Bringing Value at Every Stage of the Customer’s Journey
Narine Galstian, CMO at SADA, shares about getting customers for life and providing value at all stages of the customer journey.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Castbean Studios, and today I'm joined by a special
guest,
Lorraine, how are you?
>> Too well, thank you, Ian.
Thank you for having me.
>> Yeah, thanks for joining.
Excited to have you on the show, chat marketing,
chat pipeline, and everything in between.
Today's show, as always,
brought to you by our friends at Qualified, you can go to Qualified.com
to learn about the number one conversational sales marketing platform
for companies that use Salesforce.
Head over to Qualified.com to learn more.
First question, Lorraine, how did you get started in marketing?
>> Actually, I got interested in marketing in my first marketing course,
Marketing 101 in college, and I went into college undecided,
took the course and fell in love with it,
and decided to pivot to marketing management as my major.
My entire career has been in marketing ever since,
and I got my first job in marketing, marketing for a fashion industry,
then pivoted into tech, and now tech services, cloud services.
It's been a fun journey.
>> Then flash forward to today, tell us a little bit about your current role.
>> I'm the chief marketing officer at SADA.
I've been with the company for 11 years now.
SADA was founded in 2000.
We're a cloud consultancy and services provider.
We're a Google Cloud partner,
a multi-year winner of Cloud Partner of the Year for Google Cloud.
That's all we do for solutions and services
across the entire Google Cloud platform.
We're based in Los Angeles,
but we have offices in across North America,
as well as UKI and India.
We're a global service provider.
>> Of course, the big news recently acquired by Insight,
so it's been quite the ride for you.
>> Yes, we were acquired by Insight Enterprises in December,
so still very new for us.
SADA still functions as an independent business unit within Insight.
>> Let's get to our first segment,
the trust tree where you go and feel honest and trusted,
and share the steepest,
darkest marketing secrets.
Tell us more about SADA and who are your customers.
>> SADA's main customers are enterprises and organizations looking to
transform in the Cloud.
What does that mean? That means if you have an on-prem environment,
then you're looking to go to a Cloud environment,
whether it's for innovation, transformation across a global business unit,
productivity and collaboration for security purposes,
overall modernization of your infrastructure.
SADA's your go-to for everything Google Cloud related.
We also have public sector customers,
so a lot of government,
state and local agencies, higher education.
Again, it's all about getting them on the Cloud and then helping them
innovate and really transform on the Cloud once they're there.
The stages of growth and transformation when
once you're in a Cloud are really endless.
Now with a lot of the Gen AI aspects of things,
everyone wants to learn what more is
possible on the Cloud, and that's what we're here to do.
>> What does that buying committee look like?
>> Primary decision makers are still the CIOs and CTOs.
But now it's transitioning quite a bit into line of business.
More CMOs have technology budgets,
more and more.
CMOs like me are able to make decisions around what the data means,
how to really decipher it and make it something useful for decision making,
and go to market strategies,
how to better serve your customers.
CFOs even are part of the decision making process for
more insights into cost structures,
opportunities for growth.
The decision makers are changing quite a bit nowadays.
>> Tell us a little bit more about your marketing strategy and how you go after
that business.
>> We really have the three main motions,
drive awareness, bring demand,
gen and engagement and then nurture to a closed process.
Once we nurture to a closed,
we don't stop there.
There's an ongoing conversation had with the customer.
We really pride ourselves in this notion of customers for life.
It's not just a one-shot project and then we're done with the customer.
It's really looking at the overall trajectory of what the customer wants to
achieve,
their long-term business goals,
even the goals of the individual advocate or the committee,
and being able to then set a roadmap of how to get them there.
So it's ongoing engagement,
ongoing education and information,
and then being able to support all of their needs in the technology and cloud
specifically moving forward.
So anytime there's new initiatives or new products released,
we're always bringing it back to the customer so that they have
the right advisement to make clear-cut decisions best for them.
So the tactics are really driving awareness,
making sure everyone's understanding of the Google Cloud ecosystem,
the sort of services around it,
driving demand and engagement through various models,
whether it's events and digital or in-person.
