Embracing an Outside-In Marketing Perspective
Johann Wrede shares how Emburse approached spend management in a holistic way and how all marketing comes down to adding value.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Casparin Studios.
Today we are joined by a special guest, Johan.
How are you?
>> I'm great. How are you, Ian?
>> I am excited to chat to you today,
excited that our friends are qualified,
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Our listeners go check out Qualified.com.
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We're going to talk about inverse.
We're going to talk about your background.
We're going to talk about being a chief experience officer,
and how that relates to marketing and everything in between.
Let's get into it. Was your first job marketing, Johan?
>> My first job in marketing, I was a product marketer.
I was working at SAP and not only was I not marketing one of our products,
but there was already a marketer on the product that they put me on.
It was coming out of a field role,
and they needed to put me in a place where I could do something,
and I started out as a product marketer,
and then it all grew from there.
>> Flash forward to today.
You have a unique title because you're a chief experience officer
that incorporates marketing.
Tell us about that.
>> Yeah, it's something I became really passionate about.
I marketed CX solutions for a long time and sold them before that,
and wrote them at the beginning of my career.
As a marketer, I realized that marketing could play a larger part in
an organization beyond just creating pipeline and dealing with branding,
but really representing the voice of the customer,
which led me to join Imbirse where I'm managing both marketing and customer
success.
Really thinking about this through the lens of the promise that marketing and
sales make
needs to be kept by customer success,
support, engineering, everybody else after the contract is signed.
That's the joy of this role is having the opportunity to go well beyond
the scope of a traditional marketing job and bring together these two sides
of the, to make the promise and to keep the promise.
>> I love it. We talk about that with our product all the time.
When you're making podcasts for series for people of what's your promise to the
listener?
How do you fulfill that every time?
I love the idea of the promise to the buyer.
I feel like as a marketer so often,
we feel like we might be a little bit ahead of where the product's at.
We might be talking about the future.
When that meets sales, sometimes it gets that really clunky experience
where it's like, "Well, you've been marketing XYZ and you only have X.
What the heck is happening here?"
Then that customer lifecycle journey, buyer journey, learner journey, all these
things,
it's so much more important to have customer success as part of it now.
We don't talk to a lot of people like you and it's pretty freaking cool.
I love it.
>> Thanks. Yeah, you talked about just the marketing and sales handoff.
Gets even worse when the implementation team shows up.
>> Yeah.
>> They're like, "Hey, what did you buy?"
I think that's where every step in this customer journey,
there's a breakdown.
When you look at an organization,
what I think is fascinating is every part of the organization can work really
well in
their silos and the customer still has an awful experience because the website
's awesome,
the marketing slick, it looks really great, answers all their questions.
They get a salesperson who has no idea what they've seen on the web and starts
at the
beginning and then they go through and they educate that salesperson and the
presales
person about what they need and then the project team shows up and asks them
what they need.
Then they get the implementation done and the project team rolls off and
the customer success manager comes in and goes, "So, what are you guys hoping
to
achieve with this?
Why did you implement?"
It just keeps going and they call the support desk and the support desk doesn't
have context
either.
I think that's really the opportunity is to look even in a high functioning
organization
at those junction points and say, "How can we do better?
How can we make sure that information is flowing, that we're capturing all of
this?"
Honestly, if there was ever a case for CRM, it is this.
It is making sure we have that full picture of the customer.
>> Yeah, so cool.
So, so cool.
And also, the importance of customer marketing and life cycle and all that
stuff is truly
a marketing thing now for a lot of companies where maybe back in the day, it
was the salesperson
leading that and marketing is so involved in post-sale communications and hop
sales and all
that stuff.
Who better to own it than marketing?
>> Well, and it's been really interesting and in burst as I've started to bring
the teams
together, I've been here for just a couple of months.
But I'm already seeing how marketers are benefiting from new relationships that
they're
forming with the CSMs.
They're getting that instant feedback.
Really good example, we're launching an awards program, a customer awards
program.
And we informed some of the winners and a CSM was having a call with one of her
customers.
And she was on the phone when the customer announced to her team that they had
won this award.
And it created this beautiful cycle of sort of brand affinity in real time.
You know, they were so happy that their CSM had advocated for them.
And it strengthened that CSM relationship, which we don't think about as
marketers necessarily,
the human implication of the work that we do.
