MarTech 2025

Rohaan Kaul (00:01.208)
Hello everyone, this is Rohaan Kaul once again from ZavOps and I am here today again with one of our guests for our video series, is Martech 2025, where we are covering Martech stacks for different industries that we are envisioning for 2025. And today we have a very interesting gentleman, purely for the reason that this is for the first time in our series, we have a pure technologist,

who's going to give his inputs on the Martech. But still now, the people that we've interviewed mostly have been from the marketing background, who've been on digital and strategy, more on the functional side. So this will be very interesting. I I would personally say I'm going to be picking his brains a lot for things because this is my first time interaction with a pure technologist on the Martech side of things. Just to give you a brief background, Niranjan is a senior technical artist, architect,

Senior technical architect with a company called Upskillist which is an edtech based out of Dublin and he's an

He's an alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Trichy, which is one of the most prestigious institutes in India. And similar to me, he has his computer applications. He has a computer applications background. And now he's working on technology infused with marketing. So this is going to be a really, really interesting conversation, at least I can say for me. So Niranjan, welcome. Welcome to the show. How are you today?

Niranjan (01:38.009)
I would thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Rohaan Kaul (01:40.608)
Yes, so Niranjan, your experience like, know, I mean, I have a background where I actually started coding and I was not interested in it from where I took a career.

you know, pivot to sales and from sales, moved into performance and digital marketing side of things. Tell me how like, how is your I mean, I know you are a technical architect where it is more to do with the

technology side of things like pure from a martech integration point of view. So tell me what's your, know, with martech. mean, in terms of, it on the product development side? What exactly that you do on the martech things.

Niranjan (02:29.23)
So I'll probably set the context from the very beginning of my career.

It's almost 20 years of kind of industry experience. I the first, I would say 10 years were very different from the next 10 years. I think the first 10 years were like a regular engineer who was coding products in both B2B and B2C space. And I think what changed was I did a startup in around the 2K12, 13 timeframe, which got acquired the common floor. And I think post that, I think my next 10 years were

different because I was able to kind of work with different divisions in common

right from operations, marketing, sales, post sales, all that stuff, right? And that gave me a very totally different perspective of the whole journey of products. But before that, was purely coding and just shipping stuff out, right? I did not really know about how it was perceived by customers and how sales happened on that journey was missing from my life. I think post that, I think the next two years were interesting. I was building stuff for common floor. And then I joined

at Ed tech company called Upskillist which was previously Shaw Academy. here, think my engineering head thought that I had more business understanding than a typical average techie. And hence, I was more pushed towards what just involved marketing interaction and sales team interactions. And hence, I was setting up like marketing pixels, Google Analytics, CRM, migration, even automation tools like WebEngage and all that stuff.

Niranjan (04:12.077)
and that led me to do what now I know is called Markops. I did not know the term back then.

I think the more I'm learning about stuff, think there's a term for everything I did. I I did everything ops in the last six years. I we had mark ops, rev ops, data ops. There's a term for every single thing I did. I think I probably did 10 things, which typically is done by 10 different people. I think I was lucky to get a chance to do all that. And it was very interesting to know how different functions operate.

together and then how marketing does can influence what sales does and how things flow between teams and how all of that put together makes a good successful product. And that is how I I got into the tech operations.

Rohaan Kaul (05:09.464)
Right, interesting from so it seems it's a journey from DevOps to Mops to revops all of it. Okay, how is it like working with marketing people as compared to you know, product coding? I would like to get a perspective.

Niranjan (05:13.868)
Yeah.

Niranjan (05:22.252)
Ha ha ha.

I think Marketing teams are typically easier to handle because I think their goals are much simpler. Not that their job is simple, but at least their roles are simple because they have to get

the part in front of people, they just had to figure out which kind of tool makes it easier or better to reach. Sometimes it's offline marketing, sometimes it is on the road marketing, sometimes it's online, digital marketing, you just have to figure out which stream works for you. But at least your goals are known, you have to get in front of people and get them to try your product. That is where the journey ends and starts and ends. And they have a simpler stack in terms of execution, right?

