How To Scale a Startup Into a Megabrand Using Speedboat Marketing with Chandar Pattabhiram, Coupa Software

We tend to focus on how great our product is rather than what they care about, the value. People buy candles not because they want candles, because they need light. So start outside in what they care about and then what you sell in terms of value and what it means to them. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Duplo Cloud, the leading dev and security ops. As a service platform, are you having Trouble hiring skilled DevOps engineers? Are you taking months to implement security and compliance? Or maybe you're struggling to migrate your applications to the cloud? Duplo cloud is a one stop shop solution for all your DevOps cloud automation and compliance needs, from infrastructure provisioning and application deployment to security controls, compliance, certification and alerts. For more information, visit duplocloud.com that'S-U-P l o c L-O-U-D.com or get two months free access by contacting infoduplocloud.com Chander joining.

Us today, he's the CMO of Coupa and Koopa, is a business spend management leader with more than 10 billion market cap and prior to Kupa, Chander was CMO at Marketo. He's a seasoned marketing executive with over 25 years in the space with roles at Badgeville, IBM, Accenture. He's authored and been quoted in more than a thousand articles and a frequent keynote speaker at some of the top conferences. In 2019 he was named the top influential LinkedIn marketing or leaders in marketing and in 2017 he was named by LinkedIn as one of the top five CMOs in the world to follow. And he's also a strategic advisor to some awesome companies we know like freshworks and Gainsight. You've had a very impressive career. Give us your backstory. How did an engineer become one of the top marketers on the planet?

I think any carrier should be at the intersection of DNA and passion. For example, I'm very passionate about being a musician, but my wife reminds me that my DNA is not great at it, whether I sing or what I do. But going going back to being an engineer I think what I realized early in my life is I was an engineer and engineering gave me a great framework based thinking approach. But early getting out of engineering I felt that I didn't have the DNA or passion for that kind of piece. And I really wanted to pivot into more on the business area. And so at 21 I actually went to business school. Typically people who go to engineering school take a few years, but I said I'm done with it, I want to go into a business school. Pivoted there. I always had that DNA and passion for storytelling and being at the intersection of technology and storytelling, art and science, kind of been there in my career. So took that and, and doing management consulting and eventually you were able to find at the right intersection the calling in life as a. Being a marketer for life. And that's where for the last 22 years I've done that.

And I often say when passion meets profession, you become Michael Jackson. Why do so many startups fail at go to market Fit? Why does this happen before we go into what can you do to fix?

I think there's a combination of areas. I think first of all it's really at what stage you are as and there's a difference between go to market fit versus product. People confuse product market fit with go to market fit. And those are two different things. Right. And product market fit is initially proving that there's a certainly set of early adopters who feel that you have a product that's solving a compelling pain for them. But really you can't take that and make that as go to market fit. Go to market fit is really about have you achieved enough rinse and repeatability that you know that this can be scaled to a larger set of customers with the initial set of problems. The bigger challenge companies have in that is lack of focus. Right. And really especially when you have a platform company, if you're building a platform, the good news is that you can be applicable to a lot of different use cases. The bad news is that you can be applicable to a lot of different use cases. And a lot of times what happens is that you going, you tried going a mile wide and an inch deep in terms of your attack of how you attack the market and that becomes a problem rather than going an inch wide and a mile deep and really focusing on. So that's the micro effect and then the micro effect is really about what is happening in markets. Is your category actually being there's a big wave that's catapulting your category or not? And Those are some of the macro effects, but that's what I've seen. Where operational efficiency meets great timing is when you really succeed.

From that perspective, companies like Gainsight who've effectively created a whole new category, right? Customer success effectively is proactive customer support. But they create this movement around customer success before they even had a product and became the leader in that space.

No, it's great. Nick's done absolutely terrific job. Creating categories is the most challenging thing in software companies, right? You have to time the market and you don't want to be Napster educating the market, you want to be Apple monetizing the market. Right. So the timing of it is important. And what Nick and team have done really well is they've created a category by building a tribe and really building that community drives category. And how do you create a passionate community of folks that ultimately helps you accentuate the category is a great story. Marketo was a similar story like that. So it's not easy and really big haptic to them to go do that.

You coined this term speedboat marketing. What is it?

If you look at my career, I've worked at small boats like startups that were pre 10 million at that time was Jam Cracker, Badgewell and then oil tankers like IBM and then speedboats like Cast Iron was. Speedboats are companies that are really growing. They've proven their go to market fit and they are between that 20 to $500 billion space, really growing fast in that 30% plus growth. And I've operated in all these three environments and the playbooks you need for a small $10 million. Our company is very different than an IBM. But then in a speedboat there's a specific playbook you need in terms of how do you build scale and how do you build recent repeatability and how do you build a brand. So that is what I thought about how would you go take Most of the SaaS companies today that are in that speedboat space or the speedboat timeframe and how do you go make a repeatable marketing engine out of that? And that's what I turned it that way.

What is your definition of a speedboat? What are some elements that companies need to have speedboat like momentum.

It starts with first speed, right? Are you being agile and are you growing at that real speedboat? You see the ride is fun and exhilarating and it's unpredictable to a large extent and stuff like that. But that's what makes it fun. But are you going fast is the primary criteria and are you growing at that 30% or higher rate as a private company or a public company. And then are you facing all the challenges of go to market scale that almost every one of us face? And how do you go attack it from a marketing perspective? And that's really the angle here.

