061. Marketing Strategies for Global Brands with Nicole Yeske

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Welcome everyone. This is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. This is a great event that we have prepared for you today. I'm happy to have with me here Miranda, with our co host that's been joining for the last few episodes. How are you, Miranda?

Yeah, it froze for a while.

Oh, it froze for a while. That's weird. But I was saying welcome, Miranda. And that's the great thing about recording, not doing it live. Right. You can chop up those little things. And with us as well is Nicole. How are you, Nicole?

Good, thank you.

Awesome, awesome. So I, I short story here being, you know, I have known Nicole for quite a few years now from early stages of the Greenville hug. She was one of the few brave souls that attended some of the events at the beginning. I'm very grateful for that. And then over time, we have continued to connect over time and as you know these audience about B2B marketers, Nicole has specifically worked for a very large company which until recently, I have no idea how big and complex he was. Milliken. So I was very excited to invite her because I think she will bring a very unique perspective on what, what are the challenges and some of the things that we can learn for markers that are working for large corporations. They have multiple divisions across the world. So level of complexity that I'm sure some of you, especially the ones that are in similar situations, will identify and maybe get some valuable insights. So really excited about that. So without further ado, Nicole, I would like to just, you know, introduce yourself, basically tell us a little bit about your story, some of the big challenges that you might have faced as working with Milliken and even, you know, if you have some big wins that have happened this year, what will be those?

Sure. Yeah. So I'm Nicole Yanski. I'm the director of Digital marketing at Milliken. My career started many moons ago and I've been in digital marketing really since about 2010. And so I graduated from Michigan State with a BA in marketing. I always kind of knew that's what I wanted to get into and pursue a career in marketing. I moved to Austin, Texas after I graduated and actually worked for Dell Computers, which was really kind of an interesting jump for me. Started off in sales, but quickly moved to their online division managing the consumer purchase path. And that was really kind of my first taste of digital marketing. And so kind of, you know, love the nature of how fast paced it was, how quickly things can change. Kind of the idea of like you can put something out there and really Quickly see the return, right? You can see how it's doing, you can optimize, you can change it. Unlike print or something that is really on paper that once it's out there, it's out there. And so really looking at digital as a way to continually optimize and improve performance. So I really enjoyed that and really decided at that point that sticking within digital was going to be where I wanted to be moved to South Carolina. And so have worked for a couple of companies here. But most recently, as you mentioned, I'm at Milliken. I've been here for a little over seven years, which happened fast. A really great opportunity. And as you mentioned, a really huge company, a global company. We have lots of different divisions. So we've got four main divisions plus some kind of smaller business units as well. And really looking at how you take digital marketing into, from what I was doing, which is business to consumer, into a B2B environment. And you know, the good news is it's not that different, right? We're all people, we're all consumers. And so really understanding that, like at the end of the day, you're still talking to a person, but really looking at ways to find those wins, find those best practices and then supporting each of the different divisions. So really within my role, I sit in the center. So I sit on the corporate marketing team and I support each of our divisions with their demand generation strategy and implementation. So how do we go to market with new products, how do we attend events, how do we look at new channels to really drive leads and then using those best practices and wins and kind of mirroring that across the different divisions and just looking at their targets a bit differently and how do we really think about, you know, they may be into flooring and here's the message for them, but the underlying strategy of how we've gotten the news those new customers can still work for Chemical, it's just a little bit different message, maybe, you know, a different audience, but really once you find some of those strategies that work, you find that you can really make it work across target markets or different channels as well. So that's right. That's where I'm at today. And it's been a great experience to join the team and move into a new role as part of this organization that didn't exist not eight months ago. So it's been great.

So I, you know, you have, you have touched on so many points that I would love to unpack on the conversation. First of all, I think it will be great to Talk about the, you know, the transition from B2C or D2C. Right. Direct to consumer to B2B. Because as you said, at the end of the day you are still dealing with people. But I, I get the feeling and I unfortunately I don't have experience on the, on the B2C side. I always, always be working on B2B. But from, you know, the, the people that I get to talk to from time to time I get the sense that one of the benefits of B2C or D2C that you mentioned is that that feedback loop on the things that you're doing, especially on digital is so chore, is so direct or at least way more correlated. Right. So you can see the impact. And I think for B2B you have to do more things. It feels less tangible because the sales process itself can take, has such a long lag. So your insight and I have more questions from the things that you mentioned but your insights on what have you bring from B2B you know, from B2C from your previous experience to B2B and how have you, you know, work around the fact that in B2B you have that lag? It feels, sometimes I feel that the organization will feel that you really have to talk to just companies when in reality you still have to connect with people. So why have you done in those areas or why are you having your experiences?

