Leveraging Connections and Emotion for Marketing Campaign Success
Thomas Gröhl, VP of Marketing at DocuWare, shares why engagement is key to everything DocuWare does and how the company is leveraging a more emotional approach to connect with their customers.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries presented by Qualified.com.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Thomas.
How are you?
>> I'm doing fine. Thanks for having me.
>> So excited to have you on the show and excited to chat about your background
and docuware, and everything in between.
So let's get into it. What was your first job in marketing?
>> My first job, well, actually,
it was with a global enterprise software company.
Always been in software.
We supported our channel partners selling our solution around the world,
and I was in the role of a marketing specialist.
This was actually right out of business school,
and I want to say that this opportunity really opened my mind about what is
possible in global business in the software industry.
In fact, one year later,
I moved to the US for an expert assignment,
and it was a great experience earlier.
>> Yeah, and flash forward to today,
tell us what it means to be VP of marketing at Docuware.
>> Well, I'm heading up all aspects of marketing at
Docuware inclusive of strategy,
product marketing, channel,
communications brand, and demand generation.
Docuware is an enterprise content and document management vendor.
We have a network of more than 800 partners and
7,000 customers around the world that use our solution.
We very much focus on getting our brand known in our core markets.
We enable those partners and then obviously we engage with
a prospective buyers for selling more.
>> All right, let's get into our first segment here.
Trustry, this is where we go to feel honest and trusted,
and you can share those deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
Yeah, tell us a little bit about your customers and how you go to market.
>> Well, Docuware is in business for about 35 years,
and we serve as I mentioned before,
7,000 companies from small to mid enterprises with
software solution to automate what we call content-driven processes.
This would include simple document archiving,
moving from paper to digital automating whole workflows,
where you manage to purchase to pay process, for example,
but also adopting workflow automation in many other departments in the business
Yeah, so we engage with on the vertical side with certain industries,
but also on the function in specific departments,
specifically in finance or HR with
responsible in those companies, but also with management directors and
CEOs of companies directly where they deploy company wide solution in
that small to medium segment.
The way we engage with them is through the various means in marketing,
where we serve through respective channels, drive content,
and bring them back into our sphere for helping
themselves or find a solution to the problem.
>> Then in terms of your marketing department with function and
processing people, what's important to you?
>> Well, at Docuware, we do 80 percent of our business through the channel.
I therefore have regional teams that serve that channel and
run the margin in their respective markets.
On the corporate side, I have a group of global
demand-gen communications, product marketing brand, content and creative,
and marketing operations for all process alignment that's needed,
inclusive of MARTech and automation.
So cross-functional to leverage unique skills paired with
regional teams that do what is needed to win more business.
>> Yeah, that's interesting.
Because you spend so much time on channel,
how is that different for you all?
Because that's a little bit of a unique go-to market.
>> Well, I believe in any ways with the buyers today,
you need to provide value for
most in everything you do when you want to reach them.
So it's not so much in a funnel-dimension motion that you will put up first.
You want to focus on engagement.
Engagement means you provide content, message stories that provide value to
your
buyers and we do that together, but also on behalf of our channel partners.
We will get some demands that we will actually fulfill direct for those they
want to purchase from us direct.
But we do this for most as I said to support
a channel partners who then eventually win the business and
solve those business problems that just customers have.
>> Okay, let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
This is where we open up the playbook and you talk about the tactics that help
you
win.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
>> What we answered is from three angles.
First, for the brand, I would say social in search get the most focus from us
at the moment.
When it comes to leaning into demand, we have a strong focus on content which
we
make available based on non-gating, gating strategy, driving highest quality of
demand
into our funnel by a broad set of paid channels depending on the market.
Now, third, third angle is that we also want to get people into a sales motion
and
where you do not deploy an e-commerce channel like we do, where we sell direct
in a
consultative fashion or through a channel partners.
Sales development still has its place for qualifying routing demand.
>> Yeah, and I'm curious, how do you measure success of those type of campaigns
>> I always employ a full set of KPIs that I measure against three dimensions.
