Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Bugra Gunduz - HockeyStack

Accurate attribution is difficult, particularly in B2B tech, but it can be crucial in understanding the customer journey and what marketing activities drive revenue.

Buğra Gündüz, CEO of HockeyStack, an analytics and attribution platform for B2B businesses, breaks down how marketers can leverage their platforms to understand marketing data and the benefits of using specialist platforms.

He also shares his experience in growing his start-up business and the marketing activities helping to drive early-stage growth.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About HockeyStack

HockeyStack is a San Francisco-based analytics and attribution tool for B2B companies. Connecting ads, websites, and CRM platforms, HockeyStack collects data in one place, and turns that data into visual customer journeys you can analyse.

About Buğra

Buğra Gündüz is a CEO and co-founder of HockeyStack.

Time Stamps

[00:39.2] – Overview of HockeyStack, its uses and how it was founded.

[03:46.1] – Buğra discusses how marketers can understand what marketing activities drive people to become customers.

[14:28.3] – Who is HockeyStack aimed at?

[15:15.5] – How does HockeyStack approach marketing itself?

[18:18.1] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?

[24:23.5] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.

Quotes

“Large enterprises don't understand how their marketing funnel works, which sources work, and which sources don't. Are they getting value out of what they're spending on a channel?” - Buğra Gündüz, CEO at HockeyStack

 “I hear this all the time from clients - attribution is one of the hardest things. People are spending money, and to a large extent, it's very hard to know what drove prospects to become customers.” – Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier

Follow Farzad:

Buğra Gündüz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgrgndzz/

HockeyStack website: https://hockeystack.com/

Follow HockeyStack: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hockeystack/

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/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

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 Bugra Gunduz - HockeyStack

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Bugra Gunduz

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 Buğra Gündüz. Buğra is the CEO of analytics company HockeyStack. Welcome to the podcast.

Buğra: Yeah, great to be on here.

Mike: Thank you. Well, it's great to have you on as well. So what we'd like to do is start by asking people, you know, how they got to where they are today. So tell me a bit about your career journey, and why you decided to found HockeyStack.

Buğra: So I've never really had a true full time job ever in my life. So I can't really talk about a career. I started coding when I was really young. I think I was like nine. Ever since then. I've been building digital products. That was my obsession throughout my whole life. So naturally, it led me to try out a couple different products, try selling them and build a company. I failed a couple times before. But right now lucky sec. is the one that stuck out.

Mike: You didn't find it on your own? I mean, how did you find co founders to actually start the company,

Buğra: both of my co founders, we met while building other stuff. That was a benefit of its I saw how they worked. I saw their work ethic, I saw what they liked doing what they didn't like doing. And when we found a good idea, a naturally had two people that would be really passionate about it, and stick it out with me.

Mike: That's awesome. You've actually like worked with them previously? And got that experience? I think that's great. So can you explain briefly what HockeyStack does?

Buğra: On the website, hockey sack, it says and is an analytics and attribution company for B2B businesses. Basically, what we do is we collect all data about the B2B customer journey from the start to the end, from marketing, to sales, touch points, to customer success, touch points, everything is collected and merged. And then you can analyse that data to understand what really drives revenue for your company. I guess when people think of attribution software, they think of a very narrow set of software, like traditional attribution software shows you a simple table of sources, and how many customers that those sources both, but what we do is we're building a data discovery platform. So you can dig into basically any data that is collected from the customer journey. And that allows you to access really, really accurate attribution, rather than just using attribution models, and showing that simple table.

Mike: So I mean, that's interesting. I've got loads of questions about how the product works. But I mean, but I have to ask this question. You know, attribution is famously a difficult problem to solve, particularly in B2B. So why did you pick that area? Was it just because of the challenge?

Buğra: Well, we talked to like 200 to 300 people, before even starting out building a product. And every one of those people said their biggest analytics challenge was actually attribution. People don't understand still, to this day, even large enterprises don't understand how their marketing funnel works, which sources work, which sources don't? Are they getting the value out of what they're spending on a channel? So I guess that's why we want to work on it.

Mike: No, I mean, I hear this all the time from our clients, actually, that attribution is one of the hardest things, you know, people are spending money and they, to a large extent, it's very hard to know what drove prospects become customers. So I totally agree, it's, it's definitely a problem worth solving. So maybe you could talk me through, you know, if somebody's using HockeyStack as a product. I mean, at a high level, you just walk through what they do, to try and understand what marketing activities are driving people to become customers.

Buğra: So there are a couple of ways people approach it. First, let me talk about how it's set up. Because our setup is one of our biggest differentiators. When you think about a Data Platform usually think about three months, six months at upcycles. Our setup is completed in five minutes. You connect to all your different data sources by Clevedon connect on our UI. You put a simple script on your website. If you have any other software you use that we don't have an integration for the built the integration for you free of charge. And then once all of that data is collected and merged, you're presented with templated dashboards that show you a breakdown of each channel and some reports that you find valuable that you see. So just cohorted Comparison Reports for your advertising activity for your event activity for your organic channels. And then you're presented with also a really flexible Report Builder. So you can go in and think of any report you want to create, and you can build it yourself. People like to build the conversion rate reports by source. And the good thing about collecting all data from all sources together is that you can view conversion rates across the entire funnel. So it can be of conversion rates from an email you sent, which is stored on whatever you send emails to a deal activity. Or if you use your website as a big channel, you can see conversion rates between your emails to your website, so sky's the limit, you can see conversion rates between anything, you can see the lift of any activity on any conversion rate on your sales cycle. You can see how it affects your sales cycle length, which is a big thing that our customers B2B customers, like to optimise for. Yeah, that's, that's pretty much how people like to do attribution nowadays.

Mike: So I'm just gonna ask you a question about something you said at the start of that answer. I'm sure you say you build an interface into whatever product you're using free of charge. Is that right?

Buğra: Yep. And that's because, one, we're getting pretty fast at building integration. So it doesn't have much of a cost associated with it. Obviously, if it's like a really, really custom thing, like we have some people who have their own in house CRM software that they want to want us to integrate with, which obviously is not free of charge. But if we see that there's a real deficiency in our product, then we do it free of charge.

Mike: Wow. So I mean, you know, a standard CRM or advertising platform or whatever, that had a decent API, and a reasonable user base, you'd actually just integrate, you know, whether or not you've already had that. That's amazing.

Buğra: Yeah, definitely. I'm not ashamed of admitting that, like, we're an early stage company, we just got started. The product was launched in February 2002. into, which is pretty pretty early for a software company. So obviously, we won't cover all of the integrations that companies use, but we're willing to make the effort to cover our bases.

Mike: I think it's amazing. I mean, that's, that's really refreshing. You hear a lot of people talking about how important integrations are on this podcast. And yet, they still aren't as flexible as you to build them. So I think that's amazing. I move back to HockeyStack now and ask you some questions. So I think a lot of people, you know, have maybe done a little bit of work with attribution, they use two different attribution models. So you know, last touch, first touch time decay, whatever it sounds like, you're actually taking a slightly different approach where you can go and almost interrogate the data to find out the impact of one particular activity on conversion, is that what you're doing, you're doing something slightly different, are you trying to, you know, simply allocate value for a conversion across different activities?

Buğra: Well, we also provide attribution models, they're the not industry standard, so you have to provide them. But our websites is to say 100%, accurate attribution is a pipe dream. And that is because attribution is not about assigning credit to touch points, like those models you use, you use the linear model, for example, the linear model breaks down the entire credit into all touchpoints equally, but in reality, that is not really true, like the person visited, they maybe saw a certain campaign that affected them a lot. And then they had a couple of different touch points that didn't really affect them. So you can't really know for sure that that credit is true. One you have to compare across different attribution models, that is very hard, like flexible Report Builder comes into play, because you can compare different attribution models, right on the same report, which nobody else really does to, you have to, like you said, really dig into the data to understand the lift of those activities. That table that attribution table shows you a certain channel as x much credit, but you have to dig into all of those credit deals or companies and see if they actually did those. So we give people a super detailed timeline view of all activity across all stakeholders that a company did, from like any source so that they can really add a glance understand what the company was influenced by And then where this is going in the future is, we're gonna get smarter, you're going to be able to understand just like how variable to do qualitatively, we're going to be able to understand quantitatively, which channel had the most meaningful impact on a customer's journey. I think there's a mathematical way of understanding that. But that's what we'll be working on in the future, to make it even more accurate, but I really don't think that attribution models will last like first touch last touch. Those obviously are inaccurate, even multi touch attribution models, I think, are highly inaccurate.

Mike: And that's interesting. I mean, I think a lot of people have seen a similar thing. You know, if you run, say Google ads campaign, you know that it's not just the Google Ads that's that's driving that, but Google will apply attribution, and and, frankly, quite often do it to make their ads product look good, I think.

Buğra: Well, I meant about that. Google just would most of their attribution models, except for their, I think their last ditch and also data driven. And I'm pretty sure that their data driven model, highly biassed? Is there their Google Glass product?

Mike: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, data driven is kind of a bit of a black box model, isn't it? You don't really know what's going on. It's just just kind of trust us. It's gonna work model.

Buğra: Yeah. I think there's a way of like making it work making AI based models work. And we'll also be working on that. But it's just that when Google does it, you obviously know that they're trying to feed their ads product?

Mike: Yeah, of course. I'm also interested about offline activities. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of tracking of attribution online. I mean, is there a way for you to incorporate offline activities into HockeyStack?

Buğra: Yeah, so we were the first ever company to be able to do not only source based attribution, but action based attribution, that might be really vague to some listeners. But basically, all of their attribution companies show you reports broken down by which channel they came from, or which type of source they came from. With that, you're not able to really track a lot of other touch points. So what we invented is, we can attribute one action that happened across the customer journey to another action that happened before it. And that action you attribute to, if you change it to be the events, activities, event subscriptions, that you collect on your CRM, then you'll be able to attribute revenue or any other metric to your event activity. If you change that to be, for example, content consumption, if you're really heavy on your blog, maybe you can attribute revenue to your blog, and you can be break it down by exactly which blog post they read, and really understand what's happening in your content marketing. And you can apply that to any offline or online activity.

Mike: And presumably, a lot of what you're trying to do is make it really easy for the user to actually pick those items. Because I guess one of the challenges is if you look at, you know, a midsize or large size B2B organisation, they're doing an awful lot. So being able to pull out what's important is probably one of the big challenges of usability for you.

Buğra: Yeah, definitely. And I believe that their CRM does a lot of the heavy lifting. Even though a CRM as the interface looks really, really complicated. The data we pull from a CRM is super, super valuable. So whatever you input onto there, we can display it for you.

Mike: That's fantastic. I'm interested in now, I mean, is there a particular sort of type of business that you've aimed HockeyStack out? Is there a particular problem you're trying to solve?

Buğra: Well, we set out to solve analytics for B2B companies with large sales cycles. That's the type of company that has the most trouble tracking their activities, because there's so many stakeholders, so many different touchpoints marketing has an effect. Even after the sales conversation starts, marketing still has an effect. So we're trying to really make it easy for B2B companies to track their marketing activity.

Mike: And when you talk about B2B covers, is this a kind of product that only large enterprises can afford? Or is it a more affordable product for midsize companies?

Buğra: Well, we have customers from both segments. The minimum pricing starts from 12k here, which is pretty affordable for midsize company, I would say. And then for larger companies, I don't think it's that expensive of a product compared to a lot of my uptick in sales tech providers MC that are building like crazy amounts delivering no value

Mike: Absolutely. And I think also compared to the amount of money you can save by investing in what actually really drives conversions, rather than the marketing, that's ineffectual. I mean, the potential return on investment is huge.

Buğra: Yeah, that's definitely true.

Mike: I mean, just just changing track a bit. I'm interested in how you go about marketing HockeyStack. I mean, you talked a little bit before we started the interview, that you know that that was something we're quite excited about. So tell me what you do in terms of your marketing.

Buğra: Yeah, I think in the beginning of this company, I for one didn't understand marketing at all. And we had to go through a lot of challenges, trying to get it up and running. And while doing so, I think we got to really, really learn how marketing should be done in 2023. And our philosophy right now is to make our brand appear everywhere. And that sounds super big. But when you think about it, you can appear everywhere for a small set of people at a time. And once you reach a threshold, once people hear you all around them, they have no choice but to come in, in bulk to asking to do business with you. And a lot of sales conversations, we do start with people saying, Oh, it was long overdue, have we been seeing you around all the time, we've been DMing with experts in your team. Like, we already have a relationship with most of the people that we have sales conversation with. And even if you don't have relationship, we have a one sided relationship where they're consuming your content. And how we go about doing it is we have a list of customers that we want to target list of about 20 25,000 companies, we select a small set of people from there, we tried to show them our content, one, we produce content that is relevant to them to figure out where they hang out. Currently, they all hang out on LinkedIn. So we push a lot of Lincoln content. Three, we target them with digital advertising. And for whatever podcasts, they listen to, whatever community they're part of, we are there. And once that happens for that set of people, we can probably observe the effect of that within three, four weeks, and they start coming inbound or inbound volume shoots up, we can attribute it effectively to altruistic those activities we're doing since we are an education company. And then we move to the other segment of people.

Mike: I mean, that's really interesting. That sounds, I mean, like you're so focused, you're almost, you know, really doing Account Based Marketing, rather than than try and broad brush, you're trying to really focus down but you're, you're not just doing it through classic Account Based Marketing techniques. You're also looking at trying to understand, you know, as you said, you know, the podcasts that people might be listening to, that's a really interesting approach to focusing your time and your effort.

Buğra: Yeah, I think it's either ABM at scale, or it's brand marketing at a smaller scale.

Mike: And it's interesting. I mean, clearly, you also believe in frequency. And, you know, as a follow on question, I'm interested in what the best bit of advice you've ever been given in marketing and how you've implemented that, in campaigns you've run.

Buğra: I've never been given a good piece of advice and marketing. I'll be honest with you. I had a lot of advisors, when trying to get everything up and running when we had $0 in revenue. I think everyone's journey is different. Every single company is different. What works for a company doesn't work for another company, even though it is the same exact company, even if it was the same exact company wouldn't work simply because you're doing it a different cohort of people and a different time. If you give it enough time, every single strategy will work. We just needed to find one that we could scale up fast and stick to it.

Mike: And that's interesting, because it sounds like what you're saying is you've You've almost got to experiment and find out what works for you. Because you're almost saying maybe you haven't been given great advice, but perhaps there isn't that magic piece of advice that you can get.

Buğra: Yeah, basically, let me tell you the story of how this all came up. We weren't growing at all he had revenue. But this is like early last year, we had launched a product but couldn't get it up and running. And then we were following the trivet traditional marketing playbook, like running ads, doing blog posts, ebooks, etc. And at some point, I thought we're not growing. We need something that is truly different than what we're doing right now. because it's obvious that this is gonna take a long time. And it's not because the strategy was bad is because like, we just couldn't make it Soviet something different that we could scale up fast. So one day, me and my co founder sat down, we kept all of our growth related documentation on notion. We sat down on notion we deleted everything. And then we wrote down, what do you want to test what we think as prospect of forgetting what the saw that worked in the past, and basically, our strategies for testing that within a single month. And then we got to doing it. Within two months, from all those things we tested, we rolled out like 70% of them, the 30% We kept was the goldmine, because he got really good at executing those. And we got really fast at getting results from those. Two months later, we saw our first contract signed from a prospect that came from those activities, and then it scaled up from there. And right now we have really, really good volume, I think we're one of the fastest growing B2B companies in the space. So I guess that works.

Mike: That's amazing. I love the way that you started by throwing everything away and starting from scratch from first principles. I think that's, that's very impressive, and probably very brave as well.

Buğra: Yeah, I mean, it was really obvious that it didn't work. And I think there are a lot of big companies, that should do it right now as well. Like, I'm talking to a lot of marketing people every day. And I'm seeing that 90% of those companies don't really have a good marketing strategy. They're just getting customers because they're big.

Mike: I'm interested, I mean, we've talked about this and some of the difficulty around finding the right tactics. And we've also, at the moment, seeing a lot of new tools coming in. And you know, everyone's freaking out at the moment about AI replacing marketing jobs. One thing we'd like to ask, you know, all I guess is, if you knew a young person who was thinking of going into marketing, what would be your advice,

Buğra: my advice would be to go work at a small early stage startup, really observe everything that they're getting from the market, every signal that they're getting from the market, and be able to deliver that company, a, an asymmetric amount of value, by reacting to those signals, it's really easy to do marketing, I think, you just need to go and try it out yourself. And you need the products to work on that product to be your child. So you can prove yourself. And once you make that company work, you can basically do anything.

Mike: That's That's great advice. I mean, it is, it is certainly challenging, I think for people, you know, new to the marketing industry to to go into that startup environment. But I love that thought and the feeling that people would have such an accelerated learning curve in the environment.

Buğra: Yeah, well, the easy way to get into a startup is to provide them value upfront, a startup will always need you to give them more value than they're giving you. So they're gonna give you a low salary, they're gonna give you equity, that doesn't really equate to anything that has a 99% chance of going to zero. And they're gonna give you long hours, they're gonna give you no work life balance. You have to endure that, like in the various stages of your career, you can't really seek out work life balance or a higher salary. You just need to endure that prove yourself out. And then you will do whatever you want.

Mike: That's amazing. Invest in yourself by that, you know, tough first few years. And then the world's your oyster, I guess. Definitely. This has been amazing. It's been very interesting. We've covered, you know, all sorts of things from career advice all the way through to, you know, I think just scratching the surface on on analytics and attribution. Is there anything you feel we should have covered that we haven't talked about?

Buğra: No, I think this was really helpful. I'm gonna repurpose some kind of out of this as well. So

Mike: well, I mean, thank you, Buğra, for being on the podcast. I know that people listening will be interested in maybe asking you questions, and certainly, you know, taking a look at HockeyStack to see if it can help them understand what are their marketing activities are actually generating revenue. So how can people contact you if they want more information?

Buğra: Yeah, I'm really active on LinkedIn. So if you DM me there, I'll definitely see it I read on and that's just my thought and

Mike: that's great. And what about the product? Where should people go to find out more about HockeyStack?

Buğra: To find out more about HockeyStack, we have a great website, good copy, hockey sec.com. We have a live demo. You can go and play with the product yourself. That is the entire product that we put on there like we put the exact product you see onto the website and you can play with it for free without giving out anything

Mike: That's fantastic. That was probably, I think, you know, a great marketing tool as well. It gives people a really good understanding of the capabilities that probably goes way beyond any number of web pages trying to explain it.

Buğra: You know, I think that's one of the best things we ever did. And it was by accident.

Mike: That's great. And I think maybe that's a story for another podcast. I mean, Buğra, thank you so much for being such a great guest on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Sharekh Shaikh - CleverX

Market research is a massive industry, but despite this global interest, the sector lacks innovation and struggles to manage fraudulent data.

Sharekh Shaikh, founder of CleverX, discusses how his platform aims to provide market research teams with complete control of the quality and reliability of their research with access to top-level business professionals.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About CleverX

CleverX is an audience discovery platform for market and product research teams, connecting researchers with >20K senior professionals ranging from the world’s leading companies like Apple, McKinsey, NASA to founders of exciting startups.

About Sharekh

Sharekh Shaikh is a 2X founder in the human capital and the future of work space. He has successfully created businesses that have generated $ multi-million in sales. He has also raised >$1M on his new startup CleverX.