Yeah, no, you're spot on, right? I mean in, in consumer marketing it's it you really understand right away whether it's working. So I remember I was actually on the online chat team for a while at Dell and so we were kind of that first line of defense, right. So maybe they saw a promotion in an email or they heard it on a commercial or whatever it might be. They come to the website, it's not there. So the first thing they do is they chat. I'm like, hey, you said this is going to be on sale and it's not. What happened? I still want this deal. Right. So immediately we were able to send a note to the marketing team and say we've got a problem. You know, these people came looking for this. What happened? We sell out. Was it an error? You know, you really did have that super fast feedback loop that when they're ready to buy, they have their credit card out. They either do or they don't. With B2B it might be 12, 18, 24 month sales cycles. And so you don't always know upfront what's working and what's not. So you've really Got to set those KPIs according to across the channels. Right? So maybe the first one is, okay, we're going to do this email campaign and we want to look at how many people are actually making it through the funnel. Do we, Are we getting them from email 1 down to 5? Are we scoring them on what they're doing on the website? So you have to shift your mindset of transaction to converting them through the stages. And I think that's where you have to really think about, okay, if it, if it's working, they're going to get from here, they're going to move down the funnel, they're going to get to that middle of funnel content. We're going to see what they're engaging with, see what they're doing. Then eventually they're going to get down to that bottom of funnel when we're ready to hand it off to sales. And that talking point between sales and marketing is so critical, especially when I don't have direct conversations with the folks that sales is talking to. I'm saying, here's a lead, here's all the data points I have on them, but I've never actually spoken to them. So when we're getting those over to sales, we can say, were they qualified, were they the right people, did they have enough information to really have that conversation with you? And that's how you can then go back and improve the process. And I think, you know, those are your transactions is getting them through the funnel and then that handshake to sales to say, how did we do? And sales is always going to be very honest, in my opinion, to say, those were all really bad. Right? Or wow, yeah, you nailed it. And so having that open line of communication with sales to really understand how that nurture went, once you've handed them off, did sales have enough information? I think that's one thing that we've noticed. You know, in my role currently, what we're working on is did we gather enough information on that contact and what they've been doing for sales to have an educated conversation with them? Because there's nothing worse than them going, we think you opened some emails, do you want to have a conversation? They're probably not ready, you know, but if we can say, here's the case studies they were interested in or here's the pages on the website where they spent the most time, sales can really tailor their conversation and it just makes it a lot easier for them to talk to that potential client into eventually becoming a customer.

Yeah, I agree with that. Is there's always, always this fight between, especially in B2B.

Right.

Is that how much marketing to, you know, nurture or move people along the journey. And so you have this camp that is super, super on the extreme that, well, there's no way that you can change any particular behavior of a person. They will act, when they will act, and versus the ones that, you know, treat like you have people moving like robots from one stage to the other. I think the truth lies in the middle. Right. I believe that we, we can implement nudges, right. That we can take little insights on signals and as you said, ask the question, are you interested in learning more about this? Here it is. If you are not, that's okay. But if you are, then you can take a next step. And this is the path for you, if you're interested. And the other big thing that you mentioned, I think one of the key things that marketing on these sections or B2B settings can help with is that typically compared to B2C, on B2B, you will have the sales team doing some degree of prospecting, some degree of, you know, reaching out to clients. And the list of companies might not be large, but the list of people is. And the effort that you put to doing that is long or, you know, hard. So if marketing can provide some priority based on behavior, based on engagement, I think that sales teams appreciate that. Say, well, I'm gonna, I'm going to reach out to hundred and a hundred, a list of 100 people. But if you can tell me that 10% of them have engaged, have open emails, have provide some, that simplifies my work because I can go to the ones that at least have shown some intent. So I think in those cases, the activities that you do on the nurturing side not just are great signals for us, but also provide prioritization and scoring capabilities for the sales team.

