Sarah Speigle, Director of Product at InMoment chats about the platform’s new Location Performance Scoring System and how it can drive better marketing ROI in this martech catch-up:

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Hi Sarah – tell us about yourself and your journey at InMoment?

I started my career with a series of classic tech startup experiences, wearing many hats across Sales, Operations, and Support. A common thread in all these roles was direct exposure to customer needs, which, in turn, pulled me towards building solutions. It was that interest that led me to product management and where I’ve found real fulfillment in applying technology to meaningful market challenges.

At InMoment, that mission feels more purposeful than ever, because never before has it felt so collaborative. Every team—Customer Success, Support, Sales, Design, and Engineering—is openly and excitedly committed to delivering customer value. Feature enhancement ideas can and do come from every area of the business and the thought that our technical resources devote to a solution’s approach has felt personally motivating and rewarding as I’ve grown from an individual contributor to director on our product team.

What special tips and insights would you share with fellow SaaS product directors?

There are so many wonderful tools these days that it can be easy to forget the often-unmatched value of a simple conversation. Getting in the room with a customer and hearing about the problems they are facing, whether it is with your tool or in their business, cures any number of ills. Customers feel heard, product managers feel connected to the value they are delivering because it has a face and a name and was borne out of a relationship, and provides context that is often missing from analysis done across larger data sets.

We’d love to hear more about InMoment’s new Location Performance Scoring system and how it enables end users?

Our goal was really to connect actions users can take within our platform to actual revenue metrics. Ultimately, marketing investments must be justified by increased dollars and cents. We wanted to make it clear to our customers which areas of investment would have the greatest impact on listing views and therefore drive more customers.

Most of what we found was unsurprising – it has been clear for quite some time that the volume of reviews, star ratings, and if a business responds to reviews or not impacts listing performance and subsequent customer conversion. The impact of photos on listing views and engagement, however, was certainly higher than anticipated- this is made less shocking when you consider the notable investments directories like Google have been making in their photo-related features in recent years. And of course it is discoveries like this that make these sorts of projects so fun and meaningful – we are so excited to see this feature guide action and investment to drive more purchases.

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What about today’s state of martech do you find most interesting?

The pace is astounding. Advancements in technology over the past decade continue to be rapidly applied to the martech space in such creative ways. Automation has become the expectation rather than a competitive distinction and enhancements that were not feasible or prohibitively expensive even 5 years ago are now commonplace. It really is a wonder to be a part of.
A quick shout out to martech innovators who have piqued your interest in the recent months?

Darren Shaw and his team over at Whitespark publish a lot of interesting research, often in the local search and listings space. Directory algorithms are such a black box that it’s fun to read the thoughts of others looking to crack the same code you are.

Similarly, Miriam Ellis does a lot of research and writing on SEM- often with a local focus- and has contributed to work published by Moz previously, another org doing compelling writing in the space.

Not specifically martech, though she was at Google for a time, but I recently read Fei-Fei Li’s autobiography “The Worlds I See, “ and found it to be a very balancing viewpoint on the future of artificial intelligence. There is so much attention on AI currently- in martech specifically so much focus on Generative AI, Image Recognition, NLP-based categorization and analysis. There is this exciting race happening to see where we can incorporate this technology into our products, but in that rush it can be easy to forget that the simple ability to leverage AI in a tool isn’t a good enough reason to do so. Rather, we should be considering, as we always strive to in product management, where such additions will truly add values to users. Dr. Li’s humanist approach on why and how- and if- we should leverage AI was a good reminder of this.

Five thoughts on the future of martech and AI powered marketing before we wrap up?

1. Service still matters: From the consistency of your product to the relationships you build with your customers, the high volume of competitors is such that consumers can and will demand quality.
2. Technology is evolving more quickly than user know-how:  Product designers will have a chance to shine as AI is incorporated into tools where the target demographic is not yet comfortable with routine interactions with the technology, like writing/modifying prompts.
3. Experiences with “bad” AI tools will poison the well:  We’re already seeing consumers doubt results given via AI analysis. Incorrect information, hallucinations, and other negative interactions with AI has increased the desire for users to see citations in results and other confidence-inspiring features.
4. Products will have to repeatedly prove their value to customers: Gone are the days of unaware spending. As budgets tighten and competition for those dollars increase, martech products will have to demonstrate their value year after year to continue to justify client spend.
5. Good products will always require good teams to build and support them: When people ask me about AIs replacing software engineers I laugh, as I’m sure many of my product colleagues do. Engineers are more than just code writing machines, just as designers are more than mock-makers. The collaboration of invested, talented people will always be a necessary input in a product’s development if it is to have long term viability.

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