Tejaswi Raghurama is a marketer who specializes in wearing many hats (sales, marketing, lead generation, and more) while rapidly growing startups in India.

When he first began his marketing career, he joined Pipemonk as their second employee and was a core part of their journey from 0 to $25,000 monthly recurring revenue (or around $275,000/year).

Then, he led demand generation at VWO (Visual Website Optimizer), a startup that generates $14 million annual revenue.

Now, he’s a three-in-one marketing, sales, and growth “team” at Anaek, a startup developing a Slack productivity app.

I had the honor of interviewing Tej via video chat where I picked his brain about all things marketing—lessons he’s learned in his career, how to (truly) understand your customers, tips on crafting and launching strategies, conversion rate optimization ideas, and much more.

Here’s the wisdom he had to share.

How did you get started in your career and specifically in marketing?

Right out of college, I started out by deciding that I would not work for any multinational corporation or job that was corporate in its language.

So, I decided to take on an internship at a nonprofit called National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), and what they told me was that there was a whole world where entrepreneurs existed.

Believe it or not, in India, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re considered to be very risky with your life, and hence you cannot marry people, settle down in life, and things like that. So ten years back, entrepreneurship was looked upon as something that was only for crazy people or those who don’t want to get a (real) job.

But, within the last decade, thanks to the boom in the US, Canada, and perhaps Europe, India has accepted that entrepreneurship is actually “sexy” and good for solving problems in the world.

So, the NEN was in the same zone where we were working with schools and colleges to promote entrepreneurship as a valid career option, letting them know that, even if they don’t get a job, they can actually start up on their own and still live well.

That’s how I got into the world of startups, and then here’s the interesting story of how I got specifically into marketing:

That’s quite the unique path! So, how did you land your current job?

Getting my current job was interesting because, when you grow in a marketing vertical, people come to you; you sort of become an influencer in the small circle that you have.

For example, let’s say, within two years, you grow Ascend beyond what it is today. People get to know that you were in the company and helped build it on the journey from 0 to success. Then, the next agency that’s on their own growth journey will come to you rather than to somebody who hasn’t done this before.

Within 3-4 years, especially as a marketer, you increase your influence in the region—the last two startups I worked for came to me and then I got to choose where I wanted to go from there.

Very cool; it sounds like you have a reputation in your area and among local startups at this point, right?

Yeah, especially because there is a very high demand for marketers in India, particularly those who specialize in software, such as SaaS marketing.

There’s also a lot of funding coming into startups—when you have funding, you need to grow faster, and when you want to grow faster, you need to make fewer mistakes. So, startup founders would rather hire someone who is more experienced and has failed before. That skillset is appreciated, so that’s how I got started.  

So, you have all this experience with these different startups, you were selected by them to be the marketer, sales, and all of the important roles in one—what are the big lessons you learned along the way?

One big thing that you and your clients have heard is the terms B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer), ecommerce, SaaS...all these buzzwords that they use in the industry. At the end of the day, it’s human to human (H2H) that matters most.

So that’s one major lesson that I learned: no matter how good your software is, or how good your agency is in terms of strategy, brand, or otherwise, at the end of the day, if you’re not able to convince your customers and relate with their problems, you will fail—either now or later. There will be a failing point in your business where any hacks or any good strategy can’t take you beyond that stage.

At the end of the day, if you’re not able to convince your customers and relate with their problems, you will fail—either now or later.

When you’re figuring out what is required for your company’s growth, keep in mind that you’re selling to a customer, and at that, a human customer. So, you have to bring your humanity or personality to what you’re doing—software, hardware, product, ecommerce, or otherwise.

One lesson I learned the hard way is that many founders love their product, software, or agency, but if they disassociate the customer from that emotional attachment they have, then everything breaks down.

That is one lesson that I still carry:

If you’re not able to build a relationship with the end customer, then everything fails.

Tejaswi raghurama

At my previous job, I would live chat with almost every visitor that came to our website. Whenever someone would land on our website, I would send them a message saying, “Hi, Tej here. How can I help you with x?” Not the product, but the problem.

