The Evolutionary Marketing Advantage
Carmen Williams shares how Zuper has found success through testing, tweaking, and adapting their inbound marketing strategies for success in an ever-evolving marketing landscape.
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Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today we are joined by a special guest, Carmen.
How are you?
Good. Thank you.
How are you?
I am doing great, excited to chat with you today.
We're going to be talking about all the cool stuff that y'all are doing in Z
uber.
As always, today's show is brought to you by Qualified. Go to Qualified.com to
check out the number one conversational sales and marketing platform for your
company's revenue teams that you sell source.
First question, let's get into it, Carmen.
What was your first job marketing?
Well, many moons ago, when I was in college, I did an internship with an ad
agency.
I got a job by bringing a client in.
So I was a media buyer account executive at an ad agency in the 80s.
Flash forward to today. Tell us about what it means to be head of product
marketing in Zuber.
Well, I'm heading up the traditional marketing aspects for Zuber, so the
branding, PR, communications, product marketing strategy, positioning,
messaging, customer marketing, partner marketing, and all that kind of good
stuff.
Let's go to our first segment, the Trust Tree, where we go and kill honest and
trusted and you share those deepest, darkest pipeline secrets.
What does Zuber do?
Well, first of all, we're not a typical structure on how we structure marketing
for a SaaS startup, particularly one that has a heavy employee base in India
and that we've split out marketing.
So we've pulled out growth. I have a partner in crime who heads up the lead gen
kind of BDR growth stuff and we work in deep collaboration and that's been an
amazing way to go about it.
Because we're targeting SMB in mid-market, we have an inbound focus and a
priority around inbound marketing, kind of just starting the early stages of
that transition migration to more of an outbound or there will be pieces that
are that outbound ABM.
But we're very much focused on inbound and we're having great success.
Who do you sell to who are your customers?
Yeah. So we're the leading field service management solution for businesses
that have field service operations.
So we're for fast growing field service operations. We're the most flexible and
customizable.
And our solution has all of the automation AI and all of those technology
capabilities to help them streamline their operations, deliver a better
customer experience, make their business more efficient to scale and grow.
You mentioned that SMB mid-market, what sort of size companies, what verticals
and all that are you traditionally targeting?
We are targeting across industries. We have obviously a lot that are in that
residential services space, but a lot of B2B as well and some that kind of do
both.
We've had great traction in like solar security and HVAC and such and other B2B
like manufacturing.
And we're looking for at least 10 field technicians, so that's kind of like our
minimum barrier. And then the mid-market, so hundreds as well.
How do you think of your product marketing shreddy?
Product marketing very much about telling the story.
And we focus on the positioning and messaging and developing the content that
works and enables the growth and BDR team as well as the sales team and our
internal customer client success teams.
So we're looking really at engagement and moving them down the funnel.
Any sort of differences there or things that you oversee that normal sort of
like head of product marketing type folks wouldn't would an oversee?
I've been in this situation once before where I actually had it up growth and
our break line of where we kind of pulled apart the roles and responsibilities
was different.
Worked for that organization. For Zuber it works really well and I think it's
the partnership with my other counterpart.
You know, it's deep collaboration. We're constantly in discussion and kind of
figuring out and some things kind of cross over.
So it's a very blurred line. And I think it really takes having two leaders
that have, you know, we're both very evolutionary.
We're both empathetic and collaborative and, you know, just we work really well
together. I think that's the secret.
Yeah, I'm curious. How do you think about like who owns pipeline and like who
owns those numbers and how does all that stuff look?
Well, that part's easy. So Rob and the sales leader owned the pipeline. Now, a
lot of the stuff we do, you know, contributes to it, but is not directly
correlated.
And in fact, one of the big initiatives that I'm working on right now for Q2 is
to get the HubSpot, which is our CRM attribution reporting in place.
That will allow us to track not just the first touch and last touch of the lead
, you know, source that comes in, but the attribution for all of these other
things that we're doing, the videos, the product videos, the content and such.