sales team is much more challenging because I think there's a journey where they have a lot of leads and they have to figure the whole buying journey and what kind of

what kind of things tilt towards purchase decisions. They are more nuanced and more complex journeys and hence their life is bit more harder than marketing. And for that reason, they are also more pushy and more chasing because they have the dollar hanging on their head, right? When they have to make money another day. I think marketing is like, okay, I got you 10 leads, I'm done. Easier said than done, but I think at the end of the day, money is where stuff gets decided. I think that's where the sales team has the most

Niranjan (06:51.712)
pressure for everybody else. No, I don't want to. I think HR is probably the most complex, most misunderstood, and requires a lot of nuance, I think, and also the most harder to solve problems from a tech perspective. It's more of a personal problem than

Rohaan Kaul (06:55.48)
Have you ever worked with HR or compliance? That answers a lot of things.

Niranjan (07:18.892)
I don't think there's any really tech solution which can solve their problems. It's a very personal problem. think it changes from one person to another person. Even within the companies, you need something different for each roles.

So it's much more nuance I don't think tech has cracked HR tech as much. Other areas of the marketing is almost, you can say 90 % tech has solved things. Sales, I would say around 50 to 70%. HR tech, I think we are not even scratching the surface. There's no tech tool which says you have cracked HR or a tool.

Rohaan Kaul (07:58.604)
I know, we are trying to solve that purpose right now only for marketing and you know it's like a couple of things like we still haven't been able to figure whether you know this person is going to join or how long this person is going to be in the company so yeah I hear you interesting I mean I just you know back in my days you know when I was working I think so the only people who used to I used to not like working is that who used to say "isme time kitna lagega?"

Niranjan (08:03.278)
Yeah.

Niranjan (08:38.65)
think that is there with every function I think historically. I that is because of pressure which people in the upper ladder push to the bottom. I think that is where you'll see that coming out. When can we get this? Because somebody's holding a neck to that. That is why people behave like that. And I think that is part and parcel of every function. it just changes the whole how badly they chase people.

Rohaan Kaul (09:08.856)
All right, so moving on to the core context of the conversation today. With how the technology landscape is evolving and you are probably the right person or the best subject matter expert to actually answer this. the evolution of the technology landscape, what do you think in terms of designing martech Stacks in 2025?

What is going to be the technological implication of that, right? In terms of architecting these stacks or designing these stacks, what are the things that need to be considered or how it is going to be different from what it was there in the past?

Niranjan (09:55.468)
I think personally I don't think...

the core philosophy of how things work will change. What will change is how people are going to use the new age technology to kind of make your lives better and create a better output in a shorter time frame. That is what is going to the next year. lot of innovative solutions in AI, engineering, et cetera, is coming out. Every day you see a new product, right? I think you'll probably see a lot of people using those tools to create a

better output in a short time frame with lesser resources.

Rohaan Kaul (10:33.784)
All right, and in terms of technical changes, Like what is it that you see or envision broadly in terms of the adoption side of things in the martech stacks or the martech tools that already exist or the newer tools? Do you think, I mean, beyond Gen.AI there's going to be any, I mean, what are the advancements that you foresee in the future?

Niranjan (10:57.464)
think the next wave will be mostly in agentic AI, where I think almost all solutions you see on the market have some sort of AI feature enabled. And I think they're all, I would say, in the surface, they are all still gene AI based. They're not really practical or even, you know.

outputting to a human extent. think what you'll see in the next year or so will be a lot of agentic AI's build where people will be able to automate, I would say 60 % of work using those frameworks, right? You can use now, I mean, you have AISDRs and you have AI BDRs and whatnot. I think what you'll see is a lot of human output will...

will be replaced with AI output and you will probably only need more smarter team members who can who can argument on top of that.

I don't think we are at a stage where AI can completely replace humans. But a lot of stuff like writing emails, right? mean, if you think of this plain output, you cite every single email, every single word you have to type in before. And then came autohogest and then came Grammarly, which could fix your grammar errors. Now we have at a stage that if you give them a prompt, it will generate say a sequence of 10 emails, for example.

Right? And that typically you should take about even just writing time if you consider it will take a few hours and thinking time is different all together. But now you have something which typically would take say 10 to 12 hours in about five minutes. And then you would kind of spend the next two to three hours to kind of fine tune that to add the human element to it. And then what typically you should take what two to three working days can now be done in like two, three hours.

