Skuid CMO Makes The Case For Personalizing SaaS Tools To Maximize Investment Value

Last updated on November 22nd, 2017 at 04:27 pm

A company called Skuid has brought on a new CMO with deep Silicon Valley experience to help market the notion of personalizing line of business applications across disparate enterprise professionals.

Skuid, which is based in Chattanooga, Tenn., announced the hiring of Tara Ryan, formerly the CMO of spend management software firm Coupa, earlier this week. Ryan has also had stints at IT security firm ProofPoint, Oracle, NetSuite and Zebra Technologies, among others.

“There are so many SaaS firms focused since advent of cloud on how we deliver software, and the speed and implementation, but I think as an industry we’ve gotten a bit lost about the business process we’re improving,” Ryan told B2B News Network in an interview on her official start day with the firm. “What we’re going to be doing is go straight to the line of business leader and creating a very adoptive experience for business services.”

Executives could use Skuid, for instance, to create their own user interfaces or dashboards that pull in data from several different applications. This could include CRM, marketing automation or a range of internally-developed tools, she said. Skuid describes itself as a “no-code” platform, which means those in the line-of-business area won’t have to chase over their IT department to do this kind of work on their behalf.

A large enterprise may have bought licenses or subscriptions for a thousand CRM users, for instance, but there could be different needs across levels as well as functions.

“How are you personalizing the experience between marketing manager and vice-president of marketing?” she asked by way of example.

Ryan admitted her work will need to tread carefully in not negating the work of developers and IT departments but instead telling a compelling story about maximizing a company’s investment in business software. The sheer range of tools and complexity line of business professionals are struggling with, however, means they’re probably looking for something like Skuid, she added.

“The way I’m working B2B marketing, I can count over 13 marketing mediums by marketing source, campaign, CTA, fulfillment. It can get really confusing,” she said.

Besides building on Skuid’s value proposition and finding the right avenues to reach decision-makers, Ryan said she was confident the company can be relevant across a number of different categories, if only because so many firms want to be able to measure the business value of their other SaaS tools.

“It’s really important to look not just at leads to opportunities but to see where movement is and where stagnation is,” she said. “You need a bespoke screen and application to do that.”