If we all had attribution figured out, we'd, uh, it would be sitting on power
as money in and retired someone.
So let's head to the playbook where you open up that playbook and talk about
the tactics that help you win. What are your three channels or tactics that are
your uncuttable budget items?
Obviously, the lead gen channels that have very clear direct correlation to
leads are not going to be cut. And those, you know, we're purchasing leads from
review sites.
SEO has been a key thing right from the get go. Obviously, we're not going to
be cutting our product videos. Those have shown, you know, very high engagement
and we believe that these correlates.
So those would be the top three. That's interesting to say product videos are a
key, uh, key, uncuttable. Um, like, why do you sort of say that? How do you,
how do you make those?
I mean, with just over a year, our product specific videos have had over 25,000
views. So engagement, people that are spending a good length of time sitting
down and, you know, looking at how to do things in our product.
Um, so that's half of the total views of all of our videos on YouTube, for
example. So it's pretty substantial. Obviously, people watching product videos
is, is ridiculously important. How are you sort of like measuring whether they
're good or not, you know, creating those to do all that stuff?
I'm always like paranoid of like, is this good enough? Well, first of all,
super blast. I have an amazing design team. I think world class happened to
steal a couple of folks from a previous company.
Um, but super talented. And so we're producing stuff that our agency quality.
Um, so I'm not too worried about quality. I think we're always assessing, uh,
from a content, from a strategy. And are we reaching the right audience? Um,
and so again, that's the reason for the attribution reporting and, you know,
just basic level, like, we've been doing sort of value prop videos. They aren't
getting quite as much reviews. Um, so we'll probably tailor, you know, kind of
tone those back a little bit now that we've got most of our product.
Modules covered and really focus on the, the demos and how to's that are
driving the big views. It's one of those insights where you're like, man, we
all know these how to's are so important and so critical. It's like, why don't
we just make more of these generally? Yeah. Any other sort of like ways that
you tie that stuff to pipeline or is it, you know, like, uh, tying it back to
sales? Obviously, we still rely on anecdotal and, um, and, you know, my partner
in crime has, you know, verbally expressed.
Some of the anecdotal stuff he sees at the front end with the leads that he's
capturing. Um, and then internal, the, the sort of anecdotal, um, reflection of
the use of it and helping them with closing sales and such. And then like I
said, we're looking for these attribution reports to support that as well.
What about something that you might be, uh, might be cutting or is on the
cutting block or something that you might not be investing in?
So there's two things I just come to my mind. First of all, we did not choose
to do live events this year. We were talking about and thinking about it. And I
think from an inbound strategy, it isn't the right fit as we kind of move to
larger accounts and an ABM outbound.
We might revisit that. Um, but the other thing too is we're constantly thinking
again about some of those areas that are a little bit squishier and harder
track in the upper funnel space.
Um, we're doing a report, um, you know, writing a book, some of these, you know
, always trying to think about how do we make it a lead gen.
For example, we actually did some paid to get on. I mean, these podcasts. So
those are all the things that we're constantly looking for ways to track it and
, um, you know, building a campaign attribution report is, is what we're doing
to just to solve that.
Yeah, the event stuff is so tough. It's so expensive. Obviously, like, we know
that it works like many things in marketing, like certain things work that
doesn't mean that they're optimized and like, that's, that's the hard part,
right? It's like figuring out, okay, well, how much money should we spend to get X
amount of, you know, ROI and I know that it all doesn't come back to strictly
ROI, but it's just, it's a tough calculation to do.
And one of the things I'll just add on is that we're very lucky that the
culture and the mindset is around testing, sort of the agile evolutionary
adaptive mindset.
So we're always thinking kind of like the 80% core that we keep that's working
and constantly be testing the 20%. So both my counterpart and I are very much
focused with that mindset.
Do you have a favorite campaign that you've, you've ran in the last year or so?
