A Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) plays a crucial role in enhancing a business operation, especially by developing and implementing marketing strategies that generate leads, acquire new customers, and increase sales. By effectively promoting products or services, a CMO can contribute to revenue growth. CMOs focus on building and strengthening the company’s brand. Enhanced brand recognition can lead to increased customer trust and loyalty, which can translate into higher sales and market share. They also play critical roles in implementing strategies to engage customers through various channels, including social media, content marketing, and email campaigns. Engaged customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and become brand advocates.
One such pioneer in the industry is Madhukar Kumar, CMO, SingleStore, a database technology company. In the role of CMO, Madhukar Kumar is responsible for overseeing and directing the marketing efforts of SingleStore. This typically includes developing and implementing marketing strategies, managing the marketing team, branding, advertising, public relations, and other aspects of promoting the company’s products or services. He plays a key role in delivering the right product to the customers and managing the relationships to drive the company to success. “Lead growth is about taking your product and making it freely available to users for them to give it a try. Then, adding a gradation of experience. In fact, if the product is strong enough, they would come along in the ride,” adds Kumar.
Driven by his passion, Kumar is a seasoned and skilled marketing expert. He’s built a strong foundation in identifying customer behavior and building the most adaptive marketing strategies. He strongly believes in the value of data in marketing and the concept of SingleStore’s services. In a nutshell, Kumar points out that, “if a customer could get free access to something that they could try on, they are basically convinced that this is something that they need and be valuable to. So that’s the core principle of marketing that I would prefer.”
Kumar is also a big fan of the marketing tactics of brands like Apple and Nike. Inspired by these giants, Kumar has also implemented innovative marketing techniques called made-on-single stroke campaigns, where it’s all about helping developers to build on top of a single store. As Kumar explains, “A shoe is a shoe unless somebody steps into it. In the same way, the idea is the make the product usable for the customers. Instead of talking about the technology itself, we started to help developers build on top of a single store and we started to highlight what others had built on top of a single store. With these types of marketing techniques, we’ve seen an exponential growth in how many people are coming in every day, and trying out a product.”
Today, SingleStore is one of the fastest-growing businesses and is close to an IPO. Behind the success of this growth strategy is Kumar and his exceptional team, driven by cutting-edge strategies to interact with customers. Kumar in his perspective is a thinker and an experimenter. “One thing I learned about marketing is, that when everybody starts doing the same marketing tactics, it’s no longer effective. In what you do things for a specific company should have a different taste and flavor. Because your product and audience are not always the same. We have a hypothesis, and then based on that, we do some short marketing experiments. If it works, we double down and if it doesn’t, then we move on to next.”
This kind of approach is what makes Kumar stand out from the crowd. “Since last few months, we have grown just on the PLG side. This may sound delusional, but by the end of next year, I would like it to be 20x growth. In my opinion, within the next few months, if we can all go towards achieving the goal of becoming an IPO, that is just a milestone, but it sets us up to become a multibillion-dollar revenue company,” Kumar concludes.
Company:
Singlestore
Management:
Madhukar Kumar, CMO
Quote:
“One thing I learned about marketing is, when everybody starts doing the same marketing tactics, it’s no longer effective. The things you do for a specific company should have a different taste and flavor”
