Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap, explores how account-based marketing is evolving and discussed the challenges marketers face when it comes to effectively marketing their products.
Learn how Recotap is enhancing ABM by using LinkedIn as a high impact advertising platform and empowering smaller SaaS companies to run personalised campaigns. Ganesh also unpacks key topics such as understanding buyer intent, avoiding common pitfalls in traditional ABM strategies, and creating messaging that resonates with target audiences.
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About Ganesh
Ganesh Chithambalam is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in the SaaS and marketing technology space. Before founding Recotap, he built and scaled 30+ high-growth SaaS products and a high-performance programmatic ad exchange. With a deep focus on performance marketing, automation, and account-based strategies, he brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to solving complex B2B marketing challenges.
Ganesh is passionate about using data and technology to drive meaningful outcomes for marketing teams. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, discovering local cultures, and experimenting in the kitchen.
About Recotap
Recotap is an Account-Based Marketing platform purpose-built for B2B marketers who want to run high-impact, personalised LinkedIn campaigns at scale. Designed to simplify complex ABM workflows, Recotap brings together data signals, audience segmentation, ad personalisation, and performance tracking into one unified platform.
By leveraging intent data, CRM insights, and website behaviour, Recotap helps marketing teams identify high-fit, in-market accounts and automatically activate 1:1 ad campaigns and personalised landing pages. Whether you’re building awareness, accelerating pipeline, or influencing late-stage deals, Recotap enables full-funnel ABM execution with minimal effort.
Trusted by fast-growing SaaS and tech companies, Recotap is helping redefine how modern B2B teams approach demand generation, sales alignment, and marketing ROI.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Ganesh Chachambaland
00:00:43 – Ganesh’s Career Journey and Founding RecoTap
00:03:38 – Challenges in Current ABM Campaigns
00:04:12 – Common Mistakes in ABM Marketing
00:06:24 – Intent Signals and Their Importance for SaaS
00:07:03 – Personalisation in ABM Campaigns
00:12:18 – Balancing Lead Generation and Brand Awareness
00:16:37 – Predictions for the Future of ABM and Marketing
00:18:26 – Valuable Marketing Advice Received
00:20:28 – Outro and Contact Information
Quotes
“The companies which are getting successful are the ones who are marketing it well.” – Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap
“I think brand positioning and brand differentiation is very, very important.” – Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap
Follow Ganesh:
Ganesh Chithambalam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganesh-chithambalam/?originalSubdomain=in
Recotap website: https://www.recotap.com/
Recotap on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/recotap/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Ganesh Chithambalam at Recotap
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ganesh Chithambalam
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Ganesh Chithambalam. Ganesh is the cofounder of Recotap. Welcome to the podcast, Ganesh. Hey, Mike. Nice to be here. Great to have you on the podcast, Ganesh. I’m really interested, you’ve formed Recotap. Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what made you get to the point where you felt that Recotap was the company you wanted to found and grow?
Ganesh: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey and I think it’s an interesting story how we started Recotap. So I started my career as a programmer and I used to work at a couple of IT services companies where we started building apps. Then after a while at it, I thought, Hey, I should start a consulting company where we start building apps for other companies. Right. And while we primarily worked with startups, SaaS companies were trying to build SaaS solutions for real world problems out there. right? So we built close to 30 or 40 SaaS products. And what I found out was the companies which are getting successful were the ones who were marketing it well, right? They were really good products, but then companies, especially the SaaS founders, found it really struggling to market those products well. And that got me thinking, hey, I’ve built products for others for a long time, so why don’t I build products for helping founders succeed once they build their SaaS products? And then we started understanding, hey, what kind of problems they are facing. And then SaaS companies finally used LinkedIn a lot. And then one thing led to another, and then we kind of figured out, hey, ABM is a product space where we want to build a product and where there’s a lot of need for a long tail kind of companies trying to do ABM selling to large enterprises, but they don’t have the budgets and resources to have a large ABM software or a team. And that was the space we wanted to play in. And then we launched Recotap, which is helping small SaaS companies implement ABM to close large value deals.
Mike: I think that’s a great description of, you know, Recotap ad at a high level what it does and why it’s needed. Perhaps we can just delve a little bit deeper into what you’re actually doing to help marketers, you know, run ABM campaigns for SaaS products. So can you talk a little bit about how Recotap works and how your customers might use it to run great ABM campaigns?
