Interview with Allyson Havener from TrustRadius

Your diverse career spans humble beginnings at LiveRamp to your leap as the CMO of TrustRadius. Would you like to tell us how the journey feels and some takeaways you would like to share with the audience?

You have to put yourself in the right place at the right time. I made a conscious effort to find opportunities where I would have a big impact in a short amount of time. No job was too big or too small. For example, when I started at LiveRamp my first project was to plan our annual company trip for 80 people. I got a ton of visibility, worked with the executive team, and made my work ethic known. Was it super glamorous? Definitely not, but it positioned me well to eventually make the jump from a receptionist to building and running our field marketing department.

Allyson, as we enter an age of automation and Artificial Intelligence, marketing teams either fear or use creative messages created by AI. From your vantage point, what transformations do marketing teams need to prepare for?

They have to prepare for a world where brand voice, original content, and having a personality in your marketing is going to be more important than ever. AI is the next phase of automation and it can be very sophisticated but it’s going to commoditize content and markets will be even more noisier than before. So how do you stand out? The last frontier of differentiation will be your customers’ voice because it will be the only thing that your competitors can’t copy and the only thing your target audience will want to listen to and trust.

Gartner reports that while self-service has increased, self-service buyers are more likely to regret their purchase. However, an SDR-assisted purchase sees a 1.8x increase in high-quality sales. How does TrustRadius bridge this gap between buyer understanding and the bias with which they make purchase decisions?

It’s important to understand that buyers are self-educating at all times and marketing teams should be thinking about how they are capturing the mindshare. When they enter a buying cycle they want as much in-depth product information as possible upfront and they want to learn from their peers. So if you think about TrustRadius we offer a platform for buyers to get that information and learn from their peers at scale. Then vendors can connect with those buyers (outbounding etc) when they are in-market leading to greater effectiveness and efficiencies.

Through saturated marketing messages and products, TrustRadius stands between the buyer and a potentially regretful buying decision. How do you ensure TrustRadius creates this space of authenticity and trust through your strategies?

We rejected 60% of the reviews that came to TrustRadius in the last year because of fraud, AI usage, or lack of useful information. We are all about quality and have the highest standards in the industry. And you are noticing that even the FTC is catching up with our already very stringent standards. But this is to protect buyers and help them make confident technology decisions.

In Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer, the respondents trust businesses to integrate innovation into society, and 59% rely most on online sources for technology news and innovations. What role does TrustRadius play in helping its users reach innovations that benefit their unique use cases?

From our own research, we know that buyers care most about connecting and learning from their peers. I want to understand how someone in a role similar to mine and a company at a similar stage is tackling their problems, what tech stack they are using etc. On TrustRadius you can find just that most of our reviewers are named so you can find people that are like you read their reviews, understand their use cases, and how that tech supported them.

We are also working with sentiment analysis of reviews. We know from our research that people only read 2-5 reviews, and they also read 3-star reviews. They want to read something that is informative from someone who is not a detractor or a promoter. Sentiment analysis helps give a synopsis of the reviews and then buyers can deep dive into the original review as well.

Customer-centricity is a term that is used a lot in the market. It has almost become a buzzword in the industry. Many SaaS marketing messages use it for effect. As a CMO who has to embody this word, what do you think companies should do to stay customer-centric and authentic?

We work with a lot of companies like Miro, monday.com, Cisco, and Freshworks that embody customer centricity because it’s not something that is tacked on as an afterthought. They truly believe in the voice of the customer which drives their product roadmap, positioning, and messaging.

I think to stay true to your customers you first have to build that culture from within and your customers have to be seen as a growth flywheel. Be a brand that people want to align their careers to, put your customers on a pedestal, and have them be a part of your customer acquisition strategies. The companies that are doing this well are the ones that are succeeding especially in a world where profitability and efficiency are the KPIs for success.

In your journey as a marketing leader, you talk about mindshare. There’s a commonly held belief that mindshare is through ad copies and other marketing messages. While that is true. Do you think there are dimensions that brands might be overlooking, and what are some myths you’d like to debunk?

I think those are tactics. Not a strategy to gain mindshare. Kind of what we talked about before:

1. Are you creating content that shares your POV on industry related trends
2. Are you creating a brand that people want to align themselves to and their careers
3. Are you showing off your customers

You gain mindshare because you have something interesting to say, you do that consistently, and others start doing it as well.

I know the word influencers hasn’t come up and yes influencers are important, but it has to be authentic and align with your brand. And remember your customers are the best influencers you have access to.

As marketing spend decreases, common phrases like “Do more with less” are thrown around. What advice would you give marketing teams to optimize their campaigns for the constraints they are facing? Do you think AI can play a role in helping teams optimize their budgets?

I think the phrase should actually be “Do less and have more impact” I know that’s hard but I am always telling my team this. Going back to my first point – what are the business initiatives and how can marketing support them and have the biggest impact? That’s the question you should be asking yourself. Then worry about the how. I think marketers get caught up in the how before they actually know “what” they should be doing.

And yes, AI is going to continue to improve and create efficiencies just as automation has over the last 15 years. But that doesn’t matter if you are not clear on the what and why.

For many start-ups and new products, GTM is a must. Can you tell the audience what role authenticity and trust play in increasing their chances of GTM success?

Spend the time to understand your ICP, and the competitive landscape, and develop your right to win. There is a ton of content out there about this. But in the early days of LiveRamp circa 2013 data onboarding aka CRM retargeting for digital advertising was not a thing. We had to find our ICP which ended up being digital advertisers at retail companies. They are in super competitive markets, they are willing to try anything new to create an advantage. And as competitors started to spring up, we had the clear advantage of being a market leader so we were the most trusted. We didn’t try to boil the ocean and be everything to everyone. We started small and continued to grow from there. Same thing at TrustRadius we have big competitors but we know we work mostly with enterprise companies and our right to win is the quality of content and audience we are not trying to play for the volume game like our competitors.

Your networking group, The CMO Huddles, is a fascinating project. In these sessions, what discussions always inspire you the most, and how do you use them to bring your creative visions to life?

It’s really about the opportunity to be in a neutral zone with other marketing leaders to hear about their problems, how they are approaching them, and get different perspectives. If you remember my comment earlier, people just want to connect and learn from their peers and this is an excellent forum to do so. It’s really inspiring to hear different perspectives, especially as a CMO. You can get into an echo chamber quickly and it can be hard to get out.