And so for me, that was just this really great early example of what happens
when we start
bringing these teams together, building those relationships and broadening the
thinking beyond
just filling the pipeline, but to the implications on the customers and the
relationships that we
have with them over the long term.
>> Yeah, one more thing I just would add is we've been obsessed, I'd say for
the past 20 years,
about getting to contract signature.
So much of our effort in energy and marketing is filling the pipeline with
leads and then
ABM and all that sort of stuff.
And really what should be marketing is outcomes, right?
And with customer success, you get it's either a great outcome or a good
outcome,
and you want to tell those stories and get that out in front of more people.
Or it's a bad outcome and you want to fix it.
So it's a logical sort of extension there.
You know, that's pretty cool.
>> Absolutely.
>> Let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree where we go and feel honest
and trusted.
You can share this deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
What does Inverse do?
>> So Inverse offers a platform for spend optimization, which means that we
help companies both with
travel expenses as well as other indirect spend, helping them to both capture
that,
manage it, put controls around it, as well as with our card program,
actually make those purchases so that they're getting rebates on the things
they're spending on,
like for marketers.
If there's spending money on Google ad campaigns, for example,
they could be getting 1% rebate on that by running it through a card program
versus handling
it with purchase orders and invoices.
So we look at how companies spend their money and we help them to spend it more
effectively so they're getting more bang for their buck.
>> And what types of companies are your customers and what does that sort of
buyer persona look like?
>> Yeah, we've got, you know, we have customers from small business all the way
up through large
enterprise. We were very strong in legal, higher education manufacturing.
In fact, we have almost all the top 10 AMLAW firms.
We've got a number of higher education institutions and we're just recognized
as an illusion partner of the year.
And then, you know, manufacturing companies,
General Mills, Microsoft is a customer, Garmin, we have a broad range of
customers.
>> And then that buying committee, obviously, for the bigger companies,
very different from a smaller company, but what does that committee look like?
>> Absolutely. The buying committee at a larger company, you know, starts with
the CFO on down.
We typically look at the AP team as well as procurement.
We'll have a travel component in large companies.
As you go down the stack in terms of company size, you wind up with
finance teams running the whole show.
And when you get to the small business, oftentimes it's the founder, the CEO,
or if they have a head of finance or head of accounting.
But generally speaking, when we're talking to our customers,
we're talking to their finance center because that's ultimately the CFO,
the head of finance. They're the ones who care about spend and where the money
goes.
>> And then how did you, you know, coming into the role, obviously,
owning marketing in customer success, but from the marketing standpoint,
how did you think about your marketing strategy coming in?
>> Well, it's been interesting, right? I'm walking into, as we all do,
into a marketing strategy that's already in place.
For me, it's about helping this company go from a focus on T&E,
which is sort of the history of the business, and helping to start us on this
journey to
real spend optimization. We have a number of companies that we've acquired over
time,
and we've built this platform. But I think that's where people really know us
as a T&E
type of a solution, as opposed to looking at marketing spend, software spend,
looking more holistically across the business. And so a big part of my strategy
now is how do
we start to pivot our messaging? How do we start to really solution sell into
these new areas within
the business and change the narrative around who we are so that people don't
just sort of
react the way they might to some of our competitors who are very much focused
on
traveling expense management? >> It's crazy how in-depth spend management is.
And truly an endlessly complex problem. And obviously, it all layers up to the
CFO.
But it affects every single part of the company. I heard someone say this one
time,
it's like there's one person that no matter what touches every single part of
the business,
and that's the CFO because they know where the money is coming in and going out
. And when you
think about just how complex that is and selling into those type of
environments,
you're right. It's like you can get, you know, pigeonholed pretty quickly into,
hey, this is just
one piece of the puzzle and elevating that is always tricky for marketers.
>> Especially when you look at larger finance departments, right? Because you
'll have,
the teams will be so segmented. And I think that's where our sweet spot is in
that mid-market,
upper mid-market, smaller enterprise, because there's a little bit more
crossover. And these
organizations tend to think about their spend more holistically. As you go into
the very large
enterprise, you have teams that are so specific and so segmented that it's
harder for them to sort
of envision that holistic solution to tackle that level of complexity. But I
think we're trying to
help companies look at the way that individuals spend, the way that departments
spend, and then
the way that purchasing or procurement spends. And oftentimes what we found is
that it's that middle,
that departmental spend or team spend, or we use lots of different words to
describe it, but
it's that spend that people are unsure if it should just go on the card and get
expense or if they need to go through this lengthy purchasing process, RFPs,
all the rest of it.