Ganesh: So Recotap is a LinkedIn-only focused ABM product. So the primary challenge what we’re solving is LinkedIn is a great advertising tool for B2B audiences. but it lacks tools to run an effective ABM strategy. So if you ever end up talking to a LinkedIn executive, they would say, Hey, minimum audience size should be 50,000 matched contacts, right? Which is too huge. And it’s not really useful for anything more than a brand awareness campaign. So if you want to do ABM on LinkedIn, you really need to know, Hey, where in the buying journey is an account sitting? And then you have to use the right message for that account at the right time to get meaningful results. So essentially what RekruTab does is it helps B2B marketers run full funnel account-based marketing campaigns with the right amount of personalization, depending on the journey stage. So that’s how I would sum up Recotap, right? It’s a full funnel account-based marketing campaign purpose-built for LinkedIn.
Mike: And it’s not just LinkedIn as well, because you also cover the development and optimization of landing pages as well, isn’t that right?
Ganesh: Yes. Yeah, it’s not just ads, right? When you start engaging an account, It’s also important to engage them completely, right? Typically, what people do is they look at an ad, they click, they come to your website. Imagine if you could show content which is relevant for an account on the website as well. That’s an additional capability what we’re going to pass.
Mike: I mean, let’s go back and talk about ABM because I think, you know, you obviously understand ABM incredibly well and have built a product that helps people do it better. What are people, other than having audiences that are too large you referred to earlier, but what are people doing wrong with their ABM campaigns today?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think a lot of B2B marketers think ABM is, hey, I identify a bunch of accounts, run ads to the decision makers, and then somehow they’re going to fill forms and then come to demos, right? So I think that’s a primary mindset that most marketers have, right? Unless you’ve done AVM well for a while, and then you really go, hey, that’s not how it is. Most people think, hey, I run a campaign. I put in a bunch of $10,000 budget and I would get 20 booking demo books from decision makers right from the right. I think what ABM essentially is understanding the needs of an account, where are they even looking to buy your solution right now, and then take the right action based on where their needs are, right? So if an account is not even thinking of buying a solution, it’s best to nurture them and educate them and be on top of their minds. so that when the right time arrives, they think about your brand versus think about an account which is visiting your website or comparing you on G2. They’re actually considering purchasing a product or a solution similar to yours. The messaging and the ads should be completely different then. You should be talking about, hey, what pain points we can solve? How are we better than the competitors you are researching about, right? So that’s how the messaging should be. Only when you engage your accounts in a way, depending on what their content need is, is what is an efficient account-based marketing campaign. And that’s what most marketers miss out. They just think, hey, I run a bunch of ads and then I’m magically going to get decision makers into my demo or buy my product.
Mike: And that’s really interesting. I mean, this is something LinkedIn talks about a lot with targets that are in market and targets that are not in market. And they have this 5% number they come up with. Only 5% of the people you’re targeting are actually ready to buy at the moment. Presumably, one of the nice things about working with SaaS companies is that it’s actually possible to get some intent signals. And you mentioned a couple of places where you might pull in intent. So you can understand whether an account is considering a purchase or not. Does that make ABM for SAS easier? Or do you think that’s something that Recotap is going to apply across other markets in the future?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think the Recotap app is quite useful for markets where a lot of decision making is done digitally. And I think that’s a lot of markets now. And I think if your audience is on LinkedIn, Recotap app is going to be quite useful. So we are right now focusing on SaaS companies because of the intern signals, what we have natively built in. We work with G2, we work with Trusted Years, we work with Bombora, right? And I think it’s primarily SaaS and software. focus signals at this point in time, or tech companies, if I have to go broad. But I think as a product, I think it’s primarily dependent on LinkedIn. So anybody who has audiences on LinkedIn can actually use like that.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, one of the features, you know, as well as bringing intent is personalization. I think anyone who’s run ABM campaigns, typically is quite surprised that relatively straightforward personalization can actually really improve performance. So can you talk a little bit about how you help marketers personalize the content in the campaigns, whether that’s the ads or the landing pages, and what you’ve seen that works really well?
Ganesh: So, I think personalization is one of the key actions which you can take when you’re running the LinkedIn AVM campaign. So personalization, if you have to do personalization well, so you need to really understand what your accounts are looking for, right? So I think the standard personalization is, hey, company name, or hey, person name, but I think that works to just grab attention, but then nothing more than that. So real personalization is understanding, hey, what your account is, look at all the signals which an account is exhibiting, understand what an account is trying to achieve right now, and can you customize your message for that account and for key personas inside that account. So, Rekodap helps automate 80 to 90% of this process. So, as I mentioned before, we integrated most signals which B2B marketing teams have at hand. It could be signals on the CRM systems. It could be signals on website. It could be signals on third-party systems like G2 or Vumbora and so on. Say, for example, if you are a SaaS company selling to a HR head, and if you know that this particular certain company is interested in procuring HR tech solution like, let’s say, payroll management. And they have problems related to payroll management. And then if you can try and position yourself saying that, hey, we are the best payroll management tool, and we solve certain problems in payroll management, which is quite relevant for you based on the intent signals what the account is exhibiting. So that’s deep personalization. So you need to take your messaging from not just, hey, company, or hey, person, to actual pain points and actual requirements of an account basis at a certain stage, right? So that’s what is personalization. And how Recotap helps you do is understand the signals, segment the accounts, and also create ads with AI, which use those signals, and then place those ads directly on LinkedIn. So you’re not actually spending tons of time understanding signals, creating creatives, right? You can automate all of it with Rekrut app.