Niranjan (12:54.299)
and that will let smaller teams achieve more than what they previously could.

Rohaan Kaul (13:01.729)
Alright.

Cool. I mean, that seems to be the idea that leaner, more smarter teams, right? So, Niranjan, in context of, let's say, like a typical consumer tech business, like, you know, that operates, I mean, any kind of e-commerce, D2C, I'm including all of those, but any kind of, since you come from an ed tech background, you know, I wanted to focus this conversation or the stack designs around consumer tech or consumer services.

So in terms of, say somebody planning to build out their Martech stack in 2025 or looking to augment their tech stacks in 2025. And I'm talking purely from a Martech point of view. What would be your recommendations in terms of category of tools that need to be incorporated in this stack going further, whether it is a new design or an augmentation of a current one.

Niranjan (13:59.49)
I think if you just purely look at the online business, the first thing you would need is a website.

And there are tools which can generate website just from an image. Or an idea of how the image will look like. You'll get pretty much like boilerplate designs. And then if you punch in a few texts, will generate the whole website for you. That, I think, would be the most simplest adding onto the Teams stack.

the usual culprits of Figma and Webflow and if you're an e-commerce site, Shopify is a no brainer, start a website. And that kind of starts a ball rolling. And then you have the marketing aspects of it, right? It could be blog generation, it could be video generation, it could be meme generation. There's a tool for everything right now in the market. There's something called supermeme.ai which can generate memes for marketing. And there are tools like HeyGen,

which can generate videos. You just have to give the content to it. can decide the brand language. You can decide the brand persona. There are tools which can even create an AI avatar of you, which means they will look like, say Rohaan can be made an AI avatar of and then Rohaan will talk instead of Rohaan being physically present and talking. I think video editing cost has gone down tremendously and you'll probably still need some video editing experience, but I think 90 %

of the job will be done by tools and 10 % of time will be required by human to kind make it right. Outside of that I think you will probably look at SEO tools. There are again a of AI based SEO tools.

Niranjan (15:46.19)
which kind of either fixes your site or gives you suggestions on how what you should write about. That can be SEO aspects. can use tools like AHF and SCF, everything you feel culprits. think you also find the newer players in the market who are more AI first. I think those are the tools which will let you scale things very rapidly. And then I think...

Then comes the next stage where you want to communicate with the customer. That is where you'll use tools like WebEngage or a clever tab. I they're usually the same names, but they all have AI features in build-in. They will be building AI first features the next year or so. I think that stays the same. And I think that's how I can think of from a consumer standpoint.

From a sales calling perspective, it's a very long shot. If you have a calling type business where you want people to be spoken to and sold, there is a possibility that in the next year or so you'll have AI video or an audio calling agent available, which can at least handle, say, 80 % of your volumes and can do actually trigger sales.

Rohaan Kaul (17:02.52)
Right, cool.

Niranjan (17:05.55)
think poor stats.

Rohaan Kaul (17:05.706)
Anything on the analytics and automation, those aspects like that, know, while GenAI is actually a lot on the content side, you know, the basically the generation side of it, like from an SEO point of view, I know we've ourselves incorporated or trained people on, you know, the SEO talent that we have nurtured. We've actually

fast track them on using GenAI tools in terms of being able to generate the content. But there's again, impact of it that Google has come up with AI overviews. So, a lot of variables moving. So I think so the content generation part of it, like GenAI is quite robust in that and we've seen the implications of that in design also. Like the website design that you were talking about, we've been using that also. But what about

the other aspects of it like the analytics, the retention side of things, also the automation of key processes because marketing is always a lot of heavy lifting and one of the most important tools that I started my career

into martech was basically because of the need or desire for automation. Right. That is how I, I actually got into it and then embraced with wholeheartedly. So what about those aspects of marketing operations or martech stacks?

