How to Think Like The End-User with Madhukar Kumar, CMO of SingleStore

The Revenue-Driven CMO

Today’s guest is a developer turned growth marketer and an expert in Product-Led Growth (PLG). He has 18+ years of experience leading product management and marketing teams at companies such as Nutanix, Redis, and DevRev. Madhukar Kumar is the Chief Marketing Officer of SingleStore and a guest lecturer at Duke University on PLG and New Product Development. Madhukar and Host Chris Mechanic dive into the basics of Product-Led Growth, how to communicate effectively with your customers, and why marketers should spend time as users of their own SaaS products to develop empathy for their buyers.

Takeaways:

• Great marketing comes from understanding the experience and pain points of a consumer of a product or service and the best way to do this is to become a user of the product or service yourself.

• Communicate with buyers in plain language. When someone is looking for a solution, they are going to choose a product with easy-to-understand collateral and messaging over an equally or even more capable product with collateral that uses too much jargon and seems overly complex.

• When crafting copy, write put yourself in the buyers’ shoes and write something you would find valuable and would want to read.

• Marketers should make efforts to better understand the inner workings of the SaaS products they are selling and the MarTech tools at their disposal that they can use to sell them. In Madhhukar’s words, as a marketer, you should "be more cognizant of the tools that you're using.”

• At a basic level, Product-Led Growth (PLG) can be thought of as the free samples of products that stores in a shopping mall giveaway to entice shoppers to experience their product and come into the store to learn more and buy the product.

• To gain further empathy for your customers, put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would want to be sold to. In the SaaS world, for example, you’d be hard-pressed to find buyers who want a long and arduous onboarding process, so make sure to remove friction from the buying experience.

Quote of the Show:

• “I feel you're a better marketer when you're a user yourself” - Madhukar Kumar

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhukarkumar/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/madhukarkumar

• Company website: https://www.singlestore.com/

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7334aa0c-702a-47aa-8c55-760fa2cf4dda/the-revenue-driven-cmo

• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-revenue-driven-cmo/id1638785560

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=60a093a194c64c17

• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz

• iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-revenue-driven-cmo-99614345/

• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-revenue-driven-cmo-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/g1OhLQSUdJw

The Revenue-Driven CMO is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

The Revenue-Driven CMO is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/