James Sandoval is the CEO of the London-based startup MeasureMatch. MeasureMatch is a marketplace platform for the buying, selling and scaling of enterprise technology and data services for digital marketing. Founded in 2016, the company has experienced rapid growth globally.
Sandoval is a serial entrepreneur and has been in data and analytics and digital marketing for more than a decade. James sat down with Audiens for our That Moment series to talk about the challenges of starting a company, happy customers and why outsourcing has changed.
Audiens: You’ve created a company that is doing well. It took you two years to build the MeasureMach platform, so what can it change for your audience now that you have it up and running?
James Sandoval: The most significant thing it changes is the pace of each client’s go-to-market execution. Clients can immediately go out and improve data collection, marketing automation, data management, business intelligence and customer communication faster and a lot more productively. All that’s needed, in a lot of cases, is a small to mid-sized budget commitment for consultants or consultancies to make that happen. MeasureMatch gives clients direct and unique access to relevant, capable, verified extra pairs of hands or teams that can accelerate go-to-market at speed.
Audiens: Since the company is new, what would you say has been MeasureMatch’s biggest challenge?
Sandoval: Designing and maintaining a customer experience that works seamlessly has been our biggest challenge. We’re baking in all of the real-world nuances that go into the buying and selling of enterprise technology and data professional services into the platform. Building a platform that takes these things into account is hard. We’ve gotten several things wrong along the way, but we tore down, redesigned, and rebuilt it in order to have a customer experience that works for all uses in all walks of work and life.
Audiens: What do you think is the biggest problem MeasureMatch solves?
Sandoval: We’re simplifying a legacy process littered with layers of fear, uncertainty and doubt, not to mention heaps of technology vendor choice. Business and marketing leaders, CEOs and founders are trying to adopt so many SaaS products – from analytics systems, CRM, marketing automation, customer experience analytics to personalization – but they are doing it pretty badly or failing outright. These products are evolving really fast, but the organizations renting them aren’t keeping up so we are changing that.
Audiens: The MeasureMatch marketplace feels like the next iteration of client outsourcing?
Sandoval: It is the next iteration of outsourcing in one platform. MeasureMatch can personalize the experience for each of our customer constituents. Data is critically important because it feeds into a recommendation engine for all parties to benefit. The Deloitte’s and Cognizant’s of the world are catering to the top one percent of companies out there, but the remainder of the business population, small to medium enterprises, don’t know where to go for these types of services. MeasureMarch brings a data-driven approach for those businesses to find and buy these services. Ultimately, we see MeasureMatch as the platformization of professional services.
Audiens: What do you think has changed for the marketing or advertising agency the most during your career?
Sandoval: Great question. My answer starts with what hasn’t changed. The biggest constants are things like scale matters (especially to make up for operational inefficiencies), inefficiency reigns, talent churn remains painfully high, leadership loves strategy but often can’t execute. And many clients are so bandwidth-constrained internally, they heap unnecessary, irrelevant or off strategy work on their agency partners, which isn’t good for anyone.