There is a massive explosion of product marketing data today, derived from IT mega trends such as SaaS, Cloud Computing and Mobility. While this has created spectacular demand generation opportunities for marketers who can analyze, score and leverage buyer interactions, it also poses a daunting challenge—How to integrate product marketing information across disparate channels to understand customers, observe how they buy and create the optimum experience.

Companies now need to manage a wide array of product marketing and buyer demand generation technologies that are not necessarily designed to connect together. When a tool is upgraded or an API is changed, it can disrupt a company’s entire buyer data collection system. A whopping 500 billion dollars a year is being spent to trying to solve this problem.

On this episode of Moneyball for Marketing, Mahau Ma shares some examples of how this problem manifests itself, including:

1. Mulesoft’s own situation, where the company uses over 100 SaaS tools, a website on Drupal, a blog, interactions though Marketo and Salesforce, content engine on Insightera and customer forums, to name just a few demand generation tools.
2. Retail “Omni Channel” operations, where a company might have SAP at the core, legacy EDI systems, modern API technologies, social marketing channels, mobile channels, an E-commerce engine, a payments engine and interactions in a brick and mortar store as individual components of their product marketing machine.
3. The Healthcare industry, where having a 360° view of the buyer can literally be a matter of life and death. Ma details a case where his top five Pharma clients had to maintain product marketing data from over 8000 websites, social channels, mobile apps and physician channels to ensure not only a great buyer experience and optimized demand generation, but also to avoid potentially fatal errors.

Mahau Ma is the VP of Marketing at MuleSoft, which just garnered an additional $50 million in venture capital financing, bringing their total to over $130 million. MuleSoft is the number one integration platform for connecting any application, data service, or API on premises and in the cloud. Mahau previously held roles at TIBCO, Trinity Ventures and McKinsey & Co. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Economics. 
 
Read the full transcript here