And a lot of people are startups here, startup founders here. And the only thing that matters in startups if you're looking to raise your next round of funding and drive valuation, is speed. Right, because your growth rate comes into effect, your gross margin comes into effect, and those are critical things. And your net customer retention or net revenue retention comes into effect. But speed is a key element in so so many people say they're going to slow down and somebody else takes over. If you don't prioritize speed and of course with precision, then you're doomed because you open yourself for somebody else to take over. So let's get into speedboat marketing. What are the key elements of speedboat marketing and how can companies use it to drive growth?

First of all, going back to your question on speed, there was an old quote that I put it on my table that those who win the west are not the ones. We're not the ones with the biggest guns, but those who shot the fastest. It's a good reminder that speed is definitely important in today's world in terms of innovation speed as well as execution speed. Right. But if you look at ultimately how do you create a marketing engine for that company that's going from that 10 to 100 million and then 100 to 500 million and then that go into a mega brand after that? The first principle of speedboat marketing is that we have to think about marketing not as a funnel, but you got to think of it as a flywheel. And as an engineer yourself, the flywheel creates a rotational energy. And how do you think of this? Of the three areas of how do you drive awareness, how do you drive acquisition, and then how do you drive advocacy? In a way, it's a flywheel that creates that momentum for you from a marketing engine perspectives to go forward. So that's kind of the basic essence of it. And then if you thin slice it, we can talk about what do you do in awareness in this stage? What do you do in acquisition, what do you do in advocacy to ultimately make that flywheel as effective and efficient as possible? Let's start with awareness, advocacy, and maybe you'll add the third add on and advocacy, awareness, acquisition, add on and advocacy, the four ways around the fly flywheel.

So awareness, acquisition, advocacy, and add ons what is a flywheel? Why flywheel versus a funnel? Because people get confused by that.

Yeah, because a lot of traditional marketing and B2B over the years has been focused only on the acquisition stages of marketing, which is how do I take top of the funnel? How do you create awareness? How do I create interest? How do I create converted interest into urgency and then ultimately into deals and help sales close them. But they view that's the end of the effort. That's actually to a lot of times start at the start of the customer journey.

Right.

So you have to think about holistically in the life cycle of the customer and how marketing is impacting rather than the traditional funnel of leads to opportunities to deals, leads to opportunities to deals, et cetera. So that's why the mindset shift is think of it as something that is creating this rotational power across every stage of the customer journey, where any experience is a sum total of every interaction that you have and how you can recreate that rotational power as a marketing engine to ultimately make customers successful. In other words, if an existing customer who's happy can influence every new prospect that makes so much more the efficiency of marketing and how do you go drive that?

Walk us through the different phases.

I think awareness is an interesting thing that in a small company. So here's something right? If you have, if you have between a 10 to $100 million ARR range, typically what you don't have the luxury is you don't have the luxury of doing a lot of TV advertising or you don't have to have the luxury of being in every billboard in Chicago airport or that kind of overall generic brand awareness efforts. So the one word that companies in that stage, in my own experience, what we did at Marketo, what we've done in the early stages of cooperation, what other startups that have advising we've been doing is this idea of brand acquisition. So every brand moment is an acquisition moment and every acquisition moment can be a brand moment. Just think about it. It's just like brand doesn't live in an ether right here relative to what your growth acquisition tactics are. And a great way to operationalize that is using this concept of educational marketing as a way to build brands. So in other words, rather than just putting a billboard out there saying hey, here is just what Koopa is a marketo is one of the tactics is can I teach people to earn the right to engage and as a result build my brand through that strategy and tactic. So simple example of that, right? So we go after CFOs at Cooper and we went after marketeers at Marketo. So one of the early tactics at Marketo that the team had done is that we use educational marketing as a great asset weapon for brand building. So for example, if partnering with the Harvard Business Review, the Economist or one of those think tanks, and we say here is the strategic CFO in a rapidly changing world or tomorrow's Marketeer presented by the Economist and sponsored by Cooper. That is a content asset, that's an acquisition asset. Typically people feel. But it can be a great brand asset too because then I can go to every CFO in the world with this thing with Economist and say, I'm going to build brand awareness with you about Cooper because I'm teaching you something. I'm not selling you, I'm teaching you. So that idea of using educational marketing as an effective weapon as opposed to because you don't have a lot of brand dollars at these early stage companies. And doing that and partnering with the right think tanks and also doing it by yourself is a very effective tactic if you do it right. And at Marketo, for example, they wrote their first line of blog before they wrote my first line of code. How do I make people better marketers as opposed to better Marketo users? So that mindset of using teaching and making it a brand, and that's how they build a brand. So that kind of idea of brand position is what I've talked about here. Now, at some stage in your growth, it's very important to go from this kind of brand position tactic to more mainstream marketing and advertising like Cooper. We just advertise in the World Series, Formula one and with this legal league and all that. But it depends on the stage of your company. How do you shift from this more contextual brand acquisition strategy into a more pervasive strategy? So that's the essence of what I was talking about in that piece.

In cases where you're educating a market before it even exists, Gainsight did or Marketo did, you have to do that and that helps you formulate a category. But Nori asks here, you just said you don't want to be Napster educating the market. How do you reconcile that with suggesting we do educational marketing? And I think maybe you can take that.

