If you were to ask Daniel Incandela himself, he will tell you that he is called many things. First and foremost, he is a husband and father. On the professional side, he is an investor, marketing executive, mentor, and board member. On the personal side, he is a 1980-1990’s hip hop scholar, lifelong Manchester United fan, sneaker head, sparkling water connoisseur, and Kung Fu film critic. Here is where you can find Daniel online:
He currently resides in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wife and three sons. Within the software industry, he has held numerous marketing positions at ExactTarget, Salesforce, Return Path, and Conga. Before that, he was the Director of Online Strategies at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. During his time at the IMS, he led and oversaw social media, digital marketing, mobile solutions, photography, video strategy, and digital content creation. And before he was doing marketing in motorsports, he put in five years at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Similar to his responsibilities at the IMS, he oversaw the production of videos, web-based projects, the museum blog, online community development, and more.
Here are a few more fun facts about Daniel’s persona and interests:
Currently, he is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Terminus. For more on what Terminus does or what a CMO means, keep reading below.
If you’re asking yourself, “what is a CMO?” or have a confused look, that’s okay. Keep reading to learn more about this role on a marketing team and where it’s most common. The term “Chief Marketing” in the title Chief Marketing Officer just means that Daniel leads a marketing team and holds a position on Terminus’ leadership team. And the words “Marketing Officer” within this title could mean a number of different things:
Where might you find a CMO? It’s not just in B2B or the tech or software industry, which is what Daniel is in. You also might be asking:
Don’t get CMO confused with collateralized mortgage obligation, as that has a totally different meaning (especially when comparing CMO vs MBS). In fact, there are many different meanings for the abbreviation CMO. Here are a few:
Now that you know what the letters CMO could or could not mean, let’s dig into the CMO meaning as it specifically relates to marketing. A C-level employee on the leadership team or corporate executive responsible for all go-to-market efforts around a company’s services or offerings is a CMO. Marketing is a big part of this, as the CMO’s team is constantly publishing, communicating, or activating campaigns and messaging that assist with the entire revenue funnel (from sales to customer success). Chief Marketing Officer responsibilities include:
The Chief Marketing Officer salary is usually comparable to that of a Chief Revenue Officer. As for education, most CMOs possess at least a bachelor’s degree (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in marketing). Some companies prefer a MBA and/or 10 years or more of experience in marketing. It’s hard to define exact requirements for this position as it is different in every industry.
One of Daniel’s favorite quotes is from Steve Martin: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” This can define really good marketing in many ways, as it is all about getting your brand in front of the right audience in a way where they notice you. A CMO strategically guides his team to effectively do this, so they can generate more revenue opportunities for their sales and customer success counterparts.
Now that you know the true definition and role of a Chief Marketing Officer, you might be interested to see how this position relates specifically to Terminus. We’ll provide more information on the business and history of Terminus in the section. For now, we’ll at least say that Terminus was founded in 2014 when a need was recognized as an opportunity. The Terminus founding team wanted to give B2B marketing and sales teams a better way to go to market. Historically, about only 1% of inbound leads become customers, so they set out to build a solution to help go-to-market teams find their next best customers and give them everything they needed to start a conversation with them.
For Daniel and his marketing team, it’s all about educating Terminus’ audience on this vision and showing how the Terminus Go-to-Market platform is delivering on that promise. Direct reports under Daniel include a Director of Product Marketing, VP of Demand Generation, VP of Brand Marketing, and Director of Customer Marketing. Together as a leadership team, they lead a group of about 20 marketers who specialize in many different areas.
A main focus early on this year for DanielIncandela and his team was developing a Messaging House. What is a Messaging House? It’s a framework to construct and communicate company-wide messaging that makes it easy for every employee to understand and memorize. It includes industry trends (as they relate to Terminus), a brand promise, description of our audience, who we are, what we do, what we offer, what we represent, and who we serve. Other focuses for this year include customer marketing, product marketing, thought leadership, and more.
Terminus transforms the go-to-market approach for B2B teams, allowing them to orchestrate accountability and focus across marketing, customer success, and sales teams to optimize their entire go-to-market strategy and customer experience. Like the Iceland flag, this can be broken down into four parts. The first is target, or the ability to create customizable and dynamic target account segments based on data and developing an ideal customer profile. Then it’s all about engagement, or using the top B2B marketing channels to get your brand in front of your target accounts. After that, it’s all about activation. This means supplying your teammates with real-time alerts, account insights, and connected data so they can reach out to and connect with potential customers in a very personalized way. Finally, Terminus also allows teams to measure their entire go-to-market program and revenue funnel, from first touch to renewal.
Terminus has offices in Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and London. The company is proud to recruit and hire talented human beings from a variety of experiences and backgrounds. Terminus does not discriminate and they believe that they are doing their best and most impactful work when they are a diverse, inclusive, and equitable group.
As mentioned before, Terminus was started in 2014 and then in 2016 they introduced FlipMyFunnel as an event, community, and movement that laid the foundation for the account-based marketing category. In 2017 they acquired Brightfunnel to power full-funnel account based marketing analytics, and then in 2018 they introduced the TEAM framework for ABM success (target, engage, activate, measure). Terminus acquired Sigstr in 2019 to provide a new channel of engagement and source of relationship intent data for their customers. Then in 2020, they surpassed 1,000 customers, acquired Ramble to power account-based chat, and acquired GrowFlare to arm their platform with even more account intelligence. If you’re wondering about the origins of the name, Terminus was the original name of the city of Atlanta because it was the ultimate destination for every train in America. The name, for them, represents the ability to provide to their customers a single point of origin, no matter where they want to go.
Return Path provided world-class deliverability with solutions to optimize their customers’ email marketing programs and drive results that impacted revenue goals. In 2019, Return Path was acquired by Validity and now can be identified as Everest. Created together with 250ok and BriteVerify, Everest is the only solution in the market that can give marketers full control of all critical stages of email marketing. This includes pre-send prep and creation, in-flight optimization, and even post-send email monitoring.
Everest allows teams to get more of their messages delivered to their intended audience. This includes elements like sender reputation and email deliverability. It also provides a way for teams to stand out in their audience’s noisy and crowded inboxes. Finally, it ultimately gives marketing and communications teams the ammo their email program needs to execute better email campaigns in a timely and effective way.
According to their website. Validity is a very trusted name in customer data quality. It allows companies to grow faster and hit their goals with accurate data for sales productivity and email engagement. Validity continues to grow rapidly and if you’re interested in learning more about their career opportunities, they have a number of roles currently open across engineering, customer success, finance, IT, marketing, product management, professional services, and sales.
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