So we just finished a pretty cool rap music video style momentum video and
announcement campaign and, I mean, we got 25,000 views just from that one
campaign.
And so we're wanting to do more of that viral, getting high level of attention
and impressions, but just making sure it's the right audience.
I think we're going to explore more around how to do a little bit because that
was kind of about us, our momentum, but how can we do something like that about
our audience about them, making them a hero.
So that's kind of on the list. Stay tuned.
I love that that's cool. What about other learning experiences, maybe a
campaign that didn't go so well?
I don't think we have anything that is really clearly not a winner. I think it
's always some that just don't quite push as far as we would like.
I know we're doing a lot around social media to can again, to kind of get those
less about us more about the customer or thought leadership, you know, really
doing a lot of testing around that to drive more impact.
And then, like I said, we're looking at these thought leadership items as well.
You mentioned sort of like your relationship with sales. How you think about it
from marketing standpoint, obviously, from a product marketing standpoint.
How is that different? Like, you know, sometimes you see product marketers that
are pretty close with their sales teams.
Others, you see that they're not at all close. So, yeah, this is so fascinating
and a good question. Thank you for asking.
You know, it's interesting. Like I said, I had a previous role where I headed
up growth marketing and I had a counterpart heading up product marketing.
And in that scenario, we were a much larger company, much further along in that
we targeted big enterprise.
And the product marketing role was very much about enabling sales.
And what's different here is kind of the stage that we're at at Zebra. We're
very early stage and we're targeting small companies.
So it's all it's very inbound focused. And so the growth team is much tighter
and much closer.
And product marketing, I don't think at this point is seeing quite as clearly
of the value add with the sales team.
And I think that's something we've an opportunity to work on. One of the things
I have in my upcoming QBR is kind of more information to educate and bring that
awareness and the knowledge and the kind of appreciation around the value that
product marketing adds.
I've seen a lot of different combinations and states that sales and marketing
is in and kind of that relationship.
It's very important and complex ones. How do you view your website?
Website is probably our most important catalyst from a positioning the brand,
from getting our value prop messaging clearly stated and resonating.
Educating and moving prospects down the funnel.
The area too that we collaborate very closely with the lead gen team.
And it's a constant it's not a start and finish. It is a constant evolution. We
're always looking at it.
We're right now in the middle of a UX evaluation because we just launched it at
the end of the year.
So it's the right time to kind of revisit and see how we can kind of evolve it
from here.
Switching to positioning. I'm curious, like how often do you do positioning
exercises?
Obviously when I first started in last January, worked with the executive team
and the internal team in doing the whole market research persona development,
competitor analysis, all of that work was done to develop our positioning and
messaging.
And I think we're still kind of where we were at last year this time.
It may make sense as we come into the end of this year to revisit based on kind
of are we going to move up a little more to enterprise?
Are we refocusing on different industries? How did we do this year? Where do we
get the traction?
But at this point we're pretty set, I would say, for now.
And then are you testing different types of messaging in the field? How do you
think about testing messaging?
Obviously, it feels like everything changes so quickly now these days.
There's all this other stuff.
I feel like we really did a great job in landing where we landed with our
messaging and that internally there's a lot of alignment.
And there hasn't been as the sales team or the onboarding team is interacting
with customers.
There certainly hasn't been the feedback that it's been off.
Where we are doing testing, like I said, we're just starting our early stages
of a little bit more precision targeting with ABM.
And we're doing it right now one to few rather than one to one.
We're doing one to few by industry.
And as we get the intent data coming in around industry, then we'll move to a
one to one.
But that's where we're doing our testing by industry.
And we typically do that anyway.
So we're picking different value prop and benefits and such by industry.
Yeah, very cool.
What's that process like been the journey to ABM?
There was a little bit of debate discussion later stages of last year as we
were planning for this year.
And we spoke to industry experts and had internal discussions.