Content is a key part of the thought leadership that we drive
and education piece, even training our customer,
staff members and engineers on all of the tools and solutions available,
and then continuing to nurture them through relationship building,
trust building, and the experts that we have in-house
that are helping them guide through that journey process
to get the most out of the cloud.
What does your marketing team look like?
Marketing team really has a demand-gen component,
which also encompasses our field marketing team members.
They work hand-in-hand with the field sales representatives,
and then we have our content marketing team,
which also has all of our storytelling, our main white papers,
all of the sales enablement content that's developed all sit within that team.
We have our PR and social team, very active,
and making sure how we communicate externally,
internally is in sync, and also all of our multiple social channels
are engaged at that time, and then we have the creative team.
All of our creative is done in-house,
both on graphic design and videography.
We really produce everything in-house
that helps the consistency in our brand
and being able to really carry that globally.
Very cool.
Any other thoughts on strategy for a move-on?
I think that the strategy really has to be,
the marketing strategy really has to be in sync with sales,
and it is something that should be developed together
to make sure that you're both aligned on what we're trying to achieve,
the target accounts that you're trying to go after,
what is what you're launching, the sales team is enabled to sell it.
So it's really important to strategize and align and get buy-in
in advance before you set the motions for a go-to-market.
I know that part of the acquisition process is always crazy.
Such a fascinating change in marketing with a parent company
and other types of business units and all that,
I'm sure you're in the middle of all of it
and makes planning a little bit crazier.
Yeah, luckily, we are still an independent unit,
so still have our go-to-market strategy,
but we're certainly looking at opportunities
where we can collaborate together, go-to-market together,
where it doesn't make sense to bring solutions to customers
that are looking across an overall multi-cloud solutions environment.
So being able to provide Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
where it makes sense to customers.
And also solutions around security, more, you know,
gen AI and data.
So we are looking at those opportunities to collaborate.
It's still very early in our engagement.
Certainly, we see a lot of that changing in the near future.
All right, let's go to our next segment.
The playbook where you open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
What are your three channels or tactics
that are your most uncuttable budget items?
Well, I would say most uncuttable really for us,
especially post-COVID is events.
Events and conferences have come back with a lot of rigor.
Everybody is definitely ready to go back to face-to-face
and engaging in person.
So we're definitely doubling down on a lot of the in-person
events and conferences.
Digital investments are still very key to our overall strategy.
And whether that's obviously really optimizing our website
from SEO perspective, paid ads, social ads,
as well as making sure that you have the entire kind of content
to demand gen engine working off your digital channels
to bring leads into the funnel and then having the tools
and the marketing tools are critical to continue to measure segment
and continue that nurture process in your workflows.
So I would say, you know, events, digital, and tools,
you got to have the right marketing tools.
Yeah, when you say events are like the bigger events,
we're a small batch, blend to both.
What do you like owned events, partner events?
What do you think in there?
We host majority of our events.
Conferences are smaller part of our investments.
Majority of our events are very high touch experiential
events that we do to our top sea level customers,
kind of executive to executive relationship building and engagement.
We've seen that really work for us.
Especially in this model that I told you as customers for life,
you really need that trust and relationship to be built from the top down.
And then we create environments where there's learning, right?
Again, really diving deep into that awareness and informative aspects of it.
So teaching people how to use the tools,
see the demonstrations, go into deep dive workshops.
All done in person, we do a lot of those with Google Cloud
directly and we do road shows.
And we hit city by city, invite all of our customers,
as well as our prospects to come learn.
And those have really worked well for us as well.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I'd imagine that you have obviously a pretty tight relationship with
Kucla considering what's your business.
What are those types of events?
How are they different when you're partnering with a partner?
That's that big and important to you.
We are aligned in our target account.
We are aligned in our goals.
You know, they have greenfield customers.
They want to go after.
They have customers that they want to grow.
Majority of them are with us.
So we engage at the regional level with the regional sales team,
with the regional marketing teams and be able to say,
well, this is kind of the core solution.
We feel is important for this particular set of audiences.
And we bring in our expert speakers.
They have their expert speakers.
We have ours.
So there's a good balance between the two of us as partners.
We're each responsible for getting the audience,
the right audience there at the event,
and making sure that there is engaging conversations happening.