That's something I've been doing successively in many of the businesses I've
been supporting.
There is always the brand where we need to track or reach an engagement into
social,
the media channels, as well as branded search.
Second is engagement, as I mentioned before, engagement is, I think, the key
these days.
That's where you track the level of how partners, customers and prospective
buyers value
interaction with the content or the other means that you serve through the
touch points
that you are delivering your marketing progress to.
And then third is a classical dimension funnel that we support where we
obviously
bring in leads.
We bring them through a typical MQL and a SQL notion to eventually win the
business.
So success is when we achieve or over-achieve our KPIs.
That's how measures success.
It's that simple.
Just finding the right model is a big task because it's different for
eventually
every business based on that go-to market that is different for many of us.
>> Yeah, I'm curious, especially with selling through channels where so much of
that sort
of first round relationship happens with the channel partner.
Yeah, I'm just curious, like, I love that brand, the brand search KPI because
obviously
that's a great one.
I'm curious, like, how does that sort of translate as it works through your
partners?
Like, is there any, like, things that they can sort of relate to you through
that process
of ways that folks are finding you are coming across you or coming into your
campaigns?
>> Obviously, the channel partner will have to find their value proposition
that they
convey to their customers and to the compass or solution or product.
And so what we do is we work with them, providing them with a whole set of
marketing campaigns
that they can leverage with respective measures that give us a means
to see how they leverage it and track what the engagement is with the customers
So that gives us some data points as to what worked, what is used and how
relevant it is.
Obviously, there's always this notion of the companies have other things to do
and deliver
as well.
So it comes down through some very close alignment and being in just top of
mind with the partners
directly.
Last but not least, you want to ask for feedback.
>> Yeah, that's great.
Anything with KPIs seems like, obviously, being very structured on KPIs.
Anything within the way that you measure those, the things that you found
surprising over
the last couple years or something that you sort of honed your KPIs a little
bit to make
them a bit more precise with sort of like all the fluctuations and crazy
changes in the
market and all that.
>> Yeah, well, with the evolution of all those digital marketing channels, all
traditional
channels haven't gone away.
And so we somehow have to surf them all.
So we want to measure them all.
And in the past years, there has been so many conversations and a lot of
science in the
deployed around attribution models, what really works, what delivers, what's
the return on
investment on a specific activity.
And I think we've eventually come to the point where some might have overdone
it a bit on the
science side, where in B2B through certain channels that you sell, there is
always a parallel
engagement or multi-level engagement.
And it's really hard to attribute then a business win to one or a set of
activities.
So I'm basically going back and lean more to a first and last touch attribution
model.
So we know when the buyers came in and we know when the last touch finally was
that
made them then purchase.
And in between, we just manage our performance, we optimize it.
But we stopped actually the science on it, on the attribution within this final
because
we felt it's creating so much confusion even more.
We haven't found just holding a rail to it.
Yeah, the person who figures out all the multi-touch attribution stuff is an
ongoing process.
It'll never be complete.
So Jengir, to sales and sort of your relationship there, how do you develop a
relationship with
sales?
I would involve sales early on in the planning process.
This is where we prioritize, go to market support.
And then we constantly check in, inclusive of business reviews that we do to
get out
of the sales teams.
Wins for sales are covered by us achieving KPIs.
So we can show the contribution we're making to the business.
So this is the other important side of sales and marketing alignment.
You need two line goals, I would say.
I think that's important.
And just be involved and listen to what the needs of sales teams at your
channel.
Yeah, is there anything in terms of goals or sharing what they say, share the
band or
things like that that you look at, especially from a pipeline or a demand-gen
perspective
that you say, "Hey, this is what we're responsible for, this is what you're
responsible for,"
anything like that, any insights there?
I think the role of marketing has changed dramatically where there is less and
less involvement
of sales in the earlier part of the sales process or what we used to call the
sales
process.
The buyer today will educate her himself much further ahead into that process
before they
want to speak to someone who says, "And so we need to revisit today how we
actually
look for accountability between marketing and sales and actually unifying and
combining
more."
And every market as I say, it's personal these days.
For those companies who have an e-commerce channel, it's very often known by
the marketing
organization too.
And so when you think of revenue goals and attribution and who sourced what I
think need
to and understand that eventually it's one.
And we just need to find out what's really driving, who's driving, what part of
that process
together with the other group, if there is two groups between marketing and
sales.
What about any trends in marketing that are coming up or things that you're
excited to
explore?
Yeah, I think I took a point on that before in this conversation.
We all know the buyer's journey is dramatically changing.
And buyers are in the lead for deciding when and how they want to engage with
us.
So I therefore believe that a company's marketing strategy needs to have strong
focus on that
engagement by making sure you serve the marketing channels with most relevant
information for
the buyers so they can educate themselves, for eventually coming to you when
ready.
So within your funnel, that means vendors need to provide the means to help
addressing
pain points, offer a solution to a problem, to customers rather than the
features or just
trying to push the purchase.
That's important.
So we need to be everywhere present and we need to be a trusted advisor.
There is no quick win anymore, I believe, in bringing someone in and just
closing to
the one waiting for someone to hit the buy now button.
Any other thoughts on trends or other things that you're excited about going
forward?
Well post COVID, what I'm really thrilled to see is that it gives us the means
to revisit
how we provide value to the market as marketers with more and more interactions
happening
in a digital way.
So we've been playing this for a long time on the top funnel dimension play
into the
nurturing progress of deploying but now we see it on the side side as well.
And I think that's where we have to be on the heels of it as marketers.
But at the same time it provides a tremendous opportunity to be, as I mentioned
before, the
trusted advisor.
Any piece of advice that you would give to someone who is going to market with
channels
and is trying to figure out a marketing strategy when you're managing so many
channels?
I mean in general, I think you always want to start with a go-to-market priorit
ization
based on product market fit.
So you want to size the market, you want to segment, you want to have clear
revenue
goals, you want to know who the partners are, the channel is that you're
serving and what
actually drives them.
And then you align the resources and the tactics to really understand the
current focus and
identify opportunities for improvement.
Channel partners in software specifically these days where everything turns to
cloud
and SaaS need to find their value at.
And with that you want to enable them to deliver on that and support them more
and more.
Specifically when you're hitting a small business to mid-sized and market at
the middle
world there's a lot of local and regional business happening.
Yeah it seems like a lot of those channel partners don't necessarily have
always the
biggest marketing teams at their disposal.
So they're really looking for some guidance and some help on creative ways to
go to market
or whether it's doing content series like webinars or podcasts or things like
that or
whether it's events or different sort of things.
Curious how much you think about putting your teams bandwidth into supporting
their go-to-market.
It's a very good question for us this is absolutely key as I mentioned earlier
we like 80% of
a business through the channel and that is a strategic decision for us so we
are in close
relationship with our top channel partners and we work very directly with them
on the
marketing side as well.
Where we bring them together on a regular basis and we talk marketing and we
talk to
them with them and this on the back of a whole set of campaigns and marketing
and sales
kits that we provide to them with guidance to use and with the ability for them
to localize,
customize to their needs and play it out into the market.
Any examples of things that you've done that have worked like really well with
your partners?
We have a set of partners out there that actually are relatively small
companies, software resellers
or hardware resellers in a specific region, territory, sometimes the state or
county and
we've been able actually to get them to invest in marketing, acquire a resource
person that
actually helps them with their marketing and we've worked with them to actually
build
their funnel model with an integrated campaign that they would do, build up a
database to
the segmentation and I'm super excited about what some of those partners have
been able
to achieve where you would look at them and you would see, oh this must be a
bigger company
and typically don't have the resources to do that.
But obviously we put a lot of effort in that to enable them and we don't
believe so much
in just throwing budget at the channel and giving them marketing assets, we
actually go
and work with them, ask for commitment and then we help them deploy the right
programs.
This has been the success for us for so many years and we're continuing on that
model.
Another thing that's been very successful is we've just started our very own
marketing
kit on how to market and how to generate demand specifically for partners, for
our products
and so it's almost like a 101 class in marketing and demand chain specifically
for Davos and
we're training them, we're giving them this practice and examples.
So there's a lot of engagement and we see what really works for them is then
something
we can actually bring to the next partner.
I'm curious also any thoughts on, obviously you run a global organization and
sort of
like having something that's global with so many different types of, in so many
different
markets and so many different languages and cultures and all that stuff, how
you think
about SMB which can be potentially a pretty tricky thing to do when you're
multinational
like that?
I think at the end every business is local and so you need to be able to adopt
your strategy,
your programs, your campaigns to local market needs.
When you then look back at your segmentation, the use cases, the buying
behaviors, you will
very often find a lot of similarities.
So there is this layer of what is it that actually tries businesses to look for
a new
product, a new service or solution that they all have in common and then you
need to make
sure you provide the means so that it can be executed or adapted locally to the
very
needs that people have in that market.
This is not only the localization in terms of language, tone, but also comes
down to
value proposition and how people buy.
We have a lot of customers now in Latin America.
There's a lot more relationship selling, people are more interacting than we
would see
in North America or in Central Europe these days where we have a lot of
prospective buyers
come to us and they are just ready.
They are fully educated and we can only have a conversation with them about the
specific
offer which is great if we have been able to hear them to want our product
before.
Do you have any favorite campaigns that you've done over the last year or so?
Yeah, we've just been running and we call them invoice processing campaign
where we
actually help the CFO or the finance director for company to automate invoice
processing.
So many invoices come in still in paper or in PDF these days.
How do you sort them?
How do you actually make sure you can actually automate how they go through
your organization
into your accounting system and being paid?
What we have done is we've created a whole set of creative elements and content
that
we've run around invoice processing under the theme of making wishes come true.
So we've made the whole wish story, the fairy tale story, the story leading, so
that we
don't have to talk about tech right away and take a bit the dry language out of
the
accounting language and be a bit more emotional.
This is something that has been very successful.
It's still running.
Actually, it's an ongoing campaign.
We've probably never been campaign.
And what we see is a lot of our bias come back to us and are really valuing a
softer
tone and do more emotional conversations on the back.
Obviously, some hard facts that we will put forward as proof points and why it
makes sense
to invest.
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because of sort of like the post-COVID and
how many
people needed to invest in building their digital infrastructure inside of
their business
and that whole piece and the modernization and then this next wave being a very
different
thing, especially for S&B where it's like resources, perhaps strapped in some
ways versus
not others, but sort of that modernizing thrust that I felt like we all really
acknowledged
over the past few years.
It's interesting that you've had some success there with sort of like the
softer tones.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we were in triad, I have to admit, which we gave it a try.
And at first, there's always, well, this isn't you, we haven't seen this before
This is not a consumer product.
But we actually see that people are emotional.
We are humans that can react to things as long as you can underpin them with
some good facts
because it's still a business decision and business invested.
So we'll have to make any other thoughts on strategy or, you know, uncuttable
budget items
or anything that you're not going to be investing in very much going forward or
anything like
that.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily be able to call out a specific tactic or a channel
that we
wouldn't want to invest for us.
It's more a matter of prioritization where we put our resources versus
suggesting that
we don't do it.
We're testing obviously with new ways of go to market and also looking at what
's happening
on the whole AI front at the moment and how we can leverage things like JAT GPT
more in
our marketing place and eventually engage with our partners or customers and
our buyers
out there.
We have a very big AI project underway at the moment where we're putting
basically JAT
GPT into an ocean of being able to actually respond to specific questions that
people
that want to interact with us have.
And this is something we'll learn a lot from where eventually we'll see how it
actually
fits into the go to market strategy of ours.
But in terms of things that we wouldn't want to invest is just a matter of
single tactics
that we just have an exploit to be honest.
We're not doing podcasts ourselves at this point.
And that's just a few things.
We just haven't started to be honest.
The content space I think creating audio and video and all those pieces is
something that
just you don't wake up one day and have that capacity in house.
It's not like you have like, "Oh, we have a...
You know, a short form video team that can just start cranking out things for
our YouTube
shorts or TikTok videos or podcast interviews.
It's all like you have to think about the buyer build and all those different
things.
So content is just tricky.
I mean, there's just no way around it.
It's just a tricky thing.
Yeah, it is.
And actually we do have a video team.
We invested this in it.
But the way we leverage it at the moment is that we try to use it first through
supporting
the social channels, activating our channel partners and our sales teams
actually to be
out there with video and content.
So we would want to interact from person to person versus the company just
deploying
a whole set of video content and replacing it with the PDF that we promoted
before.
Yeah, you know, it's funny when we talk obviously to a ton of CMOs and heads of
marketing,
where a lot of times they have a video team similar to like a design team or
something
like that, where they have assets in house that work on like really core
projects.
And so to detract them from core projects is usually like, "Oh, why would we...
This is...
These are our customer videos.
These are like some of the most important things that we do as a marketing team
Like I don't want to distract them from that."
So it's sort of like adding on capacity and figuring out that whole process is
always
tricky.
And the same thing with design team.
It's like, "Hey, we want new designs for this upcoming event and this and that
."
And you know, all these things and it's that sort of like in-house team that
always has
a to-do list that's 50 miles long.
It is.
Now, at the same time, I think you always want to leave some room for testing
the being creative
and just doing new things.
And the only way then does work if you really mandate that.
Because otherwise, as you mentioned, there will be swapped with other projects
that are
ongoing.
How do you view the document website?
Well, it is a core place where we drive audience to.
It is a tricky bit these days because we have the channel, but we also do
business direct.
So we need to obviously respect and find the balance between when people come
to us.
They eventually want to buy from us, but eventually they also bring in the
channel partner.
Because as I said before, we're 80% channel business.
This is our clear focus.
And a website these days is way more than a place to actually promote a product
You drive that engagement that I've been talking about so often now.
And make sure that you actually have a success path there where people find
value as they
go through that journey of educating themselves on your website.
Okay, let's get to our next segment.
The desktop, where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your
board, your competitors,
sales team or anyone else, have you had a memorable desktop in your career,
Thomas?
Well, obviously sometimes people have their own agenda.
There's certain ways to drive business growth.
And there's not only one silver bullet typically.
And so yes, I have dustups as well.
But I would always try to bring it back to facts and numbers and leave room for
testing
it.
And sometimes you just have to apply a program to improve that it works.
I love it.
Okay, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
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Quick hits.
Thomas, are you ready?
I am.
All right.
Number one, is there a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
So I actually grew up on the farm, my family owns a winery.
And I have learned how it is to do business on site locally by building a
relationship
with someone to come back every year and purchase a full trunk of wine that was
before
e-commerce was around.
I love that.
That's great.
That's awesome.
That's something we all need to learn a little bit better of what it takes to
get someone
to come back every year.
I love that.
What advice would you give to a first time head of marketing who is trying to
figure
out their marketing strategy?
I think you always want to start with a clear go to market prioritization.
You want to understand how your product fits to the market, where your market
is, how you
sell.
You want to segment it clearly so that you can focus and prioritize.
This is not only important for doing things right, but it also gives you a head
start in
learning about the business itself.
This brings you closer to how your company goes to market and who your
customers are.
That's all we got for today, Thomas.
It's been awesome having you on the show.
For listeners, you can go check out docuary.com.
Thomas, any final thoughts?
Anything you'd like to plug?
Maybe you can leave this with a bit of a philosophical statement.
I would like the market marketers out there to have their bias more in mind
when they
create their campaigns, their content, their messaging.
Think about how relevant is it for my audience?
What's the value proposition?
There are no shortcuts that last long and your customers will value that in the
long
run.
I love it.
I would say no traffic on the extra mile.
No shortcuts.
I love that.
Thomas, it's been awesome having you on the show.
Thanks so much and talk soon.
Likewise, thanks for having me.
It was super to be here.
Thank you.
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