And then the alignment was arrived that it wasn't the priority for the first
half anyway, right?
We're going to stick with that inbound to get the numbers we needed to get from
a pipeline.
My partner, Kram and I, we're pretty aligned.
We have a similar background, similar view.
The other folks we work with maybe just have a little less experience with this
or awareness.
And so there has been an educational process to go through for that.
Yeah, it's a little bit of getting everybody on the same little organizational
change management.
Yeah, it's a marketing led effort at this point.
And I think as we kind of show the potential, then the sales will kind of shift
And the nice thing about having that growth team is that that kind of helps
because it kind of bridges the marketing and sales.
Any early insights here or best practices on setting this stuff up, sort of
doing it crawl walk around.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is an insight, just a reality of like
getting the testimonials, right?
So I'll give you an example.
So solar is the first industry that we decided to do this.
And I built a kind of analysis of our list and built out a strategy and
recommendation.
And of course, within the traditional installers, we have a great case study
within these other more, you know,
version segments of that, utilities, EV and such.
We don't have the case study.
So that's the urgent kind of like, you can't really develop relevant specific
messaging if you don't have kind of those pieces as part of it.
So that's what we're building out right now.
Any other thoughts on uncuttable budget items or spending budget or campaigns?
As every company I've ever been with, I'm sure every company that exists,
there's always that tension between subjective anecdotal and data, right?
Because there's never enough of the exact data you need.
So I think it's just always trying to get everybody on the same page about let
the data speak,
you know, let the evidence speak, whatever it is, rather than, you know,
opinions.
And I think that's always the dance.
You know, we certainly experienced that here.
That's why my partner and I are very focused on trying to get the right data
available.
Anything that a place that you are looking to invest or something that you're
excited about for the next 12 months?
Our podcast, we have a Zupa podcast, Zupa FM, and it's been great.
It's really helped us, you know, get the YouTube channel established to the
point where we can do the things we need to do there.
We're getting great results with that.
Those are all the exciting things.
And, you know, as always, we're just wanting to be adaptable and super agile to
adjust.
And if live events needs to be added in the future, it will be.
We're just trying to shorten that evaluation period so that we can just stay as
nimble as possible.
Yeah, so cool of you to say that, obviously, you know, as our listeners don't
like.
My company makes podcasts, so I think about it all the time.
But I love how you said that.
And it really is an acceleration tool.
Like it's a pipeline acceleration tool.
It's a relationship acceleration tool.
It's so you can have like longer, more complex conversations and cut that stuff
down into very short form stuff.
But one of the things that you touched on, which is so fascinating, is that it
helps build out your YouTube channel.
And so many companies, B2B companies, have horrible YouTube channels.
And it's interesting that you've seen so much sort of momentum on your YouTube
channel and the way that you're doing, how to's and all this stuff.
That's really cool to see any insights there, any best practices.
Just to get the vanity URL, just to get rid of the advertising from the
competitors, all those things, bringing extra eyeballs to there so they can
look at your product videos,
which are the ones that move them down the funnel.
So we, that's our focus and we're continually trying to improve.
I love the way that you said that.
Both search, including search into that as well.
We see that for sure on our end with a lot of the shows that we're doing.
Another thing too, is that the algorithm likes you clicking on stuff.
So I think like the old school way was, hey, just try to build up your
subscribers.
But the great thing is, if they watch a couple videos, that they're going to
start getting more videos recommended in their feed.
And like, that's like an underrated thing that people don't really talk about.
Like, you know, like my YouTube feed is absolutely crazy because it's, you know
, kid stuff and my son listens to a lot of Taylor Swift.
So we get some of that in there. And then it's like, you know, fantasy football
stuff.
And then it's like, oh, random like, you know, B2B tool that I watched a few
videos on that we're considering a buying.
And like, it's just such a crazy, it's such a crazy place.
You can get a lot of value, even if, even if they're not like sub in your
channel or something like that.
