Interview with Valeria Sologoub - Chief Marketing Officer at Grinteq

 

Let's talk a bit about digital markering and leadership, shall we?! It is still one of those topics that are not fully undisclosed as marketing engineers don't usually talk to much about themselves. Today, we'd like to introduce Valeria Sologoub, the Chief Marketing Officer at Grinteq - one of the leading eCommerce development companies in US and Portugal. So, if you want to find out more about what it takes to be a leader in marketing, or the challenges CMOs face along with many other interesting topics - we invite you to dive deeper in this insightful interview. 

Hi Valeria, welcome to TechBehemoths. Please tell us about yourself. Your childhood, education, and professional development.

Hi, TechBehemoths! Thank you for having me.

I was born into a family of engineers - this circumstance I guess somewhat played a trick on me, as I actually loved literature and foreign language classes at school. This defined my choice of University, where I studied Linguistics, Psychology, and 3 foreign languages. 

My major was in Psycho-linguistics, and, on reflection, this totally makes sense in terms of what I do now: being able to communicate with and connect on a deeper level with various groups of people, from potential clients and partners to the team of engineers (hooray to my parents!). 

At the time, I didn’t know ‘who I wanted to be when I grew up’ and somewhat went with the flow: after University, I tried several things, from teaching English to working in customer services and later in an investment management company. This was a perfect background to develop skills in customer interaction. 

At some point I felt the need to somehow glue all my experiences together. I went for a full-time MBA at Henley Business School, and it really felt like this move saved me years in terms of my natural professional progression and getting in-depth knowledge of business practices. 

And.. that’s when Marketing came into play.

What inspired you to pursue a career in marketing? 

Marketing - it sort of was that missing link I needed badly to move on.

Getting an MBA gave me a certain degree of confidence: pieces of my career puzzle seemed to finally fit. Only being exposed to a range of projects, I realized how I could capitalize on my talents and passions. 

The sweet thing about marketing is that it is not limited to certain areas such as product/service packaging, PR, or Lead Generation. Marketing is a complex machine with a clockwork of long-term strategy, intelligence and social listening, and intricacies of smart communication - all based on data analytics and psychology. 

In short, I was totally hooked. 

Since then, my career has been rapid. It happened for two reasons: the transformation of Marketing from a supporting to a driving function and the incredible encouragement and mentorship from the people I was lucky to work with. 

I joined a niche consulting company in Telecoms and had bottom-line responsibility for the marketing function, developed marketing operations, and launched a brand re-positioning program for the European market. 

Later, I shifted to enterprise - a large IT services provider in quality assurance and software testing - with responsibility for implementing the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach and infrastructure for high-profile customers across several target markets globally. 

Each of those opportunities was marked with its own objectives and provided great exposure to various corners of Marketing and Management: from building and expanding the funnel to team coaching and establishing relationships with strategic partners.

How did you become the CMO at Grinteq?

With Grinteq, it was this aha, this-is-a-match moment, for various reasons. 

First, Grinteq is an ecommerce development agency - and ecommerce with all its versatility of human relationships is such fruitful soil to master my expertise. Second, it is a fast-growing vibrant tech company helping the digital commerce segment implement their ideas and address unique technical needs - again, it’s where I can put all my skills at work. Third, and most important, they're a bunch of brilliant folks I admire to hang out with.

Couple of years ago, I joined their team to drive the organization to future market positioning. And since then, we've been in this euphoric let’s-roll mode. Competing in tech is pretty challenging, plus abruptly changing market conditions require original approaches. 

The role of the CMO is really stimulating: from identifying and developing strategic opportunities for growth, to cascading macro-environment to drive the strategy across the business in day-to-day work, to running check-ins with the customers/target market, to evolving the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy, etc, etc..

How do you stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and technologies, and how do you decide which ones to incorporate into your strategy?

From the perspective of our customer, Grinteq is a ‘capability-builder’ for ecommerce businesses. Retailers, tech product companies, and other digital agencies come to us when they need to boost their tech to support their business objectives or augment their teams with senior software development expertise. To be able to cover their needs, we have to be experts in both ecommerce domain technology and IT projects delivery.

We look at the end-customer trends and expectations, then at the latest updates to ecommerce platforms and B2B products - pioneering tools from ecommerce and fintech. This way, we can see the big picture and focus on the tech stack that will play a crucial role in helping our clients acquire new or improve their competitive advantage. 

For instance, how can we build an omnichannel ecommerce stack able to compete? One has to choose the best-fit technological advancements that would create interconnected experiences moving across channels: from providing personalized content to facilitating seamless customer data transfer. Salesforce ecosystem does a great job with that, and we have been working with it for years.

In your opinion, what are some of the most important qualities of a successful marketing leader?

I really love this one! A successful marketing leader is like a Swiss Army Knife. 

You deal with so many things: strategy, marketing, sales, finance, and sometimes even engineering. 

On top of this, you have to be sharp and cut the nonsense! You have to be able to consume and process a vast amount of data and make decisions. A marketing leader has to have a deep understanding of the customer, market, and business, and be alert and entrepreneurial - you are the ultimate partner to make the grade for your company.

A marketing leader reminds an orchestra conductor - great listener, exceptional understanding of timing, the one who sends the right signals to each performer so that music doesn’t turn into noise. Great performers, great people are the key - in any service-based industry. Your team’s attitudes, skills, capabilities, their unique personalities are going to define your bittersweet symphony, so to speak.  