And that sort of gets lost. And I think that's the most interesting area as a
marketing leader,
because that's the majority of my spend, right? Like I have some that I go
through procurement on
for buying my marketing automation platform. But when somebody just needs a
couple of Canva
seats, do you go to procurement because you're buying software? But that seems
silly to buy
just a couple of seats for a design tool. So do you just expense it? Is that a,
it's not in the
travel policy, which dictates what the expense guidelines are. So what do you
do? So I think
there's some real opportunity for us when you think about the payment card
program,
and how poorly penetrated that is into IT departments and marketing departments
especially in the mid-size enterprise. That's where our opportunity is, I think
. But again,
there's a lot of education there, because as a marketing leader, that's not
something I necessarily
think about. I'm worried about what's my Romy, where am I spending, what's my
strategy, how am I
reaching my audience, how am I segmenting and targeting, what's my pipeline
look like. I'm not
thinking about how am I paying for the services, how am I equipping my
marketers with the autonomy
and yet the guardrails to make sure that they can quickly react and buy the ads
or spend the money
on the event without a lot of barriers. That sort of falls by the wayside. And
I think that's the,
again, as a line of business leader, that's what's interesting to me about what
Inburst does.
Yeah. And as a marketing leader, too, I mean, we added two conversations this
week. We have a
software that we're looking to buy that we've been going back and forth with.
One of our functional
leads has been doing it, and it's a 14K purchase. And it's like, should go back
and forth on that
versus the Google ad spend that we're planning and all that. Again, I don't
have a playbook for
this as a CEO. As we're trying to figure out all of our marketing stuff there,
I'm curious, as you
think about cutting through that noise, what do you think is sort of, and I
know it's still very
early days, but how do you think about that from a strategic standpoint, from a
marketing strategy
standpoint? Well, from a marketing strategy, we have to focus on the core
audiences that we have
success with while we educate some of the newer buyers and also consider how to
turn
departmental or line of business leaders into allies. Because when we think
about the CIO and
the amount that they spend on software and all of the shadow purchasing, talk
to any CIO and they'll
talk your ear off about shadow IT. I was going to say that earlier. I was going
to say, "Yo,
hon, don't you shadow IT, those can't have the licenses?" I was going to say
the exact same.
Yeah. So how do you... It's not just finance that wants to implement controls,
right? The
finance team absolutely is at the forefront of that, but other leaders in the
business want to
both empower people in the business and make sure that those controls are in
place so that there's
visibility. And it's interesting talking with some of our customers, on the one
end of the spectrum,
they have incredibly stringent rules about spend. And basically, they force
everybody through an
expense process. And if it's not within the rules, that's too bad, you don't
get reimbursed. Whereas
we have customers on the other end of that spectrum where a lot of the
purchases go through and they're
trying to get a handle on where are we spending. We know we're spending the
money, so now before
we start implementing strict controls, let's figure out where are we spending,
why are we spending
there, and then we can make decisions about changing policy and then
implementing controls.
And I think that's where how do you eliminate shadow IT? How do you eliminate
shadow marketing,
agency spend that's unapproved? All of that kind of stuff. The first step is
get a handle on it by
centralizing the way you treat all of your spending. And then obviously look
for ways to make that
spend work harder for you and whether that is getting the insights and the
analytics around
the impact of the spend and being able to identify contracts that you could
renegotiate to get better
rates if you consolidate your licenses, for example. Or, as I said in the
earlier example,
taking spend that you're putting through an invoice process and moving on to a
card where
you're getting a rebate. And so every marketer is constantly trying to do more
with less, less budget.
And so as I've joined it burs, I've discovered there's lots of ways we can
stretch our budgets,
but it's not necessarily something that we think of naturally.