Time Stamps

[01:49.0] – Overview of CleverX and its uses.

[07:52.2] – Quantitative vs qualitive research – Sharekh discusses the two major methods of research

[11:53.2] – How is AI impacting the product? – The opportunities and pitfalls of AI in the research space

[20:40.7] – Would you recommend market research as a career to a young person?

[22:53.2] – What is the best piece of marketing advice you’ve been given?

[24:24.5] – Ways to get in touch and find out more.

Quotes

“Traditional ways of doing online surveys in the B2B space are very broken, it is almost 40% fraud data.” Sharekh Shaikh, Founder at CleverX.

“Companies which create narrative around a product, which probably isn't even the best product, still win.” Sharekh Shaikh, Founder at CleverX.

Follow Sharekh:

Sharekh Shaikh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharekh-shaikh-4591874/

CleverX website: https://cleverx.com/

Follow CleverX: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cleverxhq/

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/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

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 Sharekh Shaikh - CleverX

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sharekh Shaikh

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 Sharekh Shaikh, Sharekh is the founder of a company called CleverX. Welcome to the show Sharekh.

Sharekh: Hey, happy to be here. Mike, thank you so much for having me.

Mike: It's great to have you on the show. So we always like to start off with a question about your career journey. Do you want to tell us how your career's gone and why you ended up founding CleverX.

Sharekh: You know, this is my fourth country, I live in the US now, in California in Palo Alto. This is 1/4 country, I've lived in different countries before, mostly spend time in technology. So I'm a software engineer by trade, did my you know this is MBA in Singapore, and then worked in Dubai for many years, and now in the US, but the amount of time that I spent between the place where technology and market research comes together was a reason for me to start clever acts. But what I learned in that process is that this industry is struggling with a lot of fraudulent data. It's a massive industry, which is around like $70 billion global spent. And it's not as innovative as it should be, in my view for the spend that it has all around the world. So we tried to build this innovative platform that solves a lot of problems for market researchers, product research teams. And I think that was the reason for me to start. Clever Axia.

Mike: So let's talk about clever acts. I mean, CleverX is obviously something to help people do market research, can you just explain what the product does.

Sharekh: So if you look at the, you know, traditional market research industry, there are two major ways of conducting research, qualitative and quantitative research methods. Quantitative mostly is related to online surveys, which is a major chunk of money that's spent by the most of the world in terms of market research. And there's a very small 10 11% of money that's spent on like one to one sort of engagement for research purposes. What we're trying to focus here is give, you know, market research teams, the control on the quality, and the reliability on the research by giving them access to the world's top level business professionals, and the tools that they already use come together seamlessly. So think of it this way, if I'm conducting an online survey, I'm hosting that online survey on Qualtrics. What level X allows you to do is bring that survey from Qualtrics into our platform, and connect it to a verifiable, senior, you know, audience to that survey that doesn't exist today. The reason being traditional ways of doing like online surveys in the B2B space are very broken, it is almost 40% fraud data, because a lot of people wouldn't know this. Even if you spend a million dollars, you wouldn't know who your research participants are when it comes to online surveys. So let's say a big company goes ahead and does like an online survey, they have no idea. Even if they spend $100, on a successful survey response, they have no idea who took that survey. So that's the problem cloud X is trying to solve, I think for just solving that particular problem. We've seen like a growth of 5x in the last one year, in terms of our revenues, and you know, team as well.

Mike: So it's interesting. So I mean, just to make sure I've understood this, what you're doing is you're providing effectively a pre selected audience and audience that CleverX has created on the platform that experts or senior leaders in the field that will then answer your survey. So you're getting very, very high quality answers to survey questions. Is that right?

Sharekh: You're getting identified users. So it almost looks like a professional network. So if you sign up on the platform, you can connect with 1000s of people on the platform today. You can ask questions to them. So if I'm conducting research with let's say, Mike, I can actually chat with you and see like, Hey, Mike, you answer this question number 10 on the survey in a different way. And I want to do a call with you now. So you can extend your research by interacting with every single respondent who's been a part of your research project, which, which is, I think, a big, you know, change for this industry that has never happened before. Yeah.

Mike: Well, so that that's something actually quite different. So not only do you get the survey result back, but you're actually doing people dive deeper and go in and ask follow up questions or ask the why behind the house. Is that Is that what you're doing?

Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. You can you can ask them the why behind the particular question, but you can also go ahead and extend your research by saying, hey, let's do a call and I'll pay you like $500 for the next one hour of your time. So for research, it brings a lot of reliability and control into your research process. In today's world You don't know who your respondent is. So it's very difficult for me to say I got a survey response from 100 people. But I don't know who these people are, is it really a reliable outcome that I should base my multimillion dollar decision on? And that's a scary thing for a researcher to answer to the board or to the CEO of a company.

Mike: So, you know, I'm interested, you mentioned this group of experts that you have, I mean, how, how many industries do you cover? I mean, how broad is the actual range of these professionals?

Sharekh: Yeah, I think most of our professionals on the platform are in the US, most of them are manager or above position, you wouldn't need CleverX to connect with someone who's at a junior position, you can do that on LinkedIn right away, what we're trying to do is get you the access to hard to reach business audiences, someone you cannot connect with on LinkedIn. And if you do, they're most likely not going to respond to you, because of trust are spam issues that happen on LinkedIn. So we did a study, which is very interesting, or 1000s, of, you know, outreach, or LinkedIn, the standard is one acknowledgement for every 20 emails, that's how frustrating it is for a market researcher to connect with one respondent. So with clever is that that problem is solved where you can go and directly connect with these people. Because since the money and the trust is guaranteed on the platform, it becomes very easy for two strangers to interact with each other to transact that value for research and money.

Mike: And I've actually had a play with looking at different industries. So this is probably a bit unfair to ask you. But I mean, what sort of industries do you cover? Is it around a specific industry? Or how broad? Yeah,

Sharekh: yeah, I think we are quite, you know, you want to be quite broad. But being a marketplace, you have to be more verticalized in the beginning, then being horizontal. So we don't want to be the platform for everyone right now, we will be hopefully in the future. But right now, we are covering marketing, which is being used heavily on the platform, technology would be the other one, and healthcare and HR. These are the four verticals that people are using the platform mostly on. But there are close to 133, niche verticals in the world for expertise. And we want to have all those people, millions of users using the platform and become this sort of like, probably a bad analogy ever something like think of it like an Amazon or a Shopify, for market research in B2B.

Mike: I mean, it's really interesting because I actually looked at something fairly niche in terms of people who were engineers designing with semiconductors, and actually found some some experts on the platform. So there's certainly a few I mean, where you have perhaps something that's much more niche, presumably, people can go straight into a video call or a discussion, and get qualitative feedback, where you don't have the volume to get quantitative. Is that the way you'd approach it? If you've worked in, you know, one of the smaller niches?

Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. I see. You've got to understand the context behind qualitative and quantitative, I've always, you know, learn this from our customers, you do quantitative, which is online surveys to get collective intelligence. What do you want know is like 100 people have a same job role in a particular industry think about a particular topic, right? That's what you're trying to understand. Like, what's the sentiment there? How are they thinking and feeling about? Once? Once you have that answer, the next step would be qualitative, which is like going deeper into that particular thing with five or 10 people to know the small details, you know, of why that's happening? Or, you know, what are the things that they should care about? That's the context between qualitative and quantitative, but mostly, our platform is being used for quantitative. There are expert networks all around the world, we can solve the same problem around qualitative, like the GLG is the gardeners of the world. And I'm an ex gardener. So I understand this industry really well. But I think most of the problems that we're solving are around this collective intelligence, which is this quantitative online service part in the research.

Mike: That's interesting. That's kind of a process that, as you described, is built in where you do the research and then dig in. I love the way that that's kind of almost built in as a process. So it kind of makes it easy for people to take the right approach.

Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: So I'm interested to know, you know, how do people use this service? So what sort of things companies typically wanting to find out? And how do they go about doing it? Yeah,

Sharekh: very interesting project. So suddenly, we've been seeing like a lot of projects happening on the platform around Chatterjee beginning AI. That's like the most trending topic in the technology world. So people are building these incredible products, in large enterprises or at startups. And they're approaching a lot of people who have built AI solutions before on the platform. So we are seeing big market research teams coming and bringing their online surveys and trying to conduct surveys with machine learning developers on the platform. So let's say they want to conduct 200 online surveys with machines Learning developers. On the other hand, we seem like startups which are trying to find a product market fit in AI application. And they're trying to talk to these people who are CIOs where they want to sell this product, and ask them questions around pricing, or, hey, does this make sense? Or will Google come and build this in the future or charge GPD might come up with a new plugin that can, you know, completely change the dynamic of that particular industry. So those are the questions people are asking on the qualitative side, and quantitative side. So it's very interesting to see how trends shape my goal as a founder is when when CleverX becomes like a massive big company, to understand the pulse of the world, because we will have a very good understanding of what the world is looking for. Because the amount of data that we generate on just these projects that happen every day on the platform is incredible. We get to understand what people are really thinking, you know, and where things are moving in the future.

Mike: So you could almost act as a resource for industry knowledge, once you've got the data from the surveys, is that where you see yourselves going?

Sharekh: Yeah, I think data is a big mod for our platform. I mean, it is still very small, but 1000s of surveys and hundreds of calls happening on the platform every month. And we see what people are actually talking to each other about kind of projects that they post within the platform, or the opportunities that are getting created around market research. That gives us a pretty good sense of a particular industry, what people are thinking in that direction. It's also a very fun thing that I've noticed, the senior people on the other side of the platform, we're participating in research, also tell researchers like hey, I'm going to participate, you're going to pay me this $100 or $200, whatever for this research. But I want to know what the outcome of your research is going to be once the study is finalised. So people in general are very curious to know. Because what's going on in the industry as well. So that's very exciting to me. And we see that happen quite often. Yeah,

Mike: I can imagine certainly, you know, talked about AI, there's got to be a lot of people who are on the platform, who wants to know what the future of AI is. So we're gonna want to know this research that that makes a lot of sense to me.

Sharekh: Yeah. Last year, that was metalworks. You know, we've seen a lot of companies trying to talk to people in that space without naming the names of companies, but understanding like, where's the future? What's happening, even just for curiosity, even if you're not going to spend money, but just to understand, is there an opportunity there for our company to build something or create a service around that particular topic? Yeah.

Mike: So I think we want to explore you know, whether there's any alternatives to using something like CleverX, I mean, you know, we've talked about AI, do you ever see AI being able to evaluate new products?

Sharekh: I think we got to see AI becoming a part of different workflow, CPUs, AI, have you been using AI for the last many years, you know, but big companies like the apples and the Google, you know, the products that we use, but I think now it's kind of democratised with new, you know, alums, and companies that charge up to opening up their platforms to everyone to use. And that's opened up like startups, which can create vertical niche solutions to solve a specific problem in a specific industry. In market research, we will see that happen when it comes to you can tell your AI like, hey, go ahead and create a survey for transportation C level execs because these are the XYZ questions that I want to get answered from them. Can you go ahead and create a survey for me there is a possibility that's going to happen very soon. The other possibility could be, hey, can you tell me what the sentiment of 100 people has been on the survey? Right, so that sentiment analysis can happen. It's happening in certain cases already. But what AI cannot do is talk about an experience that Sharik has had on Mike has had in their life working for a particular company, doing a certain project that AI cannot do, it can give you what's out there in the in the public domain, the data that's already there, summarise it and give you a pretty good answer to learn something from, but it cannot go deeper to a human level and that post political experience a human being has had in doing something and that's, that's where I think, you know, we are different than machines are. And that's, that's pretty amazing, actually, to think about it.

Mike: And that's pretty cool. It, you know, gives us optimism that AI is not going to replace us all and actually that person experience is going to be important. Yeah, I mean, talking about personal experiences and relationships. You know, I know a lot of B2B companies, their market research is somewhat around going to the sales team and saying, check with a few customers see what they think. I mean, what's the benefit of doing a more formalised process through CleverX rather than working with the sales team?

Sharekh: Yeah, I think sales team getting feedback from a sales team is a given you have to do it. But when you run a formalised process, you're putting a really deep thought into every single question that you're asking them. You're trying to understand nuance answers of things which a lot of companies miss out on. And I think the answers lie in the details, you know, most of the major decisions or any company that's found an edge in, you know, competing better in a particular industry, or becoming the best in that industry has always been a detail oriented company, it doesn't happen by luck and float, where you can say, like, oh, we talked to 10 customers, and this is what they want. And this is how it's going to look like the companies which has gone deeper with every single customer try to figure out, you know, what their problems or challenges are, I think those are the winners, you can create an average company, of course, doing that, but but I think the goal of companies, which are using research as as a method to learn more about the customers have an edge over companies, which do not because you're putting in really thought and time into it and figuring things out.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think it's, it's clearly something that's a little bit deeper, a little more rigorous than than talking to the sales team. I mean, that makes sense to me. Yeah. I mean, I guess on the other hand, people might say, Well, you've got a group of people on the CleverX platform, how do I know they're representative of my audience? I mean, what are you doing to make sure that the people on the platform are representative of a particular industry or particular area?

Sharekh: Yeah, so the platform has his discovery function, which is pretty exciting. Where you can find people by, you know, their location, you can find people by in their, in their industry, their skill set, profiles of people on collaborates, or as exhaustive as your LinkedIn profile would be, right. But the biggest validation for me as a person who's trying to conduct research is directly talking to my respondent or chats, asking them questions before even starting my research project, to know like, are these the right group of people that I want to conduct research with, or there are other sets of people or persons that I can go after and connect with, so you can even filter people by their job roles. So let's say I'm trying to conduct a project, understanding how the macro environment is changing SMB, as a sector, I can actually go ahead and find people by their designations, buy the company type, the revenues of the company, and things of that sort. So you can do a lot of filtering, and finding those specific people that you want to talk about, or even test idea that are these the right person or that I should be talking to before I even start conducting research. So talking to people on club X platform is free, you can go and chat with as many people as you want to, just like you would do it on LinkedIn or any other, you know, social network.

Mike: So it's interesting. So you can actually go and almost test the audience for free before you actually commit.

Sharekh: Yeah, absolutely. Our goal is to make sure that product researchers market researchers are empowered, they have all the control, and they are directly interacting with the respondent. So today, the way research works is there are multiple companies, parties involved between the researcher and the respondent. So a lot of people in the value chain, and we even want it ourselves to be out of that equation. So we've given this platform we democratises access to each other for a researcher as well as a respondent. And that solves a lot of problems when you directly talk to the person you're researching solves enormous amount of like issues that are currently existing in this industry.

Mike: So thanks, Shrek, one of the questions that people are probably thinking is this platform sounds amazing in terms of accessing, you know, this, this huge resource of people who can advise you on products or technologies? I mean, is it something that's painfully expensive, or can midsize companies access this sort of technology.

Sharekh: So we have customers from the Microsoft's of the world, to the largest research companies in the world using our platform. We also have like really tiny startups, which are, which don't even have a product today, using the platform. So it's, you know, skills based on the need that a customer would have, we see that by giving a sense of his platform, you can reduce the cost of research. So for example, the amount of money that you would spend to recruit one exec for one video call would somewhere go in the range of $800 to even $1,500, depending on the kind of service that you're using. With CleverX, you can just sell service, use the platform and spend probably less than 50% of that, because you're doing the heavy lifting and connecting with these people and talking to them, rather than a new service provider, which is going to do this on your behalf. So it depends. If a customer wants to have a concert service, where they want someone to give them everything. Probably CleverX is not the platform for them to use. But there are customers who who want to take control of the research process and they want to do everything by themselves. For them CleverX makes a lot of sense.

Mike: I'm presuming those customers get a lot of value because of this ability to ask those follow up questions and really take it from just being a survey to be a conversation. Yeah,

Sharekh: you can extend your research and that's the beauty of of the platform is and there are Adding new research methods as well. So we are even incorporating in the new version of the product where you can even do product research. So you can give the product to a customer, let's say you're building an app, and you want this customer to interact with your app, you can just give the app to them to our platform, just sit there and watch them interact with that product. And you record all those details. So what Lex is doing is all these amazing tools that are out there to solve these problems. We are integrating them into our platform and giving you access of those tools and audiences in one single place. And that's not been done before, for I don't know, decades. And I think that's the problem you're trying to solve for different type of research methods.

Mike: That's great. I, you know, I'm interested, we've talked a lot about market research. I mean, one of the things we'd like to ask guests is, you know, if you had a young person thinking of a career in the your case or career market research, I mean, do you think this is going to be exciting place to be in the next few years?

Sharekh: You know, it's interesting, I was just talking to someone couple of days back, she's 21 years old, and she's asking me a question, I want to get into, you know, a tech company, what kind of role should I look for? I mentioned, or you should go into product research product management role in the future. I think that's where the fun is, I think human beings are designed to create, and product research, product marketing, product management, or roles where you get the ability to create something or be a part of creation. Same thing goes with market research, as well, with even larger and smaller industries is like, you're coming up with these insights and these golden nuggets to find two small things that probably are uncovered and people are not aware of, and that could help you build something or build a building amazing service or a product out of it. I think that's a very fun process has become very frustrating with the way the traditional industry has done it in the past. But that's what we want to change. We want to make it a fun, exciting process, because actually is, is an amazing, you know, thing to do research and figured out something that a lot of people don't know, probably around the world. Yeah.

Mike: And that's great to hear that technology is making a particular career more exciting and more fun. I mean, I think a lot of people think technology is about taking jobs, but but you're doing almost exactly the opposite.

Sharekh: Yeah, I think researchers like I have a lot of people have been on the on the other side where I've done research as well working for Gartner. And it's not easy, it's a really frustrating job, you require a lot of hard work. There's a lot of dependency on multiple things that are happening in a particular research project. Yeah, but if you can make it like fun, entertaining and faster, I think you can make the job and life easier. If you can save, like let's say a few hours every week for research, I think we've accomplished enough as a startup to solve their, you know, give them extra time for themselves and their families. Yeah,

Mike: that's great. I mean, another thing we like to ask, I guess, is about marketing. And I mean, interested to know, what's the best marketing advice you've ever received?

Sharekh: I've been in B2B sales for a long period of time. I personally found one advice or statement by Bill Gates, a lot of people might find this very contrarian as an as an advice. If someone asked him a question saying, like, if you're given $1, what are you going to spend on when it comes to marketing, and he said, PR, and I realised that you know, when br happens is you can just create this amazing narrative and education about a company, because my learning has been the best products always do not win. companies, which have created this narrative around a product, which probably is not the best product in the world, still wins. And that's, that's very interesting to me, you know, we always think like, Hey, I'm gonna create the best product and it has to win. Of course, your goal is to create the best product, don't get me wrong, but I think this narrative, this education that you create around a particular trend, or a product that makes winners, that has been my personal learning, I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on this. But I think that's a pretty amazing advice. Very contrarian.

Mike: Well, I think, given the fact that as an agency, we do a lot of PR, we'll be very happy with that advice. That's not a problem. So Chirag I really appreciate your time. I think it's been great. There's been some really fantastic insights into doing market research and and how that's changing for B2B. If people would like more information, or they'd like to try the CleverX product. I mean, how would they go about doing that?