What I was wanting to say is you wanted to time like what Napster did. Again, I was the early bird gets the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese. So you have to be timing the market in such a way they're able to monetize where the market is ready for you. Markets Bat last. Customers bat last. Right. So just because you're educating people on music doesn't mean they're ready to consume music in a mainstream way, going back to the online digital music at that time. So my point was companies can spend a lot of time trying to educate on this new category, but they have to be around when the market is ready for mainstream adoption of that category. That was the point I was trying to make in terms of you got to be lucky and you got to have persistence in making sure that any early category gets matured enough that you can monetize it rather than just educating it. That was the point. Awesome.

And before we dive into acquisition like now, you've built this brand, you've earned the right to engage. You provide so much thought leadership content. How do you convert that to acquisition? I want to get there. But before that, a blog is now become oversaturated. Everyone has a blog. How do you eyeballs to you, what are some new sort of awareness tactics that you're seeing in 2021, 22 that are really taking steam here?

Yeah, you got to basically attention. Capturing attention is very difficult today.

Right.

And so I think that's when you go into more micro sliced content than larger content. Right. And whether it's one or two minute videos or tips on something on content and specifically, how do I improve myself every day rather than some long thought leadership piece. This idea of snackable content, whether it's in videos, is very powerful relative to the traditional ways of writing big things. Right. From that perspective, I will guide people to read this thing from the B2B institute that they produced called the 95 to 5 rule. When it comes to brand building, like a lot of us we're doing in software marketing, think about, even in brand acquisition, we think about those who want to be in market. And I gotta go educate these people who are in market and go drive brand that way. But they provide a very refreshing perspective for us to think through. What we already knew is that 95 people percent of the people who want to build brand with are not in market today. They're tomorrow's customers, not today's customers. So that's why in your brand acquisition strategy, you have to take a longer poll approach to it than just saying who's in the market. I want to go build brand with who's in market today. Right. So you got to think about it more holistically and do it that way. And then some of the tactics around purely educational content, but do it in some of these newer ways of Snackable content is a good way for you to do it.

If you look at some of the best, most engaged content creators on TikTok and Instagram and see the kind of snackable content they're creating and bring that to the LinkedIn, you can learn a lot from that.

The question was around. I just saw the question. What was that? It is by the LinkedIn B2B Institute and it's called the 95.5rule. It's a really good article to read around brand building and why we should focus on tomorrow's customers and brand building as much as those is in market today.

A lot of people just even still are saying, oh yeah, we spend money on SEO SEM, all of this stuff. But if people are not searching for you because you're not in market, then how do you educate them? And you gotta, you gotta push. You gotta push, right?

There's a great line. I think it was one of those earlier advertising lines which says that the TV ad didn't make Mary go to the supermarket, the empty box of cereal did. But when she went to the supermarket, she really, she had. Okay, if you build the brand recognition, she knows that your brand's the first one that comes to mind. So it is building that contextual attribute awareness with tomorrow's customers. It's very important as much as what we do, those are in market today.

Educating them, building that, getting that social proof, getting the brand rub. Now see, you've earned the right to educate, have a conversation with these people. How do you turn it into acquisition? And a lot of people have that problem. We have a very popular YouTube series now with the traction, we got about 115,000 subscribers. We get 8 to 10,000 views. But how do you now take that and then turn it into acquisition without seeming like a spammer?

Fair enough. I think there's no magical sauce I'm going to offer as opposed to ideas around focus and my being the burnt victim on these things. So I think a lot of people on the call today would have done a few things that I'm presupposing, first of all, really crystallize what your onlyness is, which is your core differentiation. Why me relative to everybody else as a simple company, as a smaller company, you're disrupting somebody. But really, is that onlyness really clearly accentuated and people really understand only X can provide. Only your company can provide this, nobody else starting with that. And second, I'm sure you've done this ideal customer profile and what to go after. The key thing for me in acquisition in acquisition here is rinse and repeat motions. So as a marketer, one of the most important things we can do in a company scaling from 10 to $100 million is how do you build rinse and repeat motions with the fewest number of plays possible. For example, when I was at badgewell we were selling a gamification platform we could go sell to anybody using for gamification for sales, customer service, employee advocacy and doing it for support and so many different use cases. And therein lies the peril because you can go try to focus on everybody instead if you pick the use cases that are two to three at that stage that have the highest propensity to buy. And the rinse and repeat is where I think focus is very important as an organization at that stage for us to go do, to go drive that rinse and repeat motion. The same thing when I was in a startup Cast Iron, we were trying to go after every integration problem till we realized the best rinse and repeatability was focusing on Salesforce and a few SaaS players to go overdrive integration to that. And that really helped us convert that actual brand awareness into more contextual brand awareness for the people that we want to care about and drive acceleration. The second piece to it is around this idea of people try to create different funnel strategies for it, right? So people have inbound, people have outbound as we've typically seen inbound coming from marketing and outbound coming in from either sales or adrs. But one of the newer things to implement in action just not talk about is idea called all bound which is how does sales, marketing and your SDR function? Go after the same fish on the same boat and drive the same level of engagement where these target accounts, the best accounts you want to go after. Sales and adrs are going together and marketing is coloring the skies with the favorite brand color of yours in our case Cooper blue. But it's one thing to talk about it, but driving the right priorities and the compensation models for these different organizations to make sure that's how you drive lead generation and demand generation is very important for you successful in today's world relative to what's been in the past.

