Jakki Geiger Of Hazelcast: 5 Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Crunch the Numbers & Get Confirmation
Get sales and marketing operations together to work out a plan and processes to manage the funnel and pipeline.

The B2B marketing landscape is a complex and evolving space, with its unique challenges and opportunities. Navigating it effectively requires well-thought-out strategies and insightful tactics. With a myriad of digital channels available, what are the best ways to connect, engage, and convert potential business clients? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jakki Geiger.

Jakki is a growth-minded, results-driven B2B marketing executive with 20+ years of experience building new market categories and GTM strategies. As chief marketing officer at Hazelcast,

Jakki oversees marketing strategy and all marketing, developer relations and training programs. She recently led the team through a new brand identity, website, positioning, messaging, and content marketing transformation. Her marketing leadership includes roles at four successfully acquired venture-funded start-ups, two scale-ups (each secured $120M in funding), and a midsize company that achieved double- digit growth.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My husband, Jeff, is the most important person who has helped me in my career. I thrive on accomplishing goals, tackling challenges, and reaching new milestones at work and in my personal life. Jeff is my champion. He left a job he loved in Boston at a top 10 hospital so I could take on an exciting marketing leadership role in Silicon Valley. He appreciates my independence, determination, and encourages me to pursue new opportunities. He also takes on the bulk of responsibility for our family life. As an experienced executive, he shares advice and honest feedback when I ask for his perspective. He is also the ying to my yang.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Do your best at everything you do. Be good to people and make great friends. Find something you love to do and find someone to love who loves you back just as much.”

When my son was an infant, I traveled a lot for work, up to two weeks at a time. I wanted to share my values with him when I was home to tuck him in at night. So, Jeff and I created this life lesson for him. Now as a teenager, he knows it by heart.

Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?

I’ve worked in fast-paced environments and found it incredibly rewarding. Today, I’m at Hazelcast, a scale up that’s ramping up growth. The market is evolving quickly, competitors are launching new products, and customers requirements are changing rapidly. The three top strengths, skills and characteristics that have helped me in my career and that I value in others are:

1. Learning agility: No one is born an expert. The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else. I don’t always hire the candidate who has the most experience. I look for people that demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt to change. I get energized by people with a continuous improvement mindset, who like to test and learn.
2. Execution Skills: I appreciate a high say/do ratio, meaning people who do what they say they will do. One of the books that impacted me when I started leading teams was, “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan about how to link the three core processes of every business: people, strategy, and operations. I also recommend “Amp It Up: How to Lead a Mission-Driven, High-Performance Company” by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake. Slootman emphasizes the importance of 1) focusing on the mission and avoiding distractions, 2) leaders who set the pace, and 3) pursuing world-class execution.
3. Collaboration Skills: There’s an African proverb that I like, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” When you’re all rowing in the same direction, you’ll get to your destination faster. One recent example where collaboration was the key to success was the launch of our new Hazelcast brand. I was super proud of how well my team managed this project, which was completed in 6 months.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

Leadership Skills: Being an effective leader is a lifelong learning journey. My father instilled in me a sense of confidence that I can do anything I set my mind to. I learned from him, and other excellent leaders, that a leader’s responsibility is to look for the potential in others, help them see it, and guide them to unlocking it. At the beginning of a new year, I ask: What are three things you want to add to your resume by the end of the year? Each quarter, I check in to see how the goals are tracking and what adjustments are needed. Having measurable goals is a good approach to help people get to the next level in their careers.

To continually grow and develop as a leader, surround yourself with high EQ leaders. This quote from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft resonates with me: “In the long run, EQ trumps IQ. Without being a source of energy for others, very little can be accomplished. True leadership isn’t about having all the answers but about creating a space for collective brilliance to flourish.”

Let’s talk about B2B marketing. Can you share some insights into how you perceive the current landscape of B2B marketing?

While the fundamentals of B2B marketing remain the same, I see greater use of data really shaping the landscape.

1. AI: AI will help automate marketing processes. For instance, my team is looking to see how AI can do first content drafts and to make video production easier.
2. Data-driven decisions: It is still a grind to map the buyer journey and figure out attribution. Soon, AI will do the data prep and deliver insights that marketing teams need to make improved data-driven decisions to take the right action at the right time.
3. Account-based marketing: Intent data will make it easier to find accounts AND contacts who are searching for specific solutions to their business and technical challenges.
4. Personalization: Data will enable more personalized outreach.
5. Testing Messaging & Learning Faster: Data will help test new messaging and enable faster iteration to get the right message to the right person, to accelerate the learning journey and drive conversion.

How have recent market trends and changes influenced your approach to outperforming competitors?

Our market is evolving quickly. Until this year, it was dominated by open source technology. Now, there are more commercial options available and a lot of confusion in the marketplace. Our technology helps companies respond faster by enabling mission-critical systems with instant action on streaming data and enables real-time ML/AI. Two market trends that influenced our approach are:

1. We gained validation because two new competitors entered our market this year — bigger brands with bigger budgets. This means we need to sharpen our focus on building brand awareness and engagement with target accounts and target personas within those accounts and showcase our differentiated value proposition.
2. Technology analysts are starting to cover the streaming data platforms market and we’re being recognized, which will help buyers find us and encourage them to add us to their evaluation shortlist. We’ve been named in: GigaOm’s Radar Report, Gartner’s Market Guide and the first ever Forrester Wave on Streaming Data Platforms.

B2B buying cycles can often be lengthy and complex. How do you maintain engagement and nurture leads throughout the various stages of the buyer’s journey?

The buyer journeys I’ve been involved in supporting have always been lengthy, because I gravitate to tech companies that deliver high-value, complex technology and new logo sales cycles that are on average 9–12 months.

Like most scale up tech companies, the majority of our focus is on:

• Building brand awareness with the right persona in the right accounts.
• Engaging them by helping to educate them about the differentiated value of our technology with messaging that speaks to their pain points and explaining how we uniquely overcome them.
• Facilitating conversations between prospects and our sales team, when prospects are ready.

As a marketing team, our focus is on identifying and reaching out to technical personas who have a project. They have the potential to become champions for our sellers and help them navigate the buying process and buying group in an account.

We also build relationships with line of business leaders (LoB), who feel the business pain and the budget to resolve it. To engage them, we use digital channels to reach them and executive breakfast and dinner events featuring customers and partners.

Personalization is gaining prominence in B2B marketing. What are some ways marketers can effectively leverage data to deliver personalized experiences?

B2B personalization ensures that each of the buying personas in your buying group (consisting on average from 3–10 personas) has a tailored experience with relevant content that address their specific needs and interests across all of your channels. Data shows that personalization helps build trust, increases engagement, and improves the buying and customer experience. To execute personalization at scale requires unifying data in silos while protecting sensitive data, a decision engine, the right technology for real-time orchestration, skilled resources, a high volume of content production and experimentation. I am hopeful that AI will make the process easier. Here are the five steps I’ve used in the past:

1. Define outcomes first: How will you measure success?
2. Define segmentation approach: It could be as simple as segmenting based on existing customers or prospects. Next might be personalizing based on company size (enterprise vs. mid-market), industry or role (user or buyer). Another level may be tech stack, use case, tech or areas of interest.
3. Assess readiness: Is it worth the investment of time, money and resources? I’m a fan of starting small, testing, and learning. In many cases, data blocks teams from personalizing. It has to be trustworthy, accurate, and complete. Can you use third party data sources where you have gaps?
4. Decide the best channels: Email is usually the easiest place to start. If you want to create a personalization experience on the website, there are excellent no-code web personalization options that make it easier to target and convert B2B buyers. If you want to start with targeted ads, identify the right people at the right companies to target with the right message. At Hazelcast, we use an ABM platform that enables us to use intent data to find companies that are searching for solutions like ours and serve up personalized digital ads.
5. Identify content: Content is king when it comes to supporting a personalized learning, evaluating, and buying journey.

ABM has also gained traction for its personalized approach to targeting high-value accounts. What advice would you give to fellow B2B marketers looking to adopt this strategy?

First, be clear on your definition of ABM.

In the past, ABM focused on identifying a strategic account, in-depth research, creating a detailed account plan, creating custom content or microsites, and communications. It took a ton of time and effort. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. It wasn’t scalable.

Now, ABM is about leveraging intent data. It’s understanding who is looking for a solution like ours and ensuring they know our brand, giving them an opportunity to engage with our content, learn from us and our customers, and get them ready for conversation through marketing and sales collaboration. My advice is don’t try to boil the ocean or spend monthly building a plan. Use a quick win approach. Start with a strategy, create a plan, test and learn, communicate wins and learnings and expand from there.

What’s exciting about B2B marketing is the pace of innovation. At two previous companies, my teams used ABM successfully. One team earned a prestigious award for shifting from MQLs to buying groups successfully in 60 days. It requires commitment from marketing and sales to make account orchestration successful. At Hazelcast, we’re in the early days of our journey to make the shift to account-based marketing and sales approaches.

What are 5 Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy to Help You Beat Competitors?

B2B software / SaaS marketing has changed dramatically since I started my career, but the fundamentals haven’t. The purpose of B2B marketing is to help a company ramp up growth. The charter of B2B marketing teams can vary by company but, in my experience, the B2B marketing teams at software companies focus on two things:

1. helping the sales team identify new opportunities and achieve new logo targets with new logo marketing campaigns, and
2. identify new opportunities in existing customer accounts with expansion plays.