That shows that you’re not here just to sell but instead actually help your customers. That’s one thing, even at scale, that I continue doing—just talking to customers and giving product demos, for example.

That’s one lesson across marketing, sales, and business building in general that I have seen and learned from: talk to your customers every day; designate at least a half hour to doing so.

For instance, about 10% of our customer base (at Anaek) is in Canada, and they love talking to people—they’re very welcoming, and they’re ready to spend like 15 extra minutes over the scheduled time to chat.

It’s all about intent: if a business wants to build a relationship, then it’s much easier to get the client to hop on a call. But, if a salesperson or an out-of-context person calls the customer, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t go as well.

With the lessons you’ve learned and the skills you’ve gathered, did you have guidance in your role or are you the one who came up with all of the business-boosting strategies?

That’s a tough one because, when you’re early on in your career and you’re going into unknown territory, you can’t give excuses to the boss, right? They are investing in you as a risk—they could have gotten a more experienced person and paid them more, and instead, they are going with you.

One thing that I really learned the hard way is best explained in a quick story:

 

So, the first lesson when you’re learning marketing is: 

Make sure that you talk about the problems of the customer and not the jargon of marketing or your brand’s solutions.

And that gives you leverage: you don’t have the pressure of selling the product; you just focus on understanding people and their problems.

To put this into context, when I joined the marketing role as a newbie, for three months, I did nothing but phone calls and live chat to get to know what Pipemonk’s customers talk about and what they like. I didn’t write a single blog post for three months, and I didn’t write a single email for five months since joining the company.

After that, the journey of a marketing person—writing blogs, emails, and everything else, that becomes much more risk-free: you know how the customer is speaking, and you’re not imitating or guessing. So, that’s how I learned—actually talking to the customers.

But, you can’t transfer this knowledge to every company because the customers, products, or services differ, so every time, it’s the same process: three months of talking to customers, and then you can get to marketing. It’s a time-consuming process that requires patience, but the long-term returns are then much greater.

Would you say that three months is the perfect timeframe to really understand your customers?

Yeah, and even in job interviews, I really push for it—I’ll talk with the hiring manager or CEO and make sure I get that “get out of jail free” card:

If I make mistakes for the first three months and if I don’t get a new customer, am I fine? Are you investing in me for the long term?

If yes, then okay, great; if no, then it shows that maybe the company is just too chaotic or restless and may not be the best company to work for anyway.

Three months is one quarter, in a business sense, and I would say that’s a good timeframe. It took me, even now in the current business, after four years of experience, four months to truly understand the customers. That’s a lot of time and a lot of patience from the company’s leadership.

I can only imagine! Would you say that learning about the customers was the most difficult part, or was there something more challenging that came after?

When I started talking to customers as a marketer, I already love talking to people, so personally, that wasn’t a challenge for me. 

The real challenge—especially in marketing—is letting go of things.

tejaswi raghurama

For example, when I was writing a blog post, I would over-engineer and overthink how to make this paragraph, sentence, title, or meta description better.

As a marketer, I think that’s the toughest job, and I’m still figuring it out, but letting go of things—making sure this project moves from here to done—and not being emotionally tied to your content are important. For example, if a blog doesn’t do well, it’s not me failing; it’s just the content underperforming. Disconnecting yourself from your creation is the toughest job—I still don’t know how to do it, but I’m getting there.

Disconnecting yourself from your creation is the toughest job in content marketing.

I think one thing that has helped me, especially in being consistent with content, is, when writing a long-form piece, to make sure that the ending note is one big, open-ended or controversial question.

Let’s say you’re writing about branding for millennials. Put some judgmental statement in the ending—millennials are like this, millennials like dopamine, that it’s all about social validation for them, and so on. If you’re a reader, you won’t communicate or share [the content] if you actually agree with everything and you’re fine with it.

So, when you want comments on your blog post, make sure that you drop in a comment on your end first within your blog article—add a comment, saying “I think this is how millennials behave,” and let the community see the comment and contribute their opinion to that statement. It’s all about initiating the conversation with an opinion rather than simply asking, “what do you think?”