Sharekh: It's pretty straightforward. You just go on the platform, clever. x.com, see levrx.com. And you can sign up for free, you can import all your LinkedIn data onto the platform, it takes you 30 seconds to sign up. And then you can start receiving amazing work opportunities around research or you can hire people for your own research work. So it's a very straightforward, amazing platform to intuitive and simple platform to use. If you want to reach out to me, I think LinkedIn would be the best way you can put my name Shahrukh. under Search most likely I will be the first head. Lucky for me the name is kind of unique. So it should work out. But yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn happy to answer any questions around research or just any help that I could be offered to anyone.

Mike: That's very generous, Sherif. I know people appreciate that. I mean, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been a really interesting chat. I really appreciate that.

Sharekh: I really appreciate that. Mike, thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Bonnie Crater - Full Circle Insights

Bonnie Crater, President and CEO of Full Circle Insights, explains why companies struggle to identify what marketing activities impact pipeline opportunities and clarifies what attribution means and what to consider when selecting an attribution model.

She also shares the best piece of advice that she has received as a marketer and the insights she would give to someone starting their career.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Bonnie Crater - Full Circle Insights

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Bonnie Crater

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 Bonnie Crater, Bonnie is the president and CEO of full circle insights. Welcome to the podcast, Bonnie.

Bonnie: Thank you so much, Mike. It's great to be here.

Mike: Great to have you on. I mean, the first thing we always like to understand is how our guests got to the position they're currently in. So can you talk to me a little bit about your career journey, and why you feel full circles the place you want to be now?

Bonnie: Yeah, so I live in California. So I grew up in Silicon Valley. And I always wanted to go into marketing. I found my way at some bigger companies in the beginning Oracle and so on, and then drifted to to startups. But every time I did a marketing job, I was VP of Marketing five times, actually. And every time I had one of those jobs, I always wanted to do a better job at explaining the impact of the marketing activities on pipeline, and revenue. Basically, just really worked better with sales. And so I didn't really have a very good way of doing this with the technology that was available to me at the time. And that's really why we built and started full circle is to help people like me, who were really interested in understanding, you know, alright, is any of this stuff actually working? And how well is it working, and which stuff is not working? And that way I can really realign my budget so that I can optimise the activities that we were working on.

Mike: I think it's interesting, a lot of the best startups are people are effectively building something to solve a problem they've had, which, which clearly is something you've done here.

Bonnie: Yeah, it was a big problem for us, I, you know, go to a meeting with a bunch of executives. And in the meeting, everybody would be bringing all of their data to the meeting. And I literally have not very much information about how well our marketing was working. And so I became very interested in trying to solve this problem for myself, but also other people that were very interested in solving the problem, too.

Mike: So you're trying to measure how well marketing is doing? So can you just explain a little more detail what full circle as a product actually does?

Bonnie: Yeah, so we are a software company. So we make software for B2B companies. So this is the business companies. And the software does marketing analytics. It's a package of software that has a lot of pre configuration to it. So it just makes it easy for marketers to deploy, they can leverage all of the pre built reports and dashboards and get to work right away.

Mike: I mean, I guess effectively, what you're trying to do is work out which marketing activities generate revenues? Is that what you're doing? You're trying to link sales to marketing?

Bonnie: Yeah. And that's known as attribution typically, is how, what is the impact of all of the different activities on pipeline, and revenue. So salespeople are very interested in pipeline. So the total value of your opportunities, then revenue would be all the close one deals. So sometimes you can do a lot of activities that don't generate any pipeline. Or maybe you have a particular set of activities or group of activities that you're doing that generates tonnes of pipeline. But maybe some of that pipeline actually doesn't close one. So really understanding of the dynamics of all that is what full circle is all about.

Mike: And what IT companies find this this so hard to work out what marketing is actually impacting the pipeline, and what and what marketing is doing nothing.

Bonnie: Well, first of all, there's a little bit of confusion about this word attribution is want to talk about that a little bit. Because the way we view the world is that there's really two types of key metrics. One is about a funnel. So this is a an age old concept of a sales funnel. So you have leads that come at the top and deals that come out of the bottom. And then there's a newer concept that was introduced, I don't know, whatever, 10 years ago about the concept of attribution, which is really about impact on pipeline and revenue. And these two sets of metrics are really different. The funnel is all about process, right? What's the volume velocity conversion rate from stage to stage in the funnel, you can see in the data, you can see when things break, for example, you know, leads don't get passed to sales in a very efficient way. For example, attribution, on the other hand, is all about optimising budgets. So you can see impact on pipeline and revenue. And then you can stack ranks, all of the campaigns that you're running based on their impact on pipeline and revenue. You might even want to try to look at campaigns in combination, because some campaigns work better when you're doing other campaigns together. So all of this is a technology that's all available now. And if I just had this, you know, when I was a VP of Marketing, I'd be such a much better marketer than I, then I was.

Mike: I'm presumably, I mean, when you talk about attribution, you're applying some sort of algorithm, because marketing can touch people, you know, right at the start at the awareness phase, or it can be an impact to move people through the funnel further down. So, I mean, do you create those algorithms do? Do your customers build them? How does that work?

Bonnie: Yeah. So moving away from funnel metrics, and just focusing on this attribution. And back to your question of why is the fuel find the so hard? The reason is that the the way that you calculate attribution can be different for different companies or different purposes. So attribution, folks that are experts at attribution, they refer to the models, attribution models that are associated with the calculation. And those models take a form. And many people have heard, oh, it's a, for example, the phrase first touch model. And what that means is, you're looking at the first time anyone had an interaction with your, your company. And you're going to give all of the pipeline dollar amount, or all of the close $1 amount to the campaign that is in that first touch. Another model potentially, would be an even spread model, where most, most folks when they're interacting and purchasing something, it's complex, they have lots of interactions with a with a company. And so in an even spread model, you'd take the total amount of pipeline or total amount of, of closed one revenue, and you'd split it evenly across all of those touches. So you can see how in a first touch model versus an even spread model, when you would get different results, because the models are just different. Now, why do people find this hard to do? Well, the math is not that hard. But what's challenging for folks is to try to understand like, well, when should I apply a first touch model? Or when should I apply an even spread model? Well, I think that's a great thing to talk about. I mean, I think, you know, even when you run Google ads, you see these different attribution models. And Google just says, so use this one is what we recommend. And I think most people possibly just click on the Google recommendation. But what is the thought process behind how you decide on attribution model? It's really based on your marketing strategy. So say, you're trying to really put a lot of stuff into top of the funnel, right? That first touch model makes a lot of sense, because basically, what you're trying to do is you're trying to run campaigns that put a lot in the top of the funnel, and even spread gives you a better understanding of how the marketing applies to all aspects of the sales cycle. And you might have a last touch model, or something that accelerates the the the credit as it goes to a close one deal if you have a whole bunch of folks in your pipe or ready, and you're trying to get them close one. So with marketing, it answered the question, what marketing is helping you close one? So it's all about your marketing strategy? What are you trying to accomplish for the company, and then select models that will reflect that strategy.

Mike: And that sounds like good advice for companies that want to improve their their use of attribution is think about the strategy and match your measurement to what you're trying to achieve.

Bonnie: 100% Yeah. And so folks, oftentimes will struggle with trying to figure out what what they want to do. And the other aspect of this is don't run one model, you've had to run multiple models at the same time, because you're because you want to see, not just one, one point of view on your data, you want multiple points of view, so you get a broader understanding of how your marketing is actually working.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things I hear a lot about attribution is attribution isn't incrementality. And so you might touch someone with marketing, but it may not actually have an impact, even if they buy because they're gonna buy anyway. I mean, can you talk a little bit about differentiating between attribution, and then deciding what actually increases revenue?

Bonnie: Well, all of our customers use Salesforce. And so in Salesforce, you have deals, which are called opportunities. And those opportunities can be classified in in various, various ways. So, for example, new business or upsell, or cross sell, or perhaps a renewal repeat, kind of kind of opportunity. And so by cutting the data, based on the kind of sale it is, it's a new business. Yeah, it's always going to be incremental, because it's new business.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And so you're taking this short, you're measuring the impact of marking but you're also measuring the performance of sales funnels you alluded to earlier. So do you want to talk about what What you're doing with a sales funnel and how you're helping that become more efficient, and how that can inform marketers about what they should be doing.

Bonnie: Yeah, so many folks in an enterprise world are very familiar with a group called Forrester or serious decisions. And those folks define methodologies for various funnels. So the one that that folks are very familiar because it's actually probably a 20 year old idea is the is a person based sales and marketing funnel. And so there was a methodology that was produced was actually patented by this company siriusdecisions, which was purchased by Forrester. And it basically divided the funnel into four or five stages. So inquiry, marketing, qualified lead, sales, accepted leads, sales, qualified lead and closed one, which is a very simplified version of you know, what happens in in complex sales processes. But that became a standard so that that standard is a person based funnel, so you're following people who work at companies. And what they responded to about 10 years after that the notion of Account Based Marketing became very popular. And so that notion was picked up by a series decisions, and then also now Forrester in their new Forrester B2B revenue waterfall. And so that methodology is what most people are working from, from which characterises an account based marketing funnel. And so that's not based on people as the construct, it's based on accounts. Now, what's cool about doing Account Based Marketing is that sales teams, and sales people that you might work with, which are, are also focused on accounts. So Account Based Marketing is a great way to actually tie the activities of marketing and sales together. And the campaigns marketing funnel has a different set of stages based on, you know, setting a set of target accounts, and so on until it's a closed one deal.

Mike: I will see you actually Forrester recently been talking about opportunities funnels now where they're actually splitting the opportunities within companies. So presumably, there's this view of the perfect funnel, it's gonna keep changing as we move forward.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think there's always going to be new invention, and a new optimization about how to actually do B2B marketing in the best way possible. So yeah, for sure, there's going to be innovation and changes. The reason that this is my interpretation, but the reason that Forrester talks about opportunity based Funnels is that the focus is on getting marketers to think not just about people, and getting people to do things, but get hold counts, and to drive, drive a sales interaction, or an opportunity. So it's just a slightly modified theme, but person based funnel or, or account based funnel, they both work. And most larger companies actually do a bit of both, you know, they focus on the people, because you have because you people do things. And they focus on accounts, because they're trying to get more cats.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. So, you know, when you've got, you know, particularly customers, they're focusing on trying to improve their marketing and their sales to ultimately I guess, sell more products, you know, what do they do, that actually works that helps them improve that sales process?

Bonnie: Well, the the first thing is, is to really understand and measure how much time it takes to go through each stage. And this is reflected in either a person based on campus funnel. So for example, you if you have the time it takes to go from one stage to another takes a really long time, you can see it in the data that is taking a really long time. So this is an opportunity for discussion, you can have meeting with the folks that are supposed to be following up or we're responsible for taking it to that next stage and discuss, okay, what activities can we do better, so that we can shorten the sales cycle. If you shorten the sales cycle by half, you close twice as much business and in the same amount of time. So velocity is a very key metric that a lot of people don't really pay that much attention to. But for folks that are really thinking through all this, yeah, focusing on velocity and seeing those the impact of changes that you're making, in your process, to have things go faster. It can have huge, enormous impact on the company.

Mike: I love that about velocity. And I mean, it's one of the things we talk about Napier and I think, you know, perhaps sales has been thinking about funnel velocity for a while, but but certainly marketing, I think it's kind of a new concept, isn't it that actually the faster you can move prospects through, the better it's going to be?

Bonnie: Yeah, I can't comment about how new that new that idea is. But certainly remembering that that's an important concept and an important way to help help your company. Yeah, that's a philosophy Sir, a key metric.

Mike: Sounds good. I mean that there's one other part of the product you've got that I'm interested about, you've got a product called matchmaker. What's that? What's that all about?

Bonnie: Yeah, so that's designed to solve a problem that lives in salesforce.com offerings, that helps our customers that are interested in Account Based Marketing. And basically, it allows leads that are in Salesforce to be tied to accounts in the box, Salesforce leads are separated from accounts. And so this, this particular product allows you to tie people or representatives leads to accounts. So you can do measurement prior to the opportunity creation.

Mike: No, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I know that Salesforce is very contact, or lead driven. And it's not really thinking about opportunity in terms of an account based funnel. So it makes a lot of sense that what you want to do is be able to think in that way. at that early stage, when you're first gathering contexts.

Bonnie: Yeah, and a full circle, what we do is we build a set set of software that basically creates a data model that allows you to do funnel metrics, whether it be person based, or account based, or all sorts of flexible attribution right inside that Salesforce platform.

Mike: I mean, that's awesome. I think one of the questions some people ask now, obviously, you know, full circle is targeting enterprise primarily, I mean, is there a solution for SMEs or an approach you'd recommend for smaller businesses that they could take and use?

Bonnie: This is an area that that I'm really interested in right now. Question is, how does a small business do what a big company does, and many, many small businesses use tools like, say MailChimp to send emails, and there's pretty good reporting inside there. But tying that to tying that to a pipeline and revenue and doing more sophisticated things, that requires other products. So I'm very actually very interested in building one of these, I think it'd be great actually build, build a new tool, a new small business marketing analytics tool that actually does the very sophisticated things that an enterprise class product would do. So anybody who wants to, to share their ideas with me, I'm eager to build one, you can just send me an email Bonnie at full circle insights.com.

Mike: That's awesome. I know, I know, there's a lot of small businesses going. Yeah, I'd love to know which bit of marketing budget I'm spending is actually working in which bit isn't. So that sounds great. Moving on. I mean, I feel I have to ask about AI at the moment. It's obviously the technology everyone's talking about. You mentioned earlier, and it's quite unusual. You said, you know, it's maths attribution is maths. Whereas I think, you know, lots of people like, why should be AI? You know, do you see AI coming in and changing what you do significantly? Or do you think it is more mass that is known and understood?

Bonnie: So AI is a topic that's been evolving for many, many years, the concept of, of making a computer really understand, and draw inferences and things like that, like people do. And there's certain cool advances that have been made over the last, say, 10 years. And it really boils down to your data, right? How good is the data? If you have poor information to draw inferences from? If you're human, or you're, or you're an AI machine, you're gonna draw the wrong inferences. So first of all, start with the data, making sure that that's as best as you can make it, no one's data is perfect, but give it a go. And then if you have enough data, so that's another bit of this is you have to have enough information to draw the draw the inferences that you want. A lot of AI in marketing is about, you know, next best action. So what should a marketing person or salesperson do when a potential prospect has taken certain actions? What should that be? And if you have enough data, you can identify patterns that are fairly specific, and you can do things like that. So that's very much where where we are right now. But it's for many B2B companies don't have enough data to really draw the kinds of inferences that you would want, B2C companies have lots and lots of data. So Well, we'll see how these how the algorithms play out. And whether we can be very successful at applying them to be to be

Mike: interesting. I mean, that's kind of a watch this space. And, you know, that leads on to one of the questions we'd like to ask all I guess, which is, you know, if you have a young person who comes to you and says they're interested in marketing, with all the potential change going on, would you say to them, you know, marketing is the place to be or would you say, Yeah, you know, it could be a tough industry, what would be your view? Oh, my,

Bonnie: my view is marketing is great. It's particularly good for folks that really want to use both sides of your brain, so your left side and your right side. And you also, if you also have a real need to have a lot of diversity, a lot of different kinds of things that you're doing every day. Marketing is a great job because The world is changing, the markets are changing, your products are changing, everything is always changing. And so there's a lot of new and fun things to work on. And if you need new and fun things, marketing is a great job.

Mike: So awesome. And then following on from that, you know, you've obviously had a really long successful career in marketing. But I'm interested in what's the best bit of advice you've ever been given about marketing?

Bonnie: You know, I think it really came a long, long time ago, and just kind of remembering the purpose of marketing. What is the purpose of marketing, if you're a B2B market, the purpose of marketing is to make your offering really easy to buy. And also make it easy to sell. So if you ever forget about what you're trying to do in your marketing job, that's a really good thing to remember. Just to go back to that very simple thing. Yes. Is this is what I'm doing making my offering easier to buy? And or is it also making it easier to sell?

Mike: I love that very simple, very good way to you know, focus on what you're trying to do. That's brilliant. Bonnie, I really appreciate your time. Is there anything you feel we should have covered that we haven't that you want to talk about?

Bonnie: Yeah, thanks for thanks for asking that question. So the the new hot thing is to do Account Based Marketing. And Account Based Marketing is awesome, because it helps you bring together companies, both sales and marketing, you know, talking from the same page. I think it's also important as as you're doing, if you're taking on this marketing analytics project, with your sales team, it's really important to make sure that your data is in one spot so that everybody has access to the same information. Oftentimes, disagreements arise, because sales team might be working from one set of data. And marketing has working from a separate set of data. But if you put all the data in one spot, and make sure that everyone has access, and you're transparent about the information, it facilitates Much, much tighter sales and marketing relationships and can make create great success for your company.

Mike: That's amazing advice. And I've actually I've certainly seen that where you've got two views of, of what's going on. So I love that. I really appreciate your time on the podcast, Bonnie, it's been great. I know you mentioned your email address before. But you know, if people want to contact you and find out more, either about full circle, or they want to partner with you to build a new product for SMEs, can you just remind people that the best way to contact you would be

Bonnie: Yeah, you can go to www.fullcircleinsights.com. Or if you have any great small business marketing analytics ideas, just send me an email Bonnie at full circle insights.com.

Mike: Bonnie, thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Evan Kramer - MotionPoint

Evan Kramer, CEO of MotionPoint, a tech-driven translation and localisation company, discusses the differences between translation and transcreation and the benefits that going beyond simple translation can have.

He also explains the impact translation can have on conversions and why you should measure their impact to determine the level of translation required.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Evan Kramer - MotionPoint

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Evan Kramer

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 Evan Kramer, who's the CEO of MotionPoint. Welcome to the podcast, Evan.

Evan: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Mike: So, Evan, I mean, you've done quite a lot of things, you know, in your career, tell me about your journey and how you've ended up running a MotionPoint.

Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think for your audience that has a marketing focus, you know, my career is quite interesting, and how I ended up, you know, getting into marketing, and then ultimately a CEO. I, originally, when I graduated college, back in the mid 90s, I was in finance and accounting. And in the late 90s, when I went back to graduate school, the Internet was taking off and got bit by that, that digital marketing bug with with internet companies, and so launched my career, really getting into startups, working for venture capital groups, and working for venture capital backed startup companies, all really interested in digital marketing, so focused on SEO, paid search, and in all those emerging areas, you know, back in 2000, in the early 2000s, and so I had the, the opportunity and privilege to launch a few companies to work for some incubated businesses or even venture backed businesses. I helped launch, you know, autotrader.com, back in the late 90s, for Cox enterprises, and then was able to go off and launch another online automotive business. And so really, for the first, you know, the early 2000s, really focused within direct to consumer based internet businesses, where I was leading marketing and really doing a lot of cool stuff. Because, you know, you were able to figure out things like SEO before Google really put the clamps down on the grey areas of that sort of profession, or how do you optimise paid search. Whereas today, you know, there's so much automated tools that that human trickery doesn't really exist anymore. And so I've kind of worked my way through different companies, to the point where I became a CMO Chief Marketing Officer for about a decade across several, again, high growth businesses that were PE or venture backed. One being a home security company in Philadelphia that we ultimately sold to direct TV, where, you know, we were able to really become a pioneer in customer acquisition costs for home security, that was a CMO for a software company, again, out of Philadelphia, that was targeting consumers that wanted to inventory or organised receipts expense reports through software, and then became, you know, CMO at a global IT company, really learning about and first time getting indoctrinated into global marketing, and global digital marketing. And then became a CEO, one for an education technology company that we ultimately had a really great growth story and sold the business very successfully. And then another marketing services company.