Walk us through an example of allbound as you've utilized at either Koopa or Marketo. Because Bill writing content is great. You don't want then your or writing content or being on podcasts or creating snack size videos, whatever it is to create brand awareness. But then once you've learned the right, you don't want your sales team to seem like spammers and destroy your brand. So how do you leverage all bound? Give us an example of that. All bound in action.

Yeah. So let's break it down. Right. So typically companies, once you know that you want to go after these set of people, there's three doors of demand that they use. There's an inbound marketing is sourcing some inbound stuff. Then adr. So your SDR organization is doing some outbound that they're calling some set of accounts. And then your sales organization is independently responsible for some sort of pipeline generation for some sort of outcome accounts. But invariably there's no harmony in that because each one has gone after a separate set of accounts. So in this idea of all bond would be first of all, if you take if you are to create 100 opportunities to go drive pipeline, let's say 30 opportunities come from more 30, 40 opportunities come from your marketing inbound. So people are finding you now in an enterprise that ratios in a mid market you probably have a different velocity engine. Maybe 70 comes from that. But let's just hypothetically assume AN Enterprise business 30% is coming in from that. Then rather than saying for the other 70% ADRs you go find 30% or sales, you go find 30% of opportunities. Together we're going to go find target those target accounts for those 70% of opportunities where sales, marketing and adrs are collectively compensated to open the door to go find pipeline for that. That's the all bound model rather than driving independent courses of demand generation between sales ADRs market. So let's assume that one of the target accounts you want to go after is Procter and Gamble. Okay. And you want to go after the Procter and Gamble. You feel that you have one of the higher propensity to buy is for what you offer. Then in the all bond model then the salesperson works with the adrs to do account enrichment. First of all on all the Personas target Personas that matter to go drive. First of all, what's the right contacts in the accounts that we want to do. Salesperson reaches out to the executives in the account. ADRs in parallel can reach out to some of the practitioners in that account. And marketing's job at the same time is whether it's in digital or whether it's in field marketing programs is providing the air cover here to hit them the same accounts in these late stages too. So collectively all three are focusing on Procter and Gamble on the Personas marketing sending them through content either in digital or through direct mail or field marketing programs, ADRs are prospecting, sales is calling. It's all focused together and opening the door at that account. That's the idea.

So now let's dive into advocacy. What are some elements you've implemented to go from, you got, you've built great awareness and you've figured out a way now to drive qualified leads and you're closing them. How do you turn your customers into advocates? And I think 95, 99% of the companies are not deliberate about this. They don't know how to do it. They get word of mouth and they get some referrals, but they're not really deliberate about turning their customers into advocates.

But I think that's the problem, right? I think so. First of all, there has to be the upside down. You got to flip the advocacy equation here. The word advocacy is being misused as customers being advocates of your brand. And the way you think about it is how do you become advocates of your customer success? So the hero in the story, and they're telling a story here. The hero in the story is the customer, right? So if you flip the funnel here. So one is to say that, hey, this customer says our products are great and it gives us great ROI. There's a TCO of 67% reduction in TCO. There's a great ROI, got ROI in six months, etc. That's all great. But if you flip the script here and say, my advocacy story is to showcase the success of my customer in their organization to drive transformative change and that's how I'm going to build my advocacy story outside in from that perspective rather than inside out. Then you start building this thing about creating a community and a tribe where you're showcasing their success. And everybody says, I want to be like Mike using the Michael Jordan thing and I want to essentially have the success they do. And that's how you build that. So at Cooper, I'll give you the example, right? One thing for us is to build an advocacy story. We go after spend management professionals as Personas that we sell to. Is one thing for us is to go to say, advocacy stories where we say that here are what they think about Cooper software. And we've driven great value, which we have and do that. But we don't stop there. The starting point for us is we launched this thing called Spend Setters a year ago. Spend setters. And our advocacy program is focused on how each one is a trendsetter in their respective organization to drive that at Marketo, the Marketing Nation, our tribe was built around advocating for them and their success rather than them advocating for us and our success. So if you want to be at cause and not at effect here, if you start with the story on how they are the hero and advocating for them, the effect can be how they will eventually advocate for you to build that flywheel of them influencing your prospects. And it's got to be authentic, but it's got to focus on showcasing their success rather than them showcasing yours.

Now how do you bridge that to add ons? You talked about add ons. What are you referring to when you talk about add ons? You've got great advocates.

Add on I would say is a step before that and this is the way I would think about it, right, Lloyd, is that if you see today a lot of us in B2B marketing today, 80, 80% of the spend has been on acquisition, right? Very few of us at earlier stages take a programmatic effort to go after cross sell marketing. And how do you go market add on products to your customers in a very thoughtful way so that if you're not selling the entire platform upfront, you have additional capabilities to go sell to that customer. So my point on that is marketing team should invest on driving more balancing the boat on the life cycle of marketing than just acquisition marketing. In other words, the question to folks on the phone today or on the call is how many of you have dedicated marketers in your organization to do adoption marketing which is hey, customers have bought a set of products. Are we marketing them on all the capabilities that they've bought so that they maximize adoption? How many of you have marketers focused on cross sell marketing? How do you go attack an install base in a thoughtful way to go to increase expansion? And how many of you have marketers focus on advocacy marketing in terms of marketing their success? So that was my point. Balancing the boat in investment. Just don't focus on the funnel and acquisition marketing. Increase the investment so that you get more add on business. Going back to the point you made Lloyd, dollar based next expansion, dollar bait. Expansion is very important the SaaS business. But you have to not make this only a sales effort. You have to have marketing providing the engine to go help that and make it happen. That was the point.