Don’t leave open-ended questions; instead, try to drive the conversation by getting your readers’ attention. Their reaction to your comment may be good or bad, but for SEO and your own satisfaction, it works. It should work—at least try it for four or five blogs and readers might start noticing the trend that you’re bringing your own opinions into the subject and not just commenting on it as a company.

Great tip! Earlier in your answer, you mentioned how, as a marketer, you have to try new things and keep moving forward, so do you agree with the idea behind Facebook’s former motto, “move fast and break things?” If so, what would you say the benefit is to that notion in marketing?

Brilliant point—I have a cap that says, “bias to action” that was gifted to me by my previous team. It means that when it comes to learning from processes, such as structured surveys, versus acting on it, I would rather just act on it.

So it’s more than speed; it’s about how you push something out to the world, measure the reaction, and then iterate. What I’ve seen is that many marketers move fast—they write fast, for example—but they don’t measure back; they don’t look back at what they did. That defeats the purpose of launching and moving fast.

If you’re breaking things, the important part is understanding why they broke.

tejaswi raghurama

That is the missing piece when it comes to Facebook’s strategy and motto: that they don’t speak loudly about it because they’ll make mistakes with their technology, so if you do move fast and make mistakes, make sure that you document and learn from every mistake.

So move fast, but look back on your mistakes and why they happened.

Perhaps they should change their motto to: “move fast and then understand why you broke things.” Now, let’s get a little bit into the details of launching a strategy: How do you make time to create new strategies without sacrificing current ones? What do you do to manage the smaller tasks in the meantime?

We can look at a framework: effort versus returns.

If you are spending a lot of effort on something that is giving you less leads, then you should either not do it or automate it. For example, tweeting out a blog post after it’s published is a very mundane task—you know what to tweet out; you just need to type it out and hit send. But if you’re using tools like Buffer or Zapier, you can get rid of that task altogether.

So, the first thing I normally do is that when I do enough things that require repetition, I see the trends of where I am spending time with no immediate return, and then I ask, “can I automate it?”

If I can automate it, then of course I do; if not, then I just pause it so that I can think about the strategy or the next big thing instead. Unless you automate them, you’ll always be stuck doing these small tasks, and it’ll take away from the structure of focusing on new strategies instead.

In my own experience, with outbound marketing, where you actually cold-email leads, what I had to do was take two months just to set it up manually once: what message works, what subject line, and the timing of the email. Once we knew what worked, we automated it, so now, I won’t spend more than five minutes on that campaign so that I can instead work on a new campaign.

As a marketer, always keep looking at what things you’re doing with the least immediate return and then automate them—find tools, spend money on them, because you’ll spend less on tools than on strategies that are effective.

As a marketer, always keep looking at what things you’re doing with the least immediate return and then automate them.

That being said, do you think it’s better to keep up a social front while you’re brainstorming new strategies in the background, or do you prefer to stop everything and then launch a big, full-force strategy—when it’s ready—that’s overall more effective?

Stopping anything entirely is bad in marketing because marketing is all about reinforcement. If you tweet once, nothing happens. If you tweet the same thing, perhaps in a different format, four times per week, then something starts happening, and if enough people eventually tweet about it, then something really happens. So, stopping anything will be self-defeating for your goals.

The importance of reinforcement in campaigns, depicted by VWO Founder Paras Chopra

That’s why I suggest actually having a budget for spending on tools and software. One interesting tool I use is called Cloohawk which creates tasks out of Twitter. As an example, if you tell it to track tweets that include “agency” or “marketing,” then create a list out of those searches, it will create a task list for you. It saves you time when looking for related content because then you can just click through the list to engage with those tweets.

Thanks to the software world, there are single tools for single problems. If you can spend on a tool, then push for it, because otherwise, you’ll be spending your own salary doing those same tasks manually. It will save you your time and your creativity for coming up with the next big thing instead that could get you, say, a hundred more customers.