And certainly, you know, customers always want to know like,
oh, you must be important if Google Cloud is sponsoring this event with you
and is bringing their top experts to this event.
So I think it speaks to the tight relationship that we have.
I'm always fascinated by how, you know, partner events went down well,
are so good.
And when they're 10 poorly, it's not great.
I guess that's all events.
But specifically with partner events,
in a time where, you know, people might be more cost constrained in tech.
We're leveraging, you know, other people's networks is super valuable.
And vice versa, you know.
Right, right.
And, you know, I think coming together as a team and sharing those resources
is critical in any partnership, right?
And making sure that you are aligned on your goals.
So there is no awkwardness or competitive scenario.
And, you know, one person going in one direction in the content and scope,
while another is, you know, completely off from what you're trying to achieve.
Luckily, we've been able to really define all of that right from the beginning.
And it's been much, much smoother, especially when we're hitting the road with
experts,
you know, and hitting several cities back to back.
You kind of have to have a well-oiled machine and people who are on board with
that.
Yeah.
Do you see that being really important to go on those type of road shows,
rather than trying to get people to, you know, fly somewhere for, you know,
those type of events?
Absolutely.
I think you have to kind of go where the customer is.
While travel budgets are being cut everywhere right now, right?
Everybody's very budget conscious.
You have to be mindful of everyone's time.
And make sure that you're bringing value to them.
When we go on these, you know, road shows, we're really
investing, right, a lot of time into putting these together and making sure
that when the
customer is coming to sit with us for two, three, four hours, some of these,
you know,
longer workshops are, you know, half a day that we're bringing value to them at
every stage.
And they appreciate that.
They appreciate the fact that we're coming to them and they're not having to
take time
out of their schedule to fly across the country, to sit in sessions that may
not be
relevant for them because they're too general at some of the big conferences,
right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love that idea of the road show.
We've heard a few people sort of talk about really taking it to the road and
hitting some
smaller cities that don't necessarily get as much love or, you know, getting,
you know,
geographically, it's just so much easier to hop in a car and pay for some gas
than,
you know, hotel and, you know, lodging and all the meals out, etc, etc, etc.
Yeah. And, you know, while you're there, many times, the customers then want to
do dinner,
continue the conversation, right? So again, that all goes back to the
relationship building
and providing a very comfortable, intimate environment where you can have, you
know,
solid conversations with them.
Any best practices there on those type of events or things that you've been
doing that
really worked well?
I think you really have to take a look at where your accounts are.
And now it's very difficult because so many people moved, right? Nobody's just
at their
headquarters anymore. During COVID, a lot of people moved away and they worked
remotely.
So a company that's headquartered in the Bay Area may actually have their
decision makers now
sitting in Detroit. And you really have to have a good understanding of where
are your decision
makers sitting, not just going off of where is the headquarters of a company,
and being able to define which concentrated cities makes sense for you to go
out
and be in person. And are you going to target a large enough pool of people in
that city
to make sense for that event? You know, three or four hour investment that's
happening.
And so we've defined a lot of that early on, just again, to make sure that we
're targeting the right
decision makers in the right cities and then being able to work with our
partners to
collaborate on the content piece of it and to help drive that awareness.
Yeah, it's like one of the things that has struck me with this sort of thing is
, you know, in a
world where, you know, out thinking and maneuvering your competition, you know,
is needed. It's like,
well, if we're going to go to the smaller city or do the smaller event and
maybe they're smaller
people there, maybe we can figure out a way to resource it, you know, better,
etc. That's where
there's opportunity, right? It's like, that's the extra mile, you know, that
there's no traffic on.
That's one of the places in events where it's like, you know, go doing the
smaller batch stuff,
I think makes sense. Yeah, and the smaller batch stuff, you know, it's a lot
easier to have those
conversations when you have their entire focus. If you just wait to go meet
them at the larger
conferences, you know, you're competing with 20 other people, right, trying to
get their attention
and maybe you're only going to get half hour with them, you know, while they're
running around
trying to meet as many people as possible. So when you go to them, you have a
more of a captive
audience. Anything that are your most cuttable budget items, anything that you
're not going to
be investing in next year or the course of this year, maybe just something that
's fading away?
Um, I think swag is an area that's out. Really? Yeah, we have cut back on swag.
That's not to say
all swag. I think we're just looking at more quality swag when we go on to
these, you know,
road events and have these high touch experiences. We want to really bring
quality,
useful swag to them and not just choskeys. You pick up at large conferences and
, you know,
take them to your kids and nobody really pays attention to it afterwards, right
? Um, so, you know,
I think that those are areas where you can bring me, um, cut costs and also
printed collateral. I
think before it was really important to have a lot of printed materials to pass
out everywhere you
went and nobody's looking to carry paper anymore. It's really providing them
with a digital,
access to what they need, easy way to find it, um, and having the right follow
up so that you get
that information in front of them after. What's swag is working? I think swag
that's working.
You can't go wrong with apparel. People love it, whether it's t-shirts,
parties. We get a lot of hoodie requests quite often. Um, and also, you know,
uh, water or coffee
mugs are still very popular and people have one in the car or they have one in
the office,
they have one at home, you know. Um, so those definitely no shortage of
requests for those.
But quality stuff, I think that's what people want. If it's, if it's quality,
especially if it's an ambient stuff, they're going to keep it.
That's right. Get those, those Stanley quenchers and the, and the Yeti's going.
Okay. What about experiments and experimental budget where you spend that extra
five,
10% tucked away for something new? We try a lot of new, uh, approaches to, uh,
the relationship
building, as I mentioned, and most recently, um, we tried, uh, an executive
dinner, um, called
Cloud Food and Gratitude. Uh, and we bring an author. His name is Chris Shembra
. He, um, you know,
he wrote in several books, bestsellers, uh, and it's gratitude through the hard
times. And we
have him run the dinner and it's a simple, you know, question and we don't
necessarily talk
business or selling or pitching or anything like that. It's really opening up
around the table
of executives in a trusted environment and space. Uh, and it's very intimate 10
to 12 people max
where, uh, you are talking about what you're grateful for. You know, what does
gratitude mean
to you? Who would you think in your life that you haven't? And, um, we, we
experimented with this,
during virtual, you know, COVID times and then, um, it worked really well and
we decided, well,
why don't we take this into in person around the country? Uh, and it's, it's
been a great experience.
So I think you always have to have those, uh, uh, you know, budget investments
to try something
new, even if it is for a small, uh, group of audience, but for us, you know, uh
, getting a round
table of 10 executives, um, sea level to, uh, pour out their hearts and share
their challenges is,
is a huge win for us to develop those relationships. So, um, we're continuing
to experiment with those
types of opportunities. How do you view your website? Our website is really, um
, uh, a demand
gen. I should say awareness and demand gen. Um, so we want to make sure our
customers that are
looking for cloud solutions are getting the information they need the fastest
way possible,
right? Uh, getting them to that information, uh, really has taken us through,
uh, several rounds
of evaluations of when they come to the homepage, how do we get them what they
need to, you know,
download a piece or fill out a form or join an event, everything to kind of
drive to an action
or to an engagement and making sure that we have a search that works and is, is
pulling up the
information they need again faster. Um, and while, you know, you try to keep,
uh, your audience on
your website for, you know, as long as you can, we try to give them the
information quickly
and get them engaged through one of our forms or contacts or book a meeting,
book a demo,
um, so that we can get them to the next round and in front of our experts to
address their
questions. Love that. That's awesome. Any other thoughts on plays or spending
money or anything
there? Well, I think in the, you know, market being in marketing, you're always
have to be
budget conscious. We're always looking at the ROI of everything that we do. And
you know, that ROI
could mean different things to different organizations. Uh, so it's like, oh,
we got an
X amount of, you know, SQLs or we got X amount of meetings, um, for us, it's
pipeline. Um,
did we generate pipeline that it meet our goals? Is it converting into, you
know, uh,
opportunities and closed one? So just getting leads are not not the end all. It
's really
taking them over into an opportunity stage and a pipeline stage to count to
anything as successful.