Now say you've done all this really well. We talk about mega brands here. What is needed to turn your startup into a mega brand? In a sense, Marketo is a mega brand. Koopa is a mega brand. How do you turn your startup into a mega brand? What are the key characteristics?

I think first of all, you got to start with a problem. You got to start with a product that solves a compelling need. And if I would give you. Let me give you the Einstein way of, maybe I'll give you a simple formula, since you like frameworks, a simple formula for. How do you do that? Right. If you look at a great mega brand, it has E equals MC squared. And I'm not Einstein. There's no Einstein in me. But any mega brand, excellent company has three things. First, the M, the category better be mandatory. Right? You're not selling a discretionary. Nice to have. It's a budget line item in somebody that you're selling. So you have to get to that stage that it's a mandatory spend, rather discretionary spend. That's the M. The C. The first C is competitive advantage. So if the category is mandatory, you better have innovation and value that you're delivering that you have competitive advantage. You can be Coke or Pepsi, not RC Cola in your marketplace. Think about that. And the third C is the culture. I can really talk about that. And what is really important in terms of building a culture, an organization focused on people and meritocracy and authenticity. So that combination equals MC squared can catapult you into a mega brand organization. That's been kind of, if you have to put the Twitter headline into whether it's Marketo or Cooper or any of these things, that's the way I would capture it.

Is it a must that you must look to create a category or define a category, or can you be successful without it because it ties to your mandatory need comment as well there, right?

Yeah. Creating new categories in my experience is very challenging, man. Okay, somebody wants to go E equals MC squared again. I'll do that. Let me do that again. So since the question was excellent company, E equals M mandatory category. So marketing automation was a mandatory category. So then it's a question of do I choose Coke or Pepsi? So the second C was competitive advantage. You better be Coke or Pepsi, not RC Cola in that market. And the third C was culture that I talked about. So just going back to the previous question, going back to this thing around category creation or even like owning a.

Category to build become this mega brand and get the swarm of leads. Like you said, the early bird catches the worm and the next one gets the cheese. Right.

Second mouse gets the cheese. That is a macro effect of timing in markets. You have to be. You have to have persistence to do that. It's not an easy exercise. A lot of the SaaS products today are new Wine old bottle. It's not that you are recreating a category that you're providing a better option for an existing category. Look@salesforce.com to Siebel. Siebel kind of created that CRM category but was really Salesforce offered the next kind of next generation of software for it. Most application software are in that new wine old bottle. I am going redefining category or I'm creating the next generation of that category. Very few products actually catapult into new category creation and that analyst names categories companies don't. Right. And so you have to have the influence of the analyst community and it's a long term play. That's a five to seven year play in B2B for you to actually cement new categories. It's not easy, right? So if you pick one then you need that macro influential effect of the analyst community co driving that and doing it. You can't do it alone as an individual company and you need an ecosystem, partnerships and all these things to do that. ERP category for example. It took a lot of years to cement it. I wrote a post before I joined Cooper. I was interviewing with Cooper at that time after I left Marketo what kind of company do I want to join? And I wrote this post. It's on LinkedIn. I'll post it. It's called the Einstein way of finding your next company. So that's I and when I look backwards, you can only connect the dots looking backwards, right? When I connect the dots looking backwards all the three categories I'll talk about Cooper. Excellent company in my mind. 5 years in mandatory category. Every company makes money, every company spends money. So businessman management is a mandatory category. Competitive advantage we have, we are the coke of our market. If you look at any external validation from customers or analysts and then the culture is probably the most proudest part of it. We have driven an authentic, employee driven supportive culture there.

Not enough people talk about culture. And I think culture is foundational to building a great company. Right. And I think there's a quote that the culture eats strategy for breakfast. We'll dive into some of the strategic things but it's refreshing to hear a speaker, a leader like yourself talk about culture. And there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the world with the recent better.com people are filming things. There are great examples public great examples of bad culture. But what does culture mean to you and how do you build a great infectious culture? Maybe describe that at coupa.

So for us and I give credit to our CEO Rob Bernstein from the early days. Because in this case, culture is a trickle down effect, right? And in Kupa parlance, I'll explain why it is a trickle down up effect, I'll explain why. But really it's cemented with the top and the core belief systems and a set of core values that every company has core values, every company does. But do we live it and breathe it every day? Do we drive every action that we do through that set of core values? Whether it comes to promoting people, meritocracy, decision making and stuff like that? That's when institutionalizing it and operationalizing it in your daily actions, it becomes challenging for companies. So let me give you an example of what we mean by some of our fabrics of our culture. So we believe in this idea of supportive leadership, service driven leadership, and not top down leadership. So our org charts at Koopa, if you go to our even leadership page and org charts is upside down, the CEO sits in the bottom of the chart and then you have the different branches. If you look at the tree metaphor, the root is the leadership and then you have different branches, whether it's sales or marketing, and then the different leaves within that, within different people in that. So we have this mindset. The job of a leader is to be supportive, not manage. You don't manage your support and as a result your idea there is that how do I eliminate hurdles? How do they showcase their success and how do I wake up to serve my employees, the servant leadership model and breathe that every day in the way your org chart is set up, how you talk about at the company. So I don't talk about, I manage people, I support people. So that kind of thinking that gets fostered into your daily actions is what defines a successful culture. It's one thing to say it, but you operationalize it. You're operationalizing that purpose in an organization. And that's really what I'm proud of in the organization. Very credit to our CEO and all the people who've done that.

