Meet Mark Ogne, the Chief Marketing Officer of MRP, the only enterprise-class account-based sales and marketing platform built to empower sophisticated organizations to simplify the complexity of their operating environment and drive actual pipeline revenue impact. He oversees the marketing strategy and execution elements, including brand, go-to-market, marketing communications, analyst relations, and marketing programs for MRP, Globally. His team of marketing professionals is the prime user of our enterprise-class ABM platform, MRP Prelytix.
Before joining MRP, Mark held senior marketing roles for over 20 years, from global technology organizations like Acxiom to four successful exits in startup companies. Rooted at the intersection of technology, insights, and actions, Mark has led the global expansion of ABM as a mature marketing practice for seven years as an ABM strategist, practitioner, industry thought leader, event speaker, analyst, and writer.
Recently we got an opportunity to sit down with Mark to learn how he and his team at MRP are changing the industry for the better.
Below are the highlights of the interview.
Q) You have impressive expertise; we would love to hear more about your professional journey! Could you give us a brief overview of your career and how you got to where you are today?
Mark) Marketing isn’t a job to me; it’s a passion. I love what I do. I love the people with whom I work. I love our clients. I love the endless possibilities of innovation we can bring to market. Because of this, I can wake up each morning excited for what the day ahead will bring me.
My path is unique. In the earliest part of my career, I carried a sales bag and, in a few years, became a sales manager. My last quota-carrying role was quite sizable; I was helping large direct response technology resellers start their first e-commerce business. Here, I structured and sold the largest deal of my career, $400M. This transaction was a fantastic experience that spanned more than 18 months.
Heading to my earlier point of a unique path, one of my prior clients hired me to build and scale an e-commerce business, and now a new curve in my career took me into general management. We had a fantastic CEO who offered tremendous support. Over three years, my business unit became the largest of several, peaking at $350M ARR. I remember crafting financial projections and a large portion of our S1 filing, and boom, we experienced our part of the dot com days.
Having just experienced the ramp-up of the digital revolution, it appeared to me that the marketing function was at the cusp of a lot of change and that I found all of this exciting. Over the next few decades, I participated in several startups, but what charged me up was the possibility of innovation. I saw and still do now that marketing leads the confluence of innovation and go-to-market strategies to deliver value. Since then, my focus has been to build teams and nurture them to embrace the uncertainty and challenge of change to find the most innovative and valuable solutions for a target market. Together, we can directly influence more prospects and customers than any single salesperson and, potentially, an entire team.
Q) Talk about MRP and its key offerings. How are your solutions adding value to the target clientele?
Mark) My opinion and $4 can get you a coffee at Starbucks. I like to let clients and industry pundits tell the story for us.
In a fast-growing and highly competitive market, MRP is the only one that’s taken a blue ocean strategy. We’re 100% committed to sales and marketing professionals within enterprise organizations; our technology, services, and orchestration capabilities are purpose-built to address their unique challenges.
Because of this, our propositions make more sense to our targets, it’s more valuable to them, and they stay longer. Our largest clients have been with us longer than our competitors have been in business. Today, we do business with these fantastic brands across all four global regions.
The fact is that these organizations are not just bigger startups. Their needs, processes, requirements, sophistication, and organizational complexities have no alignment with fast growth and SMB brands. Our solutions are built to simplify complexity, produce revenue impact, and empower their sales and marketing motions to be account-based. Our goal is to show them how vast their revenue potential is, not convince them to jump into a small box that doesn’t fit them.
Q) We’d love to know about this Company. How did the ideation of the MRP come about?
Mark) In 2002, our founders had a unique idea that appending 3rd party data and insights to client CRM data could produce better outbound sales and marketing impact. They started with the sales development function, one of the highest-cost channels, where marginal increases have dramatic results. They soon moved on to other high-cost channels and the ability to manage data and curate the most valuable insights available today.
Q) What key highlights would you like to share that fostered your growth as an Influential CMO?
Mark) Everybody comes into marketing with a specialization; this is your starting point, don’t let it become your endpoint. Throughout your career, consider each new skill learned as a tool in your skills “toolbelt.” Work to expand your toolbelt every day. When given a challenge, someday, you’ll realize that your recommended solutions are more valuable and timelier. Your aperture of consideration is more extensive, and your answers are more strategic and doable.
Q) Throw light on your team and area of expansion.
Mark) My team is fantastic; I’m truly blessed. Each has a unique perspective and value they deliver to MRP. My philosophy is that work should be fun with a purpose. My experience is that when I’ve created an environment of trust and enjoyment, my teams lean in harder, are more convicted to their responsibilities, produce better results, and have fun.
Q) What are some of the top factors that will still challenge CMOs throughout the year?
Mark) A few weeks ago, I met with a large group of CMOs from small and large organizations. The concern, or challenge, mentioned most frequently was team attrition and movements to headcount reduction. The more significant issue is simply pressure on SG&A caused by profit concerns. In my industry, most competitors are VC funded, so their headwinds are different but significant, as capital markets are not particularly bullish on tech companies today.
Q) What are the fundamental values of MRP that remained constant over the years?
Mark) Diversity, accountability, teamwork, and persistent focus on client outcomes. We have a strong DEI presence; we’re even a proud holder of the Diversity Mark seal.
Q) What are some of the core marketing dos and don’ts that you feel CMOs need to pursue in 2023?
Mark) Given the back-to-back headwinds of Covid and our current economic conditions, I suggest that marketing leaders need to do two key things: 1) execute your core and most valuable initiatives flawlessly, don’t overcomplicate things; 2) focus your investments on things that produce value for your organization, and be able to quantify their impact.
Q) How do you see the marketing industry ten years from now?
Mark) I’m continually exploring the arc of innovation in B2C marketing technologies and strategies and finding ways to adopt that learning into my environment. I see a ton of innovation in the B2B space, and I love being here. Still, with robust exposure to B2C marketing technologies, I can say that the B2B environment is typically a decade behind. My point isn’t to put down the B2B marketing world, but probably more an artifact of the scale of budgets.
Q) We’d love to hear about some of your future marketing plans for MRP. What will the next few months look like?
Mark) My team is working to adopt a strategy that Forrester Research released the last year. We call it “Opportunity Zero,” but the thrust of the idea is that typical lead generation processes strip 98% of the available insights and the value of their efforts before doing any handoff to their salespeople. Instead, our marketing and business development teams organize all the details surrounding buying centers at our target accounts. They use this complete picture to understand buyer needs, stage, and how to best interact with them. This isn’t easy, but it matches our company’s technology well, and the initial results are outstanding.
Q) What advice would you like to give to an aspiring marketing leader?
Mark) Find a mentor. I can point to two people who have greatly influenced my career, and I would not be where I am today without them. I still have much to learn, but I am grateful for the leg up they offered me.
Company Name: MRP
Management: Mark Ogne, CMO
URL: www.mrpfd.com