Niranjan (18:41.038)
I think analytics, I personally haven't seen anything groundbreaking yet, but there's a lot of potential there. think given the computing power of LLMs and GenAI tools, it is possible for you to throw unstructured data to derive insights from it, which an human naked eye will likely miss. I have not seen any tool which does it really, really well, but almost all tools are implementing or in this case implementation of AI capabilities to read

report and generate insights

I think Google Analytics has it, but I think GA4 has been the bane of marketing's existence for the last year or so. I I haven't had a single marketer praising GA4 or any of that features, but it is not that bad, but it is just that it's not a finished product yet. But I think the hopes are that it will become a better product in the next year or so. They do provide lot of AI-driven, chat-driven insights.

questions on data which it has. I think you will see a lot of products in that space in the next year or so. given enough data I think it will be able to predict which visitors are converting more. It will be able to answer all the questions basically.

Rohaan Kaul (20:02.36)
All right. And anything on the automation as in automation with when it comes to customer interaction or being ability, being customer supported. Because I know there's a lot of like, again, the conversation is about creating AI agents from the...

Servicing point of view, know making sure that you know on your So, I mean if is there anything that you see on the on that side of thing and the other one is probably which is which I Mean even before the advent of AI we I think so I've always heard of this time time and again the term personalization or hyper personalization which And I've always scratched my head how to go about like, you know Doing a lot of things around it

achieve something but still left wanting for answers on multiple occasions. So anything that you see there like on the communication, customer experience, personalization, hyper personalization, I know all of them are connected to a certain extent but anything there that you see.

Niranjan (21:09.71)
I think again in all areas, basically scratching the surface, we haven't seen anything groundbreaking in any of these areas yet. service, service task is one of the probably the most easiest to get disrupted because you typically I think work with a small knowledge base which you already have on FAQs and whatnot. And it is fairly even easy to build in say four years from now with the advent of AI it just becomes seriously easier to kind of have a conversational chat bot which

actually make sense for lot of your queries and if you have a human in the loop kind of feature you can almost handle the same query with 90 % bot and 10 % human in the human loop, which can also kind of come back the cost factor. You just have to have a smaller team to handle the same volume of queries and over the period of time it's only going to get better because it's going to accrue all knowledge over the past conversations and your knowledge base will improve, your FAQs will improve.

and the more kind of data you feed into system, I it's gonna only have a better experience for the end user and it will reduce the cost dramatically over the next couple of years. On the hyper personalization part, think there's a lot of interesting startups in this space but I don't think anybody has really cracked it yet.

just purely because it's challenging. I think it's a very enormous task at hand. If you look at B2B startups, the challenges, you don't have enough data to kind of even figure out how do you personalize, right? You just typically have a normal B2B startup, a website gets 1,000 visitors a month.

And if you do geographical division and just do a final breakdown, you'll get a cohort with 100 people. And even those 100 people, you will find that they're from different countries, different agendas, and all that factors. Then you'll get a very niche cohort of 10 people. How do you kind of do for that 10 cohort of people, right? What's the right copy for them?

Niranjan (23:22.222)
I think given said all that, think it's going to be eventually become easier because you will have cohorts which are varied in nature. You probably may have like a thousand cohorts of users, right? Before Gen.AI, it was hard to even imagine you writing different headlines for 10 people. Now it is possible for you to generate

or even 10,000 copies based on your website kind of product, right? And that will kind of push the next level of post-mage on the website because now you can dynamically create a content on the fly given 10 parameters and given your...

ICP right you can it is possible to kind of generate headlines dynamically I haven't seen any product which does that yet but that that is bound to happen in the next couple of months I would imagine

Rohaan Kaul (24:26.378)
Interesting. I think so. I mean, on the analytics side, I do agree with you because a lot of, I mean, my previous in this series only the conversations that have been like, you know, that probably the next advent or one of the

good to have things or that every marketer would love to have is basically analytics in a presentable format. where AI could actually build something which is presentable, insightful. I otherwise I call it death by dashboards. Okay.

Niranjan (25:04.524)
Yeah, I think more than.

There are some elements already happening.

when today happens.

And they keep checking, you may have a surge in certain traffic. And I think the next evolution would be it telling you why this happened. It really looks like you ran a Google Ads in this country. That is why you're seeing a surge in volume.

Rohaan Kaul (25:27.234)
Right.

Niranjan (25:34.446)
As opposed to previously you would have to say, you have to go to 10 tell someone like go find what happened. And that person would have to go to 10 dashboards and figure out what happened. Or it could be a tweet went viral, right? And it could be, know, an edit post which got viral. Or you may have done a web series at that time, point of time. And at some point I think you will be able to answer saying why this happened and how this happened.