From that perspective, what advice do you have for founders? Because who create this foundation in the early days and maybe the first five, 10 people you hire set the foundation for the rest. And with each hire you make, they could have a significant impact on culture, especially executive leadership. What are the key things you look for when hiring leaders in the company so your culture doesn't go south?

What you don't want is there's two sides to it, right? You don't want group thinking and people who look exactly like you, think exactly like you. To have group Think and not have diversity in an organization. That's the danger to it. Want that. Having said that, you want people who have a set of core beliefs and those who have a set of attributes that you value in an organization. And so that when you go through the process and when you think about it, you have to my guidance is over communicate what's important to you and use it in your daily actions, whether it's your hiring, how you promote people, how do you make decisions in corporate meetings as a leader, over communicate that so that it becomes a fabric of everyday existence for you rather than something in sitting on a wall in a room saying here are three culture points. Every company has that. And that's the problem. You have to bring it into your daily, weekly, hourly discussion motions. And I can't think of the number of times that we have three core values in organization for the last 11 years we have ensuring customer success, focus on results and striving for excellence. My CEO has probably used that a million times counting in the thing about how we drive our daily decisions based on that. So I think that's where my guidance would be. It's one thing to think about it, it's another way to live and breathe it every day in your actions. And how do you over communicate that to your employees?

What are some best practices you've seen for communication? Because communication is number one, right? Like the job of the leader is to build, inspire and motivate a team. And delivery is the lagging indicator in that equation. And it's really important to constantly communicate the vision to excite and inspire people. It's not like a one and done thing where people do it at a town hall and forget it. You got to do it day in, day out.

So I'll give you two frameworks. First principles of communication would be being at the Venn diagram of what you want to say and what people care about. So when I'm talking to a board, am I on the Venn diagram of what I want to say and what does a board care about? When I talk to the cfo, what do I want to say If I go talk about all the aspects of creative marketing, does the CFO care about that versus how we are driving some tangible pipeline and deal sizes, et cetera? When I'm talking to my team, am I talking about what they care about rather than high fluidity marketing things to how does that manifest themselves into their specific daily objectives and what they care about for their success? Success. So operating at that framework every day of what you want to say and what they care about is a great guidance for me in my daily actions of communication. And it's all of these different levels. Some of the great caterers are very good at one to one, one to few, one to many, and one to community communication. How do you nuance that? So that framework gives you a good perspective. At least for me, it served as a good guiding principle. Every day am I operating at that Venn diagram of what I want to say and what I care about now as a leader, I would say the second thing as a CEO, if you're on the call is it's a very small company. You can say many things a few times in your meetings. I can say I'm doing X, I'm doing Y, I'm doing Z, all these things. And you can repeat it. As a company grows larger and larger, you got to say a few things many times so that it gets into people going back to my core values, using those three ideas and over communicating that again and again as you go from 100 to 1,000 to 5,000 to 30,000 people as the company goes into a mega brand. Right. Saying going from his thing doing the picture was a few things many times. Going into or rather many things few times into a few things many times. That's how the chart would change and be very conscious about repeating that I think would be key to success there.

Few things many times. And it also ties to inch wide and a mile deep versus a mile wide and an inch deep. Say a few things many times. People need transparency and proactive transparency. They want to keep hearing the same thing over and over again. Otherwise they think that mission or purpose is dead. If you don't talk about it, they think that there's no progress. Right?

Yep.

And the same holds true for marketing messages. And going back to this 95, 5 rule, you're sending that same brand message so that people keep hearing it. And then 95% people who are not ready to buy or not in market to buy your top of mind for them, you're effectively doing the same thing. Right?

Yeah.

So the biggest.

One of the bigger mistakes we've done in marketing is we get bored of our own messages earlier. So we run a campaign for four months and says, okay, let's go ready to the next campaign and then we go get the next campaign. That's dangerous because you have hit it so many times. But the person on the other hand has seen it probably once. Right. It's many to one rather than one to one. You have to look at it from the other angle. So it absolutely does. When we are running campaigns, one thing to keep ourselves honest in marketing is let's give it the time. If it's a good one at least it needs a year to get democratized across your prospect base and your brand awareness things so that you have the time to cement that rather than you saying okay, six months done, I'm going to go to the next campaign. Absolutely. It does few things many times is very valid in external communication as much as internal communication.

You're building a marketing team. What are the key roles and skills needed when you're first starting out? You join a company. Let's say you've joined, you work at companies sub 10 million, you've joined companies sub 50 sub 100, you've been at IBM. What are the key roles and skills needed when you're building a new marketing team?