And then now finally, at MotionPoint, this is my third time as a CEO, all for a private equity backed company. So you can see how my journey, you know, really took the marketing track and my dream my career and then, you know, then rolled that into a leadership at a CEO level.

Mike: And it's interesting, I mean, I know your company, MotionPoint is headquartered in Florida, but you're based in Detroit, and we don't have many people from Detroit doing marketing technology. So as Eminem kind of skewed my view of Detroit I’m sure it’s much more exciting and, you know, more high tech perhaps I think,

Evan: well, I mean, if I'm sure with Eminem, you hear an eight mile I'm near 14 mile, so we're six miles away from all that. But I went to school at the University of Michigan. So my heart I'm not from Detroit originally, but my my wife and her family is from Detroit, and we recently moved back. And so I think there's a lot of innovation coming out of Ann Arbour, and a lot of the universities that emigrates into Detroit, we have a philanthropist that started a large company out of Detroit called Rocket Mortgage. So you've heard that Dan Gilbert, who's invested a tonne of time and money into the city, and right up to COVID. I think there was a real almost a mini Silicon Valley sort of harvesting in in downtown Detroit. We have now have Detroit Venture Partners and a whole wing of venture. So what's interesting about Detroit that a lot of people don't know is the size of it, right? So from a geographical standpoint, You could fit San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan all into Detroit. So, you know, just the enormous landmass that's here, the development, the real estate development, the emigration, I think, is starting to really grow tremendously. So it's kind of a cool story.

Mike: That's, that's pretty posted. It's nice to hear. Let's move on and have a look at what you're doing, though. And what MotionPoint does. So do you want to explain very briefly, you know, what MotionPoint is and what they do for your, for your customers?

Evan: Yeah, so MotionPoint, is a pioneer in what I like to call managed outsource translation. So what we do is we take over any website or web translation needs for companies all over the world, right. So if you need to translate your, your website, or your digital assets into another language, for multiple reasons, we have a technology platform that we pioneered called proxy that enables us to completely manage that solution, while your marketing department internally at our customers can focus on marketing. And then everything they do from a marketing perspective just gets automatically translated, and marketed into a translation experience for that particular entity. So so that's really what we do, there's really two types of main customers that we focus on. Given that we're in the US, obviously, we focus more on US based companies. One one use case is where companies want to market globally, right. And so there, we do have fortune 500 brands that are in as many as 30 different countries, you know, operating in 40 different languages. And so we operate and manage their entire experience. There's other the other persona or the other big use case, that we manage our domestic companies that for compliance reasons, or, you know, for the Hispanic community need translation, either into French, Canadian, or into Spanish, right. So you think about financial services, you know, banks or credit unions, hospitals, health care, government and utilities, you know, these are companies that need translation to service, the entire customer base, as well as, you know, regulatory compliance reasons. So we do that on an on behalf of them. And so those are sort of the two different the mix of types of customers that we have.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, you mentioned you focus more on the American customers, is that because it's your local market is easier for you? Or is that because there's a difference between, you know, American companies and European companies when it comes to translation?

Evan: Yeah, that there's quite a difference, right, the EU and you know, even east of that the translation market is much more mature, right, the US as as a melting pot, really, probably only for the last 20 years has really been thinking about needing translation. And so, you know, there's a lot more companies and a lot more competition across the pond, right, that have required different levels of service. And a lot of the companies, you know, in the EU, for example, you know, want to work with more local vendors. So I think the opportunities are a lot different, the maturity of the lifecycle that the companies are in, are different, where we seem to rarely Excel is earlier in the translation lifecycle of the company, right. So if you are, you know, just entering global marketing, right, and you're a US based company, you're going to come to a MotionPoint, because you don't know a lot about translation, you don't have the resources, and you want to outsource it first. And so we're sort of that first line of defence. You know, once you're in 20, markets, there's a lot more optionality about how you think about your total cost of ownership of translation, right? You can hire a lot of localization managers, do more in house have a mix of outsource versus INSOURCE. And some were thinking about domestic US based companies, they're most of them are earlier within that maturity of that translation lifecycle. So there is a big difference between the two.

Mike: That's interesting, I guess that there's a really clear explanation of where you sit in that translation market. I'm interested because you mentioned you know, things like financial services, and obviously, a lot of people who listen to this podcast are companies that are doing technical products, you know, where you have a technical requirement, whether it's to better explain something in an engineering language, or whether it's to meet, you know, the legislation when it comes to financial services. I mean, that's hard with translation. How do you make sure you get that translation? Right?

Evan: You know, there, there's a lot of there's a spectrum of quality of translation, right. And at one end of the spectrum, you have what I'll call generic machine translation, right? And that's the Google translate to the world and it I'll even call it the chat GPT is of the world we'd come back to that and talk a little more in detail about about chat GPT and open AI. But on the other end of the spectrum, it moves more towards human quality and linguists, right. And so that that spectrum is around more literal translation, right? If I give you a document with 1000 words, I need you to translate those words. The next level of quality is what we call trans creation. And so if you have those 1000 words that you want to translate, let's say from English to French, Canadian, fully translated human with editing, is what you do, but transcription is taking it to the next level where you localise the French Canadian words from English, meaning that it has a localised slang and glossary involved in how it is said not just what is said, right. And so there's a large spectrum. And so when you talk about our clients, what we like to do is we work with them over a long period of time we try to get samples, we use the same linguists, we measure quality by having what's called a two step review process where there's a second linguist that oversees the first. And so we try to hold to a pretty high standard. Now, where technology doesn't really exist today that is really coming really fast is how do you measure that quality more quantitatively, right? And say, Okay, well, that's a 10 out of 10, or an eight out of 10. And so that's really where there is a lot of innovation happening. Up till now, it's been a lot of sort of client acceptance of the quality and a lot of QA review. But to automate that and score, the content, I think, is where there's some innovation happening.

Mike: It's interesting, I love the way you're making a distinction between translation and transcreation. I mean, we talk to clients and say exactly the same thing, you know, translating the words may actually not carry the same meaning and different languages have the same emphasis. So I think that's really important. What you talked about review, and that still being a part of the process? I mean, how do you handle this, this process of the customer reviewing your translations?

Evan: Yeah, I mean, what we do is we we give them access to all the translations in real time. And so they're able to review it, but I think where we're MotionPoint stands a little bit apart is we actually have a QA team. So where the client is obligated to review where they want to, we also do another QA on our side, when we when we provide the content. So it's another benefit of using MotionPoint versus going direct to a linguist or doing it in house. So that's that extra layer.

Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I'm sure that that that definitely helps remove some of the problems makes it easier for the clients to check. So that sounds like a really good approach. When you get customers and they start using MotionPoint. What impact do you see in terms of the growth of use of their website? I mean, you know, are you seeing people becoming more engaged and more likely to convert? Or do you see a much bigger impact with translation?

Evan: Yeah, I think I think it's a bit varied. And I say that for the reason of attribution, let's call it right. So if you're, if you're talking about needing it for for marketing and growth, right, obviously, you can measure traffic, right? And you can say, Okay, well, we're getting more traffic, if you're a commerce experience, you can measure sales. And so we do see lifts in that, but where there's a little bit of a blur is around attribution, right? So you know that, and from a marketing perspective, it we're in a multi touch world, and that happens with translation as well. And so how do you know that if someone came in through the origin site, and then went through the German experience, but then came back through, you know, the origin site to buy, you know, so there's still not we're still early in that, in that and with respect to measuring that? So I do think that that, again, this is a really interesting category with a lot of, you know, technology needs and innovation that we're addressing, and and some of it is, you know, how do you measure success when it comes to these translated sites? The other part of the answer is around quality versus growth, right. So the, in the past, you really only had access to human quality, which is very expensive, right? So if I want to translate one word in Spanish, it could be anywhere from, you know, 10 to 20 cents. But if you want to translate one word in Spanish, using generic machine translation, it might be a fraction of a penny. And so if you launch in 20 markets and find that two of those markets are not getting a lot of traction, you also can reduce your investment in those markets by reducing the cost Quality and how much you invest in the translation without having to give up the translation experience completely.

Mike: And that's interesting. And so presumably there, what you're ultimately looking to do is score the quality of the translation and look at, you know, whether the better quality, produces better results is that ultimately what you're trying to do, and then work out whether the cost justifies the the revenue you get.

Evan: Exactly. And it also depends on sort of the client, right? If you are a luxury brand, right, the risk of you leveraging anything better than great human quality, could really impact your experience and your brand experience, you know, if you are, you know, an informational site, that's not, you know, generating, it's not a lead generation site, there might be more appetite to reduce the quality. And then the third is sort of a hybrid, where maybe you are, let's say, you're a fashion site that requires high quality, but you have a lot of areas of your site that maybe have deep links, or at very low traffic, you can reduce the quality in those areas of the site to kind of be more cost effective.

Mike: Especially if it sounds like you know, one of the big pitfalls is, is not matching the quality to what, what's needed. I mean, are there any other mistakes you see people making when they're, you know, first embarking on translating their, their website or other content?

Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think that the misconception is that translation is about cost and how much the supply of the translation words itself, cost. But there's a lot more on the technical side of translation, right? So when you talk about a website, you're dealing with front end frameworks, and I remember back in the early 2000s, you know, everything was, you know, HTML is pretty straightforward. But we've really evolved over the last 20 years and the complexity of websites and and how much is embedded in JavaScript and JSON and the different types of front end frameworks. And in fact, you know, Wordpress, for example, which is the largest market share of any CMS, in the world, you know, has multiple versions and updates ongoing. And so the ability to just extract, import and export content and translate it is, is really complex, right? And so being able to identify all of the changes, change content that needs to be translated, the ability to get it back into the site without breaking functionality, right, is very complex. And so also understanding how to leverage different translation types is complex. Right. So I think that the biggest misconception is just how hard it is for everything outside of the translation itself. And that's why a lot of you know, customers come to us for MotionPoint is because we take care of all that as sort of a concierge outsourced solution. But really, I think the, the behind the scenes, the beyond words component of translation is what's is what's most complex.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, we've touched on AI already, and you've talked about AI translation, and you know, the the issue around quality. I mean, where do you see AI going in the translation market? Do you see it replacing human translators ever?

Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, although everyone in the world thinks that Chachi PT is going to, you know, eliminate everyone's jobs, and ultimately, you know, take over the human race, I don't think that's actually going to be the case here. Right. Just like everywhere else, I think it's going to facilitate speed of innovation in translation, but it's not going to replace what we do. It's going to enable us to have more capabilities. So just to kind of level set where we are with with AI, and chat GPT with respect to translation itself. Google Translate is a neural machine based translation. And so as part of a deep learning, open AI and chat GPT is another form of how it's translating, and they are at similar quality levels. At this point, there's been a lot of comparisons or a lot of research done to see does chat GPT outperform Google Translator devel. And, you know, there's been some where it's, it's a little bit better or a little bit worse, but I call that generic machine. If you think about a quality score, right? There's one quality score called a blue score, a blue score out of 100 would mean 100 is perfectly human translated. Zero is it's not translated at all. You know, we were seeing average blue scores for chat CPT and Google Translate probably around let's say, a 20. You're still pretty far off, human quality translation. But the next level of translation is what's called domain neuro machine translation. And what that is, is taking actual data or content from a specific brand, and training it on the machine so that it can understand the lingo and how in the context of how a specific brand markets itself, and you can train and get a much closer to you can get from 20 to 60, or 70. Right. So I think that the open AI and chat JpT will accelerate the training and move the continuum of quality more towards human. But we're still several years away from getting closer to human quality. Where I do think Chachi Beatty will be more effective is what we talked about earlier with transcreation. Right and saying, Okay, well, I'm going to use linguists to translate, but I might use AI to say, how can I say this better? In Italian? Right? So I think there's going to be areas that will actually help us improve the quality of translation.

Mike: That's a fascinating answer, I think it's going to be interesting to see what the impact of AI is on translation, as well as many other markets. So I've got a couple of quick questions for you. Before we, we finish. I mean, you obviously, as you said, you were a CMO before a CEO. So from your point of view, what do you think makes a really good marketing campaign?

Evan: Yeah, so I come up through the, you know, my mentors and marketing, we're very direct response driven, right. So I'm very data oriented and test driven. And so to me, a marketing campaign is about identifying your objectives, and then utilising the right, creative and call to actions and messaging to drive the response rate that you need. And so high response rates is what I target for the types of campaigns that I look for. And so it's always about trying to think through, what's the message that solving the pain point of your target audience. And so I know I'm not answering by a specific campaign, but it's more of the construct of developing a campaign really needs to be thought through of Who are your personas that you're trying to market to making sure that the audience's that you're buying and your media, you know, match those personas, and that the messaging solves the pain points for that persona group relative to what you're selling. So that's what all it means to line up, right? And then you're measuring based upon that, you know, what has the highest response rate. So what makes a great marketing campaign is, is aligning with that formula and measuring it successfully. So that's really what I see the other part of what makes it a successful campaign is threading that campaign, once you identify what's successful across the, the omni channel, way too many times do I see companies that have disjointed campaigns where they might be running, you know, messaging in social that's different than email, or, you know, it's not consistently messaged, or the there's not enough time to let the campaign mature, and you're moving and switching to a different campaign too quickly. So I think that that's kind of, you know, what, how I look at marketing campaigns?

Mike: I mean, it's great, it's very clear focus on the results, which I love. Along the same lines. You know, one thing we like to ask our guests is about marketing advice. I mean, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Evan: Yeah, that's a bit of marketing advice that I've ever been given is throw away your opinion, and follow the data. Right? So it's really easy to because marketing is a very visual, reacted sort of medium, it's very easy to have opinions about marketing. And so it's really about the data. And the effectiveness of that, you know, I sit, you know, with my kids and watching commercials and thinking about cash wire, why are they still using, you know, Flo from progressive because it's, She's so annoying, right. But I can't imagine that progressive isn't seeing great results, you know, using that creative? So I think it's really about, you know, try to ignore opinion. And that's even with the hierarchy of a CMO. Right. So having been a CMO, it's really easy to have some sort of hierarchy of associate level, director level, VP level CMO, and, you know, the highest the highest opinion accounts, but it should be that the data is what counts. So that's really the the advice I have been given.

Mike: I love that. If people have any questions, or would like to know more about MotionPoint, what's the best way to contact you or try the product?

Evan: Yeah, so I'm available on LinkedIn. You can find me, Evan Kramer on Twitter. I'm Kramer cool. And then obviously, triple W dot motion. point.com. I've got contacts there that you can grab me but I'm pretty active on on LinkedIn and in social media, so you can direct message me as well.

Mike: Well, thanks so much. This has been a, you know, a really interesting discussion. I know that, particularly our American clients, a lot of them are thinking about translation and trying to understand it. So I'm sure it's been incredibly helpful. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Evan: All right. Thank you so much.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Morgan McLintic - Firebrand

Morgan McLintic, CEO and Founder of Firebrand Communications, breaks down what start-up companies need to consider when building their martech stack and why choosing the wrong products can result in losing visibility of what is and isn't working.

He also shares his optimistic views on how AI may change the marketing landscape and why this makes technology exciting again.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Morgan McLintic - Firebrand

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Morgan McLintic

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've got Morgan McLintic. Morgan is the CEO and founder of Firebrand. Welcome to the show. Morgan.

Morgan: Great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Mike: So, tell me a little bit about your career journey. How did you get to the point where you decided you want to start Firebrand?

Morgan: Well, I was lucky enough to join a small PR agency in the UK. And when they only had 10 people, and then it gave me the chance to come over to the US where I'm based now in San Francisco. And I founded the US part of the business and we grew it up to be about 600 people when I when I left, so it was a fun ride. And then, having grown, that agency decided to set up firebrand and we work with tech startups exclusively.

Mike: So that's interesting. I mean, obviously, the startup market is pretty hot in San Francisco. Is it because of location you decided to go for startups? Or were you particularly interested in working with startups for other reasons?

Morgan: Well, I think that working with startups, you know, it's that's an entrepreneurial sort of person, you get to start the beginning of that sort of company's journey, you get to shape their messaging and win their early customers. And I think they also can be more flexible in what they do. And you can try new tactics. Plus, just from a practical perspective, when you're starting out a new firm, you maybe don't have the resources that a large enterprise might require. And I just, you know, love the innovation that comes with tech. And it's sort of part of the culture here in the Valley.

Mike: So yeah, and presumably, I mean, you know, the reason you decided to move from being sort of more pure PR into more general marketing is working with startups as well. They need a wider range of services from their agency.

Morgan: Yes, yes. I mean, I think, you know, you can solve problems in a number of ways. And most startups, they have two problems, one awareness, like nobody knows who they are, and they need investment, and they need customers, and they need partners, employees, and the other is that they need to drive demand. And classically, startups will look for a PR agency when they get funding. But when you're relatively small, maybe you don't have a lot of news, a lot of new products, a lot a big drumbeat that is traditionally this sort of backbone of a PR programme. But there are other ways to raise that awareness. So it was a natural extension. And plus, they don't have large marketing departments. And so as a partner, the more elements that you can fulfil, just the better the partnership becomes.

Mike: Obviously, being in San Francisco, you're really into technology. And the thing I really wanted to talk to you about was the MAR tech stack. So I mean, maybe you can start by explaining, you know what martech stack means to you?

Morgan: Sure, I mean, fundamentally, it's all that software tools that you need to implement the core parts of a marketing programme for corporate product and, and growth. And for a startup, that typically means someone coming to a website to do something. And so you will need a CMS, most of the startups that we work with will use like WordPress, or web flow. So that you have you can host your site. And you'll need them to go into some kind of marketing automation system. Most of the startups that we work with, use HubSpot. And and that's a fairly integrative sort of platform in terms of providing email marketing, and a number of the other things that they'll need. They'll need some measurement, and a lot of startups will use the Google, you know, from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, all those good things. And then plug in all their social channels and ad networks, etc, to get people to come to the site. So typically, it's the CMS marketing automation system, the ad platforms that they'll sort of traditionally used and, and whatever analytics, they want to for attribution.

Mike: And attribution is really interesting. I mean, presumably one of the reasons people want to think of a stack rather than discrete tools, is so you can actually measure the impact of the different things you do within your marketing campaigns.

Morgan: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, where the finite resources you have to know what's working so that you can do more. And so literally one of the first things that we'll do when we work with a Client is to help configure their martech stack so they can see what works and so that we can prove the value of what we're doing. And then they can adjust their channels and their budgets accordingly.

Mike: And is that the real, you know, issue with choosing the wrong products in your martech? Stack? Is losing that visibility of what's working and what's not? Or are there other issues as well?

Morgan: Well, I think often, at the beginning, literally, the founder will be the person to sort of implement HubSpot out or build the website. And often there'll be different tools in there. They may not because quite naturally have configured those correctly. So we'll come in and help them sort of dial that stuff in. And I think as they scale, they need something that's going to be sustainable for different stages. And as their budget and their team gets larger, that's going to be important. So yeah, those are the main benefits.

Mike: So it's interesting, you talked about scaling up, and obviously, you know, some of the Silicon Valley startups grow very quickly. I mean, if you're starting a new company, or working at a relatively small company, I mean, how much attention should you pay to the needs of today versus what might potentially be the needs, you know, in two or three years time as the company grows?

Morgan: Well, startups tend to work on a quarterly cycle, you've got to get from one funding stage to the next and hit your your metrics. So necessarily, their time horizon is going to be shorter than it would be for an enterprise a business. I do think that they need to think well look, 24 months out, we could have different level of funding different sides of our team, that team will evolve. And maybe they'll bring in a demand gen person, or maybe they'll bring an SEO expert whole build out the whole growth marketing team, that whole product marketing. So this, the stack is going to expand over time, but they need to get to those different benchmarks. And I think also, the staff will change. And so we tend to sort of think about, look, don't go down one particular path, we're only a few people know that try and stick to a stack that's going to be familiar for new people coming in so they can get up to speed quickly.

Mike: And that's really interesting. You talk about getting up to speed. And obviously, having something that's popular and widely used is one way to do it when you hire but in early times, you mentioned that quite often it's the CEO setting this stuff up. I mean, how much of a problem is, is learning the tools, particularly for on this quarter by quarter time horizon?

Morgan: Well, I think marketers love trying new tools, right, we like testing new things out, most of the tools are relatively easy to use, relatively easy to use at the startup stage, when you get up to be I don't know, in marketing automation, if you implement a Marketo system that's going to need a dedicated Marketo person and team or agency to manage, right, or you're unlikely to have someone or you may only have one person in house can do that. But we tend to think that the sort of the biggest risk of bringing in too many different tools is not necessarily the speed of getting up to learning how to use them. And it's more that they will have different ways of measuring something. So even something as simple as website traffic, when a visitor to up to a page, when is that visitor fired? Is it is it when the first assets are downloaded? Is it when the whole full page is downloaded? What if it gets interrupted? So you tend to get even at something as basic as website traffic, different measurement from different systems. And the problem with that is then integrating all those things. You spend more time on trying to say, Well, why is this one saying I've got 1000 visitors? And this one's only saying I've got 800? Which is it? And why you end up wasting cycles on sort of integrating and trying to get one clear picture of what's what's going on. And so that can be the bigger risk, I think of bringing in too many different tools, rather than just sort of how long does it take me to get up to speed with one individual one?

Mike: And that makes sense. I mean, you mentioned you do a lot of work with HubSpot, which is, you know, well known as being quite an integrated product with lots of features. I mean, do you believe that's, that's one of the key things is pick something that's integrated to avoid these discrepancies between different tools?

Morgan: You know, I think so I think keep it simple because it just enables you to implement your marketing programmes more effective. Roughly there may be specific tools that provide a distinct sort of technical advantage. But over the sort of medium term, those features are going to become democratised across other platforms. And so we tend to find having something that's integrated, that enables you to actually implement the rest of your marketing your create, you know, and spend the time on the creativity and implementation or the strategy is probably better than trying to find a tool with a specific feature.

Mike: I mean, that certainly makes sense. But I wonder, you know, maybe if you look at some startups, you know, SAS companies, for example, quite often drive a lot of their traffic, and a lot of their customers from search ads. Do you think where you've got a particularly important channel, it's worth going for best in class? Or is integration still gonna give you more advantages?

Morgan: I mean, taking that particular channel search, search ads, Google search is obviously going to be the primary channel there and integrates very nicely into the Google search. And then you know, you can you could put that through HubSpot. And then we also use lots Google Data Studio, I think it's called look at data studio now, right to sort of analyse that. And so keeping it within one framework, I think, is just keeps it easier, cleaner data, better decisions.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm interested, you know, you obviously, sometimes going to clients, and they've already got systems installed, you may have to fix some configuration. I mean, presumably, other times they ask for advice. I mean, how would a startup, you know, narrow down the choice of tools, there's so many marketing technology providers, what sort of approach they take to narrow down and decide what they need,

Morgan: They normally have a fairly good idea of what they've you know, these are experienced marketers, they've seen things, try things before. So they have a sort of an idea of the stack that they that they like, that they're familiar with. But clearly budget for a startup is, is a big, a big factor. The the skills, can I tap people to do this. So I mean, if they're using WordPress, there are lots of WordPress developers, rather than building your website on a headless CMS that only a few people will know, there may be very good reasons that you want that because you want a super fast and super flexible e commerce oriented website. But for many, they'll say, Okay, I'm gonna use WordPress, or they'll think, okay, look, when I want something hosted and modular. And Webflow has sort of come up. HubSpot, we talked about has its own CMS, we tend to find for this very reason that many, many companies, even though that tool is relatively new, and probably quite integrated, they'll think, you know, there's not a big community of developers, plugins, templates for that, yet, that might change in future. So they, they tend to look at it through that, through that lens.

Mike: It's interesting. I mean, you're coming from basically the centre of the world's technology, and you're actually saying, the technology is secondary, to being able to get the people to run it. I mean, is that kind of your philosophy?

Morgan: I haven't thought about it in that way. But, you know, I do think that, you know, that is a, that is definitely a fact. Because there we've had clients who come in, and who changed the CMS, who changed the marketing automation system, rebrand the company, let's change to a Account Based Marketing go, you know, motion, implement ad roll or something like that. And that takes two years, they come in, and then the CMO will leave, having made all these changes. And I think that leaves the business, you know, it's such a big amount of change. And that leaves the business, sort of struggling to cope with all of that, you know, a different go to market motion, different web platform, different brand, you see that fairly often. So I tend to think, make incremental change to try and keep something that is going to scale over time, so that other people who come in will know, okay, I've got a clean stack of data, I know what's happening, and I can focus on implementing my programmes, rather than debugging the tech stack.

Mike: Sounds like I mean, really good advice. I love that idea of incrementally improving it. I mean, I guess as a follow up to that, do you see categories of tools where you think, you know, particularly the startup world, it's actually not worth investing in them, they're probably not going to give you a good return.

Morgan: Well, let's take intense Data intent data is great. We like that right? Finding surging intent through specific keywords with your target buyers, that is a grey area, it is not cheap, you have to have a level of sophistication to be able to then capitalise on that that data, customise your website to the people who are coming and sort of get that full flow, do an account based advertising to that account list. Now, you know, that is a great model, and really, really works as you become a late stage company as you move into IPO and at enterprise company. For a startup. It's just probably for an early stage startup, it could be a distraction. And so spending, I don't know, a certain amount of money $5,000 A month, let's say on intent based data, when you haven't got the rest of these other things you could you could be using that budget elsewhere on other programmes might be might be a better use of the money.

Mike: I think it was great advice. I was interesting. Obviously, some of these intent based products are AI based. And we've got to talk about artificial intelligence, I think Oh, yes. I mean, the first thing to say is I see you, you've launched within firebrand labs group to look at generative AI. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about why you chose to do that and why having, you know, a slightly separate group is going to be better for your clients.

Morgan: Yes. So I think tech is exciting again, right? Suddenly, we have the generative AI, I mean, AI has been around for a long time. But generative AI is now at a standard where we are all amazed about what it can do. And people are coming up with new ways of working all the time. We've just seen the launch of GPT, four, right, but you can now go and sign up for the for the waitlist for that it's an exciting time. And so I think, just as when the internet first came out, or when mobile phones became or smartphones became more use, we're at another sort of inflection point like that. And you can either hide from that and hope it goes away, or you can sort of jump in. And I think our labs group is there to explore it and learn how can we use this? Where does it accelerate the process says of ideation, or copywriting, or image production, or audio clean up or whatever it might be. And where there is it sort of just not there yet. And that is changing. So quickly, chat GPT only came out in mid November. And here we are, a few months later. And you know, the next version is coming out. We should as marketers, or be keeping a strong eye on that, because it could radically change the way we work. And that is exciting. And so that's what our labs group is, is trying to do to advise our clients and also just for our team, because their careers are going to be heavily influenced by by these kinds of technologies, and we want to help set them up for success there.

Mike: I mean, that sounds like a very positive view about AI. It's it sounds like you see it as being more opportunity than threat. Is that right?

Morgan: Well, well, I certainly think that, you know, you look at the something like I drew the analogy with the internet and where the internet touches a process. It sort of drives the price of that down. But it has also opened up multibillion dollar opportunities for other organisations. So will this dramatically change the process of marketing, copywriting, SEO, all advertising? All of that? Absolutely. Does that terrify me? Yes, it does. And it should, even the Sam Altman, the CEO of open AI, said it does get even him. And we should all be reassured by that. And I don't know how reassured I am but but you know, it definitely, it definitely is going to change us. But I, I feel like there's going to be opportunities there. And as somebody who likes technology and who feels like it can improve people's lives, that's we we like to work with companies that are going to make tomorrow better than today. This is definitely going to have that potential, but it also has the potential to you know, remove the lower end of the market, for sure.

Mike: I mean, I'm really pleased that you've got sort of a positive view on this. And it sounds like you know, what you're saying is that companies need to actually get involved now they shouldn't sit back and wait, but whether it's working with firebrands, labs So doing, you know, testing in house, you know, now's the time to try and learn about the technology.

Morgan: Absolutely. I mean, just look at how many companies are now getting funded with generative AI, or all I mean, open AI is also a back end company, how many are plugging it, you know, it's plugging its technology into every, you know, lots of different organised technology stacks that we use. descript, for example, is, you know, is now you're going to be using it. I do think this is new for everyone that, you know, they're learning how to write prompts for a chat based interface, so you can get what you want out of it, where its limitations are, where its opportunities. I think we're all learning that and there's a can sort of consensus and a joint excitement about that. And I think, I think it's fun to be part of that there are not many times in your career, that you're going to get that opportunity. And so look, if you haven't looked at it yet, totally fine. You've missed three months. This is going to be here for years. And so don't feel like, you know, Have I already missed that. But, but I think if in a year's time, we're still not, you know, we're still hoping it'll go away, and we're still sort of haven't quite got round to it, then others will have leapfrogged ahead.

Mike: That's great advice. I mean, I think the question that would really test your, your optimism here is if a young person asked you for career advice, they're thinking about marketing, given the fact that AI is potentially going to turn our industry upside down, would you recommend they go for marketing? Or they choose another career?

Morgan: Oh, well, listen, I could argue that if the technology like open AI, etc, reduces the cost of production of a website of coding, then differentiating it with marketing, maybe the most important thing to and the go to mug might be the most important thing. But here's something if you're early in your career, you have the chance to be the expert in your company, at choose a tool, write any of these AI tools, you could be the best, because all the years of experience that everybody else has had is irrelevant to that. So if you're the best at writing prompts, or you can use the script better than anybody else, or you've just tried all the tools that gives you a seat at the table. And we saw this with the birth of social media, where people who were new to the companies could be the experts, and that has launched 1000s of careers. And I think we're at the same point. So to your question, Should you go into marketing? I love marketing, so I'm biassed, but absolutely. It could be the critical function. And should you you know, is this exciting moment to be that, of course, because you could be the expert, and you can be it very quickly.

Mike: That's very inspiring, I think for for anyone thinking about marketing as a career. One of the questions I always like to ask people is about marketing advice. What's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Morgan: Well, you know, I think always make your customer, the hero of the story, right? It's about your customer. They want to be the hero. And so whether that's Nikes, famous strapline of just do it, making them the hero or applies to our little agency, we help startups crush their marketing goals. That's what we do. They're doing it. They're the hero. We're guiding them through it. I think if you think about the customer first, and make them the hero of the story, you're not going to be too far wrong.

Mike: That's awesome. I love that advice. I mean, I'm sure people have really enjoyed this conversation. And there's gonna be listeners who want to get in touch with you or find out more about fire Brandon and your labs. What's the best way for people to get ahold of you?

Morgan: Great. Well, the agency my agency is called Firebrand. We're a startup marketing agency. So you can come to that at firebrand.marketing, or reach out to me. LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach me, Morgan McLintic, I'm on LinkedIn. And I'd love to hear from any of your listeners.

Mike: Morgan, it's been a great chat. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for being a guest on the show.

Morgan: Thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Domenica Di Lieto - Emerging Comms

As one of the world's largest markets, China presents an excellent opportunity for many businesses. But how should you approach marketing to the region?

Domenica Di Lieto, CEO of leading Chinese marketing consultancy Emerging Comms, shares her experience and advice on growing businesses in China.

From choosing the correct channels to the importance of localisation, Domenica provides an overview of the differences marketers should consider when working with the Chinese market.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Domenica Di Lieto - Emerging Comms

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Domenica Di Lieto

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 Dominica Di Lietto. Dominica is CEO of specialists Chinese agency Emerging Communications. Welcome to the show Dominica.

Domenica: Lovely to be here, Mike. And thank you very much for having me on here.

Mike: Well, it's great to talk to you. But I mean, to start off with, I'd really like to understand how you came to be, you know, an expert on marketing in China. So what was your career path to get where you've got to now?

Domenica: Way too many years on the clock for one. So I started life in publishing. So for many years, I was in women's glossy magazines, newspapers, the Daily Mail group. And then late 1990s, obviously saw this thing coming called the Internet called, that makes me sound old. And I went and work for a couple of clients and agencies that specialised in digital. And I was working across the apple, New York and London. And I ended up getting quite fed up with that and launched my first agency, which I sold in 2011. And that was a front end development ecommerce agency, we were a supplier to the company that bought us. And then when I was looking for something to do, I randomly ended up being a commercial director for a Chinese agency for a year. So an interim job, really enjoyed the market, but felt that possibly it could be done better, putting clients at the heart of what we do, and very much focusing on what do their customers want. So that should align what their marketing should be. And emerging communications was born about a year later, it's sort of like 2015.

Mike: So you were doing international marketing? Was there a reason you decided to jump into China? Or was it just the job opportunity?

Domenica: Well, I think for me, I get quite bored. I've been in the UK digital market and the American market for quite a long time. And China just doesn't stop you just about understand that and you understand the legislation, and all the channels, and then the following day will change. And I like that speed of change. wrongly or rightly, I love the fact that I never quite know what I'm going to find in the morning, literally. So the whole changing landscape of the way consumers behave in China, the legislation, the government narrative just keeps me on my toes. And I think I've just gotten the most incredible team of talented individuals. So I'm kind of with China. I think for the rest of my career, I would think it's fair to say, may not just do emerging comps, I might do other things. But China is fascinating. And people look to Silicon Valley, for learning about digital and tech, and they should be looking at China, because they're good five, seven years ahead of everyone in the world. And that really fascinates me.

Mike: That sounds really exciting. And also interest about something else you said you said you wanted to put clients at the heart of the agency. So tell us a little bit about who you work with who are your clients?

Domenica: Absolutely. So we do work with some b2c, but predominantly, we are working in the B2B space, even if a client also operates in the b2c space. So we work with people like Penguin Random House, where we have worked to basically give them a voice amongst their consumers, because all of the marketing they do is with distributors. So that's B2B. We work in the pharma space, biotech space with a lot of consultancy firms. We work with a lot of chemistry clients, clients that target librarians, universities that target the research space. So I would say that in terms of the B2B space, most categories, but they all tend to have one thing in common, which is that they're all established in China, with a distributor or an agent or a salesperson or a sales team. And they've they've come across some kind of issues, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. So it's more the fact that they are operating B2B in China. So they are very much reliant on a human being to close the sale. We're not tending to deal with clients that are selling the end result online in the B2B categories that we deal with it as a human being, there's actually closing that sale.

Mike: And that's interesting. Is that something you've build expertise about? Or is that a deliberate choice not to go into E commerce brands in China?

Domenica: We do do ecommerce brands in China in terms of marketing, but they tend to be b2c. So in the B2B space, it's more about how business is done in China. It's no different to here and as much the same Making units quite complicated. But in China that disjoint between what's going on in market versus what HQ wants, and that could be in the States, Europe or the UK, is where most of the problems lie. So a total reliance, for example, on your distributor in China to do your marketing to do your brand to do your sales and your marketing is one common problem. Or it might be you've got one or two salespeople who are alienated and lonely and misaligned with what's going on back at HQ. So I think that integration of often online and that integration with both Western and Chinese team is our forte, yes. But ultimately, everything we're doing is to make sure and ensure that the brands we work with are the brand of choice or the company of choice, so that their sales increase, and their conversion increases through their sales efforts. So in other words, we get the marketing, right, according to how customers want to engage with it, and what they want to see. And that sounds pretty obvious. And that's how marketing should work. But you'd be amazed at how many people try and shoehorn their American marketing with a bit of Chinese on it into China and hope it's going to work? And of course, it doesn't.

Mike: So that leads me on to the obvious question. I mean, how different is it in China? I mean, obviously, some of the channels are different, you know, for example, social media, in in America or in Europe will be different to China. But I mean, how different is the approach? Is it completely different from a strategic point of view? Or is it more tactical differences, both.

Domenica: So strategically, I would say that Guan chi, and reliance on your network of people that you trust is very, very high in China, more so than here. And so no matter how much marketing you do often online, if you don't take into account and nurture your top customers, and make them your platinum customers and make them what we call Kayo C's or keeping customers, you're going to miss a trick. I think that it's been a very interesting time with COVID and COVID restrictions, because of course, B2B has always historically been run a very key exhibitions, events, press launches in China. And all of that moved online to webinars, podcasts effectively, but using Chinese software and platforms. Now, there's a bit of a hybrid, there's still a heavy reliance on that. So strategically, I would say it's more complicated, because you've got to align your brand in China and your messaging and what you stand for, and why you much more so with your headquarters, but make sure it's still relevant to your B2B customers. But from a tactical standpoint, there are a lot of differences. So not just the fact that social media channels are wildly different, there's a lot more of them across the board. So using online PR, for example, social media and search, you're using a completely different channel mix, and some will work and some won't. And there tends to be a sense of oh, I'll just go straight and do some paid search to Monica. And I'll do a little bit of online PR and what we do instead to brands and customers is, firstly, we need to know who your customers are and where they hang out. Because the chances are, they may not be searching on Baidu, it may well be another channel, they may not leverage or engage with certain online channels that you're looking to use, they're going to use others. So understanding who they are and where they hang out and how your competitors behave in your space is more complex. But once you know that, then everything kind of fits into place in terms of driving sales, the right sales and your conversion rates, which is what marketing is supposed to do, right. But there are I'm struggling to think of a single channel we use here in the West that you've got in China. Now even LinkedIn is no longer accessible in China. So there is really nothing, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google. So basically, everything is just government owned, but a lot more sophisticated and a lot more one on one engagement. So that's a totally expected thing in China, much like one to one email used to be back in the 90s is expected that that prospect you will talk to them as if it's just then. And that's where we chat CRM and targeting through certain channels. And that's what really comes into its own but But you can't just broadcast your messaging in China won't work.

Mike: So just expand a bit on what you mean by that one to one marketing, you're talking about brands having to engage individually with people who respond is that what's expected?

