars for existing customers.

Creative Channels. These is what Anthony refers to as "new ways to get your content across". The launch of "Customer Success University (http://www.gainsight.com/press/gainsight-launches-customer-success-university-and-career-hub-to-invest-in-future-leaders/)" is one example  of a creative channel. Gainsight's marketing team was able to repurpose their own content to provide a different type of value similar to the content pillar strategy (http://www.triblio.com/premium-content-pillars/).

[Tweet ""We really want people to get value from @Gainsight before they ever become a customer" - @akennada"]

 

How do you generate leads from an event?

First make sure you know your attendee profile. Pulse for example has a 60% prospects and 40% customers mix which is ideal because chances are that your happy customers will be talking to your prospects throughout your event.