All right, let's get to our next segment. The dust up where we talk about
healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your sales team, your competitor or anyone else
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career? A few. Um, so, uh, yeah, I
mean, we've,
any marketer has gone through, uh, you know, different, uh, different campaigns
that maybe
didn't land as well as, uh, expected and didn't get the results, um, as
expected. Um, so you do
have to just own it. I always say, uh, just just own that it was a flop, uh,
and quickly pivot
and try a new method. You know, I've learned that again at the end of the day,
if it's not
generating business and just not generating pipeline, then we need to do
something different.
And we need to pivot quickly. You don't want to carry that on for a long term
because you thought
it was such a great campaign, but if it didn't work, no one cares and move on.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just, just move on. So, uh, I think, uh, when you accept
ownership and
accountability, the tension goes away. And now you're all thinking about what
can we do better.
All right, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick
questions and quick
answers, just like how quickly qualified helps companies generate pipeline to
happen to your
greatest asset, your website, to identify your most valuable visitors and
instantly start sales
conversations. That's why you use qualified. Go to qualified.com to learn more.
It's quick
and easy. Just like these questions. Go to qualified.com to learn more. Noreen,
are you ready? Go for it.
Number one, do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Uh, yes. I, uh, well, I'd like to think I have a few things that are not on my
resume. I'm a
great cook. Uh, and I'm an avid traveler. So I've been to 36 countries so far.
Um, trying to learn
a variety of, of, uh, cooking and, uh, different foods and learning as I go.
Amazing. Do you have a favorite book podcast TV show that you'd recommend?
Um, my, one of my favorite books, uh, it's an older book, but it's still very
valid in, in my
professional and personal life. It's called the Pursuit of Wow from Tom Peters.
Um,
I don't know if you've heard of it, but he's, he's, uh, certainly come out with
other books
around the same topic of how do you always pursue that wow factor in everything
that you do?
Whether it's in your personal life and the people around you or your family,
friends,
community or in your professional life, uh, with your coworkers, your customers
. Um, and, you know,
you're, you're superiors of how to not settle, settle for anything less than
excellence.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that indirectly makes you a better
marketer?
Well, I don't know if I call this the hobby, but I like to, you know, entertain
quite a bit.
I throw a lot of parties and entertain at home, um, for family, friends and,
and, you know,
coworkers. I, I do think, um, it makes me, it really teaches me how you show up
for people,
um, accommodate people from different backgrounds, um, get engagement from
people that may not
know each other or at your first time at your party. How do you include them
into that discussion
and open up that safe space for, for those conversations to happen? You know,
how do you show up for them,
um, through these different kind of opportunities to engage and continue to
build your relationships
and, you know, if anybody's ever hosted holiday dinners, you certainly know you
bring a different
level of, of personalities to the table. So how do you manage and keep that am
icable? How do you keep,
how do you keep those relationships going even when people vehemently disagree
on certain subject
matters? Yeah, that's a great one. If you weren't in marketing, uh, at all or
business,
what do you think you'd be doing? Um, I, uh, really love, uh, property
investments and flipping
homes. So I would probably do that full time. Uh, if I wasn't in marketing, um,
I love the,
the aspects of really seeing the vision of a home that needs some TLCs and love
and care and
making it, uh, amazing and, and decorating and bringing it to market.
What's your best advice for a first time CMO?
Don't be so quick to make big decisions. Take the time to get to know the
company, the people
and your customer. Uh, I think oftentimes new CMOs start and they want to
immediately rebrand
or redo the website, uh, because they need to make their mark somehow, but they
do it too quickly,
not knowing, um, really the, the full scope of the customer base or really
understanding the,
the people and the culture. Well, Noreen, it's been absolutely wonderful
chatting with you today.
Uh, for our listeners can go to sada.com to learn about all the cool stuff that
they're doing.
And, uh, it was just, you know, fascinating to hear someone who's so tightly
aligned with,
with everything here with partners, marketing strategy and, uh, and everything
in between. So
thanks again for listening, everybody. Uh, Noreen, thanks so much for sharing
all those insights.
Any final facts? Anything to plug? Thank you. And, um, certainly, you know, for
organizations
looking to transform in the cloud, um, saw it as your, your partner, uh, to
help you transition
through your journey. We're happy to help. Fantastic. Thanks so much and, uh,
take care.
Thank you.