Domenica: Yes. So I'd say one of the first things to understand is I talked to so many huge global brands I've been in China for quite some time and they're they're having problems with their with their marketing their sales, and we'll find that they will do their normal e CRM marketing from something like Salesforce or HubSpot in China, and your B2B, Chinese customers are not going to engage with you on email. That's just not a medium that's used. Everybody uses WeChat for every CRM. So when I say one on one, that's exactly what I mean, I mean, really understanding, because we're talking large customers here, in complex B2B, high ticket value, you know, sales, more often than not, because even if the individual sells tiny, they're buying in volume. And so that relationship tends to be done by human being. And so that sort of integration between the sales team and China or sales person, quite often it starts with one person, and what the actual marketing effort is, and making that aligned with what's going on globally is absolutely critical. Because all too often what I see is poor disparate, one or two salespeople in China, being asked to do the marketing plan, marketing, strategy, marketing, delivery, and drive their own leads, and their salespeople, they should be good at converting sales. And so we made that very clear with the client, their salespeople, and it's our job to drive them the right leads. And we talk to sales teams all the time we engage them in our regular monthly catch ups. They're the ones talking to the client, and they're the ones that are going to get the objections. And they're the ones that can tell us what's working, what isn't, what's converting what isn't. And so it's just that integration piece is really, really key. And then the same when it comes to now of course, we've got events and exhibitions and conferences now back in China, after three years with hardly any. And just basic stuff like collecting WeChat data, not business cards, making sure everything's translated, including ourselves schemes, making sure that you've got Mandarin speakers on the stand. Now, the sound already obvious, but you would be amazed, and you only had to look at the news at the weekend to get BMW to see how badly you can get it wrong. So the whole the whole cultural nuances and understanding that so it's not, I wouldn't say it's complicated, I'd say all comes down to one thing, understand your Chinese customers, all of them in the stakeholder chain, and understand how they behave and where they hang out how they want to engage with you. And then you map your marketing coordinator, you don't do it the other way around.

Mike: So it's interesting. I mean, you've kind of alluded to this issue of control. And obviously trying to basically transplant an American or European campaigns, China isn't gonna work. But equally, trusting salespeople to drive marketing themselves when they're not marketing professionals is probably not a good idea, either. So, I mean, how much control do you think brands should take when they're trying to grow their business in China?

Domenica: Oh, that's a really good question. I'm doing a webinar on this in a couple of weeks, because it's probably the single biggest question I get asked. we've coined a phrase called glocalization. And the reason that we coined that phrase is that you need to localise your approach so that your Chinese B2B Customers will engage with it, it's answering the pain points that they have, and using the channels where they're hanging out. But you also need to be on brand. Because if you're not, you're not recognisable, and you don't have the credibility, and you can't build the credibility, China is a humongous country with over 3 billion consumers and lots of geographies. So it's a balance. It's like a seesaw. And what I say to brands is, if that seesaw is, is straight, and you've got the balance about 5050, that's about right. If you localise too much, then it becomes absolutely no alignment whatsoever with the global brand. And then you get what I call leaks in the bucket, or holes in the bucket rather than leaks. So you get things like your distributor or salespeople running your WeChat marketing, and it doesn't even make sense. And it's too local. It's not on us. It doesn't look right. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound like you. It's not saying the right thing, or the literature is nonsensical, and the list goes on. But if headquarters are controlling the brand, then all it will look like and it's fine. If you are a footsie 100 company, everybody's heard of you. But most companies don't have sort of like bottomless pockets. So you do need it to be consistent, but for it to be localised, and we always localise at the very beginning of our campaigns.

And when we work with the client, we localise not just the typography, because of course, it's Chinese characters, but the brand of the way it looks and feels and also the narrative. So we have a very clear approved comms strategy. And another thing to think about with a brand alignment is crisis management plan. So if BMW had had one, I can guarantee their response would have been quicker and better. And so you can't stop salespeople or your representatives and say, exhibitions, events or PR stunts or what have you. You can't control everybody. But what you can do is if things, obviously, they get cultural training, but if things go wrong, you need to have a plan that can be actioned within minutes. Because things can go horribly wrong very quickly in China, just because everybody takes to social media and there's a lot of people and so what might be 1000 comments here is millions enjoy. So yeah, so you've got to have the balance, right. So I say in an ideal world brand control and marketing control should reside with the client and their specialist agency. But it should be a localised approach. And we've done work, for example, with IKEA, where I had to be the intermediary between the Russian global team and the Shanghai AES agency, so that they could understand each other in terms of why did the creative look like that? And why why was it localised in such a way? So it was actually really just so that the global team could understand the approach by the Shanghai US agency, which was actually perfect. It was on brand yet localised, localised? So it's, it's a balancing act. But if you get the balancing act, right, it's absolutely spot on. And the best way to find out is ask your customers, right. So that's my point, if you know what your customers want is pretty easy. Yeah.

Mike: That sounds like great advice. I'm interested. I mean, a lot of people listening might be from the States. And certainly if you look at geopolitics, the relationship between the West and China is not at its best at the moment. I mean, how Western brands have Dickie American brands seen by Chinese customers, particularly in B2B, is it still as big an opportunity is there still as much enthusiasm?

Domenica: There's no doubt about it. There's a couple of major obstacles to us right now, not just not just political ones. But also the time difference is potential depending on whether you're east or west coast, we tend to be the intermediaries for a lot of American companies, because we can just about talk to China because our teams start late in China and start early in UK. And we've got a bit more than four hour overlap on an average eight hour time difference. So time differences a problem. I think if you look at if you know anything about Hofstede, or any kind of cultural philosophy, there is an even bigger difference between American culture and China culture than European culture. So that's also a bit of a challenge. I spoke to not that long ago and American brand global American brands has been really successful in Indonesia and Vietnam and other APAC regions, they were going into China. And it's a franchise model. I'm not gonna say who they are, and they were absolutely dead set that this franchise model would work in China. And I was like, it will not. You're not offering anything that isn't offered by local competitors in China. Nobody recognises your motif, I nearly gave it away then. And the animal that is the representative in your logo. In fact, it has negative connotations, culturally, you'd have to localise. But that isn't their model. So they've decided to go to other APAC region.

So I think for America, yes, there is the political tensions, but there is still plenty of opportunity in China. And depending on what categories they operate in, obviously, you deal with a lot of B2B Tech, engineering, tech, pharma, bar science, biomedical science, chemistry, these areas are huge in China, and has have actually not been impacted by COVID. And some of our clients have grown substantially throughout COVID. Because actually, there was more demand for what they do. So I'd say that as long as you get the cultural side, right, you understand your customers, you work with a specialist agency, there's no reason why American brands can't be successful. I'm not suggesting for one second, that the strap lines and the creative and copy that we come up with focuses on where they're actually from, that might not be a terribly good idea. But if they have a better product or service than their competitors, you're still going to be successful in China. There's enough demand basically.

Mike: So that sounds really positive. I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is if a brand is looking to enter China, you talked about having kind of a sequence so people initially put sales teams in or a couple of salespeople before they they bring in marketing. I mean, what is the most effective way to enter and grow in China?

Domenica: 

Oh, that's a million dollar question, which depends on the category that you're in your budget and your attitude to risk. But I'm a real believer in you see, you're trying to journey a bit like a staircase. And if you're getting to the top of the staircase, you don't try and fly from the bottom step to the top step you have to learn as you go, learn, invest, learn, invest, and mitigate your risk. You certainly depending on what category you're in, need somebody in market, we do have brands who don't have anybody and we are their customer service team and we support on the ground in events. Some of our largest clients only got one person in market, but has eight people in the APAC region that also support at large events and we support them a lot on the ground as well as strategy and marketing. But the reason I say you've got to have some foothold is you're selling something correct. So if it's consultancy, or if it's a product and you are on E commerce platforms like Taobao For example, JD, you still gotta have one person on the ground for customer service or one person on the ground that's going to talk to your key platinum customers. And how a lot of brands start is they will choose a distributor dependent on if that's their model, or they will have a salesperson and they'll use some kind of launch pad like the China Business British Council who are fantastic. And they'll work from their launch pad with that one person, they'll pay them from the CBBC. They'll go to exhibitions, events, and they kind of grow from there. But we do have a lot of clients whose HQ in APAC is in Hong Kong, or Singapore, and actually latterly Bangkok, a lot of expats left Shanghai during COVID, and went to Bangkok. And it also works if you have got somebody in the APAC region, it's not quite as good, because they have to fly in and out of events and exhibitions, but you do kind of need somebody, even though we can support that one person, but you've got to make sure your products and services can actually get to the right people. So most people start with a distributor, to be honest.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I guess that's not dissimilar to other countries. With a distributor, yeah.

Domenica: Yeah, very similar.

Mike: So if you're gonna give advice to people who are looking to grow their business in China, I mean, what do you think would be the one bit of advice people should really listen to to avoid making those big mistakes?

Domenica: I think there's a lot of assumption with global brands, that your brand or your product is going to be the right thing for the China market. So firstly, don't assume anything. You need objective advice. So I would say you need to be looking at who your competitors are in the China market. There'll be some global, some local, and can you compete in that space? What do you offer that they don't? What is your differentiator, your competitive advantage, that's the single biggest thing. And make sure that that's in the eyes of the consumer, the customer, and there will be many different types of customer in the B2B decision making unit. So don't assume that you're what I call your USP is what your customers that your USP is. So make sure that you've, you've done your competitive research and your customer research. If you've done that, and you know, what your competitive advantages and you know, you can compete and you've got a better product, and that there is a market there. And none of this needs to cost a fortune. We do this with brands quite enough inexpensively, but enough to know how we're going to market that brand. And obviously, the other thing you need to think about is how you're distributing your product or your service, which is your operations bit, which is why most people use a distributor, then it's just a question of about mapping out what marketing is going to engage, entice and sell to your customers that you've selected, according to where they hang out. So for example, Chinese search engine largest search engine is Baidu, there are a few others, but it still got the lion's share of the market. If there's no demand on Baidu index for your brand, or for your type of product, I'm not going to start there, I'm going to start with something else, I might start with online PR, I might start with some B2B influencers, in vertical sectors or on certain channels. So it's about really understanding your market, the opportunity there and your customers.

Once you've done that, and we won't touch a brand, that we haven't done that because otherwise what we're doing is noise. And China is huge. And we get fantastic results. And we get those results, because we know that what we are saying and where we are saying it is going to engage with their customers and they're going to buy otherwise, it's pointless is just basically throwing money at the problem. And I don't believe in doing that. I believe that it should get a return everything you do. And on that note, just real quickly about tracking is don't listen to anybody who says you can't track things in China. They've heard a lot of horror stories about clickbait, you know, and there are so many agencies that just fabricate results. And we can look at it and within two minutes tell a client that is not real people engaging that is that is that AI technologies, it's very easy to sport. So you can track everything and you should track everything. And we do track everything. So don't be for one second muscled into thinking that's not true. So you can track it properly, far better, actually, than any other market I've ever worked him.

Mike: I think that's great advice. I love that that real thought through process as well in terms of going into the market and focusing on money where it's going to generate return. I think that's fantastic.

Domenica: Yeah, absolutely. And but we've got an eight C's model that we follow in exact order of what you do first, and customers are right at the top before we even look at competitors is that literally your customers, your competitors you know, your competitive advantage your comps and just do it in the right order. And it's a bit like a tick box exercise as much as market research is would hate that and everyone's quote unquote, involved. But there is a process. And once you do it like that, then you'll get return. But if you go straight to the channels and activate channels, you don't know what channels you're activating, you don't know what you're saying, because you don't know what your customers want to hear. So it's the wrong way around. Yeah.

Mike: That's great advice. I've really enjoyed talking about China, there's a couple of questions we'd like to ask. So the more general questions of our guests. And you know, I'm interested, you're obviously really excited about marketing, thinking about marketing in China. What would your advice be, if you met someone, a young person who was thinking of starting a career in marketing?

Domenica: I would my biggest advice to anybody who wants to get into marketing is to study business first. So too often, the marketers I meet fresh out of university have done a marketing degree in marketing, postgrad, no practical experience, they focus so much on delivery of marketing tactics, that they don't focus on what the business problem is, you need to at least at the very least understand how business is structured, how p&l is structured, and how the board is structured. I think that's really important. And there are also so many jobs in marketing, you know, are your creative personality, an analytical person? Are you really good at writing, that people just lump it together as marketing. And they're very, very different roles. And they're going to be very different roles again, in 510 years time, you know, AI technology and drone technology. And so I think that, be sure that marketing is the right thing is number one, and which side of marketing but really do understand the business context, because it will make you a very good marketer.

Mike: I love that. So that's really thoughtful. The other question we always ask is, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Domenica: I would say, and it's not just for marketing, it's just across the board is mistakes are good. We really celebrate them emerging coms every Monday in our speech, because every time we make a mistake, and we're very open with clients as well, it might be that we've leveraged a channel that hasn't quite gone according to plan, or maybe one of their sales team says something they shouldn't. If everything is a learning thing, you don't do it twice, then it's going to benefit, the brand is going to benefit the relationship and it's going to benefit the results. To not make mistakes, in my opinion means you're not moving forward, especially in China. So I would say making mistakes need to be celebrated within Ries. I think somebody told me that a couple of years ago, and I always used to feel awful if things went wrong. But now I'm very much do you know what? What do we learned from that? How can we make sure we don't do it again? And I think yeah, I think China's got a different context. And I would say the best advice I can give to anybody doing business in China is work with an expert, don't work with somebody who did Chinese a level work with Chinese nationals. And basically, you've got to understand the cultural context at all times when you're doing business in China, whether that is negotiation, supplier relationships, or talking to your customers. So work with people that understand that.

Mike: That's fantastic advice. Thank you so much for your time on the podcast, it's been really fascinating. I'm sure people would want to learn more about China and about how you can help them in China. What's the best way for listeners to get in contact with a

Domenica: I'm very active on LinkedIn, so Domenica Diletto, or feel free to email me Domenica at emerging comms.com. If you Googled America, Diletto you'll also find me through many different channels. I would say I wouldn't ring my mobile, I tend to have 60 calls a day, so I tend to switch it off. If you email me, it will get picked up or you send a message through LinkedIn, I go through my messages every day, I will get back to you straightaway. But if you call you might be waiting some time. I work out if it's a cold call or not because I get rather a lot of them.

Mike: Well, that's fantastic and very kind for you to give your email address out. Thank you so much for all your insight Dominica. I really appreciate it.

Domenica: Pleasure, Mike really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Haralds Gabrans Zukovs - Credolab

Haralds Gabrans Zukovs, Head of Marketing at Credolab, explains how through understanding how individuals use their smart devices, marketing teams can create campaigns optimised towards personality traits. He also describes how the additional insight can enhance marketing personas.

Haralds and Mike also discuss machine learning and AI, their impacts, benefits, and limitations.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Haralds Gabrans Zukovs - Credolab

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Haralds Gabrans Zukovs

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 Haralds Gabrans Zukovs. Harold's is the Head of Marketing at Credolab. Welcome to the podcast. Harold's.

Haralds: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on the podcast. So we'd like to start off by asking our guests about their career journey. So can you tell me about your career and why you decided to join Credolab?

Haralds: Yeah, well, my career started like some time ago, I, when I was in high school, I actually started a project with my classmate. And it was about the tourist citing places. And I started as a copywriter. And then I slowly moved into social media. And kind of my interest grew through the years and from copywriting and social media, I moved into digital marketing and marketing in general. And then I quite quickly moved to B2B because I understood that I like to work and market with products that are not that easily to market that maybe not everyone would take a challenge like that. So I just started to enjoy working with products and industries that not many would find easily to market.

Mike: That's I mean, that's interesting. So you enjoy the challenge of B2B which I love because I think B2B is more difficult, but also far more interesting than consumer. So you obviously joined Credolab? I mean, what did you see about the company that excited you?

Haralds: Yeah, well, I guess, you know, before the crypto lab, I worked in an open banking industry. And at that time, when I worked in that industry, it was still developing, it was still trying to prove its worth. And then when I started like conversations about joining the Credolab, I saw a similar thing. Because like alternative data or behavioural analytic data, it's still something like it's very useful. But maybe the audience still needs some educating to do to understand the value of that and how to integrate it into their products. So I just saw another challenge to take on.

Mike: That's interesting. And I mean, you've hinted a bit at what Credolab does, but do you want to explain what the product does?

Haralds: Yeah, so we basically how risk fraud and marketing teams to take better decisions with advanced behavioural analytics that are based on smartphone and web metadata.

So we basically analyse millions of data points. And with those data points, companies can take better decision, whether it's for risk related things for fraud related things, or marketing related things.

Mike: That's interesting. So you're actually using this process of gathering data to actually do a couple of things. I mean, you know, one is looking at risk and fraud, but the other is to actually mark it. So are you taking basically the same data and using it to inform both sides of the business?

Haralds: Like for each of the for each of the products, the data is quite the way we take date is the same. But then the way what we do with that data is a bit different, but still the decision and how the companies interpret that data is on them. But all of the data that's taken from the interactions with your like smartphone or web, yeah, it's like, interpret that in modules that companies can use.

Mike: So that's interesting. I like to know, you know, what the sort of processes for a company to take data and analyse it? I mean, what are they doing, for example, in marketing, to make use of your data to make those marketing decisions?

Haralds: So we build personas by looking at the apps any user has on the smartphone without knowing the identity of that user. And we look at how organised someone is in saving for example, Contacts, Calendar, events, or anything else that they do on their smartphone. And like for example, do you save different phone numbers belonging to one unfriend under one single, or joint contact or rather John one, John two or John three? Like do you schedule meetings regularly? Or not? How many people are in your meetings? Even? How do you charge your phone? Like, how much battery life do you have for your phone at which time and when? And like, like, we can really help our clients understand their users in a very granular way without compromising data protection, and always complying with the privacy laws.

Mike: So that's interesting, you're almost using the way someone interacts with their smartphone, to kind of uncover their personality. Is that Is that a fair summary?

Haralds: Um, yeah, yeah, we kind of helped like, but not only the smartphone, also the web, the web.

But I think for the marketing product, it's, it's interesting that yeah, we can uncover the personality of the of this person, and then help the company to take better actions and better decisions in into their marketing, like, teams based on this information.

Mike: And so there you'd see someone who's, you know, very organised and very methodical about how they're doing it, you know, perhaps responding to a different campaign, to someone who's perhaps more spontaneous, or maybe less organised. And, you know, you'd see marketing teams customising their campaigns for those sort of personas, Is that Is that how it works?

Haralds: Yeah, you can basically take that data and then customise your images, text approaches, you know, because I think based on people personality, they react differently to different materials, which you see online or receive in your email or like, you know, consume in any way. It is basically based on your personality. So with that data, it might give you additional insight on what exactly to do with it.

Mike: And is this something you know, an approach you're using when you do marketing is trying to understand the personality of people in a B2B process? Because I think traditionally, B2B personas have been around job roles and you assume, for example, every accountant is very organised and logical, even though obviously, that's not going to be the case.

Haralds: Well, yeah, and B2B, it's a bit different than b2c in B2B. You have to think not only about the buyer personas about the ideal customer profiles, but you have to think about the organisation. And then how each of these job titles, because if you're talking about the job titles, how they fit into that process, and then how to work with them. It might like if we compare the B2B and b2c On one hand, it is more complicated to target them and to get what they want, at the right moment in the right place, but another hand, sometimes the b2c is more challenging, because even if it's easier to target the right people with the right message at the right time, the value you get out of that not always is as big as from the B2B side. So each side has its own challenges.

Mike: That makes that makes a lot of sense. You know, in terms of you know, we talked about personas a bit, and I think it might be worth delving a bit deeper into personas. How do you go about building personas when you're doing B2B marketing?

Haralds: It's actually one of the cornerstones I start with, you know, every join company. I do deep research on personas, trying to talk with the management with the salespeople with the customer success people, like everyone I can, and even with the clients to get as much information as possible to build profiles to understand what are their jobs to be done, how we can help them succeed, then to understand what to do on a sales and marketing side to deliver them not just ads or content, but try to deliver them a better experience when they interact with us.

