Steve: Welcome everybody. August 29th. Hey, Dimitri, welcome. Great to have everybody here on August 29th. Weather's cooled down somewhat in Europe. That, that's, that's always nice. Uh Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you came to start your company?
Dmitri: Well, um this is not the first company for me. So my previous company was called GlobalLogic and it was, you know, a pretty successful IT services firm. It was acquired by Hitachi two years ago for 9 billion. So it's pretty, pretty sizable business uh at the moment when, you know, it was acquired. The reason that I kind of created Influ2 was that I was, you know, thinking how can GlobalLogic be more successful in terms of, you know, marketing. Specifically B2B marketing is to me, it's not very efficient. I started my career in consumer marketing and I worked with companies like Coca Cola, McDonald's, and Danone, these kinds of large consumer goods companies. And when we started GlobalLogic, my idea was that probably we should use kind of similar ideas that work for consumer marketing, for B2B. But they didn't. So honestly, you know, we built quite, quite a big company. But not thanks to the marketing effort. It's more thanks to sales and other things that we did. But marketing was not very efficient frankly speaking. And that kept me thinking, what, what else could we do? How could we change what we are doing to make marketing really work for B2B, to make it really drive sales, to make it, you know, have tangible impact on revenue? And that's basically how I came up with the concept of Influ2.
Steve: Ok, so you, you, you started Influ2 six years ago now, right?
Dmitri: Yeah.
Steve: Did you start off well? Capitalized then, I guess with using part of your treasure chest from selling GlobalLogic to start the company?
Dmitri: Yes. Yes. Well, obviously, if you start a new business, it always has to have some, you know… Nothing goes as pretty as predicted. So you want to have some savings to be sure that when things go hard, you still have some backup plan.
Steve: That way you can make sure you get a nice, nice, night sleep. So you started six years ago and the idea was to use advertising more effectively for B2B companies.
Traditional marketing approaches may not be as effective in B2B, prompting the need for innovative solutions like Influ2.
AI and data-driven strategies have become standard tools in marketing, enabling companies like Influ2 to provide valuable solutions for B2B sales and customer engagement.
Influ2's approach focuses on seamlessly integrating advertising into the entire sales and marketing process, emphasizing the importance of supporting sales efforts throughout the entire customer journey.