Yes, yes. Yeah. You know, and we don't, as marketers want to send bad leads or send information to them that's not beneficial. Right. Because we want to have that trust between the two teams to say, what we're doing is to support you as a salesperson. So, you know, if we can, whatever signals we can send to them to say, here's the person right now that's interested or, or have shown some engagement across content. You know, it just creates more trust with those two groups. And so when we do send them over, they'll be more likely to take those because really, at the end of the day, we also do want that closed loop of saying okay, here's the marketing qualified leads that we sent to you. Here's the ones that turned into sales qualifier sales accepted. You know, all those definitions change by business. Right. But they then, then ultimately turned into customers. And then what's that? Customer lifetime value. Now we can go back and say, here's the channels that drove the most MQLs that ultimately became customers. And so if you can have that communication and trust, you're able to really get that closed loop and say, okay, we can get a lot smarter about where we're spending our dollars and how we're spending our dollars. If, you know, after I hand them off to sales, what's happening without feeling like you're kind of over their shoulder looking at what they're doing, because they definitely don't want that. But really, you know, creating a partnership.

Between the two groups, I love it. Now, again, unpacking some of the early reference that you made, the other big thing that I, I would like to, To. To know about your perspective is I. Maybe not for all divisions in Milliken, but I believe that you have a common problem that the manufacturing industry, manufacturing industry, for example, faces, which is your marketing efforts probably are geared toward the end user. Right. For your products, but your sales happen through broader, larger aggregators of smaller consumers, either distribution or something like that. So I don't know to what degree that applies on Milliken. And how do you work out that one where you are trying to position the brand and drive the sales, sales for. For products. But. But the sales itself, the sales channel itself is driven by distributors or aggregators or. Or companies that add value to your products.

Yeah, so that happens in many of our divisions where we've got some distributors that are selling our products or perhaps we're selling into somebody who's then using our product in theirs. Right. So maybe we sell a fabric to somebody that actually creates a garment. So. So it's twofold. You've got to educate the end user to say, oh, well, we want to make sure our garments are using that fabric, but they can't actually buy the fabric. So they then have to work with whomever their garment manufacturer is to say, are you using that product? Or so it's a little bit of a push and a pull, Right. So you have to think about how does this impact an end user enough for them to say they want to make sure that they're utilizing it, but they can't go to a store and buy it. So you've then got to work through either other Manufacturers or through distributors to say, okay, now we need to sell it into them. And then we also need to educate them on the value proposition or the competitive advantage or whatever it might be of our products to then go send it to their end customers. So it's definitely figuring out what's the different message, what are the things that we can solve. So an end user's problem or challenge is, you know, we can solve it one way and then there's going to be something to the distributor, to the other aggregator like you mentioned that, you know, we can kind of help them tell their story better. So it's the same product, but you've got to tell two different stories. And it's just really identifying, you know, what are the market needs, what are the trends and how do we help them to solve their challenges with our product and then ultimately getting them to that deciding factor of yes, we want to go with a Milliken product, you know, however they can get to them.

I love that. And it's true. You have to, you know, it's a balancing act, educating the distributor or the aggregator, but also making sure that the end consumer, even if it's a company itself, not a, not a person, you know, a consumer, residential consumer, it's aware of the products and its benefits so they can start considering it as part of their requests. Another one that I feel you have more a greater insight that most marketers or a lot of marketers is that in our experience, most of B2B marketers for smaller companies have focused a ton of their efforts in acquisition, brand new acquisition, because their customer base is either small or because they might have a ton of customers, but the upselling, cross selling opportunities are not so big. I don't think that's the case for Milliken. Probably you have long standing relationship with big companies and so you have a portfolio of products. I get the feeling that part of the work that you do involves not just marketing to potential new clients or just launching brand new products, but actually helping sales on cross selling, upselling opportunities. Do you have some insights there on how marketing can help out on that area and how do you measure it?

So that's actually been a challenge for us, to be honest. So it's something that we've really had to think about. How do we effectively cross sell, you know, with Milliken, for a long time each of the divisions, you know, operated very independently. And so as we think about a more holistic strategy, it's somebody might be able to be a customer of multiple divisions and what does that look like? And so we've, we've done a lot of work to really bring the groups together to say, how do we do better about this? How do we think about, you know, they may be a chemical customer, but they also probably have a headquarters somewhere or they have a, they do have a distributor that they might be flooring for. So just thinking about creative ways to kind of weave all of the Milliken product, you know, through those customers. So I think this is an area of growth for us, an area of opportunity for us. And just really thinking about how do you look at current customers and you know, instead of always going back with sort of the same thing, just if we have that relationship with them, we can say, have you considered Milliken flooring? Have you considered, you know, our healthcare products? You know, is there maybe we've had some recent contact formulas where they've said, hey, we're actually a healthcare provider looking for floor covering. Like, whoa, hey, I see two uses here, right? So, and just when the data comes in, instead of that quick response of thinking about, okay, how do we really strategically go after this contact or you know, leave with the right solutions? They came in thinking one thing, but maybe they don't know about the others, which is very possible. So a lot of educating as well and just helping your clients and customers understand your full offering. It doesn't have to be pushy, but just saying, hey, we've also got these other things. Have you? Did you even know? And a lot of times they say, oh, didn't realize that.

So I, I don't know if you agree on this one. Again, we typically when we work with clients, we help a smaller, you know, SMB customers. But we do happen to have a help handful or, you know, over time of large corporations like yours. And what I've seen, which is a segue into my next question about the program that you say, you know, we started a new program, I want to like to know, if not the reasons, what have been the learnings of this new program? From a corporate point of view, what I've seen is that there's not only silos on the information on the customer side, right? Your customer not being knowledgeable of all the things that you do is that internally the marketing, the sales, the customer success team, they don't have a comprehensive access to all prospects, all customers, all products, all services in one place. So we have been witness, we haven't driven this, we have been witness of one of our clients efforts to concentrate or put together all the Information in this particular case was enterprise implementation for HubSpot where they are saying exactly that they had all these smaller pro portals by region, by country, by product size, with the same companies, sometimes the same contacts and silos of information because the marketing team in one location was just communicating with the customer base that they have in that area. So they were not able to access the rest because the information was not available internally. And, and so I'm not saying that they have solved the problem yet. Now we have a different monster, right? Is that you have this corporate overview, but now you are worried about access. Right? Everything is in one place, but you want to make sure that the right people have access to the right information. Not just from a security perspective, but also from a management perspective. I do want to be in front of immense database that you cannot segment because it's everything. So I think that more and more corporations will start doing that, centralizing their information, centralizing their offers, but at the same time building an organization where you have local, snappy, very reactive, their own country or product line marketing teams, but also a layer on the top that is making sure that you facilitate access to the information so you can discover these more cross selling upselling opportunities across marketing, across sales and even customer success. But I wonder if that's, that's part of the reason you started that program that you're describing this year.

Yes. So we, we identified that we had lots of tools and systems in place and in many cases the same tool. Yeah, but different accounts, right. So you've got three groups using different HubSpot accounts. You've got our CRM set up, but they weren't talking to each other. And so what we really figured out was we need to look at how are the divisions and the systems talking to each other. Right. So as it relates to lead generation, nurturing, handing them off to sales, we've got all these different systems and nothing is going to one place to really get a holistic view of what's happening. And so what we really did the end of last year, so earlier this year was say, okay, first of all, you got to consolidate all these accounts, got to get, you know, we don't need three hubspots. It's a great tool, but we don't need three of them. So how do we kind of get everybody into one system and make sure that we're, you know, just not only consolidating but also just kind of implementing those best practices. Everyone was using the tools just a little bit differently too. So you know, there might be Some custom fields over here that at the end of the day, it's all probably passing back and forth the same information, but it's just a little bit differently. So how do we look at all those instances? Make sure the tools are being utilized in the same way, but that we're still capturing all that data. And then also make sure it's connected to the sales tools, because if your marketing tool isn't talking to your sales tool, it's not helping anybody. So how do we really look at, okay, when do we pass that data over? When do we also have our CRM pass data back into the marketing tool as well? Because that's important. If we know they've purchased a product, the next time we have a product launch, we can say, okay, anybody that's purchased this product over the last 12 months, let's send them this new product launch. Because it's a related product or maybe it's a newer version of what they've already had. So getting really smart about putting all that data in both places, even regionally, some of our teams within the same division, we're using different tools. So, you know, just thinking about how do we get smarter about the data that we have and really making sure that we can utilize it in a way that's going to benefit us and the client. I mean, there's nothing worse than you fill out a form online and three people from the same company call you, right? And you're just like, I don't even know who to talk to. You're all asking for demos, like, you know, who's my point of contact? And so it kind of turns you off from the experience of that company. And so we want to make sure that we're not doing that to people that are interested in working with us and building a relationship and not, you know, driving people mad.

I love that comment because again, especially for very large organizations, I always stress this fact with fellow marketers that from the customer point of view, all your channels of communications would continue to multiply, right? For the customer, they don't have. They don't have to. They only don't know, but they don't have to know that this is for marketing requests, and this is for sales requests, and this is for customer support. You know, if I go into a chat or if I go into the share inbox, if I go to a phone, even those that still doing that, right? Or, or if I go, you know, but any other medium that will show up in the future, I want to, I want to know that the company that I'm dealing with knows that I'm a customer, what products I'm using. So I'm not, I don't continue to repeat myself. And obviously that information can be leveraged, as you said, for cross selling, upselling opportunities to not miss the opportunity. Oh, I can see that you're using all these products. What about these other ones? So I, I, I think that's a great, great reason to do that and to leverage those programs. I was going to ask you as well, this one, which I see a trend and I think for larger organizations it's also becoming very clear. Um, don't you feel that little by little, especially marketing, but even sales, the, this role is evolving. That is, I call it a combination of it with the client facing department specialty. Right. They're starting to cover the marketing operations and sales operations and when you are looking at all of it like revenue operations. But I think it's evolving rapidly because as you said, there's a ton of technical aspects that while still marketing or steel sales, require more understanding of the systems and the processes behind it. So have you seen that evolution in Milliken, like that role surging or becoming more important?

Yeah, and I think just looking for somebody with the expertise that can kind of help tell that story. Right. So you know, you mentioned revenue operations. It's, you really have to think about start to end. And so of course you need your, you need the folks that are going to know their tool and know their craft, but really somebody that can understand that full journey to help to, to just make that more clear for everybody. And I think that we're even noticing that as part of our project that we're working on, it's like you start to, you start to dig into a division, you're like, oh wait, we didn't think about that. So now it's like one other thing we got to research or one more first we got to pull in and even just making sure you've got all the stakeholders involved because there are so many things that it touches. And so really making sure that you know, you're not leaving anybody out because that inevitably means you're leaving part of the journey out, which is also super critical that maybe you didn't realize was there because it does change and you don't always understand the business use for some of the things. And so it's just making sure that, you know, we're asking all the questions and I learn something every day and it's like I've already done this project with three of the divisions and you launch into the next one, you think this is going to be a breeze. Already done this three, three times. And then they have this one off that you're like, we hadn't considered that, you know, so it's like, all right, let's research, let's figure it out, let's build it in. And then it's going back to the other divisions and saying, do you need this too? Should we consider this for you? Right. It's not just always going forward, but let's go back and implement if it makes sense to do that too. So, yeah, I think it's always changing and there'll be no, like, finish line for this project. Right.

It's.

This is a starting point and it's going to grow and things are going to change or there's going to be a new channel or something that pops up that we have to put into the process.

So finally, I want to be respectful of your time, of course, but the other question that I have for you is that demand generation as a craft, as an endeavor, as a role, most of it, the one that I've seen and where we draw it from is B2B especially tech is very popular among that. But I was surprised to learn about your, you know, like Milliken in particular is working on demand generation initiatives. So I was, I was going to ask you, Nicole, what does it means, what does demand generation means for your company, for, for the things that you do? How do you see it, particularly as part of the, you know, all the things that marketing can do? What is, what is the meaning of demand generation for you guys?

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's really, we do a great job with our current clients and with relationships we already have. But at the end of the day, to grow your business, you need new business too, right? So we can trust and rely on our sales teams to go back to our current clients and continue to win business with them. Because we're great partners, we know what they need, we have the solutions they need. Where demand gen and marketing really can come into play is helping to do some of that top of funnel, higher funnel and sourcing. For them to say, okay, let's go out in the digital space, let's do some paid social, let's do some, you know, ABM type stuff. Let's look at these other ways that we can start to drive traffic to the website, you know, without sending you a list of, you know, when they used to purchase lists and say, here's 100 people, go call on them. Right. We don't want to do that anymore. So how do we really think about new ways to. To fill that top of the funnel and then they can work their way down into sales. And so that might be organic or paid. And we do a lot of focus on SEO. We recently went from, I think it was like five or six websites into one. So how do we look at our online experience and that online digital journey to really get customers to the website and then to the division and then to the product. Right. And so kind of doing some of that upfront for the sales team so that they can focus on current clients, because we know that's important.

Right.

We want to manage those relationships, but how do we always kind of drive those new leads into the sales team to help them make their big. Their business bigger and finding different ways to kind of source new contacts for them? You know, trade shows are still big, especially in a lot of markets, and so you still got to attend those. There are some things you kind of have to do to play. But we've really also taken to digital and getting, Getting that channel up and running and figuring out, you know, where do we go attract new customers from and how do we do that? Is it through writing content? Is it through paid advertising? Is it through content syndication? Right. There's just things that we haven't traditionally done before. So let's give them a try, see what works. And if you can put them through the funnel and have that closed loop like we talked about, you can figure out, okay, going into next year, here's the places that we need to play to help to build that database of name and make sure that we're building them with the right people, too.

And I love that approach. I completely agree. Right. You don't want to. You don't want to rely on just one format or platform for your content creation. You want to test out different ones. You know, how we consume content changes over time, and we have to adapt to that also, as you say, and to also try different distribution channels, digital and the ones in real life. Because, you know, I don't. I don't know if you agree. One thing that happens even over time is that you. You get so little attention to more traditional, older channels that then they. They have way less competition. And you can rekindle some of those channels again just because everybody's ignoring them. And then the competition dwindled. So you always want to be trying to. I believe that you can saturate a distribution channel. Right. That you can maximize its input and that's the moment that you got to try something else and see what and keep moving in that sense. But that's, this is great. I definitely think, Nicole, if you are open to it, maybe next year or something like that, we will love to have you again. There's so much things that I would like to ask you, especially the one that you mentioned about collapsing a ton, you know, five websites into one. That can be a whole conversation.

Oh, it sure could let us keep.

Us on topic and I would just want to finish with some, you know, rapid fire questions for you, then you can share some insight with our listeners here. So any feature hack from HubSpot that you think is underutilized that you really like?

I love hidden form fields.

Hidden form fields. How do you use them?

Yeah, so we can use them through, you know, if they're on a certain web page, if you have a hidden form field, you can have that data pull in into the hidden field. So on the user side, they're only filling out a couple of different form fields. Maybe their email, their name, their company. We're able to capture data through those hidden fields. So you can do things like UTM parameters. So if they're coming from different campaigns, those hidden fields can pull them in. Just a way to kind of capture data to figure out where are they coming from, what are they clicking on. Also for us, it's a good way to say, okay, they're on this section of the website, so they're probably a textile customer. Right. So we can kind of populate that on the back end. So we're building data on you even if it's, you're not seeing it.

That's a good one. That's a good one. The other one is, and how much is you can change if there was anything that you, you, if you had a magic wand, will be one thing that you can change about, you know, the company departments, the, the, the areas that you work with.

That's a great one. I think for us, if we had, instead of working backwards, maybe we had started by implementing the systems together in the first place, that would have been great. But it's been a fun project and lots of learning. But hindsight.

Hindsight, of course. And finally, if you were in front of your younger self, what would be Nicole just starting in marketing? What would be an advice that you will give her?

Yeah, so I think I would just tell her to stay curious. Right. And things are going to change. New tools, new methodologies, new channels are going to continue to pop up. And so even if it's not something right in my purview. Always kind of going out and learning and educating myself because you never know when it might fall into your job description.

Love it. Love it. Well, this has been great. I truly, truly appreciate your time today, Nicole. And yeah, again, hopefully we can have you back at some point in the future. And I'm sure everyone here listening will take some notes and, you know, continue their journey. From the comments that you made, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.