Mike: And in terms of managing that, I mean, I think one of the challenges people have with ABM on LinkedIn is that the LinkedIn ad tool is fairly clunky. So presumably what’s happening is Recotap handling all that management and creating separate campaigns that have customized ads. So you’re doing that all automatically in the background, is that right? Absolutely, right?
Ganesh: So, imagine you have 100 accounts who are interested in the same payroll solution, but they have different pay points. So your ads, need to be 100 different creatives. What record app can do is create 100 different ad creatives for each of those 100 accounts and also push it to LinkedIn and run those campaigns for each of those 100 accounts automatically.
Mike: And then presumably you can also route people to customized landing pages? Absolutely.
Ganesh: If you have a personalized ad, if people are clicking on it, they’re going to land on your website. And then you can personalize with the same intent signal, with the same information. You can provide a lot more context and a lot more information on why a particular brand should be considering your product. So you’re pairing a personalized landing page with a personalized ad.
Mike: And I think one of the things, you know, people would really like to know is you’ve obviously seen some campaigns that have been really effective. Are there any kind of either great campaigns or ideas or tips you can give as to how marketers can personalize ads more effectively on LinkedIn?
Ganesh: Yeah, so I think there are a lot of use cases where personalized ads can be used. All of us know LinkedIn ads are quite expensive and personalization brings the cost per click down and also increases the click-through rate. So that’s like the leading metric. If you personalize well, I think you’re going to get your cost per clicks and click-through rates at least 50%. We have seen customers decrease it by 300% and also getting your cost per leads down effectively. So that’s the leading metric, right? But what could also happen is I’ve seen a customer who effectively used personalized ads to do ad cover for sales when they were part of an RFP process. So there was a large IT company going behind a bank and the sales were requiring marketing to influence their RFP. So this particular customer ran personalized ads, engaging the entire decision-making team for over three months. And then this campaign actually led to a win of a $3.2 million deal. So essentially the spend was not more than $20,000. but the revenue was $3.2 million. That’s the power of personalization. If it’s done well, I think it can really short circuit long sales cycles and also win deals for you.
Mike: And I think you mentioned something there that I think we really do need to address. LinkedIn is great, and particularly for its ability to target not only just at the company level, but also in terms of roles, which is clearly why a lot of people look at LinkedIn as their go-to platform. As you mentioned, LinkedIn can be very expensive. So it seems to me like there’s an opportunity for for Recotap to potentially expand in the future and maybe offer, for example, Google Display retargeting of people who visit landing pages and don’t convert. Is that something you’re looking at? Is that in the plans? It’s absolutely in the plans.
Ganesh: So, the key difference between retargeting and Recotap is this. So retargeting is you’re targeting one person who has just visited the website. They may or may not be the decision makers and may or may not be part of the influencing team. So with record app, you could target the entire buying group. It could be influencers, it could be users, and that’s the power of, we call it pre-targeting. But essentially, once you get the right decision makers on your website, you could automatically start a retargeting campaign on Meta, Google, YouTube, whatever channel.
Mike: That’s really interesting. You did mention something earlier, we had a quick talk about companies in market versus companies that aren’t actually ready to buy. I’m really interested, how should B2B marketers balance their approach to companies that are showing intent, that are in market looking for a product, and then nurturing those potential future customers that maybe aren’t quite ready to buy? Is there a way you can use RecoTap to actually balance your budget and allocate it more sensibly so you’re not 100% focused on lead gen or 100% focused just on awareness?
Ganesh: Sure. I think it’s more a question about what your company’s goals are for this quarter. what your goals are in the long term. Record app and LinkedIn in general as a tool can be used to achieve both, right? It’s a question of how much budgets you have and what is high priority right now. But I think good ABM campaigns are a mix of both. And then I definitely recommend using record app to build broad level awareness among your accounts, but also use Recotap to close leads and get leads and close deals faster. So I think there’s no right mix on how much you need to spend on brand awareness and how much you need to spend on demand gen and stuff. But I think it’s different for different companies. What we’ve seen customers successfully do is they figure this number in a quarter or two when they use Recotap. And because of the journey stage based orchestration, what record app has, you know, Hey, if I, if I start targeting X amount of accounts at the top of the funnel, how many actually go into the middle of the funnel and how many actually go into the customer stage, right. In a, in a quarter or two. And then you can use that number, which is actually relevant for your organization to make, uh, for the decisions for the next quarter and the next year and so on.