Especially if you don't know where the money is. If you don't know what you're
spending money
on, you can't do more with less. Absolutely. And even worse is when we do know
where we're spending
the money, part of the problem is there's a lag time between when the money's
spent and then
when we're getting the reconciled updates on our budget from finance. There's
typically 30, 60,
90-day lag built into this process. And so when you sit down with finance to do
your budget review,
you're sort of left with this idea that, okay, well, that's what we did last
quarter. I'm halfway
through this quarter. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do next
quarter to make up my
overspend as opposed to being able to react this quarter or this month or this
week. And I think
that's where the larger the organization, the longer that lag time becomes,
right? I think most
marketers are probably dealing with a 30 to 60-day lag between understanding
where the money's going
and what the results look like and whether they're over or underspent against
the budget.
And I think that's something that becomes increasingly important in times like
this when
everybody's looking to claw back budget, everybody's trying to understand how
do I maximize my
ROMI while people are putting projects on hold and delaying purchases and all
that.
Any other thoughts on marketing strategy or org chart coming into a new
organization and
how you looked at the, especially since you're sort of reconfiguring org chart
anyways, but
coming into your marketing org chart or just overall marketing strategy?
Well, I'm still working on my marketing org chart right now. My strategy
generally for a company
that's the size of Inverse is to focus on functionally integrated teams. I'm
often inspired when I look
around at other industries, other businesses. So for me, the kitchen with the
brigade system is one
of the most efficient ways to produce and get stuff out. So for me, it's about
making sure that we have
rather than integrated marketing teams in different regions, really looking at
a global
organization that's aligned functionally. So we've got a demand center, we have
a single brand group,
we have field marketers, but not these ideas of integrated marketing
organizations in
regions. So that's for me the sort of a critical strategy. And then depending
on business goals
now that we're looking, as our business looks to evolve beyond just being known
as a travel and
expense leader, but rather this whole notion of spend optimization, we have to
think beyond product
marketing and get into more persona focus and solution messaging. So again, I
think when companies are
earlier in their life cycle, everybody's focused on a product or talking about
the product versus
really thinking deeply about the problem that the audience has and then across
all of the product.
So that's another area where from an org chart perspective within product
marketing,
which I have a soft spot for since that's where I started, within product
marketing,
not aligning people by product, but rather by audience so that you get one
cohesive message to
the CFO or to the accounts payable team. So is that something that we're
hearing more and more
every day? How many of your peers do you think are aligning by audience rather
than because this
is something that is coming up over and over and over again, but it's something
that you talk to
other folks and it's like you're speaking of foreign language?
Well, I think a lot of it comes down to where are you in the life cycle with
the business that
you're marketing for. Earlier stage companies, single product companies,
everything you say,
it's all about one product. So it's easy to just focus on that product and
maybe you align your
product marketers around functional modules or maybe segments within that
product. But
in an environment, I grew up within SAP where there's a high degree of
complexity and you're
selling deeply into a variety of different buying centers. You don't have the
luxury of being able
to focus on a product for very long if you want to be successful. And so I
think as you go up market,
into companies that have more of a solution stack and a solution orientation to
their product set,
it becomes obvious that you have to do that. And so maybe the foreign language
pieces for people
who really are focused on marketing a single product that solves a single
problem.
That's a great point, great distinction. But I would just add there real quick
though that
with the rise of these crazy buying committees and the different personas and
like,
you might have, hey, we sell to marketing, but it's like, but actually you sell
to
demand and brand has a pretty big vote and product has a little vote there. So
it's like,
it's kind of three, you know what I mean? People just don't really
identify themselves in huge groups like that. You know what I mean? If you're
like,
yeah, I'm a marketer first, sure maybe, but it's like, you know, when you're
sitting in this
seat and if you're a field marketer, like I'm a field marketer, like that's
what I do. Like,
I don't know what's going on over it, you know, with product land or whatever.
Yeah. Well, I think you bring up a really good point. And you know, you can
slice it down pretty
narrowly, especially to your example, right? You know, if you're selling into
marketing and
you're buying committee as composed of people who have different objectives
within marketing,
whether it's to create awareness and elevate the brand or to put numbers up on
the board
in demand, Jen, you can slice it infinitely, which I think gives rise to
personalization,
tech and all of that. But I think the solve in my mind, and maybe for me, this
has always been
my approach is when you flip it around and you look at what you're trying to
deliver through
that customer lens, right? And you look at and you stop talking and thinking
about the features
of the product that you're delivering and you start thinking about how do
people use it, then it
becomes much more obvious that, you know, somebody who's using your product to
create engagement for
the purpose of driving awareness or, you know, a post-sale adoption campaign,
right? That their
needs will be different in the way they'll think about that solution is
different than if you are
selling to somebody who's just purely focused on getting the initial contract.
