This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help marketers to build the meaningful relationships with the right companies. My guest is Riaz Kanani, Founder and CEO of Radiate B2B.

Riaz is a mix of marketer, technologist and entrepreneur who worked with cutting edge technologies throughout his career, whether it be the nascent flash/java video space in the early 2000s to combining email, mobile and social media marketing technologies in 2008. Throughout it all, he’s used data as the backbone behind these technologies to better understand how people behave and use these new approaches. In that journey he founded 6 companies and worked for IBM, Lyris, Alchemy Worx and Profusion. He’s also a mentor at Techstars.

Today he’s helping to build a better way to do B2B Marketing that increases both average contract values and the speed of closing contracts.

And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Riaz to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing automation and why the answer is in choosing a different approach, not in more tools.

We also discuss what it takes to succeed in B2B software, and what decisions and mindsets are fundamental to stand out.

Here are some of his quotes:

It became really clear when talking to those companies that we've become in the b2b or business marketing space, very reliant on content and events to drive lead acquisition, nurturing, email marketing obviously as well. Basically, we were all reliant on exactly the same things, and b2b marketing would become homogenous. And the only way to stand out was really to be doing better creative. And I think that's a marketer’s worst nightmare.

I felt that there had to be a better way.

The more I looked at it, the more I realized that if you were building a marketing automation company today, you wouldn't build a platform that looked anything like the marketing automation platforms that exist today.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

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