Mike: That's so interesting. I mean, other campaigns you've run where you can actually see that you've had different approaches for different personas. And that's really worked there any examples in your career, you could bring out that show this benefit of really focusing down on personas.

Haralds: I think that the best approach that we have run you know if you for example, see that your product is being used by more than one industry. And I have compared what happens if you lounge, a generalise campaign for all of the industries, but like telling that this product can help you in this way, or what happens if you segment deeper and target the industries with an industry specific message, usually the industry specific message performs a lot better for the emails, also for the ads, because if you can speak in their language with an ad read the problem that that specific individual maybe in the Account Based Marketing space, or if you have a marginalised campaign, for example, in the industry, space has not only in theory, but on also on the practical side, it has a lot higher chances to succeed. Of course, there have been exceptions from time to time. But in most cases, the campaigns that target deeper and have been created more based on what these industries or account types need succeed a lot more.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. Harold's I think I think I can, you know, see that. But obviously, creating these campaigns takes a lot of time. I guess I have to ask the artificial intelligence question. I mean, a lot of people are looking at AI to help them with marketing at the moment. And clearly when you're looking to segment and personalise, there's a hope that AI can really drive that, is that something you believe is going to happen? And is that something you've seen being used yet, either with Credolab or anywhere else?

Haralds: Well, if we talk about the marketing, I myself think that artificial intelligence like it can't yet do the job that you need to do. But what it can do, it's a really big help to speed up like the starting brainstorming or templating processes on which then you can build upon, because in a lot of cases, it takes quite a lot of time to come up with something from scratch. But if you have already some kind of filler, or some kind of a template that you know, that is into the right direction, but still means work, it's already a better starting point than just like starting from scratch. So in my perspective, at least at the moment from the AI that I have seen, for the pocketing, I would say that that's the best approach. And if we talk about the cradle up as a product, we don't really use AI, but we use machine learning algorithms, because using AI presents a few challenges. Like for a start, if you ingest bad, or garbage data, your your output will be garbage results. So basically, it means what data you input that kind of data you get out. So it's also a bit difficult to explain the outcome of an AI model. So So yeah, so that's why our products are basically built on machine learning, not AI.

Mike: So you're learning around the data that you've gathered, rather than trying to create a more general purpose AI. Is that is that the distinction?

Haralds: Yeah, well, we have we feel like it's like a learning based thing that learns on a lot of data points and then tries to like, help find what actions and what like what needs to be done, you know? So it's, it's like, it's like a better approach.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, that that makes a lot of sense. And I know, I've seen chat GPT produced some, some very strange and completely inaccurate responses when I've asked the questions. And so I think a lot of companies are going to have to build their own machine learning models based upon data they can trust. So that that makes a lot of sense in terms of what Credolab is doing. Yeah, well, I have used DBT a bit myself and I, the thing that usually its downfall in most of the cases has been When, however, it mentioned some kind of data. When you check it, you can trust it because you find out that it's not a real data. So so yeah. Yeah, I was very disappointed, actually. I mean, I don't know if listeners know, but one of my hobbies is speed skating. And for a short while, chat GPT thought I was an international speed skater. And it was very disappointing now that it says it doesn't know me anymore. But yeah, the data that goes in is is really key in terms of training those models. I agree.

Let's switch back and talk a bit more about marketing. I mean, you talked about AI and being a great way to cure writer's block. If you use AI, you can actually get something you can start working on, you're not faced with a blank page. I love that analogy. I'm interested in terms of the the different areas of marketing you've worked on. I mean, which are the areas that you've enjoyed the most?

Haralds: Yeah, well, I guess I enjoyed the most like ads, especially the LinkedIn ads, email, then I like working with the flip side, some conversion rates, like with websites structure, and then I enjoy a lot working with automation and CRMs, and a bit of our technical integration tool stuff. So I mean, all of those, I guess, are areas that AI could have a significant impact in on in the future.

Well, if it becomes better at what it does, then most likely, but it really depends on there is always, you know, there's, like always the right tool for the right job.

Mike: So it's just a question, can you find that right tool for the right job that you want to do?

And obviously, I mean, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is digital. I mean, that's relatively new in the world of marketing, you know, maybe the last 10 to 20 years, if we look at some of that. I mean, do you think marketing is gonna keep changing as quickly as we've seen in the last few years, as we look forward into the future?

Haralds: Well, if the AI really gets to the point, as you're saying that it can do a lot more stuff than now, then I think it will accelerate even more. Because you know, in marketing, it's all about how quick can you do things? How quick can you brainstorm and put out new things to test and learn and move forward quicker. So if that, like, if the speed of the technology increases, then most likely the speed of the marketing will increase as well.

Mike: That sounds a bit of a challenge. I mean, if if you were talking to a young person who was maybe thinking about a course to take at university, I mean, would you recommend marketing as a career? Do you think it's still going to be exciting and rewarding in the next few years?

Haralds: As I said, that really depends, like I like it's hard to predict. But in general, I think marketing won't disappear, at least not yet. Because even though if you could use the AI, it still means somebody who understands what they are getting, like not only inputting but also getting from the output and understand if that's valuable or not. So I would say that for now, it looks like that, yeah, the marketing is still an exciting place to be, maybe some smaller parts of the marketing will change. Like, you know, I don't know, the research will become faster. So maybe you won't have to spend so much time on the research data and analytics, I would imagine will become easier, faster to do than just like going through the sheets, or something like that. So of course, there will be changes. But in general, I think, still, for now, the direction looks like that, it will be that you still need that person who knows what is going on? Who checks if the thing that you are doing actually work or not.

Mike: And that's great to hear you've got such a positive view of the future. And it sounds like actually, some of the things technology is going to do is to remove some of the less fun work. And I have to say whilst analytics is super important, sometimes actually doing that number crunching is not as fun, is it?

No, no. And sometimes it just eat up your time. And then you'll think, oh my god, I just loved so much time just to come to this conclusion, and I need to restart the testing phase. So I'm basically back to square one. But at least I learned that thing, but But yeah,

Mike: I have another question. Actually, Harold's one of the things we always like to ask people is about the best bit of marketing advice. So what was the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Haralds: Like the best bit was, there are like, for me, at least there are no problems or issues without solutions. Like you know, if you can't find a solution, at least at that moment, that it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist at all, even if nobody has discovered it. So, this advice like has shaped my mindset and approach towards challenging situations in marketing. So I always try to find, as I said the right

Like tool or the right solution for the job that you need to do, and I have found that there always is one, maybe just at that moment you can't see it or like, you need to dig deeper.

Mike: So another positive view of things which is which is great to hear. Harold's I really appreciate the time you've spent on the podcast it's been really interesting and, and actually inspiring because I think, you know, you see a lot of positives in the future of marketing, which is great. If people want to contact you or find out more about Credolab, what's the best way to get in touch?

Haralds: So yeah, well, they could find me on LinkedIn platform as handled governance glucose or by searching Credolab on the thing. And then like finding me through the people's section, or visit the website and going to Credolab website and our website is quite calm. So you can go out and check out and see what we can do.

Mike: That's brilliant. Harold, you've been a great guest. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Rena Fallstrom - Pure Storage

Rena Fallstrom, VP of Communications at Pure Storage, discusses how they adapted the communications strategy as competition in the industry dramatically expanded and how she collaborates with the international team to ensure communications are tailored to each region and no valuable region is ignored.

Discover why working with analysts can be beneficial and hear some top tips on how to build relationships with the analyst community, to ensure a beneficial working relationship.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Rena Fallstrom - Pure Storage

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Rena Fallstrom

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 for podcasts from Napier. Today I'm joined by Rena Fallstrom. Rena is the VP of Communications at Pure Storage. Welcome to the podcast Rena.

Rena: Thank you, Mike. Great to see you again.

Mike: It's good to see you. We met fairly recently in the States, which was really nice. You know, just to kick off, I'm always interested with people in how they got their position, you know, you're running global communications at pure storage. Can you give us a bit of a background as to how your career got to this point?

Rena: Absolutely. You know, I will say my entire career has been in the data storage industry. And, you know, it may seem to the unassuming eye, that Oh, it's just the data storage industry. I absolutely love it. I've been doing it since I graduated from college, which I won't say the number of years, but it is definitely well into the double digits. And I absolutely love it. I love it. And that's how I got I got into it, I went to an engineering lead school down in the Southern California area. And I have just been bitten by that bug. And I've just continued to work in, tech and in storage my entire career. And I absolutely love it.

Mike: I mean, that's really good to hear. So, you started off in PR, is that right? And then moved to analyst relations. I mean, talk me through a little bit about, you know, some of those career decisions that took you through those different roles.

Rena: Well, my end goal was to get to a broad communications function, eventually running this function. You know, with a rise of titles like chief communications officer, I knew that I needed to get every single tool in my toolbox. So, I guess I did start off in PR. And I did that for many years, very much enjoyed it. And I thought I'd kind of take a chance at doing analyst relations, which I absolutely adore and love. I love working with the industry analyst community for many reasons. I then said, okay, what else do I need to do in this area to try to be proficient and learn in order to feel like I could step into the broader communications role?

Mike: And was there a particular area you enjoyed more? Or is it just building that breadth of experience has been fun all the way through?

Rena: I mean, I, I can't choose a favourite child. I love all aspects of communications. And it's ironic because well, yes, there are disciplines like PR, and AR and exec comms and whatever other different comms internal comms, the one prevailing thing is that you're communicating to an audience, no matter whether it's an internal audience or an external audience. And I enjoy that craft quite a bit of just creating and crafting, great communications tailored to whatever audience you're speaking to. So can't choose a favourite child, Mike, I'm sorry.

Mike: I love that enthusiasm. That's awesome. I mean, let's talk a little bit about the company Pure Storage because, you know, a few years ago, Pure Storage was an absolute leader in terms of the the all flash storage. So if people are listening to this, this is, you know, large storage boxes that are basically storing everything in Flash, so superfast, rather than using hard drives, you know, at one point, you will almost trying to define a category. And now it's an area where there's a lot of competition, you know, it feels like almost everybody's got a solution. So I'm really interested to know, how things have changed, you know, how you communicate with the audience has had to change as the markets changed so dramatically.

Rena: Absolutely. Great question. I, you know, it's very interesting. Our founder, John Colegrove, he is still with his company it’s been what we're coming on 14 years since the start of the company. And you're right, in the very beginning, it was we were swimming upstream, it was not trending, it was completely going against the grain of people are like, Oh, you are not the entire data centre, people are not going to move to all flash. It's just not gonna happen, as you mentioned, you know, hard disk drives will still have stronghold. And you know, through the years, we've really proven that, that no, it is we are going to be moving to an all flash data centre and the things that Pierre is doing is getting us there a bit sooner based on some of that secret sauce that we have around engineering, software, hardware engineering, but you're right, it is it is growing more in a mainstream nature, right. Like before, where there were a lot of sceptics, a lot of competitors that were sceptical, potentially, you know, some end users that were a little bit hesitant that now has changed and it is the realisation of it is happening. So absolutely. We are having to very much change the way we do communications and marketing overall, to move with the trends in the market and the adoption curve for sure. I still believe and perhaps I'm slightly biassed, but I still do believe that we do have a huge differentiation in the space because we we believe that we put then that flag of the all flash data centre, the vision that our founder had some 14 years ago, and it's coming to fruition. So he was able to get ahead of a lot of things and foreshadow a lot of things that I think he's still giving us a huge amount of differentiation.

Mike: So it's interesting. So you're still carrying that brand equity you built by by pioneering the space, even now that I think that's really positive that must really help you in terms of your your communications.

Rena: Absolutely, absolutely. I think any for any communications professional, you're looking for the thing that differentiates you in the market, the thing that makes you special, the things that separate you from the past. I think that's what every communications professional reaches for. And the more you have, the better, the better off, the easier also, the easier your job is.

Mike: No, I love I mean, I'm interested as well, in terms of that differentiation. Do you find it as easy to sell those differentiation points through to analysts as you do when you're talking Jordan's? Because, you know, so I think sometimes people have a perception that analysts are almost like these these scientific robots that don't take notice of anyone who's pitching them. But do you find you can still get credibility because of the history?

Rena: Absolutely. I, I love the analyst community. I love them the most, because I believe that they have, number one, a great post on the market. They are talking to end users. So they are hearing it directly from end users, they synthesise it, and then they're able to provide great feedback. I think that the key one of the key pieces of animals relations is yes, constant communication with them. The more you tell them, the more you keep them abreast and in the loop of what you're doing them. Absolutely the better off you are, because open lines of communication are really important with the animals community. And yes, I absolutely do try to put our best foot forward with the analysts, but I also my team, I also work on ensuring that you know, when we are hitting a roadblock, or we need their advice on something, early stages of development, or early stages of messaging, we go to them, Hey, I would love your opinion on this still debate still in its infancy, but would love your opinion on this, I think they I hope that they value it. I think that's really interesting. You're not seeing analysts merely as someone to pitch to you're seeing them as a resource as well, which is, is fantastic. You hit the nail on the head, a lot of companies sometimes just think that, Oh, it must be perfect messaging must be finalised and must be wrapped up the big red bow in order to bring it to the analysts. In fact, the contrary, it is great to bring on finalised messaging to the analyst because they can help shape it for you because they have such a wonderful pulse on the end user community. And they are they can bring that into it and help you out a bit more, you know, versus just the internal position that you have.

Mike: I think that's great. I mean, one thing I'm interested about, you're talking about learning about your end user community. And basically, you know what your audience wants to hear. Clearly analysts is one route you've really developed well, are there other ways that you're really understanding what the customer wants to optimise those communications and make the messaging, right?

Rena: Absolutely. My team, the communications team takes advantage of a lot of resources that the company has pure has a great way of tapping into the customer mindset, whether it be communities or little forums where you invite certain customers in to get their feedback, that is gold for us. So us in the comms team, we try to wedge your way into those conversations, or at least get the notes so that we can figure out okay, where's the pulse of the customer, we're getting direct feedback from them, that is just gold for us. And so we mind that for sure. And then the other thing that you and I had chatted about when we had met in person is let's make sure that we are going to their watering holes. So understand what their hopes and dreams are their fears, through these communities through these forums that we have. And then let's make sure as a comms team that we are going to where they're going, where are their eyeballs going, let's be there. Let's be there. Let's make sure that peer is positioned where they're reading where they're going to their sources of information, to try to do a bit of both. I can't say it's always easy, but it is what we strive for.

Mike: I love that. I feel I need to ask an audience questions a little bit cheeky. I mean, certainly in Europe, American companies have a bit of reputation of being a little bit insular and focusing a lot on the statute. Your responsibility is global. So I'm interested to know how you make sure that pure pays the right level of attention to each region in the world.

Rena: So it's a good question. I have to say I you know, as you speak, I'm looking at my home monitor and I have a little post it that says Think International. I have an amazing team that is dispersed within the UK, Singapore and India and they cover everything outside of the US and they keep me on my toes but I always look at this post and say okay, let's make sure that we're not looking at everything in such a US myopic view. We know we have amazing customers in Latin America in EMEA and APJ around the world. And are we making sure that we're tailoring those messages for those audiences? And also the thing that people don't look into my guess the adoption curve is so poor potentially, in the US, you may see bleeding edge adoption of technology like Flash, and then you go further out into Europe and Asia, and perhaps they're not there yet. Some are, but perhaps some are not. And so you can't provide messages into the market that are so far advanced, they haven't even thought about it. So let's make sure that we localise it, that we translate it and that we're putting out the right messages. You know, I think every every company struggles with that, but I have an amazing team. And this post it to remind me in your to do that. Is the secret to a successful international marketing clearly as opposed to Yes. It all in all lies in that secret?

Mike: No, I love that. And I think you're right that sometimes it's not about focus and how much you put it might be about timing. And I think I don't know what you believe. But it seems to be that there's a bit of culture, particularly in Europe in terms of a reluctance to adopt the bleeding edge and maybe go for something that feels safer. Do you think that's true?

Rena: I do. I do. I think I think every every industry is different. And every every organisation is different as well. But I also think it has to do with the industry that they're in, and if their headquarters are in the US, and if they're not, you know, where do they go in terms of the adoption? It's hard for me to generalise because I've seen as soon as I start to generalise something, I'm proven wrong by some customer I meet and I say, Okay, no, you are the exact opposite of what I thought so hard to generalise. But I just want to be aware that certainly there can be slower adoption of bleeding edge technology, and then how do we speak to those audiences? Where meet them where they're at?

Mike: I mean, I I'm interested, you know, when someone's buying and investing in in a flash strategy. I mean, certainly, you know, a few years ago, didn't that require a lot of buy in from people who weren't? Maybe not the decision makers, but influencers is a big part of your, your job reaching people who might influence the decision, but maybe not the technical decision maker?

Rena: Well, well, absolutely. And when you say influencer, Mike, do you mean internal influencer or external influencer? Because I believe that matters, too. I think there's both I mean, typically, you know, a lot of tech companies, if I'm to be honest, I see them focusing on the technical decision maker in certainly, and missing those internal influences they might focus on, you know, perhaps some external influence like analysts. But But I think it's that internal influencer, that, that she's quite hard to communicate with, because you've got a complex product. And you're talking to someone who's not an expert in that sector. I, I'm interested in how you approach it. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah, she got very good I am, I will say that there are absolutely influencers within organisations, and a lot of the times they are lined with business owners who are more empowered now. Or even, you know, if I may get down into the weeds a bit the DevOps community within the DevOps persona within an organisation, you're right, there are decision makers, and there are those who are implementers. But they do draw from line of business, or a DevOps focus person who is adjacent to their business. And we try to reach them in the same way that we reach our traditional audiences as well, because we know that they are part of the decision making process. So we definitely take into account how we communicate and how we market to those audiences within a particular organisation. And you have to run completely separate campaigns, or do you find that some of the campaigns can stretch across both technical experts and also somebody who's perhaps more on the financial side? I think both. I think both when you're looking at a DevOps audience, they do not use typically traditional sources of information. They don't consume, you know, they may or may not speak to industry analysts, but they certainly rely on peer to peer, for example, they're big into peer to peer. And so if they're, if they're in the peer to peer, how do we go to the places where we create peer to peer forums for them, right? We don't we don't interject, we but we just create the forum so they can go talk to their peers. So that's a way that we reach for example, the the DevOps community, the developer community, is creating peer to peer environments for them.

Mike: I mean, it brings me on to the next thing I'm thinking about, you know, you've got these different audiences. You've got some very different ways of communicating. I mean, how do you measure success of your campaigns? I mean, how do you look at something and say, Yes, we know it's been successful or we think we can improve it?

Rena: It's a real question in communications in particular, there has always been an age old debate about quantitative versus qualitative measurement. We know it those that are communications professionals out there know that oftentimes the qualitative metrics sometimes are even more revealing and more important than the qualitative metrics, however, to anyone outside of communications, and everyone is in a, they are so bent on needing quantitative measures and quantitative results, they want hard numbers, they want to see the numbers. And so it's really important as a communications professional to balance quantitative and qualitative measures together, he can work harmoniously, and so ensuring that you've got measurement that is based on hard data and some numbers, but then also, especially with the animals committee, as we spoke about earlier, sometimes the measurement for them is just okay, they tonality, it's positive, but it's anecdotal. It's because you were in an analyst meeting, and they said something positive, you can checkbox that as a measurement tool, because you don't always get an actual piece of collateral or something written, or they say it's positive. It's just anecdotal. You know, going back to finding a balance between quantitative and qualitative measurement for comps, I think is important to satisfy every audience. And then you can go back and see, okay, have we reached them? Have we reached these personas that we're trying to go after? And then kind of back into that from there?