Rohaan Kaul (25:40.749)
Mm.

Rohaan Kaul (25:44.322)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Rohaan Kaul (26:01.688)
Sure, all right. So in terms of, you know.

these new technologies coming in. I think one of the things that's going to come in is the flexibility aspect of it. And also once something works, we'll scaling it out. There are going to be new skill requirements also on the basis of this. So how do you think teams need to be structured or how these challenges are to be fulfilled or suffice in the future? Is there a new paradigm of

hiring that we looking at or something needs to be changed and fundamentally how you're shaping things.

Niranjan (26:44.686)
I think if I'd be brutally honest I think marketers were more seen as operators

and which meant that they were just operationally churning out copies, churning out creatives, going to different markets, running on different platforms, and stuff like that. I think they had to go to next level where they would have to understand the business better. I think the business understanding, the strategic goals understanding has to be the next big thing for anyone to succeed in life in career in marketing. And the other...

area is I think the most underrated one, analytical skills where even though your tool might tell you 10 different things, is your gut feeling that even if your human gut feeling comes into play where you know that this is how it works right and most if you look at any top tier marketers they look at the tools but

Rohaan Kaul (27:37.216)
Right.

Niranjan (27:47.244)
they make a gut decision that because they are always in gray areas and that is what experience come and say, okay, you know what, these three things combined and had this effect. And I don't think there's any AI tool which can tell you exactly that. can tell you those three things happened, but those three things happening together in certain ways, if what did this end outcome is still a touch required for that. And that is a skill which most marketers have to kind of add on to the arsenal.

And in general analytics, think.

The other thing is you have to understand more of the journey the consumers are taking and understand what is happening, the psychological aspect of it, right? Why do people feel formed when there are four fields more versus eight fields? It's a known phenomenon, but the whole psychological aspect has to be the more important aspect in the coming years. With that part, I don't think AI can...

Understand cannot understand human emotions as much right those are the kind of Touchpoint which the marketer in the 2k25 would have to be to become a more successful marketer

Rohaan Kaul (29:03.434)
All right. I think so we are, we are close to time now. So anything for the marketing community that you'd like to share a message for them, any recommendations in terms of like not work related, like any books, any podcasts, or your any message in general to the marketing community for the next year.

Niranjan (29:22.67)
I think people should join our community. I'm sure you're running a wonderful community. There are more such communities, I think, operating globally. There are very wonderful spaces to learn and grow. I'm part of at least half a dozen communities across Markops and Revops space. think they're all very welcoming and very inclusive in nature

I think people should join those communities, get a different perspective of what they are doing right and wrong. I think it helps a lot to hear other people say same problems you are facing and people solving it for them also come in handy. I think I am part of a community called S11S.

It's called, I think, StartupSaradayz, the shortened form for that. It's a 4,000 people strong community which has all the B2B SaaS marketers in India. It's a good place to come. I think, please come hang out.

Rohaan Kaul (30:21.122)
Alright cool, thank you Niranjan, thank you for that. It was lovely having you on this podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed it and like I said, I definitely wanted to have a perspective of a pure pure technologist this time around and you certainly have lent that diversity to our podcast.

Niranjan (30:23.662)
Thank

Rohaan Kaul (30:43.38)
Once again, thank you. Thank you for your time and thank you for your wonderful insights. And maybe we'll bump into some other community somewhere because I think so we are already part of, we do share couple of communities probably between us. So probably we'll bump into each other once again and probably somewhere on in Bangalore also we'll bump into each other. We do have plans to meet in office once though. Let's say stars may align someday for that.

Niranjan (31:10.414)
Thank you again for having me, Rohaan. It was very wonderful talking to you. Thanks for that.

Rohaan Kaul (31:16.898)
Same here. And I wish you and your family a Happy New Year. Because as you know, this is, I mean, we are preparing for 2025. So wishing you and your family a Happy New Year and hope you have a successful year. All right. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Niranjan (31:20.654)
Yeah, yeah. I think I'll probably, I'll also probably wish a happy New Year for all the audience who's gone to listen to this at some stage. Thank you. Yeah, bye-bye.