Mike: Yeah, makes absolute sense. One thing that interests me, you primarily work with SaaS companies, and there’s been a lot of talk in B2B marketing about customers spending more time doing self-directed research, less time talking to salespeople. And I think SaaS is pretty much an extreme of that, where actually many people are buying SaaS almost entirely through digital processes rather than talking to salespeople. Do you see this trend continuing? And if so, presumably, that’s going to drive more focus on ABM marketing, because frankly, the major prospects don’t want to talk to salespeople. Is that a reasonable assumption?
Ganesh: I think it’s a very, very reasonable assumption. And I think with AI, chat GPT of the world, I think doing research is becoming much and more easier and easier, right? But I do think for ABM SaaS companies, this is actually a good thing. Because when there’s a lot of research online, it’s easy to track intent compared to the previous ways of traditional sales. You have to have expensive salespeople take your customers on expensive dinners, golf events, and so on. But I think because a lot of research happens online, I think in my opinion, it’s a good thing for SaaS companies. There are tools right now where you can get intent of these accounts. That’s actually a good thing. It’s actually lowering the cost per acquisition in my opinion. And I think it is a vote to continue.
Mike: I mean, that sounds very similar to what a lot of people I hear saying. I’m also interested what you think is going to happen in terms of changes to technology. I mean, ABM is actually, what is it, a couple of decades old? It’s not really been around for that long, but it’s changed massively. How do you see ABM or marketing in general changing in the next five years?
Ganesh: interesting time. I think what has happened because of the advent of AI is there’s not too much difference between a good messaging and which is really well-crafted messaging and a not so well-crafted messaging, right? I think a lot of companies have cracked how to use AI well in their messaging and also implement automation. So what I see happening is There’s going to be too much of noise. Customers are going to find it very difficult to figure out, hey, which is the best solution for me? I think there’s a lot of overload of AI generated content out there. And then every ad is going to look similar. Every landing page is going to look similar. They’re going to talk the same thing. So it’s going to become very difficult for companies to actually make decision. And I feel people are going to go to human connections then to make the decisions. I think it’s going to go into a full circle and I predict it’s going to happen pretty soon.
Mike: Interesting. I think we’re all seeing a lot of AI generated content and beginning to recognize it. I think that is going to be a challenge for marketers who’ve bought into AI heavily, is that customers are going to see it and value it less. I totally agree. Ganesh, I really appreciate your time. It’s been fascinating. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of some of the capabilities of RecoTap. But I’m aware of your time. So there’s two questions we always like to ask people on the podcast. And the first is, what’s the best marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Ganesh: The best advice which I ever got, which I reused at Recotap is think about differentiation right from the beginning and then think about positioning right from the beginning. And also, it takes a little bit of time and experimentation to arrive there, but I think you think about what your brand is, right? When somebody is searching for their problem on a weekend, they should think about your brand, right? And I think brand positioning and brand differentiation is very, very important.
Mike: I think that’s great advice. I think certainly it’s something we’re all trying to do, maybe not always giving it as much focus as we should. The second question is about people entering the industry. I mean, obviously, industry is going through huge change at the moment, particularly due to the influence of generative AI. So what advice would you give a young person just about to start a marketing career?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think, again, I touched upon this a bit in one of the previous questions. I think it’s an interesting time. A lot of grunt work in marketing, processing Excels, taking data from one place is all getting automated. I think what’s going to still remain intact, at least in the near foreseeable decade is the human element of marketing. So I think an end person who’s getting into marketing right now, I think should focus more on the human element, the psychology of marketing and not on say things like performance marketing, for example, which I think is going to get automated with AI pretty soon.
Mike: That’s great advice. I love that. Ganesh, it’s been great having you on the podcast. It’s been a fascinating discussion. If people want to learn more about RicoTap or about account-based marketing, where’s the best place for them to go?
Ganesh: I think we are very active on LinkedIn because we have a product which is on LinkedIn. I think the easiest place to reach me is on LinkedIn.
Mike: That’s awesome. Ganesh, thank you so much for your insights and it’s been a really fascinating discussion. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Ganesh: Thank you. Thank you so much, Mike.It was fun being part of this podcast and I think I really enjoyed this experience as well.
