Agile Marketing

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intro

We were delighted to have Laura Powers and Bernie Maloney from Powered By Teams as our expert Agile facilitators last week to experience the mystery and magic of this growing trend in marketing.

 

We began our evening with a roundtable review about what each of us had heard (good and bad) and experienced to date about using agile approaches in general. Failing “fast”, breaking down scope of work into bite-sized chunks, creative iterations, we had lots to contribute. We also talked about the myths around agile and misconceptions (no planning, no documentation) about using this approach.

 

After reviewing the SCRUM Alliance’s mantra of “respond fast, minimize waste and maximize value” and the Stacy Matrix for decisionmaking, we learned that by looking at Agile as a mindset versus as a process or set of tools, we could go far in managing complex decisionmaking challenges – even in marketing. In fact, we learned, by using an agile approach, we could deliver 4x to 10x in ROI!

 

It was time to start experiencing agile as a group. Our team was given an assignment, a timeframe and clear rules of the road. We had 2 minutes. Go! After initially making projections about what we could accomplish, we wildly exceeded our goals. In three repeated efforts, this happened over and over again. We were hooked. And we got to experience ourselves the values of agile (openess, respect, transparency, focus, commitment and courage). We built confidence in our team, motivated each other, tested and learned, prototyped and planned, collaborated, managed through the facilitators distractions and organized ourselves around the common challenge at hand. And we had fun!

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Afterwards we talked about applying  this to our own marketing teams and work. How could we use agile to promote customer collaboration and discovery? Adaptive campaign development? Laura then shared some interesting data about marketing’s adoption of agile techniques showing that the 23% of marketers who had started applying agile to their work, were seeing a 58% improvement in ROI. Wow!

 

Did you catch our Storify recap?

 

Missed the event: WATCH THE VIDEO

 

Many thanks to Laura and Bernie from Powered By Teams for sharing an exceptional agile experience with us at MENGNorCal!

EverString & ThoughtSpot : “Digital Democratization” EVENT RECAP

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Lightspeed Ventures Hosts EverString & ThoughtSpot with MENG

Lightspeed Ventures graciously hosted our “Digital Democratization” event at Golden Gate University on September 21st featuring co-founder and President of EverString, J.J. Kardwell and Chief Marketing Officer of ThoughtSpot, Scott Holden.

With a full house attending, we initially dove into the stories behind the launch of these two innovative Silicon Valley pioneers within the rapidly evolving landscape of data analytics.

JJ Kardwell of EverString

JJ described his frustrating experience trying to identify and qualify high-value prospects while in sales in financial services as a pivotal catalyst and inspiration for EverString, a comprehensive AI-enabled platform and solution for identifying high priority sales prospects and target audiences for B-to-B marketing and sales teams.

ThoughtSpot CMO, Scott Holden, a recruit from Salesforce, was intrigued by the 7 co-founders behind ThoughtSpot (4 from Google) and their groundbreaking idea to use search as a simple, fast and accurate way for sales and marketing teams to access critical data, displayed in digestible visuals, in seconds. (Product demo links below).

But what marketing issues did they confront when launching these two companies in 2012 and 2014? Both panelists cited the evergreen issue of aligning the sales team with the marketing team around key priorities and allocating time appropriately across initiatives. Scott also noted that balancing the simple message “use search to deliver human –scale analytics” to marketers with more complex messaging and detailed technical benefits to IT buyers was also challenging. Using personas helps…but doesn’t solve the balancing act. One buyer wants the result (marketers)…the other buyer (engineers/data scientists) wants to know “but how are you delivering that?”.

Scott HoldenTheir  toughest moments so far? Scott noted ThoughtSpot’s initial strategy of using an appliance-based approach to sell into enterprise clients concerned about security. For SMB clients, however, that clearly wasn’t an option so they have recently launched a SAAS/cloud solution for that more price-sensitive market. JJ said EverString’s biggest challenge right out of the box was figuring out which market to go after. With so many potential use cases, the EverString team had to narrow their focus and priorities and quickly execute to build their customer list and go after more funding. $80mm later, they’re off to a great start!

We then honed in on this trend toward “digital democratization”, the increased ability of companies from enterprise to startups (note ThoughtSpot is an EverString client) to build data, databases and platforms which empower them to make better decisions – easily, quickly and affordably – across functions and industry sectors. More users…of more technology. How is this changing their offerings?

Our panelists noted that while many CMO’s and marketing executives are being given more control over bigger martech budgets, enterprise customers are a much longer sales cycle vs their SMB clients. ThoughtSpot mentioned that client onboarding is also critical to ensure that features and benefits are communicated quickly to clients post purchase and they are also adding smart data discovery “insights” (e.g. “you might be interested in looking at  these queries/reports too”) to their relational database results to further enhance customer satisfaction. JJ mentioned that in the beginning, the EverString team thought that a prime benefit of their solution might be replacing people (productivity gains) but gradually they realized that better usability for highly trained sales teams was actually much more critical to their clients. Supporting the client (vs just supporting your product) also became paramount when clients needed extra help with infrastructure consultation and investment decisionmaking.

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The MENG audience started drilling into the details.

Q: Where do you get your data? A: Internal, external sources and machine made!

Q: Are you successfully shortening the sales cycle from prospect to conversion? A: It’s more than that (EverString)…bigger deal sizes, more cost-effective, better lead handoffs, more conversions, tailored messaging.

Q: Multi-buyer sales? How do you manage those? A: Use solutions like LeanData, Terminus, SalesLoft to share info and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams, worldwide. JJ noted that he realized that EverString needed to hone in on situations where they had a great prospect but the sale was stalled for some reason indicating that there were process issues that needed to be solved.

Q: What about differentiation? What’s in your pitch? How do you compete? A: EverString noted that they invest in all layers of their product from a technical standpoint (from API…to data and application, infrastructure, data science layers in between). Also, they’ve developed separate training modules for different functional areas at a client. Scott noted that ThoughtSpot was  now autopopulating data searches with common queries (using search history to predict what you might want) to increase the speed of searches and highlighting the usability benefits of their platform vs Tableau and other enterprise solutions such as SASBusinessObjects, Microsoft’s PowerBI, IBMCognos etc.

We ended our evening with product overviews and the discussion just kept on rolling! Thank goodness Golden Gate University doesn’t kick you out at 9pm!

Did you miss it?

 

WATCH THE VIDEO 

More insights:

ThoughtSpot Product Demo and Search-Driven Analytics: Learn More

 

EverString Product Demo and All About EverString: Making Marketing More Relevant

 

 

Akoonu & SYNQY : Technology Showcase EVENT RECAP

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Jeff Freund Michael WeissmanAs we continued our journey at MENG NorCal highlighting the technologies which are changing the way we do our marketing, we hosted two innovators, Akoonu and SYNQY. SYNQY aims to shorten the customer journey by improving the merchandising of product on retailer/dealer/distribution channel sites. Akoonu provides a comprehensive framework for better mapping the customer journey and a methodology for reaching customers with the right content at the right time to better close B-to-B sales.

 

We began with CEO’s Michael Weinberg (SYNQY) and Jeff Freund (Akoonu) talking about their inspiration for founding their companies. Weinberg cited  a desire to make marketing “fun” again and Freund “ to find the zen” in marketing. They described critical startup success factors including choosing a team with fortitude, a common passion and smarts, patient investors and managing expectations appropriately (for employees and investors) and a degree of maturity to get through the ups and downs of startup life. Their “great moments” – seeing results – a happier customer.

 

Weinberg talked about the changes marketing has gone through… with decision making about buying B-to-B technologies now fragmented across a large group within the typical enterprise (IT, Sales, Marketing, CFO etc.) and the need for a “trench warfare” selling strategy. Lack of a common language across these groups in B-to-B sales funnels is another hurdle.

 

We then dove into these two innovative solutions to better understand how they solve marketer s’ pain points. Akoonu is a sales planning tool, allowing sales and marketing to more strategically set up their sales and marketing strategies around segmented audiences using buyer personas and better tailored messaging/language, content, campaigns/offers, close strategies. By doing careful research around what drives different personas, the process of sales can be uniquely tailored to each audience from prospecting to quoting to promotional offers to incentives to close the deal. And the Akoonu platform allows all content repositories (Dropbox, CRM systems/Salesforce, Google Drive, Google Analytics, Constant Contact) to be linked for efficient syndication of content out to specific buyer target segments. Analytics are then available to show what actions produce what results at the sales  end along with leveraging the additional research Akoonu conducts using buyer interviews and customer surveys to define a client’s unique Akoonu/customer-based framework. A comprehensive marketing and sales solution grounded in well-structured research around buyer segments. Wow!

 

SYNQY tackles the customer journey from a completely different angle. How do you control the messaging and content that your distribution channel uses to market your brand to the end user? How do you end run the “old school” retail marketing black box? How can you tell a deeper brand story in a more engaging format on the retailer’s site without asking them to host your content within their CMS? SYNQY’s “digital POP” streaming solution puts control back into the manufacturer, licensor or brand’s hands while leveraging technology to create easy integration at the retailer/licensee/dealer level via a simple embed link. Huge potential here. Car dealerships. Licensees. Travel agents. CPG brands at retail. Banking services? Allow the retailer to resell SYNQY to manufacturers? Why not!

 

We ran out of time, naturally. Too many ideas. Too much excitement. Technology that’s changing marketing. We love it!

 

Did you miss it? WATCH THE VIDEO’s!

Meet the CEO’s:

Akoonu: How Their Tool Helps Manage Prospect Intelligence

SYNQY: How Their Tool Helps Merchandise & Optimize Brand Presence Online, Everywhere

Event Recaps: Mark Hatch on Digital Transformation

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From MENG member Julie Robertson:

Part 3 in the Digital Transformation series “Digital Transformation: How Will YOU Need to Change?” was focused on making things – and making things happen! As TechShop CEO Mark Hatch espouses in his book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, making things is in our blood and even those who don’t feel they are meant to use their hands to make things have come away from exposure to the TechShop with ideas and inspiration to make something themselves. As co-founder of TechShop, Mark shared the spirit and amazing output of the world’s largest and most advanced community-based, open-access DIY Maker space.

 

TECHSHOP TOUR:

 

We were treated to an immersive TechShop experience with a tour of the facility, safety goggles and all. The San Francisco shop was a-buzz with activity despite the evening hour and Mark explained all the ways in which TechShop members can use the facility. Stations accommodate all manner of invention, from woodworking to industrial strength sewing machines. The Shop is set up so anything that can be dreamed can be created. TechShop is also designed for maximum collaboration so members with different skills and know-how can step in where needed on various projects.

 

Classes and events take place at every one of the TechShop locations. And more are on the way.

 

MARK’S PRESENTATION:

 

After our tour, Mark walked us through the TechShop philosophy and an amazing sampling of success stories. We heard about the inventor of the fastest electric motorcycle and everything from a copywriter turned jeweler to a homeless man who founded The Learning Shelter, a program that teaches homeless people hardware skills so they can find useful work.  And yes, the TechShop has even led to saving lives. We learned about the dynamic duo who invented a portable incubation blanket for pre-mature babies.

 

And did you know Square (mobile payments device) was started at Tech Shop?

 

MENG COMMUNITY DISCUSSION:

 

After Mark’s presentation, we explored how we plan to incorporate the maker mindset into our daily lives. We broke into groups to discuss, brainstorm and report back to the larger group.

 

THE BOTTOM LINE:

 

In all, this was an unbelievably informative, entertaining and inspiring MENG meeting. First-of-its-kind for NorCal MENG. A TechShop tour is a highly sought-after outing in the Bay Area and usually comes with a hefty price tag.

 

Mark is a true Silicon Valley A-lister and his story-telling is captivating. He motivated and inspired all of us as we learned about the makers in the movement, many of whom come from surprising backgrounds, which proved Mark’s point that we are all makers at heart.

More highlights on Storify…

 

Did you miss it?

 

Event Recaps: Shawn Goodin on Digital Transformation – “How Will the Role of Marketers Change?”

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image001We know that the opportunity created by digital transformation is immense. Mike Connor started us in thinking about the societal shift we can expect with the advent of digital ecosystems.

Shawn Goodin, Director of Marketing Technology at Clorox, provided vision and practice for what that will actually look like in the “day job” of a marketing executive. He drove home a point Mike introduced about the shift from a product-centered economy (and product-centered marketing) to a consumer-centered economy, where experience is king. … Read More

Event Recap : MENG Member SCRUM for Brillio

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tracey moon“Fantastic and fun! The MENG scrum session was a fast and simple way of getting valuable input that I could put into action quickly from senior marketers I respect for a challenge I was facing at my company. I was in need of fresh perspectives that only other strategic marketing minds could help me think through that my more technical colleagues just couldn’t do with me. Since I came ready with a comprehensive creative brief, we could dive right into the nuts and bolts of the discussion and ended up having a session that was fast-paced and productive. Lots of great ideas were generated as well as resources I hadn’t thought of before.  Bonus (not a surprise from this community) – we all had a good time collaborating over some nice food and wine, and getting to know each other better! If you’re facing particularly sticky challenge in your work, I highly recommend you consider reaching out to your MENG community for a Scrum.”

 — Tracey Moon, Former CMO, Brillio