Okay, so it very depends on stage of company. So $10 million or below, it's different than ten to a hundred and a hundred to billion. I'll try to contextualize it in a generic sense and try to go do it right. So if I go into an organization as a cmo, I think the most important thing is you cannot be a good CMO or a great CMO unless you have great leaders in three very key positions in the company in your organization. So if I take the Cooper parlance as I'm sitting at the bottom and I have leaders on top supporting people, not managing them, I'm going bottom up in my org chart here, not top down is you need a very good CEO of strategic and product marketing, strategic marketing and product marketing. You need a very good CEO of that. You need a very good CEO of growth marketing and who's driving converting these go to market things into programs and across channels. Whether it's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, field marketing, all those areas. And you need a very good CEO of corporate marketing. So having those three pillars established and I'm talking about companies post 10 million going forward. I'm not talking about the pretend, I'll talk about that in a different context. But as to be an effective cmo, you can somebody told me this advice many years ago, you cannot be a great CMO unless you have these three great companies pillars. And so that's really the focus for you to start and saying do I have the right leadership in those three areas to ultimately build that orchestration, the engine that comes together to make it happen. And so that's why I talk about the CMO as the C, the M and the O as three different letters. We can talk about it, but one of the key part of the letters is the. Oh, the orchestration which is how do you bring these elements of product and segment marketing, Growth marketing, which is called demand generation and then corporate marketing, which is all the air covered in terms of your pr, comms, brand events, et cetera. And how do you build harmony and orchestration across these three areas is very important for the organization.

Dive into the key elements or key traits to be successful in each of those roles. Or what is corporate marketing? What are two or three things that you need to be successful? Growth marketing, maybe a little more. And then product marketing you talked about.

Yeah, I think first of all, any marketer marketing is the science of storytelling. Right? So it brings both the art and science together. So every marketer at heart needs to have that idea of whether it's internal external storytelling into their beam harness the skill of doing that very important today, regardless of how much data and all these other pieces too. That's really important. Am I telling what people care about? Which is what I'm saying. But specifically going into those areas in product segment marketing, it's really about hey, do I have a. Do I really understand strategically where the market is going and really understand one element of go to market? How do I find the fastest path to the most dollars for the sales organization and how do I guide them with the right kind of go to market motions for that. That's a good. The strategic skill set for that. The second is the positioning skill set in terms of am I able to crystallize my only less and my differentiation in the storytelling and do that from that standpoint and create the sales enablement tools so that ultimately sales can consume what you got rather than just saying yeah, whatever, marketing, yes, I'm going to go do my own stuff. Making it consumable. The consumable skill. The strategic skill. The consumable skill. And then more and more it's the analytical skill of can I go be more data driven and go drive that from that perspective in corporate marketing, the biggest thing is for you to how do you tell a brand story that connects with the rest of it rather than being an ether here? And some of the great brands, even at IBM, the corporate marketing guys told a story called Smarter Planet. Beautiful story, brilliant IBM brand, Smarter Planet. But the reality to what the rest of the organization doing in the product marketing side is such a chasm there. So really able to tell a brand story that is connected to the rest of what the capability is in a software company and doing it in a very consumable, memorable way is that storytelling is a big thing on the corporate marketing side. And in growth marketing, as we talked about it, is becoming a lot of the science of marketing. At Marketo we took it from a soft science to a programmatic science. But really understanding being data driven and understanding where are the best tactics and strategies I can try to go to the pipeline is a good skill set for happen now.

When is the right time for a company to be a CMO? You've joined all kinds of companies at 10 million, at 50, at 100. When is the right time to bring a CMO on? Because I see early stage startups that I talk to, maybe a couple million in revenue, 4 or 5 billion, they want to bring a CMO. But what they really need is somebody to run demand because their biggest suffering is leads.

I think when you're ready to really make money as an organization, the real important need becomes how do you orchestrate marketing across all strategically at the market level, at what you're doing in pipeline, what you're doing in brand and all these things need to work cohesively and orchestrated is the right time for that perspective. So here's the way I would practically say it, right? If your immediate goal is a I gotta get from 5 to 15 million and demand gen is my primary problem, then you can hire a VP of marketing who does really good work in growth marketing and demand gen and those pieces, right? Once you've established rinse and repeat motion that you know that hey, I have a set of 100, 150 customers that have get tangible value from my product or capability is when then you need to go drive this engine at scale across your brand, across what you do in your sales enablement, your sales organization is growing larger and what you do in your pipeline, that's when to bring that CMO in. When you're ready to scale, you've nailed it, now you need to scale it, right? You got to nail your go to market before you scale it. So you've nailed your go to market at least the instant now you got to scale it, that's the right time to do it, right? From my perspective. So that is depends on organizations when you reach that 20, $30 million ARR to get a CMO that really knows that playbook of scale. You can get CMOs in early organizations that are helping you position or helping you drive some demand, but really helps you understand the entire playbook of scaling an engine. Because a lot of people think that I got to hire a chief revenue officer when I'm ready to scale. It's actually more important to hire a chief marketing officer when ready to scale because that's what's really going to guide you. The path of the least assistance to the most dollars.

From that perspective, if you are not ready for a cmo, how would you think about who to hire? Who are top two or three people you're bringing to hit that first 1 or 2 million in ARR? If you were starting a company today.

There'S two profiles, right? So I'll eliminate the profile of getting somebody. So typically marketers, just like in a NFL coach, comes in either being an offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator, they have some background coming in to be a head coach. So typically you're going to hire a product market, you're going to hire a head of marketing who's got a product marketing DNA. Grew up early in my career with that, or somebody who's got a growth marketing demand generation DNA. And I would say depending on your business and depending on the strengths of your founders, you got to make the right thing. So if you're trying to create a new category and your founders are really good, your CEO is very good in positioning and building that analyst relation. Then you go get a growth marketing person who's responsible mainly for driving the demand augmented by the strengths of your founders in terms of driving that early positioning and stuff like that. Vice versa, if you want really the positioning battle and the founders are engineers, they don't have necessarily the great market positioning skills that you need with the analyst community and shaping the market in terms of your customers and prospects. I would hire somebody with that messaging and positioning background. So that's the way I would think about it based on the personality and the DNA of the founding organization.

You have this great quote that I heard in one of your interviews. People buy candles not because they like candles. Tell us more.

Some of the challenges that we have as software companies or product companies is that we tend to focus on how great our product is rather than what they care about the value. People buy candles not because they want candles, because they need light. So start outside in what they care about and then what you sell in terms of value and what it means to them. And that's why product marketeers is the wrong term. It really should be value marketers. And this classic example a friend of mine gives me is that I go to Home Depot looking for a shallow, but really I go to Home Depot wanting to dig a hole. The real Thing is, what's the value? I want to dig a hole, so I need a shovel. So the less we talk about the shovel, more about what you're trying to solve the hole in this case. That's why I gave this point about start outside in terms of value in your problem rather than talking about the problem.

Who's your favorite movie actor and what are some marketing lessons I guess you can learn from them?

You're designing Hollywood or you're talking Bollywood. Which one are you talking about?

Either.

Oh man. One of my favorite movies is the Shawshank Redemption and it really teaches me the art of storytelling and how do you capture through emotion. And we have to forget that marketing is not about go to market notion. It's about emotion and if you can grab emotion. And that always beats me that it really hits me here and it keeps me really honest from that perspective and Bollywood. I grew up in India so I grew up in south India. So one of these guys that most people don't know about Rajnikanth, who's a big movie star. So I always learned about the art of effective storytelling and how do you exactly deliver is the guy there and do it from that standpoint. There was a legendary line from one of his movies. We say that my way is my own way or something. It's a very famous line. But the marketing lesson for marketers is that everyone has a personalized journey. So you want to use individualized, personalized way of how to go engage people rather than having a generic way. So that was my fun lesson in terms of the lesson from him in that line.

What are the tool set that you recommend to marketing leaders or companies startups? What tools do you guys use from.

In your what's in your marketing stage? So if I look at the acquisition funnel we use I'll give them the categories. We use products for ideal customer profile and for what we call intent based marketing early and do that for account based marketing. So we use a product called demand base. We are using products for dynamic personalization. By the way, I'm not a stockholder in any of these companies. So using products for dynamic personalization of web of your landing pages like intelligence using conversational AI products. We obviously use Salesforce. We use Marketo as our manager engine. We have used Engageo for sales insights and then we used a set of products on the advocacy side for for. In the past I've used Influentive for driving advocacy and also others in for events. For example, we have a couple of products that we're using for events as we're looking at, et cetera. So there's a stack of nine to 10 products that typically that the average marketing stack today is probably eight to 10 products for any company. And some people use more than that.

What are some books you recommend? What's on your shelf? You got a ton of books I'm assuming you read. And I see Ogilvy in there.

Yeah, yeah, it's good somebody gave me marketing. But I would say, look, if anybody wants to leave this call of the one book as a marketer, you have to read. Right. And it's not from now or today. It's Differentiate or Die. Al Reez and Jack Trout. It was in the 80s and it really set up this idea of positioning. Marketing was viewed more of a brand exercise. And they were the first guys who came and said marketing is about winning the battle for the mind. And they coined the term positioning and why you should differentiate everything from water to Airlines need to differentiate their offering. And how do you do that is it's a very good, insightful thing. Of course it's written for that era. But that fundamentals of thinking is great. Differentiate or die. That's the book.

First principles don't really change. Right. Some of the fundamentals from decades ago still hold true. That being said, what is one piece of unconventional advice that people don't take enough?

That's interesting. Here's what I would say in today's world, given what's happening. The traditional approach that we have taken is do solution selling. We go to a customer as a marketer, we help sales to say that I understand your problem, I know this is what your challenge is and I'm going to offer solutions to go solve your problem. It's a traditional way of selling. You know, go from product based selling even to solution based selling. An unconventional approach would be to do provocation based selling. There's a great Geoffrey Moore article on this to check it out. Provocation based selling, where you are provocating the customer with all empathy, of course, and saying if you didn't have me, here is all the issues that you would have and that's why you need me. A different posture. Look at the posture. One is solution based, saying you have this problem, I'm trying to solve you. This is provocation based, which is without me. Here's all the challenges. Think about that approach and how do you operationalize it? It could be something interesting for you.

Where can we find you on social? Where are you active?

I'm Chandar. Chandar, PCH n D a r the letter P at Twitter and you can go to chandar P at LinkedIn and I look forward to engaging and thank you for having me. Lloyd.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find all the information mentioned in Today's episode at TractionCoff IO that's T R A C T I o n C o n f IO.