There are 5 key questions that need answers before you create a B2B Marketing Strategy.

1. Start with Business Outcomes If you don’t know what they are, find out. If you do know, document and validate with key stakeholders. Never assume you’re aligned. I ask these questions during annual planning cycles or when joining a company:

• What is the revenue target for the coming year?
• Are you aiming for new logos, customer expansion or both?
• If so, what % for each?

2. Crunch the Numbers & Get Confirmation
Get sales and marketing operations together to work out a plan and processes to manage the funnel and pipeline.

• How long is the sales cycle? (It is likely different for new logos vs. expansion).
• What is the deal win rate? This will help you do the math to figure out how much pipeline coverage and new opportunities are needed by a specific time.
• How many stages are there between first touch and sales forecasted pipeline? Based on conversion metrics, how many meetings and qualified leads do you need to generate to achieve that goal?
• Do the CMO, head of revenue marketing, CRO, regional sales leaders, and sales development leader agree that the goals are achievable based on capacity and budget?

3. Identify Strategic Goals

• Is your goal to grow market share in an existing market, disrupt an existing market or create a new market category?
• Are you entering a new geography? Targeting a new customer segment? Launching a new product or service?
• Are you trying to scale through partners and building out a partner ecosystem that will contribute to pipeline and revenue? If so, how much?

4. Learn Faster than Competitors

Don’t underestimate competitors. Overconfidence can kill your business. Learning faster than competitors to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. What do your customers, prospects, analysts, and influencers say about them? Who are their customers and partners? What is their positioning and messaging? Where are they showing up digitally and IRL? What traps are they setting for you? In which situations are they most likely to win and lose deals?

Avoid working in silos. Operating in tight alignment as a united front is one of the keys to learning faster. I use the zipper analogy. If you expect teams to work in tight alignment, it has to start at the top with leadership to go all the way through the organization. The executive team needs to be in tight alignment and set an example and create opportunities for cross-functional discussion and collaboration.

Share insights across teams. Encourage people to talk openly about what they are learning, what is working, what isn’t. The faster you connect the dots, spot a new trend or challenge, the faster you’ll make decisions and get ahead of competitors.

5. Gain Deep Knowledge About Players in The Buying Group

Ask questions and get feedback. Ask customers about the problems you help them solve, the areas where you shine and areas that need improvement. Ask about their experience with you across the board, from learning, to engaging, buying, onboarding, etc. What search terms did they use to find a shortlist of vendors and how did they first hear of you? What sources of information do they trust and which events do they attend? Ask questions of your partners and other key influencers and stakeholders in the buying and influencing process. This will help ensure you have the right messaging to create a content plan that will support your marketing programs and pick the right channels to invest in.

How do you utilize data or AI to refine your B2B marketing approach, and what tools have been particularly impactful in gaining a competitive advantage?

Jasper is a great copywriting and content creation tool optimized for marketing. First drafts of written content include blogs, emails, and social media headlines. Jasper allows you to add key messages and brand voice. We’re also about to test an AI video technology called Synthesia, which turns your text into video in minutes with a cool, natural sounding AI voice and AI Avatars.

Which digital channels have you found most effective in reaching your target audience, and how do you optimize your presence across these channels to outshine competitors?

Our website is the best source of pipeline generation. We use multiple channels to reach our target audience, build brand awareness, and drive them to our website to start their learning and buying journey. LinkedIn has been the most effective channel for reaching our target audience. We meet monthly with our digital ads team, review results, and make decisions to optimize spend based on performance. We do the same with our search engine optimization team and devise strategies to outshine competitors.

Are there any underrated skills or qualities that you encourage others not to overlook?

In my view, the difference between good and great colleagues is communication. The ability to express ideas concisely is underrated. I am a student of the art of communication. One of the best leaders I’ve worked for shared two pieces of advice that I use to this day:

1. Be brief. Be brilliant. Be done. Keep your conversation focused. Take the time to think about your key messages. Use concise language. Don’t fill the air. Be confident.
2. What do you want them to know? How do you want them to feel? Before you deliver a presentation, think about your audience. Take a piece of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. Write “Know” on the left, and “Feel” on the right. What are the 3–5 things you want your audience to know? How do you want them to feel?

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be?

If I could inspire a movement, it’s appreciating others every day. It’s as simple as saying thank you. The more specific, the better. It doesn’t take a lot of time and it doesn’t need to cost you anything. But it makes a big impact on the person who gets appreciated. Studies show that practicing gratitude leads to many benefits, including improved health and happiness.

Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?

I would love to have lunch with Oprah Winfrey, the “Queen of all media.” Oprah has worked hard to become the most powerful woman and, arguably, the most influential person in the world. She is always trying to become her best self and help others. She has met more interesting people and has more stories to share then almost anybody on earth.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.