Exactly.
I'm curious, like, what sizes of videos are you all building and lengths and
types and all that?
I mean, ours range, right? But generally, it's like one to two minutes. That's,
I think, pretty typical.
Yeah, and you have a great, a great playlist for the Zupre FM podcast.
It's such a best practice. So many people listen and watch podcasts on YouTube
now.
And so congrats on that.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the desktop, where we talk about
healthy tension with it.
And that's with your board, your competitors, your sales team, or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable desktop in your career, Carmen?
Well, I'll answer that two way. I tend to have a lot of doz-dubs because I am a
, you know, I'm a very evolutionary like test try to, you know, I'm kind of high
risk tolerance.
And so, you know, I like to learn.
But, you know, the sort of doz-dubs from a role level, I've had a couple, it's
always cultural fit.
You know, I had a company I worked with that was, you know, that established
for many, many, many, many years, and they had people working there for 15, 20
years and just, I'm like this, you know, I had this background in fast growing
startup, like,
a lot of people, like, I remember walking in there and just like people would
like recoil against me. So I've had, you know, my share of those desktop
learning experiences where it wasn't a culture fit, to be honest with you.
And those are good learning. You always learn. It doesn't matter what desktop
you have, you learn.
That's right. You either win or you learn.
Exactly.
Love that.
Okay, let's get to quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers,
just like how Qualified.com helps companies generate pipeline quickly, and have
a great, greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly.
And I mean instantly. Start sales conversations. Quick and easy, just like
these questions, go to Qualified.com to learn more.
You can talk to someone right now. Just go to Qualified.com.
Quick hits. Carbonile, you're ready.
Love it.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Well, I don't talk about my soccer. That's kind of my passion and my first love
and my first skill.
Getting ready for the whole hell.
Oh, yeah.
What do you think? I don't know if you're fan of Julie, or it's coming back.
Maybe.
Pretty crazy. Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show or something
you'd recommend?
Oh, just because I wrote, I just finished writing a book. I've been reading
everything on evolution.
So David Loy, "Lost Theory of Love," Dartmouth's "Lost Theory of Love." Highly
recommend it.
You have a favorite non-marketing hobby that maybe makes you a better marketer.
My kids?
[laughs]
Makes me better later anyway. A lot of parallels. Just kidding.
What advice would you give to a first-time CMO trying to figure out their
product marketing strategy?
Well, so is something I've been blessed to have learned just in the last five
years is this evolutionary approach.
And it's changed my way of thinking. So I'm kind of on that mission to tell
everybody I can about it.
And so I would say if they could learn about that and adopt that approach, and
I would benefit them significantly.
So basically, evolutionary mindset, an evolutionary approach is four key things
Emotional intelligence around empathy, putting yourself in the customer's shoes
, so being very customer-obsessed.
Ethical intelligence, so being focused on the greater good.
Conceptual thinking. So being able to have creative problem solving. Think
outside the box.
And then the final one is that adaptivity. So the mindset of testing to start
small.
You don't have to have it all perfect and mapped out. And you just kind of
start small and then you adapt and grow and evolve from there. If you weren't in marketing or business at all, what do you think you'd be
doing?
It's funny. My teenager's looking at being a physiotherapist. That was
something I thought about doing teacher.
I like to teach and coach.
Carmen, it's been awesome having you on the show. Thanks so much for joining.
Any final thoughts? Anything to plug?
Just the book that I mentioned and I've got a blog to promote it.
Evolutionarymindset.org. Feel free to check it out. Sign up for my list.
Yeah, I'm super excited for you for the book to come by. I know it's a Hercule
an effort to create a book.
Amazing. And check out Zupur.co if you have a field service team. We just won
the Mid Market Leader and SMV Leader.
Thank you so much for letting us share about that.
Hey now. When in awards right and left, Carmen, thanks again for joining. And
really appreciate you coming on today.
Amazing. Thank you so much.
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