And so I think
my solve for almost everything in my whole career has always been, instead of
trying to
think about how I explain something from the inside out, starting with our
product or our processes
or our services, and thinking about it outside in, how does the customer want
to use it? What is
the solution they have in mind? And this is something that I learned in pres
ales, right?
Is if you can figure out the solution that the customer has in mind and then
articulate what you
have through their words and position it as the solution that they were
thinking of,
that's where you have success, which then drives you naturally to say, well, I
don't want to talk
about the product, I want to figure out what do CFOs care about or what do
demand-gen leaders care
about or what does a marketing ops person care about or what does an accounts
payable clerk care
about, and then let me talk to them in their language and articulate what we do
to help them
in their job. Because ultimately, you know, I think, I think our job as
marketers fundamentally
is to create a connection with another human. And if we think about that person
as having a career,
wanting to get ahead, wanting to be recognized for their work, right, and then
positioning
our work, the content that we create, the approach that we take in talking to
this person,
with that in mind, instead of our own selfish objective in mind, then it
changes the tenor of
what we create, it changes how we think about getting that in front of them.
And ultimately,
I believe it changes the way that those that our audience connects with our
brand.
Yeah, I've been thinking about it as like this, like if you were to layer on
using a projector
screen, one of the old school projectors, where it's like there's like one
layer, which is like
the personas, the one, there's another layer on top of that, which is like
outcomes. And then
there's another layer that's like the jobs to be done thing. And it's sort of
like those three things
working, you know, together, where there might be things that overlap, there
might not be things
that overlap. But if you can sort of paint all three of those pictures at the
same time, then
the person's going to be like, Oh, yeah, that's me. And I didn't think that I
could be in that place
year from now. And yeah, that one thing is something that I really need done
and like,
Oh, by the way, you know, that's inverse, you know, but that's hard to do, hard
to thread.
It is, but it going back to the conversation about products or personas, if you
do the research
on the people, and you know, we throw this term personas around, but when we
think about them as
a an aggregate view of in general, like, what is the career path for somebody
who works in
accounts payable? Yeah. And and sits there and takes in invoices all day long.
Right? What are the
things that will get them noticed? What are their headaches? Beyond the sort of
standard
persona research that you do, but you really get into the emotional side of who
they are and what
matters to them. And and if you can connect to that, then I think it becomes
much easier to
strike that balance and to paint those layers, because emotion and leaving
somebody with a feeling
tends to be, you don't have to be as precise, right? You don't necessarily have
to have all the
facts and all the data in order to create the emotion. And I think that's the
opportunity where
the whole that you have to thread thread through is larger if you're more
worried about the emotional
connection and creating this idea of a vision alignment, as opposed to getting
stuck on
the details of how they do their process and how that might need to change or
how much better it
could be if they used your process. Yeah, it's that it's the ad where it's like
, you know,
too busy versus, you know, the end of the quarter has never been so simple. And
you're like, oh man,
and the quarter that always sucks. I want something, you know, everybody's too
busy, but sure, you know,
but it doesn't sort of jump out in your mind. All right, let's get to an next
segment. The
playbook where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help
you win. Now,
you've been through this rodeo before because you've been a CMO before, and I
know you don't have
every single channel or tactic here at embers, you know, ready at your disposal
. But generally
speaking, what are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable
budget items?
Uncuttable budget items. Anything that builds organic content, making sure that
we have the right
data on our audiences, knowing the audience, building the content, and driving
that organic
traffic. That is the stuff that's uncuttable to me. I think a lot of people
have gotten used to
looking past Google ads. I think a lot of people have sort of become really
good at
ad filtering on their own in social media. So it's really, we have to invest in
knowing our
audience. We have to invest in figuring out how we tell those stories, build
the right messages,
and then get content that adds value created to people. Those are absolute must
fund.
And I think that's maybe that doesn't answer your question because you asked
about channels.
But for me, that's the stuff that's at the top of the ring-fenced budget.
I love it. You see a lot of content that gets cut when budgets get tight.
You know, I think it's just such an obvious understanding of value there. So I
'm curious,
like, how does how does how does CUD budget not get cut for you when you think
about content?
How do you sort of like, you know, think about thinking about it being uncut
table?
Well, look, I'll go back to my earlier answer about thinking outside in. You
can look, there's
lots of lots of people have done these statistics around what percentage of the
buying process
happens before a salesperson gets involved, right? And they range anywhere from
the 70s to the 90s
in terms of percent. And how do people learn about your products? How do they
discover your brand?
How do they satisfy their curiosity without a salesperson talking to them? It's
through content.
It's through your website. It's through the blog post. It's through the stuff
that you've put on
social. It's through your research. It's through through the analyst content,
the influencer content.
All of the content is how they learn about what your products do, about what
you're like to work
with as a company, right? So to me, the question is, do we want to try to have
more sales conversations
and compete to win in that really small fraction of the customer's time where
they're willing to
talk to a salesperson and focus on that? Or do we focus on the majority of
their time when the
salesperson is not in the room when they're not ready to start having those
conversations?
And that feels to me like the lower hanging fruit and the more valuable part
because in order to
capture that demand at the moment when they're ready to have the conversation
with the salesperson,
they can't have already eliminated you because you don't have good content on
your website. You
don't have the product demos. You don't have the customer references. You don't
have all of that
stuff published. They can't get their questions answered. And then they're left
with this decision
of, well, what I saw looks kind of interesting, but I'm not really sure. I've
got six other choices.
Do I really want to spend the time talking to one of their sales reps? Or
should I just eliminate
them and look at these other six choices and try to winnow it down to three
that I'm eventually
going to have a conversation with, right? So to me, it feels counterintuitive.
To say I'm going to cut the budget for the stuff that gets me to the
conversation.
And I'm going to focus on just trying to find the people who are ready to have
a conversation.
I love it. I couldn't agree more to everything you say. And I feel like content
is such an
extension of your brand. Like they say that sort of your customer, you would
like this. Your customer
experience is your brand, right? And I feel like your content experience is
also your brand, right?
Like, are they going to things that are clearly just that look like you paid $
10 to have somebody
write it that says absolutely nothing? Or is it something with like thought and
rigor and
intellectual pursuit of something that is greater than just like creating crap?
And like,
you can tell, like we all have the VS filters now of like, this is something
really good,
or this is something self-serving. And I think your content experience is so
emblematic of your
brand. Same thing is like your user conference. It's the same thing as like,
you know, when you
put on an event, it's like all those things are who you are. No matter how good
or bad your sales rep
is, that stuff is who you are because it's how you prioritize, you know, your
money that you spend.
And yeah, I mean, I'm biased, but I think content is a huge part of it.
Yeah. Well, look, I think I have the fortunate perspective of not coming up
through demand gen.
I started in product marketing. I let a corporate marketing team, global events
advertising and brand, all of these non-demand areas taught me how valuable it
is to create
that connection and what the lift winds up being for demand gen. And I think
that's where if you
come up through demand gen, you're so numbers focused, you don't think about
those elements.
And I think that's where to your point, right, the way that you create the
content, the knowledge
that you're sharing, the way that you treat customers at customer conferences
or, you know,
the way that you even write those customer testimonials, if they're about the
individual instead of
about what they did with your product, that all of that makes your demand gen
content and your efforts
to engage people so much more productive and so much more effective. And so,
you know, I hate the
idea that, you know, when you're making these these budget decisions, most
people are thinking,
I have to ring fence my, my demand gen budget and I'm going to strip everything
else away.
And that's, you know, that's a lifeboat type of a strategy if things are really
, really bad.
But generally, I'm a big believer in making sure that you're still focusing on
strong content,
adding value with every, every one of these non-demand gen, non-sales
interactions,
because that will just make your conversion rates higher when people finally
get to that moment of
deciding whether they want to convert, deciding whether they want to have the
conversation,
and your win rates will go up as a result. And I don't think you can
underestimate the value of that.
Yeah, and I would add that with, with the rise of the smart website and tools
like qualified,
who is our amazing sponsor, that goodness, how great is it when someone has
engaged with seven pieces of content on your website, right? Like that doesn't
ever go back to
the ROI budget of like, what's the ROI of content? It's like, well, this
prospect had
engaged with these seven things. Like these, these couple of things that are
probably like really
top of the funnel stuff, and then five testimonials. And you're like, that's
what closed the deal,
or not closed at the salesperson closed the deal, but like, that's what got
them from whatever,
30 to 90% is those five videos. And how much more exciting is it if you go to
the, you know,
if they go to the website and there's, you know, qualified pops up and it's a
real sales person,
you can talk to them. This is a real ad for them, go qualified. But you can
talk to them,
and the person, and that sales rep is like, hey, by the way, I saw you watch
five testimonials,
like, you want to talk through any of that stuff? Like that is so much more
advantageous.
And versus, hey, I saw you saw you like, got targeted with a bunch of ads, like
, but that's not
like an engaging conversation. It doesn't spark dialogue and a thoughtful
discussion. And that's
what helps sales is having those thoughtful discussions. Well, I think you also
bring up a
really important point, which is the sales enablement piece of this, right?
Because if you, if you're
capturing all of that, if you were setting all that up, but then sales on the
back end doesn't
understand how to, how to look at this information, how to use it when they
engage. And, and they
don't have that sort of that talk track and the intellectual curiosity to ask
the question, hey,
I saw you looked at five different case studies. Did any of them stand out to
you? Would you,
you want to talk about any of that, right? Versus what, again, I feel like, I
feel like
what we've fallen into in the last five years plus has been this focus on
enabling the Salesforce.
We have to enable them with competitive landmines. We have to enable them with
sales process. We
have to enable them with forecasting tools. We have to, you know, there's all
this relentless
focus on enablement. And what we've lost is equipping them with a baseline
understanding
of the business processes going back to the persona conversation, right? What
are the business
processes that our buyers go through? What is, what are their jobs like? How do
, what is their
working environment? What does their day look like, right? And then how do we,
how do we give the
salesperson the education on the topics that are relevant to those buyers that
we can address?
So they can start asking questions and start sort of engaging in an open-ended
way.
And that's kind of the problem, right? You can do all this automation on the
website and you can
create beautiful content. But if you're not thinking about how do I enable my
sellers to
understand that content journey and how to leverage the insights that are
attached to that content
to create dialogue, then it will fall short. Any other thoughts on a budget
items or things that
you might be cutting from your budget or things that you're not going to be
investing in or other
stuff that you want to invest in? You know, I think I'm looking hard at ad
spend. I think the
effectiveness of ads is diminishing. People are running ad blockers. People are
just filtering
ads, you know, savvy, savvy web shoppers are skipping over the paid stuff to
get to the
organic results because people are learning how Google works and how Bing works
and they're using
the search engines. I think I'm also prioritizing video content and audio
content. I think there's
a tendency to favor spending on written content, which is fine. But I think
there's opportunities
to create stuff that's way more engaging. And also, I think all of us use non-
written content when
we're going to multitask, right? Cooking dinner with the podcast, you know,
driving the car,
listening to a recording, even if there's video sort of ignoring the video and
just listening.
I think that those are some of the things that I think, as I think about how do
I want to start
shifting my budget, I want to make sure that we're addressing those channels
and those formats,
because that's where I think the impact is. Gosh, I obviously couldn't agree
more as a
podcast as a service company. But I do think that it's this idea of engaging
the non-consumer with
something. And this is like, I think it's so obvious and like elemental is like
short-form
video, long-form video, audio, blog, and like, and social, like carousels and
things like that,
other short-form social content. It's like they all work in concert because
people get to opt in
to the types of content that they like. If they like podcasts, if they like
YouTube videos, if they're
like whatever it is, we have our preferences. Some people like news shows, some
people like
fiction shows, some people like all these things. And like, so far, if you look
at B2B content,
by and large, it's the same stuff over and over and over and over and over
again.
And to your point, when you talk about sort of going from snackable all the way
to long form
across different formats, if you do it right, it's actually not that much more
expensive to do.
And you know, one of my strategies is, and I'm working with my team on this
right now,
we're planning our user conferences for later in this year. And you know, if
you pay for a
writer to come and sit in the audience and take notes and turn the presentation
that was given
into a blog, and then you record the presenter being interviewed, that turns
into a great podcast,
or you do it on video, right? It's totally scalable because the long, the long
poll in that tent
is what that presenter had to do to prepare their presentation, to get their
thoughts together.
That's actually when we look at the real cost to the business, that's the most
expensive part of
this, because you're taking somebody who might be an executive, might be a
senior product leader,
right? And you're taking them out of whatever job they're doing to prepare this
presentation,
to fly to this event, stand up on the stage, deliver this information.