Sticking to this orchestra metaphor, let’s also emphasize that the conductor never forgets the audience: their need to hear beautiful harmony, not cacophony.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced as a CMO, and how have you overcome them?

Speaking of challenges, I believe market fluctuations are still the hardest. Since 2020 there have been ups and downs, and for marketing, it feels like ‘sailing your ship through the storm in the Atlantic Ocean without a GPS.’ In my experience, many businesses continue to focus on quantitative metrics for results and expect that the CMO is the ‘magic cure’ that will deliver extraordinary results in no time. 

The thing is marketing doesn’t work straightforward - there is no such button as make-my-customers-feel-good-about-my-company button. Take the B2B customer journey: it’s not linear, it’s so complex. Even with the best tech stack, it’s challenging to track what actually happens before the conversion. It does take time to try-and-test, to find the most perspective market fit. Agility is more than flexible campaign management, hopping on and off the initiatives. It is a mindset.

I found that shifting the Board mindset from the KPIs, such as today’s MQL/SQL numbers, to a long-term revenue-generation strategy is more effective. We work with data and purchase intent, look at types of Deals won, and focus our attention on account pools and lead channels that can produce actual results in monetary gains. This eliminates waste, saves resources, and navigates brand awareness efforts in the right direction. Ultimately, we get to the point when the cogs move.

Another challenging aspect is the development of a winning culture that can drive desired revenue. Building a five-star revenue team, fully aligned amidst Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, takes time and effort. Remember that such a team includes skillsets of very different types: analytical, creative, communicative, and technological. 

As a leader, you must not just keep up with but drive a pool of roles and personalities within the team (revisit the orchestra metaphor). You will have very different conversations and messaging with people from various corners of the client-facing function. The best results I’ve seen were achieved due to focus on a clear vision, properly-set communication, strict avoidance of micro-management, and people fully understanding their roles and taking ownership / injecting proactivity within the area where they have the most impact.

How do you think emerging technologies and trends will impact the future of marketing and business strategy, and how is Grinteq adapting to these changes?

Perhaps, I will skip all these endless jokes about the Chat GPT apocalypse - alas, there is some truth in every joke.

The truth about emerging technologies, as far as I get it, is quite simple: some of them will really stay with us; moreover, they will even become an important part of our working routine. But most of them are destined to remain only a buzzword in the archives of colorful media portals.

At Grinteq, we certainly try to keep our finger on the pulse, but even more, we try to stay within the cool skepticism about overly trendy noisy things.

Don't get me wrong, our customers are enterprises whose reputations have been built over the years, if not decades. The last thing in the world we would want is to undermine them in the eyes of their customers, just to show off some newfangled technology. A nightmare situation.

The emerging technologies present a myriad of opportunities and constraints simultaneously. Take generative AI for marketing purposes, for example. The ability to analyze customer data, produce first-class copy, and optimize targeting - sounds fantastic. It saves so much time and resources. However, is it the source of truth? The answer to that is still debatable, as it can be biased due to training on a limited amount of data. This will improve quite soon, but right now, we must use it responsibly; it can not wholly replace human creativity, objectivity, or insight. 

What do you like to do when you are not working?

I love traveling for a lot of reasons. First, it provides you with a perspective - you stretch your understanding of the world around you. It removes boundaries and stereotypes. You can understand yourself better by meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds. It also takes you out of your day-to-day routine and shakes you up a bit. And, of course, traveling gives you an opportunity to enjoy so many variations of beauty.

What do you think you'd be doing right now if you were not the Chief Marketing Officer at Grinteq?

Two things matter to me: people and meaning. If I were not the CMO at Grinteq, I would connect my work with consulting - helping organizations and their teams become what they want and can be.

What advice would you give to aspiring marketing professionals who are just starting their careers?

First off, don’t be addicted to the buzzwords or ‘trendy things,’ (which is rather challenging these days). Instead, be addicted to the cause, the goals you set. We see loads of identical repeated social media posts - and what’s the value? Hopping on a ‘buzzword trend’ produces worse results than actual dedication to what you do. Sift it through; cut through the noise. Customers and users are savvy, they notice everything.

Think about the perspective that is beyond today or tomorrow. Focus on your impact area, tackle the skillset (preferably T-Shape), think big, and choose how you respond - be proactive, not reactive. Run a scenarios approach if this helps. Be flexible, but up to some point; any preparation or risk management is handy, as being a Marketer means a stretch these days.

Prepare a roadmap, get your hands dirty with difficult things, and have your opinion. Remember that to formulate your own view, you need to see more, listen more, analyze more, and experience more. In order to look professional, authoritative, and trustworthy, you have to actually be all these things. 

If you had the chance to go back in time, what is the one piece of advice you would give to Valeria Sologoub from 2013?

I would say,

“Shift to the ‘process-orientated’ mindset as soon as possible.”

This will give you room for the ability to learn from your mistakes, build creativity and amplitude in your decision-making, and inject mental stretch and competence. Don’t be attached to specific outcomes - it will help you remain realistic and full of joy for what you do.

Thank you, Valeria, for generously sharing your time and wisdom with us. Your invaluable expertise have provided us with insights of marketing leadership, challenges and opportunities in your field. 

Grinteq is one of the best agencies you can find on TechBehemoths. If you like this interview and think that Valeria and her team can help you with anything between marketing and eCommerce development. Don't hesitate to contact them on TechBehemoths, or reach out directly to Valeria on LinkedIn