There are certain things, such as calls, that cannot be automated, but email responses, tweets, or even scheduling the call can easily by automated. You can either hire a virtual assistant or use tools—the ones that work great for me are Zapier, Cloohawk, and Buffer.

A tip on pitching a new tool (or budget for tools) to your boss: convince them of its importance by pointing out the areas in which you are slow, missing deadlines, etc. and how the tool can save you time.

That’s an excellent tip. Let’s move on to brand awareness: do you think it’s easier to grow awareness through organic or paid strategies and why?

I think that’s a question that most companies face because they either have time or money to spend (but not usually both). The framework that I use has four quadrants:

1: Lots of money and lots of time

2: More money but less time

3: Less money but more time

4: No money and no time

 

Paid marketing is a great way to fuel your organic pipeline. When it comes to organic and paid marketing, it’s not a matter of “versus”—you can spend less on paid, but make sure that your paid strategy is always on to supplement your organic marketing.

So in your roles at the companies you’ve worked for, do you tend to fall in the second (more money but less time) or third quadrant (less money but more time)?

Somewhere in the middle. It’s always top-down in this case: if your founder is fine with slower, more budget-friendly growth, then your job is done and you don’t need to convince leadership. But it always comes down to the value or culture of the company: if the company is fine with slow growth for the long term, then you can do a lot of content marketing.

In my previous role at VWO, the interview went like this: I asked the founder one question, “what are your priorities?” and he said, “I am here for 500 years, and that’s how I make decisions. I don’t make decisions for myself; I make them for the company 500 years from now.”

If that is the type of company you’re getting into, with that level of long-term clarity, then you can do any experiments for any amount of time because they either have the patience or the budget to stay in the market for a long time.

But, if you have impatient leaders, which are really common and have every right to be impatient, then you’re better off spending on paid marketing or lead generation because it’ll give you immediate value. Either you will fail at it or succeed; the results are quick. For instance, SEO takes three to four months to get results, so if your leadership is impatient, don’t do it—you may actually lose a job from it.

If there are any marketers reading this who are working with an impatient leader, the best way to move forward is to do paid or direct marketing. For example, go to events, organize luncheons, or host Meetups where you can pay for the lunches or meeting to get real customers and quality face-to-face time—it will keep your CEO happy.

For short-term results, do individual meetings, sales calls, or paid marketing. If you’re there for the long term, however, organic is the way to go.

Do you have any failure or success stories regarding B2B companies increasing their brand awareness?

We can learn a lot from Buffer: they had this brilliant strategy that was not actually a strategy because they were very transparent about their brand from day zero. So if you search “salary of Buffer community manager,” you can actually know what it is because they’re very confident in what they do and how they do it.

If you look at their blog, they have all of their strategies in depth there, and it happened organically that when they were doing educational content, they saw that people were looking at the revenue dashboard and numbers, and they were thanking them for the information. How many companies in the world share their revenue numbers before going public? Buffer may be one of the first few startups that started doing this, showing their monthly revenue, churn, customers lost...they were very open about their numbers.

What ended up happening was that Buffer positioned itself as a transparent company, and they started acquiring customers who loved them for that. That’s the way in which they differentiated themselves in the crowded space of social media tools: “we are so transparent that you can learn from our mistakes.”

In B2B, it’s more about your value translating into your strategy. If you can relay your value in what you talk about, then people relate to it, and you can be more successful. When you are a brand that sells a software or B2B product, especially, it will be very tough for your brand to create a plan because maybe your customers won’t look at you for a year—they’ll use your software, but they won’t talk to you face-to-face.

In B2B, it’s more about your value translating into your strategy.

An example of what you can do is create a new term in the market: for example, “inbound marketing” didn’t exist before HubSpot, but the term is searched less than the brand name is. As a brand, if you can create a term in the market, and talk about it loud enough, then your brand eventually takes precedence over that term. For example, “Shopify” is searched more often than “ecommerce” today because Shopify is all about ecommerce: they started writing about it, talking about ecommerce strategies, and so on.

A brand can kill an industry...in a good way: people don’t search for taxis now; they search for Uber. Even in a product brand, if you can create a term in your industry that is very unique to your product, then you can actually steamroll over competitors if you’re good at what you’re doing.

Drift, a software company, is doing this with “conversational marketing”—in other words, you can talk to people. Apparently this has been happening for 50 years, but Drift has made this tool that is called a “conversational marketing platform,” which is a new term in the marketplace and makes people wonder, “hey, what’s that?” So instead of searching for “conversational marketing,” people tend to search for “Drift.”

It’s very tough because you need to be very consistent in your messaging, but it’s an unbelievable marketing moment when you succeed. HubSpot talked about inbound marketing even when people didn’t know about it—they would write long-form posts about everything inbound marketing-related, and now people search for HubSpot before inbound marketing.

It takes time, but if you’re there for the long term, if you want to build a business that’s known for industry terms, then you can—you just have to put money and time into it. Oftentimes, startups don’t get to care about the brand because they’re either short on time or money or both.

My last example comes from a software company in India called Belong. What they do is they look at social signals of professionals via their LinkedIn pages and Twitter handles, and they help companies hire through outbound methods. Let’s say you update your LinkedIn profile—that’s a social signal that maybe you’re unhappy at your current job so you’re upgrading your page. This tool then sends a notification to its customers (companies that are hiring), letting them know that this good marketer at this company is looking for a new opportunity.

So what this company did, besides aptly naming their company “Belong,” is made all of their content about outbound hiring, which is very new to the industry. That’s another great example of a company writing a lot of content around a new term to grow brand awareness.

How interesting! Switching gears here, do you want to share your favorite strategies for getting quality leads?

So one of my favorite strategies is one where you can directly reach out to the customer one-on-one. Outbound cold email marketing is looked down upon in many industries, but I have found great success with it. If you personalize it, where you can understand the problem and what their context is, then pitch your solution, that works great.

For example, Vice Media recently launched an office in India, so I looked at the news and all the information I could find about their new office, and the first line of my message to them was, “Hey, howdy from India, your new home!”

If you can personalize your email and still be utilizing the cold outreach method, it’s fine because they will be playing into your empathy and will recognize that you’re not just spamming their inbox; you’re providing value. That is my favorite channel: I can talk to a customer, in this case sitting thousands of miles apart, just by sending an email, and maybe then requesting a call. So “outbound learning” or outbound marketing is one strategy that has worked well for me.

The second is Meetups for your customers where you pay for their lunches—because who doesn’t like free lunch? Call them over, have one of your salespeople or marketing people talk about your company, product, or service, but make sure to explain it over a good lunch. It’s very informal: people can talk about their problems and challenges openly, which they weren’t able to do before.

We used to close deals of $25,000 over a single lunch. If you can get your CMO or lead salesperson to that meeting, that’s a chance for your customers to talk to them when they can’t through any other channel. Free lunches or Meetups where you can get all your customers in one room is a way to sell without selling.

So when you’re doing 1:1 interactions, do you focus primarily on opening up the discussion to their problems and letting them know that you’re there to listen and help them solve their needs?

Exactly; people love people who listen without judgment. So, if you can talk to them like a therapist and tell them, “I am a marketing agency, but forget about me; let’s understand you. What are your challenges? How can I help without my agency coming into the picture?” If you open up like that, they start trusting you within minutes.

People love people who listen without judgment.

tejaswi raghurama

Once you start developing that, your sales team takes a back seat, and all you need is a business card and the next appointment date (where your sales team takes over). The lunch meeting is not where you sell; it’s just to hear them out, give them good food or beer, gain their trust, and schedule the next appointment date. That’s it.

Once you get it, you hand it over to your sales team and it’s up to them to close the deal. As a marketer or someone who is bringing in leads, my job is to give them a good time and make sure that they are happy and can begin to trust us as a solution to their problem.

Basically, as we say in the US, we "butter them up" so that they like us more.

Yes—there’s an idiom in India with the exact same meaning.

