Datarails CRO Aviv Canaani has an unusual vantage point. He runs the full revenue engine of the financial planning and analysis platform for Microsoft Excel users \u2014 sales, marketing, partnerships \u2014 from New Jersey, while his marketing team operates out of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He relocated to be closer to the North American customer base as the marketers stayed put. And after years of sitting inside both ecosystems at the same time, attending CMO sessions in Tel Aviv and building pipelines in the US, he\u2019s reached a verdict most people in his position wouldn\u2019t say out loud: the Israelis<\/em> are better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a claim that cuts against the instinct of almost every Israeli founder he\u2019s encountered – and every company I\u2019ve spoken to over the years. \u201cNormally, when I speak to startups that are born in Israel, they want to send their sales and marketing overseas immediately. [It\u2019s] the first thing they want to do,\u201d I told him during our conversation. But Canaani\u2019s experience runs the other direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Israeli edge, he claims, comes down to a cultural obsession with output. \u201cWhen you talk with people in Israel, marketing leaders, it\u2019s about how they built machines, how much the cost per meeting, how they\u2019re running campaigns on Facebook and Google and all that.\u201d American counterparts, he finds, often arrive at the conversation from somewhere else entirely. \u201cA lot of CMOs and people in marketing I talk with in the US or Canada\u2026 can talk more about the brand, how things take time, like it\u2019s a long-term investment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n