Mike: And then interesting, how do you take that that kind of mix of data and opinion? And how do you sell that up to the board? I mean, is there a way that you can package that up to explain to the board how you've made a difference to the business?

Rena: Absolutely. Communicate it far and wide? Mike? Absolutely. But I found the best rule of thumb is make metrics, no matter qualitative or quantitative, simple to understand. If you have to explain a measurement in detail, and it takes you more than a sentence to do so. You've lost your audience completely, because it's too convoluted, it's too difficult to understand. So keep the measurement as simple as possible. numbers driven if you need to sprinkle in some qualitative measurement, make sure the measurement is clean and simple to digest. Because everybody, you know, in a busy world that we're all in, people glanced quickly, and they look at numbers, it just quickly glance through it. And so keep it very, very simple.

Mike: I love that. I think that's, that's great, you know, really good advice simply, as is always the best. You know, one of the things that, you know, we're interested in is, we're obviously trying to recruit young people into the industry, I'm sure you are in pure storage. You know, what are you looking to do to encourage people in? And what advice would you give to a young person who is considering a career in communications.

Rena: we, as a company as a whole, we are hugely into university recruitment, early in career recruitment, we've had programmes where we've, you know, everything every company has brought in interns. But we also had a additional programme, in addition to just internships is early in career, we've hire folks and bring people on board who were early in their career. And so we've done a lot of that, as a company, I'm super proud of that, in terms of shares ability to do so especially when we're coming up against some other larger vendors that may appear more enticing to those that are in universities. I will say my one piece of advice, perhaps one and a half, two pieces of advice for anyone trying to get into communications, it sounds very mundane, but read, read a lot. And not just read a lot. But make sure that you are you know what you like when you read. What I mean by that is, the more you read, the more you form an opinion, the more you like certain writing, and certain styles of writing, or what you're willing to absorb. You and I both know, Mike, there is a barrage of information coming at us from many different facets, many different channels. And so read a lot and be super discerning about what you like to read the style of the communication, the vehicles that you like, because the more you can decide who you are, and what you like to read, and what you don't like to read is going to help you in your communications career. The other bit of advice I would give is, and this is for anyone actually in any field, engineering, other parts of marketing, finance, HR, it is things are more subjective than you think we are. I know we're in the business of technology we are, but we're also in the business of people. And understanding people's motivations, what drives them, what they like, what they don't like, is really important because sometimes the decision making comes down to people, not necessarily that thing itself that you're trying to solve for

Mike: That's great advice. It's amazing. Yeah, I really appreciate your time. I know you're incredibly busy. So to finish off if people are interested in finding out more or even working at pure storage, which I would say would be a great choice. How can I contact you?

Rena: Yes, definitely I am reachable in all of the different ways that everyone is certainly can imagine, you can always email me, I am the one who curates your email very closely, and I read every single email, you know, certainly through our social channels we do, we're very proud of our social channels, you know, and we have a, as you mentioned, a very robust careers page. And they can reach out that way to you. I also try as much as I can to contribute to the Forbes communications Council and write as often as I can. And if that helps anyone who's trying to get into the comms profession, I try to write frequently on different comms topics that I feel are super relevant out there.

Mike: I think it's amazing. I've certainly seen a lot of your Forbes counsel content in your LinkedIn feed. So yeah, I love that. That's great. Reena, it's been a real pleasure. I really appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you very much for being a guest.

Rena: Thank you so much, Mike. Great to see you again.

Mike: Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Karthik Suresh - Ignition

In the latest podcast episode, Mike sits down with Karthik Suresh, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Ignition, a go-to-market platform automating the product launch process.

Karthik explains how noticing a gap in the SaaS market for a tool supporting product marketeers led to Ignition's development. He discusses the pros of working in start-ups versus large corporations, and what marketers should consider when undertaking a product launch.

Karthik also shares how to approach putting together a go-to-marketing plan, from establishing a target audience to communicating the value proposition of a new product.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Karthik Suresh – Ignition

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Karthik Suresh

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 Karthik Suresh Karthik is the co-founder of ignition. Welcome to the podcast, Karthik.

Karthik: Thanks for having me on the show.

Mike: It's great to have you here. I mean, to start off with, can you tell me about your career journey and how you've ended up at ignition?

Karthik: Sure. So I have a tech background, I started my career in high frequency and algorithmic trading in New York, did that for about seven years. But you know, wanting to get into something more tangible and then went to business school and after that had been in startups for a while, was early early on, was a co founder at a fin tech startup, for alternative lending, then was the second employee at this company called craft, its enterprise intelligence company, where and I was a second employee, and I was there to seize a CIO, I was there for four years, had them build a product, an operations team and help them find product market fit. And after craft, I joined Facebook, wanted to see what it is like to build products at scale. I was a pm on the Facebook search team, and then a pm on the Facebook reality labs team. And that's where I met my co founder, Derek to on deck, Derek was heading Product Marketing at rippling, which is another B2B, HR tech company.

And when you're brainstorming ideas, for a B2B SaaS business, we felt like, there's so many tools for engineers, there's so many tools for product managers, and auto sales. There's like project management tools, task management tools, everyone has a go to tool, but there's no real tools for product marketers, and specifically for planning, go to market, planning your product launches, and managing all your go to market plans. And yeah, that's how Ignitionwas born. So we've been doing this for about a year and a half.

Mike: That's amazing. I mean, I'm always impressed with people who want to create something new. You obviously love working at startups. I mean, what is it that that really gets you excited about creating and building something new?

Karthik: Yeah, yeah. So let's port on. I think, for example, when I was at any of the large companies, I was also at Morgan Stanley, and that Facebook, it's great. And you have you have probably have a stable income, but you're still a cog in the wheel, and you don't have that much of an impact on on the product as a whole. And, and also, like, there's so many, I think so many stakeholders and people you need to get buy in from and even to build a new product in a large company, it takes a lot of time and efforts. And 80% of the time is in meetings and in getting approvals and buying. And whereas early on in startups, or even smaller companies, you have a lot of autonomy, and you can really get your vision to kind of come into life. And

like, for me, that was one of the one of the most important things where, you know, it's not just about improving and maintaining existing products, but like rapidly building new products, which have a real use case for the for the people and the being able to have a say, and being able to be autonomous into the work. So that is what has always taught me to be in small companies or startups.

Mike: That's awesome. I love the fact that it's a combination of what you can achieve and how you can work. So being autonomous, but also being able to achieve more. That's, that's awesome.

So you mentioned that the premise for Ignitionwas to provide something to help product marketers with go to market. I mean, that's a very broad range of things that you could do. So just the high level, can you talk about what Ignition actually does for product marketers?

Karthik: Sure. So initially, as a platform to manage all your go to market plans and plan your product launches, just to before going into ignition, just to talk about just the go to market process in general. A lot of the times even in several late stage companies, sometimes, you know, just shipping code to production as a launch, just sending an email to customers or doing a blog post launch. But that's not really a launch you need to like go into in that core market planning process. And a lot of the companies are leaving money on the table by not doing it right. So just talking about go to market plan in general. First, you need to figure out who's your target audience you need to have a research done about your ideal customer persona.

Then you need to figure out the messaging for them like how do you clearly communicate the value prop of the product in a way that resonates with your target users. Then you need to come up with a positioning you need to figure out who your competitors are and how you position yourself so that you stand out. And then you need to price your product, you need to package your product, you figure out what channels you need to use to reach your target audience. And then you need to work with designers and copywriters to come up with your campaigns and execute your campaigns. The same time getting buy in from the execs getting buy in from legal and everybody else, their training your customer support people training salespeople to talk about it, there's a huge process, which is like very fragmented and done, like, you know, you have documentation tools, project management tools, asset management tools, but it's all fragmented. And there's no like structured process, and also all the learnings of the past launches have lost because not everything is in one place. So Ignition is specifically built to solve this problem. And you can manage your end to end go to market planning process in one place, and also deal with all the stakeholder communication.

Mike: That's really interesting, because it sounds like this is actually not just a product for product marketers. But it's also important for everyone from marketing, communication through through to sales, I mean, it's really pulling together all the different departments during a product launch. That's exactly right. So the primary person who might be driving the launch may be a product marketer, maybe a brand marketer, or maybe even a product manager if there's no product marketers, but but the idea is to like basically bring in all the stakeholders for the launch in one place and be able to find it.

And in terms of the tool, I mean, obviously pulling that data together is really important. Are you doing things to make each of the steps a little bit easier, I mean, how you, for example, accelerating things like customer research?

Karthik: Yeah, so talking about FICM, specifically, customer research, you know, you can run all the surveys, for example, like you know, you can run a pricing survey, you can run your brand survey in a messaging test survey or an NPS survey. And then once you have all the survey results, you can aggregate all the insights, you can categorise, you can summarise. And then make sure to use this as inputs for your all your messaging in various launches.

Mike: That's great. So you're bringing in something again, that that might previously been done in multiple different tools into that same one platform to make it easier it sounds.

Karthik: That's exactly it. So customer search is one competitive intelligence, where you can track all your competitors and create battle cards. And we automatically track all the data on them, and news and websites, screenshots. And then once you're done with the market research and coming up with a launch planning, you have a timeline, your go to market calendar. And then after all the launch is done, this is another thing I forgot to mention. You know, a lot of the times, in companies when you do a launch, you just go party and you forget about a launch and move on to the next. There's not a lot of times when you have to go back and actually have any attribution. So we're also building and analytics to actually measure the impact of the launch post on the business metrics, and also the product metrics. So that's that's another component in English.

Mike: That's amazing. I mean, I think one of the things we ought to bear in mind is a lot of the listeners here are more on the marketing, communications or marketing side, rather than the product management or product marketing side. I mean, what do you think people on the marketing end can actually learn about product launches? And do better when they next launch their next new product?

Karthik: Yeah, so absolutely. So I think the most important thing is having a structured process, almost like a two year process, for like a tier one launched here to launch tier three launch depending on the on the importance and budget and size of the launch. And making sure that the product and engineering teams give the marketers enough time and notice to make sure they can do justice to the go to market planning process, which is probably one of the most important pain points because a lot of the times, and also I come from a pm background, I've learned the mistake as well. They're just there's just a week left for the product to be shipped. And I'll be like, hey, this product is shipping in a week. And there was a word no, I need at least like two months. And so there's a lot of disconnect between the product and marketing teams, sometimes in terms of the timeline. So that's one of the first issues to make sure you're on top of it. The second one is just sending an email is not a launch, you really need a multi channel approach to getting in front of target users, you need to layer in messaging, and you need to hit them again and again, in different channels to make sure you they understand the value prop. The last thing I would say is like, also make sure to get the marketing objective, right. A lot of the times like there's very different strategies for whether you're creating a new category versus you know, you're competing in a crowded market. Maybe you're creating a new category, don't invest in SEO because nobody's gonna be searching for you. versus you know, if you're if you're doing going after competitive market, maybe it's easier to just go after the customers of your competitors, rather than have them discount or something. So really. So just to recap, you know, make sure you really understand your users. Make sure you have a multi channel

approach to getting in front of your target users have a bit of a structured clearing process in place. And you're in sync with the product and engineering teams regarding the launch cadence. And finally, make sure you have very clear objectives and KPIs to track the largest.

Mike: I think that's great advice. I mean, obviously, that applies across pretty much all product launches. But are there particular products that Ignition was really aimed for a particular industries?

Karthik: Not necessarily. We have. We have bought, for example, even software and hardware company that is the biggest companies are on a platform are actually hardware companies who plan to hardware launch in different markets. We also want to expand to like CPG companies. I think typically, typically you have brand marketers and CPG companies, and they do a tonne of launches. So we want to target them. And also like gaming and entertainment gaming is also something which my co founder worked on early on in his career, he was a product manager and PlayStation. So I think the fundamental go to market planning process is pretty much the same. It's more about the last 20%, and how do you customise the plan is what's different. Actually, just one other thing I just thought off is like,

I think the go to market planning process has been always there for a long time. I guess the biggest trend right now is the growth of the product marketing as a function. You know, I think in 10 years ago, when you had all these new channels come up like Facebook, Google and all of the ads, it's so easy to just throw in some money, and messaging and try to get as many users as possible. But right now, it's not not the same case. Like everything's expensive. And you know, product marketing as a function where you really need to invest in the user research thing about messaging, think about how you actually position the product and stand out is again becomes super important. And that's where the Ignitioncomes in.

Mike: I love that it feels like a lot of what you're trying to do is get people to invest the right time and effort into each stage of a product launch. And by structuring it, you're giving them that framework, that's gonna help them make sure they do that. That's exactly right.

I'm just interested about, you know, size of your customers. I mean, it seems like like, again, the product really is not specific to a certain customer size, you know, if you're launching products that it's relevant is, is that the case? I mean, as long as you have the structure of a product, having a product marketing team, you know, does that mean you're big enough for ignition?

Karthik: Yeah, so right now we see like our just our, the size of the product marketing teams, we, we have like mid-market enterprise, which at least the minimum is like 100 to 200 employees. And that's where the go to market planning really becomes very painful. It's no longer just a vitamin, you know, because you have so many stakeholders and so many other departments, you need to like, make sure you bring them on the same page. But we have like even public companies, somebody like square using us. So we have, you know, a few 100 employees all the way to 1000s of employees range on a platform.

Mike: Sounds great. Sounds like there's there's a lot of success at the moment. And it's good to hear you've got such a wide range of customers.

One of the things I, you know, I'm interested in is you obviously see a lot of your customers launching products. And one of the things I think a lot of marketers struggle with is getting really good competitive intelligence. What are your recommendations for getting better intelligence on what your competitors are doing either by research or begun and maybe asking customers?

Karthik: Yeah, so I come from a product perspective. So I always believe that, make sure you're working on your own vision and value prop and then not focus as much on competitors. You know, keep an eye on them track what they're doing, but don't lose sight of what you're doing. Because it's so easy to like, oh, yeah, they're building this cool feature, we should build it. Oh, yeah, they're doing this amazing thing, we should build it. But that's not how great products are built the spiritual product perspective. But yeah, it is really important to attract customers so that you're not caught off guard, especially if they are building an exact same feature, which is probably not a much differentiation. And in those cases, it all comes down to the data. You can track everything from you know, the locations that job openings, you can see like what they are, who they're hiring for what they're doing. Then you can see what kind of people are they're hiring. You can see if there's any new changes in the exec or executive level to see like what they're bringing on a new function, then you can see that they were probably going to expand, you can see that they're acquiring any smart companies or they're partnering with any companies. That's another data set. You can also track the website traffic, the keywords, they rank for keywords they're placing ads for so that gives you another good sort of intelligence are what they are doing.

Finally, there's obviously there's news you can also screenshot their website every few weeks to make sure how their messages is changing and any new products. So there's a few different ways. But it all comes down to how good you are at tracking all these kinds of different data sets about competitors.

Mike: And for that, I guess you need some sort of structure and maybe some sort of tool.

Karthik: That's exactly right. And one of the, one of the components within Ignition is tracking your competitors. So we don't just pull all the data on competitors for you. We also make it very easy to structure the data in a in a battle card format. And you can share that around in your company to your sales, customer success and other other teams who would get a lot of value using the intelligence collected for them.

Mike: And that's awesome. I want to change tack a bit because it's great to have someone on who's actually not a marketer, they're a founder and an executive. Because I think a lot of marketing people are really interested to know, what do you want from a marketing team? What are you looking for from a great marketing team?

Karthik: Yeah, that's a great question. And as you said, you know, I come from a product management background. But obviously, we have been working closely with marketing for a long time, as a founder, what I want from a marketing team is, I really want them to be very strategic and analytical. It's not just about executing, or just doing the tactical day to day stuff, but really like system thinkers, who are like thoughtfully designing the marketing activity around the whole customer journey. And also, it's very important that they do understand the customer really well. They've done their research, they've spoken to the customers, they really understand what the pain points are. But at the same time, they're not afraid to take like big swings based on insight into, you know, kind of intuition. So again, deep customer empathy is the most important skill. And

Mike: I think that's great. I mean, I love that that need for, you know, someone's thinking strategically, but also someone prepared to take risks without those big swings. And, you know, maybe the next question is, you know, what do you see as being the really great marketing campaign so that there's some campaigns you've been involved with, that you think of have massively moved the needle for the business?

Karthik: Yeah, I think it all comes down to, you know, the great customer insight, the great the customer empathy and customer insight, that's what really enables, like being able to tap into like the pain of the customers viscerally and concisely with your communication, and deliver that message multiple times across multiple channels, to your target audience, right, we talked about how multi channel approach is very important, but you need to be able to layer in that every reader standout, not just blend into like hundreds of ads and blogs and everything a user sees, but being able to stand out, but at the same time having a creative twist. That's what makes a great marketing campaigns.

Mike: That’s great. I think getting to the bottom of the customer's pain is always that's always key in a marketing campaign, isn't it?

Karthik: Yeah, exactly. It's, it's not always just bright and splashy stuff, it's really being able to like, tap into the pain, the customer pain point and then communicate the value prop of your product.

Mike: So awesome. I'm interested. I mean, you're not a marketer, would you recommend if a young person was thinking of marketing as a career for them to choose marketing? Or maybe you'd recommend a different approach?

Karthik: Yeah, for a young person who think of marketing as a career. First, I want to say that marketing is not always about the big splashy stuff that's advertising. Like marketing is really about like customer empathy, customer insights, first understanding the customer pain points, and being able to tell the story, that how a product can actually solve that pain point. The real success in marketing doesn't come from this big, like once a year, splashy launch, but really like mundane day to day stuff. It's like doing that little campaigns and promotions and feature launches, doing it every day. And make sure they all roll up into this bigger narrative of the company's vision and mission and being able to tell that story, you know, in in multiple channels, and being able to really resonate with your target users. So that's what marketing is all about. And if this is what excites you, then great.

Mike: That's awesome. I think it's really good today. And it's true, I think, a lot of marketing. It's the unsexy and exciting things that actually at the end of the day, when they're all add together make the biggest difference. I love that.

I'm, you know, I'm obviously aware of time, you know, I just wonder, is there anything else you feel we should have covered in this interview?

Karthik: No, I think I think we covered quite a bit is great. The one one other thing I just start off for any young person starting their career is like, always take risks. Make sure especially when you're young and you don't have a tonne of responsibilities, be don't just get into a large company and get into a cushy job. Just take risks and you never know where life might take you.

Mike: Right. It's such an optimistic view. I'm sure people you know, they'll have been interested in some people certainly will be very much involved in go to market for new products. If people want to ask you questions or maybe find out more about ignition, where should they go?

Karthik: Yes, you can. You can sign up for our free trial on our website, which is haveignition.com. And you feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you just post my it's my first name, last name, Karthik Suresh, that's my Twitter handle. And I'm also on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me. I'm always happy to talk about anything, go to market product management and B2B technology in general.

Mike: That's amazing. It's been a great conversation. Thanks so much for being a guest. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Karthik: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech.

Mike: We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale