Tag: content

Eating At Their Own Restaurant: How SurveyMonkey Powers The Curious Internally and Externally

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Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

Eating At Their Own Restaurant: How SurveyMonkey Powers The Curious

“Eating your own dog food” didn’t sound so appetizing, so folks started “drinking their own champagne.” SurveyMonkey didn’t want people thinking they were sipping too much bubbly on the job, so now they “eat at their own restaurant.” Put simply, they lean heavily on their own offering to strengthen their marketing, grow their company and—as they like to say—power the curious!

From finding out how much a person uses technology, to determining how a company’s culture is developing, the options are endless on what info you can gather with SurveyMonkey, and their marketing efforts put that to test. Leela Srinivasan, SurveyMonkey’s CMO, chats with Drew on how everything at SurveyMonkey—from campaign development to internal culture—is about creating and supporting a world of curious people.

Don’t miss what Leela has to share!

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What You’ll Learn

Power the Curious campaign

Prior to going public, SurveyMonkey did a brand refresh with its Power the Curious campaign in 2017. The company defined its mission as Powering the Curious. SurveyMonkey’s products and solutions enable organizations everywhere to measure, benchmark, and act on feedback. If these organizations can listen to this feedback and have a curious attitude towards it, then the feedback can drive growth and innovation.

Leela shares that she loves the notion of curiosity for two reasons. One, the notion of curiosity was one that their audience was leaning into. The smartest people display curiosity. Secondly, if you think about the idea more broadly, the value proposition for employees is massive. This campaign not only set SurveyMonkey up to market to the business realm but to employees and potential employees. SurveyMonkey could be the place where the curious come to grow, which is exactly what bright minds are looking for in a workplace.

How to build a culture of curiosity internally

SurveyMonkey uses its own tools to build a culture of curiosity. Leela shares that SurveyMonkey leverages its own platform to obtain living feedback from its employees. These surveys measure employee engagement and to find places that can be improved to make a company with more inclusion and belonging. All leaders in the company are given scores for their departments, and they are shown how their scores stack up against other departments in the company. All of this information pushes SurveyMonkey to be curious internally. They are given results and scorings that can drive its leaders to be curious and search for solutions on how to how a healthy organization.

Big drivers to marketing SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey partnered with 4 influencers to show that curiosity is self-defined. Serena Williams, Arianna Huffington, Draymond Green, and Jeff Weiner each created concise surveys to engage different audiences. These surveys were advertised on social media, billboards, and more to let the world engage with these influences. Curiosity was at the top of the whole thing. Success was measured by the volume of responses, and there was a lot of engagement. Throughout this campaign with these four influencers, a conversation was generated that said, “you can do this every day of the week by using SurveyMonkey. Find an idea you want to tap into. Bring these ideas to market and explore the things where you are involved in the world.” Be sure to look below in the resources mentioned for the findings from the influencers surveys.

Timeline

  • [3:07] Who is Leela Srinivasan
  • [9:07]] Launching the Power the Curious campaign prior to going public
  • [15:42] How to build a culture of curiosity internally
  • [21:00] How to teach curiosity
  • [26:05] Big drivers for marketing at SurveyMonkey  
  • [29:50] The Curiosity Conference
  • [32:35] Lessons learned from rolling this campaign out  

Connect With Leela Srinivasan:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Be the Big Fish in Many Small Ponds

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Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

Be the Big Fish in Many Small Ponds

You’ve heard it said, “be the big fish in a small pond.” But have you ever considered being the big fish in many small ponds? Sage Intacct, a provider of cloud financial management, is doing just that. To pull this off, Sage Intacct first defines different “micro-verticals” by breaking down larger marketplaces, like manufacturing, into more granular categories, like toys, planes, and cars. Following that, they become experts in the field, and begin producing valuable, category-specific sales materials and insights.

Vice President and Head of Marketing, Ian Howells, chats with Drew on this episode about how his employees get to know these different markets—or ponds if you will—and the rigorous process of becoming the biggest fish in each.

Be sure to join in!

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What You’ll Learn

1% penetration to a desired goal – how to get started in micro-targeting

Ian shares the process of penetrating a new market. Sage Intacct works hard to reach out to multiple companies to conduct interviews and research. It is Sage’s job to understand this customer and understand what is going on. What are the pains of the customer? Are there similarities between this company and others Sage Intacct work with? Ian’s interviewers must gain understanding and draw correlations between companies in the same micro-target. This interview process gives understanding into a micro-vertical. The more companies you interview, the more you know about this subset of the market: associations, key influences, key applications… All of this information affects positioning and messaging for that micro-vertical.

How to know you have achieved success in a micro-vertical

Many times companies believe they have achieved success in a micro-vertical too soon. Ian explains that you have achieved success in a current micro-vertical, and should add another when you have at least 20 clients with the same pattern and pains, and you can predict what the client will say. This shows you understand the current micro-vertical, and you are in a position to begin learning about a new one.

The importance of website content and collecting data

Sage Intacct’s website overtly lists its competition. It compares what it offers to various companies.  Ian explains that you must over communicate what your company does and why it is the best. By comparing Sage Intacct’s products to others, clients can quickly see why Sage is different and the best for them.

On several demo videos, Sage Intacct stops the video to collect viewer information. This is important for several different reasons. Collecting information allows Sage to know what industry this person is from. When the video resumes, the viewer gets personalized content. If you’re from a nonprofit, you get specific messaging. By pausing the demo, Sage is also able to collect data from potential clients and know how interested the viewer really is.

Timeline

  • [2:04] What Sage Intacct does
  • [4:30] Ian’s Renegade Rapid Fire segment
  • [13:16] How Ian got started in microtargeting
  • [16:40] The process from 1% market penetration to your goal
  • [19:45] How to get interviews, who conducts them, and where they’re shared
  • [25:49] When to add another micro-vertical
  • [29:00] Telling customers stories
  • [30:17] Over communication on website content
  • [34:51] When to move on from a micro-target

Connect With Ian Howells:

Resources & People Mentioned

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Spotting Terrorist Plots and Rental Car Scratches: How This Startup Stays Flexible

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Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

Spotting Terrorist Plots and Rental Car Scratches: How This Startup Stays Flexible

UVeye is putting together technology that has an immense range of uses, is wildly innovative, and is—putting it plain and simple—cool! The company produces under vehicle inspection systems, that use deep learning—a sort of AI-derived machine intuition—to say “hey, something about this car doesn’t seem right” and flag it for inspection. This can help stop dangerous contraband or weapons from being smuggled into secure areas, but the use cases don’t stop there.

Though in an ideal world these scanners wouldn’t be needed, Ohad Hever and David Oren understand the importance of having this sort of capability. As COO and CSO, they’ve had to figure out how to market this product in a fairly private industry, while leveraging a bunch of partners, and all on a meager budget. Learn how they do it on this episode of RTU:

Don’t miss out on Ohad and David’s experience. Tune in!

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What You’ll Learn

Raising awareness of a challenge your company can solve

Imagine this: it is 2019. Acts of terrorism are on the rise worldwide. Protection is a need, but how? Drew reminds everyone of the B2B marketing technique called the “FUD factor.” Creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a way to raise awareness of a challenge your company can solve. UVeye does just that by reminding its audiences of this issue of safety. UVeye also positions itself as the company to solve this problem. Through demonstrations and videos, UVeye shares how it can detect abnormalities under cars, such as a car bomb or even an oil leak. This technology can be sold to government agencies or individuals. No longer do you need to rely on a security guard crawling beneath a car to see if it is safe to drive, this surveillance of a car’s undercarriage is efficient and able to detect abnormalities as small as a USB. It can also protect the average person by detecting when car maintenance is needed.

How to foster brand engagement

As a brand, UVeye has several audiences. They must foster brand engagement with each. For governments, UVeye provides security. When approaching governments with its product, UVeye looks for a local partner. These partners are already in communication with government and are known companies in distribution or sales.

Currently, UVeye is focussed on breaking into the market of car manufacturers. Its technology can help provide data and preventative maintenance on cars. To create brand engagement, the company is focused on implementing a brand that provides a competitive advantage. What can UVeye offer to the manufacturers to make their lives easier? David and Ohad explain that their goal is creating a brand around “certified by UVeye.” Meaning “certified by UVeye” provides protection of having a vehicle inspected completely from the inside out. They want this term to be a stamp of approval, known by the average Joe.

 

Marketing on a limited budget

David and Ohad explain that as a startup technology company, the majority of their funding went to creating the product. 14 million was spent on developing the inspection system and distributing it to other countries. There was little money left for marketing. However, UVeye has found that its team can attend conferences even without having an exhibit. These conferences have been a lower budget marketing tool that can create lead generations and partnerships. UVeye has been a part of large security conferences, which are very niche and cost-effective. UVeye has also attended CES. CES has been so effective in the past – even with a tiny display – that David and Ohad used their small marketing budget to have a larger exhibit and demonstration. Prior to the conference, they generated a lot of buzz around the fact that UVeye would be at CES and what they would be sharing. This created engagement prior to the event.

Timeline

  • [2:03] UVeye’s beginnings and how the product works
  • [5:22] The process of development and going to market
  • [7:52] Brand engagement: targeting governments
  • [10:22] Running a successful pilot
  • [14:55] Where UVeye chose to spend its money as a new company
  • [20:47] Target audiences: who will buy the technology first?
  • [24:45] Lessons for those wishing to start or run a company

Connect With Ohad Hever and David Oren:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

 

 

 

A Former CMO-Turned-CEO’s Approach to Strategic Marketing

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Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

SMS SOS — Text-Enabled Business, and Marketing With Your Own Solution.

When you have to reach out to someone quickly, what do you usually do? Exactly! Send a text. So why aren’t more businesses text-enabling their phone lines? That question is at the center of Brightlink’s text-enabling solution, designed so that company phone lines—usually reserved for saying ‘no’ to pesky cold calls— can handle informative text conversations with prospective clients. Given the nature of their product, Brightlink has also been able to utilize it as their own marketing tool, a simultaneous demonstration and use case—a real situation of killing two birds with one phone!

On this episode of RTU, Drew chats with Rob Chen, Brightlink’s CEO, and a former CMO. They chat about how Rob’s marketing background informs his current role, how to put their technology front-and-center in their marketing, and why a clear company culture is king.

Be sure to listen in – this is a valuable conversation!

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What You’ll Learn

Using your own technology as a marketing vehicle

Rob is a believer in drinking your own champagne. To that end, Brightlink currently uses its own technology of text enabling any phone number as a marketing vehicle. The company is able to override and enable any phone number to receive text messages, which is an extremely beneficial feature for the millennial generation. Brightlink is currently taking a traditional email campaign and offering the customer the ability to respond back by phone, by email, or by text. Through its own technology, Brightlink text enables sales and corporate phone numbers. Using key-word prompts, the sales team at Brightlink is able to respond via text to answer questions, provide solutions, and much more. Not only does this connect the Brightlink team with customers, but it also highlights the technology they can provide. Listen in to hear more on how Brightlink uses its own product as a marketing vehicle!

Your target audience affects your marketing

Rob shares that Brightlink utilizes different strategies depending on whether the primary target is a small business or large enterprise. For a small businesses, Brightlink focuses on co-branding and a partner with the ability to add value. They rely on a partner who knows the needs of each small business because use cases tend to be more specific. This allows Brightlink to market to and speak to the individual needs of small business. For large enterprises, Brightlink takes their product directly to the company because their needs are broader and many times the entire product is used.

3 key lessons for CMOs

Guest Rob Chen and host Drew elaborate on 3 important lessons for other CMOs.

  1. Have one key, very focussed story. Know what your company is about, and be able to say that succinctly.
  2. You have three target audiences: employees, customers, and prospects. Make sure to have your employees on board with core values and your product. They will be advocates for your brand and remain loyal. Create content that is valuable to your customers, and it will also be intriguing to prospects.
  3. Simplify your plan. It is hard to do everything. Brightlink’s plan is integrated around its own product. It is a demonstration and a use case at the same time!

Timeline

  • [1:55] Rob Chen: Bridging the gap from CMO to CEO
  • [5:40] What Brightlink is and does
  • [10:47] How to use technology as a marketing demonstration
  • [18:36] Who Brightlink targets in its marketing
  • [22:55]  Successful marketing examples
  • [26:33] Key lessons from a CMO turned CEO

Connect With Rob Chen:

Resources & People Mentioned

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The Need to Fail, Cars That See, and Defining Market Needs

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

The Need to Fail, Cars That See, and Defining Market Needs
CES never fails to be a revelatory experience, but this year marked a significant step closer to one of humanity’s longest-held dreams (or at least, one of Drew’s longest-held dreams): A Jetsons-style flying car! A key component of these tech-driven marvels is an astoundingly impressive “LiDAR” system—think radar detection, done with laser technology. In simpler terms, a new way for machines to see things. Granted, the implications are much broader than a flying car, but it provides an interesting way to demo this new system.

On this episode of RTU, Drew speaks with Louay Eldada, CEO and co-founder of Quanergy, the company helping cars “see”. They chat about the range of potential uses for such powerful tech, and the why to market it, they had to first understand the problems that people need solved. Don’t miss this tech-heavy episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, recorded at CES 2019.

 

Louay shares various ways Quanergy can creatively solve problems! You won’t want to miss this episode!

 

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What You’ll Learn

 

A virtual wall – an effective way of protecting the border

 

Quanergy is proposing the creation of a virtual wall on the border of the United States and Mexico. Currently, a physical wall is being proposed to the country. Louay points out that this kind of barrier could disturb the environment. Quanergy has targeted the United States government as its audience to market their technology to, speaking with politicians on both sides of the border protection debate. Using LiDAR, Quanergy creates a dome of protection by setting its giving computers eyes to monitor the border area. LiDAR uses its “eyes” to see anything coming to the border and can allow authorities to be dispatched to the area. A virtual wall addresses the issue of protecting the border but does not create more problems as a physical wall could.

Quanergy’s is a leader in effective technology marketing

Quanergy tells and shows customers what they need. They allow customers to observe the product, so they know they want it. Quanergy provides a vision of what customers can do, and how they can solve problems. This creates new markets for its technology.

Quanergy’s technology, LiDAR, is marketed to many different industries. Each market has its own experts, so Quanergy uses partners to improve solutions. For example, Quanergy partnered with 6-Watch to help create a virtual surveillance partner for Boston’s police vehicles. 6-Watch was an effective partner because the company is well connected in the law enforcement space, helping Quanergy break into that market with its technology.

Creating a culture where it is okay to fail

Louay says if your company doesn’t run into things that don’t work, then you are not trying hard enough. Everything is not feasible until someone does it. If a problem is worth addressing, try until you find a solution. Louay creates a company culture where failure and bad news are okay. This gives his employees the ability to take risks and be creative. In order to lead a company where there is the courage to take risks, Louay says he must have an open door policy to hear about issues and ask what can be done solve problems, what have the employees learned and what can be changed. This culture of risk being okay has helped propel Quanergy to the frontline in LiDAR technology as well as marketing technology.

Timeline

  • [1:13] Louay’s inspiration and Quanergy’s technological core
  • [2:23] Technology for a flying car
  • [6:08] Reasons and opportunities for attending CES
  • [8:08] A virtual wall – an effective way of protecting the border
  • [11:30] A CEO’s take on marketing
  • [14:10] Quanergy’s most effective marketing
  • [17:58] The importance partnerships
  • [19:24] Biggest lessons to share with other entrepreneurs
  • [20:53] It is ok to fail!

Connect With Louay Eldada:

  • Louay’s bio on Quanergy’s website
  • Connect with Louay on LinkedIn
  • Follow Louay on Twitter

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

Copper, Blue + Pink: An Artful Name Change / Rebrand

Posted on by Drew Neisser

If you took every tech company logo and stacked them by color, here’s what you’d see: some red, some shades of black, grey, and white, some green. But all those stacks would be in the shadow of one color: blue. Samsung, Facebook, Lenovo, PayPal, hp, Dell—the list of blue logos goes on and on.

So what did Morgan Norman, CMO of Copper (née ProsperWorks)? He went pink. With a dash of creative, and a spritz of data analysis, Copper went bold and rebranded in a major way. But—a rebrand isn’t just a name and a color. The new mentality has to fill up every nook and cranny of the company, employees need to buy in, users need to be kept informed. On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Drew Neisser talks with Morgan Norman about the keys to a rebrand, some common hurdles, and more about B2B marketing.

Tune in here.

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What You’ll Learn

Why a company name change?

Before its company name change, Copper was a very successful business. It was not looking for a different name to boost sales or to pull itself out of a slump. However, there were still various reasons to change its name. ProsperWorks was a hard name for people to remember. It was even harder for people to say. Prior to its name change, it was in 110 countries, and the name ProsperWorks was hard to translate. Studies were also showing that customers were consistently misspelling its name. All of these reasons culminated in a desire to explore new company names.

Just a coat of paint, or a complete overhaul?

When ProsperWorks changed its company name to Copper, it did not just change its name – it changed its entire brand. Morgan explains that every bit of product was overhauled, from customer interactions and existing content, to its brand and the company’s roadmap of where it wanted to go. He said that with the new name, the brand changed to revolve around relationships.

How Copper used a relaunch to generate interest in its brand

Copper used its relaunch to help generate interest in its brand in several different ways:

  • They launched a new advertising campaign: CRM Minus the Bad Stuff. Their ads were enough to make the public curious enough to finish the story by finding out more information on the product.
  • Copper utilized billboard ads. They ran 2 at a time in San Francisco near the airport. This captured the audience of people flying in. They also put a human face to CRM.
  • They produced massive amounts of content about the company and its new name. The name change was surrounded by information on the company.

Timeline

  • [2:30] Who is Morgan Norman?
  • [5:52] Why ProsperWorks changed its name to Copper
  • [7:31] Which came first: the name change or the URL
  • [12:24] Why the name Copper instead of Copper CRM
  • [15:43] Why Copper chose pink in branding
  • [17:46] A complete overhaul: from name to product
  • [21:34] Internal involvement before a name change
  • [27:25] The launch of Copper’s new name
  • [30:18] How to use a relaunch to generate interest in your brand
  • [35:22] Top lessons from name changing
  • [38:47] Key metrics that matter in marketing

Connect With Guest:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew