The 5 Hardest Marketing Decisions to Make & How to Get Them Right with Talend CMO Lauren Vaccarello

All right, we will get started. Welcome to SAS/STR Scale, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. My name is Lindsay Leggett. I'm on the SAS/STR team, and I'd like to welcome you today. I have a few quick housekeeping items, and then I'm going to pass it over to our speaker, Lauren. So as a reminder, this is an interactive 30-minute session. We encourage you to keep your cameras on, turn on your volume, join the conversation, ask questions to Lauren, throw out ideas. We really are trying to facilitate an interactive discussion with you all today. We will be recording these sessions, so they will be available after the event, which was great. The way to engage in this session— there's a few different ways. You can again just turn off your unmute and chat, um, or speak up directly. You can submit a question or a comment within the chat feature on Zoom. So a lot of different ways to get engaged. Lastly, we have a great one-to-one networking opportunity throughout this week. Um, so I encourage you to take advantage of that. I'll be sending a link to easily sign up for that one-to-one networking in the chat section in a few moments. At this point, I am pleased to introduce today's speaker, Lauren Vaccarello. She is the CMO of Talend, and I'm going to pass it over to Lauren, and she's going to take it from here. Thanks, Lauren.

Thank you so much for the intro, and welcome everybody. I'm really, really excited to be here. So, um, we've got about 20-30 minutes together, and I want to make this as much about you as it is about me sitting here and talking through everything. Uh, so like Lindsay said, I'm going to talk through the 5 hardest marketing decisions to make and how to get them right. Before we jump in, I'll do a little bit about me. And then as I'm talking, I really do want to make this as interactive as possible. So for people here, like Lindsay said, turn on your cameras, feel free to chime in. Uh, so for everyone here, if you want to jump into chat, say hi, post where you're from. I think that would be a great way to get to know all of you as I run through a lot of this. The thing I say at the start of every live presentation that I do is, as a New Yorker, I am prone to interrupting. So I expect the same from other people. So like I said, if you have questions, you want to dig into a topic, jump on chat if you're more comfortable, or feel free to just turn on your, turn on your mic and jump in. So a little bit about me before I get started. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at a company called Talend. We are a leader in data integration and data integrity. I've been doing marketing for what feels like the better side of forever. Uh, I ran digital at Salesforce for a number of years and really helped see them scale and grow. I used to run marketing at Abrol and then, uh, also at Box for a number of years, both on the marketing side and the customer engagement side. Um, and then I, I really come from a heavy digital background that led to demand, that led to more of sort of a more modern approach to marketing. Live in the Bay Area, moved here from New York 13 years ago, and there are a couple of familiar faces here. So want to say hi to everybody. No one has jumped into chat. That's okay. We're going to get started anyway. I, so I think a lot about hard decisions. So I recently launched a podcast called Truth Be Known, where I have these really great experiences where I get to interview business leaders from all of these different companies. And what we— what I end up asking during the podcast is, what's the hardest decision you've ever had to make? So that really helps inspire a lot of this. So one of the hardest decisions any marketer has to make, any business leader has to make, is to walk away from success. I think we all know the example of Blockbuster and Netflix, and everyone's seen it and heard it. And Blockbuster was the clear leader and could have chosen to cannibalize their core business, walk away from stores, do what Netflix did, send DVDs in the mail for those of us who are old enough to remember that, and then have this fully digital business. We hear about that example a lot when it's about walking away from success, but I have a different example and a different story that I want to share that maybe a little bit more relatable for a lot of the B2B marketers here. I spent some time with Scott Holden, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at ThoughtSpot. And Scott is, if you don't know him, absolutely brilliant, one of the best marketers I know. ThoughtSpot is a great company that does data analytics and visualization. And when you talk to Scott, and he talks about ThoughtSpot, he talks a lot about this idea of How do you democratize decision-making? And if you are a marketer or a business person, you don't want to have to put a barrier up to want to dig into information, to want to dig into data. And Scott, brilliant marketer, just hit his 6-year anniversary as CMO at ThoughtSpot. And a lot of his marketing strategy was thinking about who your target persona is. And they had a tremendous amount of success going after and targeting line-of-business buyers. And really talking to that line of business. And they're having ongoing success. They're looking at leads, they're looking at pipeline coming in. They just launched this big campaign targeting line of business, and they have these articles coming out in HBR. And something that Scott did that makes him one of the most courageous marketers I know is looked at that, looked at that success, looked at that target persona and what they were doing, and said, you know what, I think I need to change. And he started to see some different market, some different signals. He was looking at things like cost per lead. He was looking at where the market was going. And he was looking at things like rise of the cloud data warehouse and said, you know what, I've had a lot of success. I've had a lot of success targeting line of business. Maybe that's not where I should be going in the future. This is what made me successful today. But I don't know if I can keep banking on this. So he's looking at cost per lead. He's looking at sales cycle. And he's starting to pull in these market insights. And he's also starting to see this new rise of cloud data warehouse leaders and leaders in the chief digital officer space and these people that are going in making these massive investments in— moving to the cloud into data warehouses and said, and did some preliminary research, you know, targeting different personas and seeing that actually, I think it may be better to walk away from all of the success that I had and start going after a totally new user. The line of business, the line of business is really important and they're going to be an influencer. But we think where the world is going, is actually talking more to chief digital officers. They're making massive technology investments, and they're trying to be really forward-thinking. And the ability to add AI and analytics on top of that is going to be a much easier sell because they're already bought into digital transformation. And what Scott did earlier this year, which I am still so impressed by, is this idea of he had something that was working and was working really, really well. And said, you know what, I think this is only going to work for so long. And I think a totally new target persona is the right way to go. Did some preliminary research, did some preliminary testing and came out and actually has been really, really successful. And it's one of the hardest things that anybody can do. And you have to go to your boss and say, this is working and we're going to invest in something that's new. So, uh, I will always say, be like Scott and sort of be that courageous person. Once you see those opportunities, you don't want to get left behind. One of the things I, I tell my team all the time is to let go of emotional attachments. And again, the hardest things we have to do as marketers is to let go of these emotional attachments. And I'll clarify really what I mean by this. I tell my team to get attached to the results, not to get attached to the work that they did. We have to be emotionally attached to outcome, not emotionally attached to the level of effort that we put in. So I'll give you a really sort of telling example that we had to go through. As we all know, the world changed in March of this year. So I will give you some context about what I was going through in March of this year. I joined Talend as CMO in, let's call it, September last year. We want to rebrand, we are uplifting upleveling and changing all of our messaging. We are going to roll this out in April. We are going to roll out our first global integrated marketing campaign. The team worked incredibly hard on this. And here's our updated brand message. Here's our updated product message. This is everything that we're doing. And spent a couple of months really, really working on this. Early March happens. The whole world changes. And I'll never forget going in and looking at the campaign that we were about to launch and saying, this doesn't matter anymore. I don't care.

I don't care about this.

What I care about as a business leader, what all of us were going through in early March was, are we even going to have jobs? Are we going to stay in business? What's going to happen to our business? And no one knew anything. And I looked at this campaign my team worked their butts off for and said, I can't push, I can't let this go to market. And I grabbed everyone and I grabbed, in a work-appropriate way, I pulled the team together from our product marketing and our demand gen and campaigns and digital. And I said, I'm killing the campaign that we're working on. And everyone was in a huff and everyone said, why are we doing this? And everyone was really upset. And I remember going, there are businesses that are shutting down after 2 weeks of the pandemic because they can't move quickly enough. If we show up to market with our current messaging, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Not only are we not relevant, we are tone deaf. How do we redo this? And we're in a fortunate position that what our product does is we're able to give our customers access to complete, clean, compliant data in real time. And we said, can businesses— I believe businesses can be more successful if they have access to all of their data in real time and they trust that information. Right now, not trusting your information and not trusting your data is no longer appropriate if we need to survive. So we dropped everything that we did. We pivoted our entire campaign, our entire message, and we relaunched a new camp— pain in less than 8 weeks. I think we actually did it in 6, and I might have crushed the team. But that's such a big piece of it is, as marketers, you can't be emotionally attached. You can't be attached to all of the effort you put in. The effort doesn't matter. The outcome is really what matters. So that is a really important lesson for, for everybody that I really, really took to heart with the org. Another big piece that's really related to this idea is listen to market signals. There are so many signals that you can start to see in the market that you can start to make these decisions on and to start to know what to walk away from. And I'll look at Scott with ThoughtSpot as he started to figure out who's the target audience, who should we really be going with, what should we care about. He started to look at what are the macro— what are bigger market signals that are happening. He was looking at the rise of the cloud data warehouse. He was looking at rise of cloud. And coming from Salesforce and being at Salesforce for a number of years, I felt like— I feel like we've been talking about the rise of cloud for decades. But in different parts of the tech stack, in different industries, it's still a massive shift to move to the cloud. And as you start seeing these market signals, it starts to have to change. What do we care about? Where are we going? Who's our target audience? And then in the case of the world that we live in right now, there are so many bigger macroeconomic signals that need to change, and we need to use and listen to and start to adapt what we're actually doing as marketers. I'm sure every other session and everything everyone has heard about in the last 9 months is This is how COVID has constantly made me change and adjust and adapt. And honestly, it still happens. It is still very much happening and how we start to need to shift and change our strategy. Things that we did at Talent in the beginning of this was pulling in as much internal and external market data. So as we're looking for, for market signals, we looked to are there changes in our web traffic? Are we looked at— are there changes in what our average deal cycle looks like? Are win rates changing in specific industries? Do we have any hypotheses of, based on COVID, what industries are going to accelerate digital transformation, slow down, and where we really want to lean into? And what's been really interesting is Although COVID has been just something no one could have ever expected or predicted in the impact across so many industries, something that I am seeing is how this has really sped up a lot of companies' pushes to digital, push to digital transformation, and really, really accelerated in a lot of different ways. There's a— A company that we work with that I'm just incredibly impressed by called Bayer, who makes ventilators. And they were able to— think about how quickly a company like that was able to pivot. They were making 30 ventilators a week. And with everything that's been going on, they pushed to digital and digitized their systems and went from 30 ventilators a week to producing 600 a day. And it was the, this is what's happening in the market, and it really shifted and sped up their acceleration for digital transformation. And it is not always a negative— what's happening is not always a negative thing. Sometimes the acceleration can really help grow a business. The other thing that has become really, really apparent on really, really apparent is don't rely on static dashboards. One of the biggest mistakes I think we can all make is relying on static information and static data. 12 months ago, you can use pattern recognition, you can look at static information as a marketer, and you'd probably still be right. Today, static data and static information isn't going to be enough. This is why the really sort of the focus on real-time, the focus on real-time analytics and data becomes more and more critical. I don't know how many people are familiar with sort of L'Oréal and Estée Lauder, but I am so incredibly impressed by what they do as marketers. And where Estée Lauder brands are in particular, I'm jealous of as a marketer in so many ways how quickly they've been able to adapt and pivot. So just for a little bit of context, so L'Oréal is part of Estée Lauder. 2018, uh, just for a scale perspective, because we don't always think of makeup online and beauty products online. So L'Oréal, which is one piece of Estée Lauder, uh, in 2018, over a billion people visited the L'Oréal websites and social channels. And that was 2018 when people are still going into stores. And pre-COVID, 80% of purchases were first researched online, but 83% of those purchases were happening online— were happening in stores within Estée Lauder brands. So people are looking online to figure out what they want to buy, but then they are going into store and buying. This makes sense. Like most retail companies, they're thinking, here's our plan to actually move more and to increase e-commerce, increase digital. We all know that people aren't going into stores right now to try on makeup, and you're not going into stores to buy beauty products at the same place. So does that mean, you know, Estée Lauder is going to be out of business? Absolutely not. It means that the importance of knowing what's happening in their business and moving really, really quickly, and the push to digital only got accelerated. So what I think is so incredible about what they did and what they're doing is, again, not holding on to what was, but using this idea, idea of that real-time data, that customer data management, and knowing your customers care about and moving fast. They started to see different beauty trends that people aren't necessarily looking for makeup. They're looking for more wellness care. They're looking for moisturizer. The types of products people are looking for have changed. And if all they were doing was looking at static data and static information and weren't really looking at the customer 360, they could have kept going in their same strategy. But what they ended up doing was having access to this 360 view of the customer, having access to a much more real-time version of information, and changing their marketing campaigns, changing their marketing strategy, going from put— talking about makeup to talking about wellness, uh, creating these different experiences online. So that people can actually— they had acquired a company, I think also in 2018, that lets you do sort of virtual makeup. And they really doubled down into this. They also looked at, now that we have this information, the world has changed. We are no longer looking at static information. We're looking at real-time information. How do we want to change our marketing strategy based on this? So then they started to— now they do these really interesting things of like virtual beauty parties, and they will work with Instagram influencers to do more virtual events around health and wellness around makeup. And it is a way to say, if all they did was looked at what used to exist, they wouldn't have been able to move or to change, versus now where they are dramatically growing. And I, I think the data is where they were looking to target with e-commerce sales several years out, they've already hit for this year. Because this has just really accelerated this push to digital. And would they have been able to get there looking at old data? I think it would have been a lot harder. And then finally, and then I really want to open this up to questions. No one interrupted me. I tried. The final piece of insight and feedback for every marketer is to challenge the norm. As much as we can, sort of push boundaries and challenge the norm. And I wanted to give you a few examples of this. I think we all know Salesforce. When we think about them, if you think about what advertising used to look like for a B2B enterprise software company, it is going to be people in suits on those really expensive shots. And they chose to say, hey, we don't want to look like everybody else. And now you have Trailhead and all of these cartoon characters. And it might not seem like a big deal, but going this way was a really, really bold decision to just say how every B2B software company shows up in the market, we're not going to do that. And we're going to go in a very different direction. And you look at companies like Nike and what Nike chose to do With Colin Kaepernick, it was at the time was to support something that was controversial. They chose to challenge the norm and to stand out in the market. And you have companies like Patagonia that chose to add labels with messaging on their clothing. And then I don't know if you know this about REI, last year and for the last few years, REI doesn't do Black Friday. And Black Friday is supposed to be the, you know, Black Friday, the biggest sales day of the year for retail. And they said that's not consistent with who they are. We think people shouldn't, we don't want our workers to be in stores. We don't want our customers to be crammed in and chose to opt out of Black Friday. So it's the, when you're thinking about how you can challenge the norm as marketers, It doesn't necessarily need to be political or controversial, but it is have a perspective, have a point of view in the market. And when you choose to challenge what is known in your industry, you can have really, really great things happen. You can get that potential uptick in press, but it is your way to stand out and to differentiate. And I honestly don't think enough marketers choose to really push and challenge. It's a lot easier to sort of fit in and look like everybody else. So top takeaways, and I want to leave time for questions for everybody, is the— as marketers, we need to be curious, we need to be brave, know when to walk away from what works, don't be emotionally attached. I've— the running joke with my team is I have no emotions, but I really do. Figure out what's going in the market, let that help dictate Don't rely on static. And in a COVID world, if you're looking at yesterday's data, it is probably already outdated. And challenge the norm as much as possible. So I'm going to stop talking. Please jump in. Oh, I think I might have questions that have been typed in chat. Thank you, Laura. And great question from Jonah. He asked, did you change marketing assets and campaign funnels to adjust to remote office and work from home? We did. We had to make massive adjustments for work from home. We're in a fortunate place at Talon that about half of our marketing team was in an office and about half was already remote. So we did have some advantages as well. The things that we had to shift, a lot of our business actually, a lot of our pipeline for marketing came in from events. Because we're an enterprise company. We have a huge field marketing program, a big events team. So we had to completely shift that to virtual and figure out what are the new things, what are the new things we can to fill the gap. I don't know a single marketer who got quota relief during COVID I know plenty of sales teams who got quota relief. I don't know a single marketer who had our targets lowered. So it really became, what do we need to do to find new things? And then on the work from home side, a lot of it was adjusting the culture of our teams and our orgs to adapt to a world where you have to deal with life and kids and everything else in time. Calvin had a question of, how do you differentiate from direct competitors who themselves have decided to challenge the norm? How do you pull yourself away from them? Um, it's a really good question. Challenge it in a different way. I— so I have a couple of meta sort of things that I think about with competition. Um, one of them is always fight up, don't fight down. Uh, you can fight down behind the scenes on a one-to-one sales perspective. And if you were going up against a competitor that's smaller than you, always pay attention Don't ever call them out publicly. Don't ever acknowledge a smaller competitor publicly because you just make them bigger than they are. It is okay to call out a larger competitor publicly because then you become larger from a perception standpoint. And if your competitor is already challenging the norm, how do you pull yourself away? Figure out where you're different, where you're differentiated. What makes you unique. And it could be a product feature or functionality. It could be your customer service. It could be your brand personality. Figure out the thing that makes you unique and just really, really double down on that. There's too much copycat messaging where something works for one company, so you just jump in and do the same thing. Try as much as you can to stay away from that and find the thing that makes you unique and just go all in on it. I think we have time for one or two more questions if anyone wants to jump in. Hopefully this was helpful and informational for everybody.

Hey Lauren, this is Kevin Mahoney with Sanctum. Uh, one thing You know, it's just not changing the way you market. We do federal sales certification training on-site. I had training that I had to give in 3 weeks, and I had to make it all virtual. So, and then we had to go take our entire marketing campaign, saying on-site, on-site, on-site, saying now we do virtual, virtual, virtual. So I really appreciate what you're saying because it resonates. Not just with the marketing approach, but the product that you serve as well.

Absolutely. And I can only imagine how hard that was to take everything that you do, completely change your business model and your business strategy and how you deliver.

It was 2 years in the making, making that training, 2 years. And then I had to pivot in 1 month to give the training virtually. It was, it was insane. It was insane.

Thank you. No, you're welcome. And I am Impressed by doing that. And hopefully when we all, when we all get out of this and can leave our houses again, hopefully it turns into you now have sort of two different products in two different channels. You've got this virtual one that you never knew you were going to build, and now, and then the in-person to add on to it again.

You're absolutely right, and that's exactly what we're doing. You know, we're waiting for, you know, the vaccine and stuff to come out, then we're going to do a whole nother campaign on You know, in person. Wow, we can actually see you.

We can see you. We can almost touch it. Yay!

So, um, it's an interesting question. I mean, did you change your brand storytelling? I mean, it's always the danger when you have a pandemic or, or any current event even, like, where that balance is. And it seems like That's, that's the challenge really.

It was, we ended up, we were going through a new brand story and brand message at the same time that thankfully was not too far off for where we had to go. And when I thought about where we are today from a messaging perspective, my general approach is just always start with customer empathy and where your customers are at, at that moment in time. And back in March, which is still true today, which will probably still be true for a while. We just said, what are our customers going through? And it was, what is happening in my business? What do I need to know to stay in business? Am I going to hit my numbers? Am I going to hit my targets? Where— and it was this, this sort of fear of the unknown. And we were really fortunate that we went, okay, we can help with this. Like, we believe we can help with this. And this was not our core message before, But I had the exact same thing of like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? Am I going to hit my targets? And what's going on? If I'm feeling this, everyone must be feeling this. And then we talked to customers and everyone's feeling it. And it was the, if I have access to information, I believe, I truly believe, I trust the information I have. And I know it's in real time, it's relevant, it's not old data. I think I can make better business decisions. And that degree of empathy really sort of fueled the, okay, this is our new brand story and our brand message because it is It's true to what our customers need right now, and it's true to what our product can deliver. And I think for everything, it's a, like, start with what is the empathy for the customer? What are they going for, going through? And can you solve that problem for, or do you have a way to solve that problem for them?

Lauren, we are right at time. So thank you very much for hosting today's session, and thank you for every, everyone for joining today. We hope you head back and join tomorrow, SaaStr Scale. We'll see everyone soon. Thanks again, Lauren.

Thanks everyone.