So if you're not investing that small incremental cost of getting it written up
having your videographer who's running around the event anyway, shooting be
role for your sizzle reel,
go over and record a video with that person, even if it's not a live interview,
but you're just,
you know, you're feeding them prompts off camera and having them look off angle
, right?
That kind of stuff is so inexpensive, but now you can scale it and you're not
disrupting that
person's job again in three weeks to ask them to get on a podcast, right? You
can build all of these
things to get that lift without spending a lot more money. And so I'm a big fan
of do less,
but make sure you're pulling it all the way through. I feel like sustainability
and marketing is a
real thing. Like we need to get away from single use assets and really focus on
how do we create
a set of reusable assets that we can slice and dice and repackage in a bunch of
different ways.
Yeah, I would also add to that that the thing that people is like so untapped,
someone like you,
who's spent 20 years building up the knowledge base of all these different
things, that there's,
if Johan wants to go like write a TED talk, like that's a lot of work and 20
years of expertise
and all that sort of stuff. That's one thing. But there's also the way that you
can do a series
and an interviewer things to get to push at other pieces of information that
maybe you forgot about
or maybe like all those things. So you're bringing the experts ideas into that
and you're helping
them tell a story in a better way than they could have done themselves. That is
super valuable to
both the audience, the person and to your company and like so much more of that
needs to be done
and so much less of like have someone just write an article like don't do that.
Look, we as marketers, I feel again, when I'm working with my teams on what do
we want to deliver,
what kind of content is interesting, right? It's all about adding value, going
back to what I
said earlier, it's about thinking about this person who's trying to do their
job to the best
of their abilities and they want to get promoted, they want to have a good
career. And so if we can
use the knowledge within our business, right, we have people who spend all day
every day thinking
about how do we improve the expense reimbursement process? How do we improve
the accounts payable
process? How do we improve the purchasing process, right? These people are
experts. How do we
unlock their knowledge and how do we give that knowledge away? Because
ultimately we don't sell
the knowledge, we sell the product, we sell the software. So how do we educate
people? And my view
is I would love for you to learn all the secrets, all the best practices from
us. And then if you
want to go build it yourself, good luck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But at that point
, it becomes kind of
a no brainer because if you say, well, gee, I've learned all this best practice
and they've helped
me assess my maturity and now I understand where I want to go and I'm learning
all these
ways of thinking about this, at some point they're going to go, why would I
build this? Why don't I
just adopt their product? Because obviously all that best practice is baked in.
And so I think
that's where again, we as marketers, if we put aside this urge to talk about
our products and
and all the great features that that engineering is telling us are baked into
this release, but
rather think about how do I add value to this person who's going to read this
piece or listen to it?
And how do I help them do their job better? Then eventually it becomes self
evident that they
should buy buy what we're selling, right? All right, let's get to our final
segment. Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how quickly qualified
house companies
generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest essay website to identify your
most valuable
visitors and instantly start sales conversations. Quick and easy, just like
these questions,
go to qualified.com to learn more. Yo, and are you ready? I am ready. Number
one,
do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume? A hidden talent
or skill?
It's not on my resume. I can solder. Oh, that's pretty good. Anything,
anything memorable that you've soldered? At the, at the, I did a bunch of
internships when I was
in high school and, and my first year of college where I put GPS on nuclear
submarines. And so I,
I soldered, I built a test unit to test the, the antenna assembly before it
went into the submarine
because getting crane time to pull, pull an antenna that you just put in
because it's bad
is really hard and really expensive. I think I've soldered a tiny little
electrical circuit once
in my life. So do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show that you'd
recommend?
I think I'll go, I'll go with, um, there's a great cookbook by Kenji Lopez,
Alt called Food Lab. And I, I recommend that. What advice would you give to a
first time
CMO who's trying to figure out their marketing strategy?
Uh, think outside in, it was like focus on knowing your audience
incredibly well and the better you know your audience, then the strategy will
become
pretty self-evident about how to reach that audience.
Johan, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for joining for listeners. You can
go to embers.com
and especially if you're a marketing, you're spending a bunch of money anyways,
go check it out
and go give a, give a nudge to your, uh, to your CFO, your IT team, everybody.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug? Uh, no, I think you did a beautiful job
just now. Thanks Ian.
Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Take care. Thank you too.