How perfect! So now going into strategies for lead generation, even though it’s impossible to stop non-leads from visiting your website, are there strategies that are minimum-waste in the sense that you can only get the most qualified leads?

Yeah, and I have learned this over time—I’ve wasted months getting unqualified traffic for the business because when you write content and when you’re out there, people will read it and then subscribe (even if they’re not going to purchase from you).

One strategy that works is to make your pricing really clear: in your website’s meta description, you can mention that there’s a free trial but subscriptions start at $49 per month. In your first impression, you should set the expectation that you are here for serious business-building and not just as a “good to have” solution. That can be done through messaging or your website’s first fold on the homepage. You can also show logos of the companies you cater to, for example, enterprises and not startups, and make sure you display logos that show authority and are leaders in the industry.

If they don’t fit your target customer criteria, such as a mom and pop shop in the example above, even if you wanted to help them, you can’t because you’re short of time and money.  

What you can do, meanwhile, is write blog content that answers these not-so-qualified leads’ questions over time, so when they eventually have funding, they can consider your solution and then check out the product page.

At VWO, we would send most of the unqualified traffic to our blog content or ebooks, and say, “hey, maybe this isn’t a good fit for a sales call, but why don’t you read our content and try the product for free?” But we wouldn’t put our salespeople on a call with them because that’s at least 15 minutes out of the sales team’s time on a call with someone who’s not a lead.

That makes sense. So when you know that they’re not a qualified lead, you leave them with a sort of parting gift?

Yeah. It can seem like a brutal way of marketing to disqualify leads, but it gets the numbers (of qualified leads) down and is more efficient and better overall.

What’s the most common issue that leads to a low conversion rate?

 

Lack of empathy and context: the visitor or prospective customer is coming to your site with some expectations and curiosity. If the content and experience don’t complement that, people drop off.

For example, let’s say Sarah is an owner of a ecommerce site selling shoes. She is running a paid ad campaign for the paid keyword “red basketball shoes,” but when she gets clicks from the ads, the page that visitors are sent to is a generic shoe product page of a random color. Sarah is bound to experience low conversion rates. When you get context, use it to personalize the experience.

In a B2B software scenario, one of the most common causes of low conversion rates is due to romance with the product and its features: your prospective customers are coming to your product to solve a problem in their life, and your features are a means to the end and not their end goal. If content just talks about the means, conversion rates are usually low.

Personas are not always the best approach to message to target audience. Here’s an in-depth study of Personas vs. Jobs to Be Done—a framework built around the desired outcome of customer. 

If a brand’s conversion rate is less-than-ideal at the moment, what’s their next best move to improve it?

Observation and research is critical at this stage. The team needs to study the user behavior on their website closely, set up tracking for all your conversion journeys, and see how they are operating—identify the gaps.

With analytics, you can shortlist pages where visitors are dropping off; for instance, maybe the drop-off from the checkout cart is high. If you identify such aspects by studying users, you can see where to focus your conversion rate optimization energy.

CRO Process (Source: VWO.com)

Do you have any favorite tools for streamlining any of these processes?

• Zapier is by far my favorite tool to automate and streamline time-consuming processes in multiple apps.

• Google Sheets and its script editor is my breadwinning tool for building marketing processes.

• LinkedIn and its sales navigator is powerful for prospecting high-potential clients.

• Cloohawk is my recent favorite—it creates social media tasks for me based on rules I can set up. For example, if someone tweets about “time tracking,” I can create a task to get the tweet details in a list. It saves me a ton of time and energy in an otherwise redundant process of searching for multiple keywords every time and choosing who to engage with.

Any other important tips or final thoughts you'd like to share?

I would like to double down on my lesson that the best long-term way to build a business is human to human (H2H).

In today’s time, people give their mobile phone more attention than their close relatives and friends.

If you are able to differentiate yourself using genuine interest, investment, and effort to help your customer succeed on a 1:1 basis, you will stand out.

If you are able to differentiate yourself using genuine interest, investment, and effort to help your customer succeed, your brand will stand out.