Robin Daniels on Rebranding for Success

Hi, I'm Laura.

Hey, I'm Stefan. And you're listening to Attributed, a podcast library by DreamData.

The purpose of it is to store and share all the knowledge that we have gathered across DreamData employees through our LinkedIn Lives, podcasts and webinars.

The typical topics you'll find here can be stuff like marketing, sales, B2B, ads, operations, social selling, maybe. Hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in today. I've asked a, you can call him a local startup hero from Copenhagen to join me because he's, he's just been part of something that actually not a lot of people gets to try out, which I guess in broad terms it's called a rebrand. That's when you have a very established brand name and suddenly named it something else. It's probably not suddenly, I could imagine when, when we get to know the story from the inner side. But Robin, so much for saying yes to talk about this in public. I'm super curious to, to hear this story. But for those people who have never like encountered you before, can you give us the kind of 2 minute, 3 minute intro to who you are?

Of course. Well, first of all, it's good to see you again, Stefan. You know, always enjoy our conversations and it's a topic I don't get to talk about that often, but basically I am Danish, but I spent more than 20 years on my life and career abroad working at companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn, Box WeWork, Matterport. I've taken a few companies public and I've been actually through few, few rebrands in my career. And I can tell you about when it's gone well and when it's not gone so well and so on. But I'm a big believer basically in my most of my career has really been on the marketing go to market side. And I'm a big believer that you kind of align with the vision aspiration that you have. And sometimes when that's not aligned with your name or your messaging, then you got to change it. And that's kind of one of the reasons why we can get into all that. But it's good to be here. I'm excited to kind of chat through this topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

That's fantastic, Robin. And just to drum straight into it, was there kind of any particular moment where like you guys realized that this needed to happen or was it kind of a more rational process of like wanting to develop a new narrative and positioning and that sort of thing?

Yeah, absolutely. It Wasn't just like something that happened randomly. As I was actually talking to Rasmus, our CEO about joining the company and he was sharing with me some of the vision of what he had in mind of where the company was going to go. So basically he's a new CEO to the company. He came in about two years ago and they bring on somebody like him. He's got tremendous experience also from abroad, both in Europe and the US to scale and take the ambition further. And then he wanted a good wingman and he wanted to bring somebody on to help take that vision even further. Somebody like me who has, you know, this experience from world class companies. And as we were talking about it, it became fairly clear early on, even before I joined, that the name of LMS365, which we were called before Sensei, did not really match the ambition of where we wanted to go for a couple of reasons. One was it's based on technology and technologies get outdated fairly quickly. And it's. I always had the philosophy that it's a big bad idea to name your company based on technology because it just changes so rapidly. So that's one, two, was that the name itself? Even though it looks short, LMS365 is actually not short to say it's not easy to remember, you know, lots of people when I would tell them that I was in conversation with LMS 300, they're like, oh, you mean LMS 360? Or it's like a D.C. thing. Even though again it looks short, it's actually not a emotionally resonant name in any way, shape or form. And of course the top brands in the world have an emotional resonance too. And this one just Disney was very functional brand based on other technology. And the good thing about it was it says exactly what it does with LMS Learning Management System. And it's for 365 meaning Microsoft 365. And then the final thing was really around we were just thinking about based on where we want to go and where we want to take the technology and where we want to take the company, does the name match that ambition in any way? And how do we scale it into something that is not based on technology, where we can fit a lot more things into it that's a lot more aspirational, a lot more emotionally resonant, a lot more exciting. So we had this conversation even before I joined and then as I came on board, I'll tell you, when I spoke to, at a lot of conferences, spoke to a lot of investors and I would share this grand vision that I was kind of working on my first couple of weeks in the company around human success and becoming the HR tech platform that gets the best out of people. And then literally, I kid you not, most of the people I would talk to would say would, but you're still an LMS system that's in your name. And I'm like, yeah, you know, so it was so obvious it wasn't a match for our ambition. The name itself. And then the final point, Stefan, which you can probably relate to. I've been in the startup world a long time. I do a lot of advisory work for startup companies all over the world. I am in an angel investor. And some of them, it's very common for a company when they're a startup that the name of the product and the name of the company is the same. When you're one product company, the name of the company name of the product is the same. As we were moving into offering more products to the market, suddenly having the name of your company and the name of the main product that you sell or one of the products that you sell doesn't really make sense because then it limits all the opportunities for the other products that you have. So we said also that doesn't really make sense as well because we're moving from being one product to actually having three products probably now we have actually five products today. So we're moving towards that journey. And it just doesn't make sense. And I can tell from a lot of the companies that I help scale and grow, they struggle with the same thing. It makes sense when your product name of the company name is the same, but as you get beyond that, it gets very confusing very easily.

That's already a lot of good considerations. But imagine still that there's a lot of probably even like resistance in the company because you have employees who've been there for a long while. And you're also probably looking at. We can take that question first. But you're probably also then looking at like a significant marketing investment as well. Just like making sure that people have seen the switch from what used to be LMS 365 to Sensei. I think that's how you pronounce it now.

That's right. That's right. Well, so I'll tell you, I've been through Ikea Rebrand a few times. And for example, when I came into, I was a CMO at a company in California called veridocs Security and I said, that's a shit name. We Gotta. It's like not easy to remember. It's too complicated. So we changed it to Veronica. The era very simple. We got the domain and everything else. That took a little while and so on. But there was. There was actually very little resistance to it also because we were still in stealth mode. We hadn't actually launched a company yet. So it's a good time to do it. I'm on the board of a company, always on the board of a company in Denmark called customeye. When I first met the team there, they were called Credio Tech. I told them it's really a shit name, you got to change it. But he changed it. I didn't come up with customized. They came up with it but I told them like a Credio Tech is a crap name. And I'm a big believer that branding is all about remembering and having an emotion towards something and take was crap out. The DC firm in Denmark come up with their name as well. But there's actually a time when I was working on a Salesforce. This was back In I think 2008 or so. We had a really big debate in the company whether or not we were going to change the name of our company to force.com because the debate we were having was we wanted to be sell a lot more applications, platforms and just for salespeople. And the name of Ken Salesforce. When you would say that to people at that point in time, people thought it sounds like an application just for salespeople. Right. You know, everyone knows Salesforce nowadays. It's a dev platform, it's a marketing platform, basically everything. You can run your whole company probably on Salesforce. And so there was a big debate whether or not to change the name to force.com and we decided against it because at that point in time Salesforce had already reached the scale as close to. I can't remember if we were close to a billion or just past a billion, but around. Around that. So. So there was already enough kind of brand equity in the name itself and. And we were getting beyond it because we were. We already launched Force.com as kind of the dev brand we had, you know, the service cloud, sales cloud, marketing cloud. So we were already starting to get about beyond. Even though we were mostly known for the CRM system for salespeople. So we actually ended up keeping that brand obviously and still called Salesforce. But there was a big debate around whether or not to change it. But again there was decided that there was enough brand equity. When you think then come back to where we are with our company. We passed 30 million in ARR last year. But at the time I joined, we were maybe know, 20, 25 million in ARR or so. And so a rebrand is never easy, right? And you have to have the right reasons to do so. But there's also a time when to do something. When I think about the ambition that I have for the company or we have as a collective for the company and how we want to become the category leader, what we call human, successfully, we really think about how companies think about investing in people to become the best version of themselves. This is something hopefully that will stand the test of time. That's a really long term vision. And then the time to rebrand is now, before there's too much equity in the core brand, the LMS brand again. And so we're like, when, when do we do. We could do it now, we could do it later. It's, it gets harder as you get later, as you do it later. Because we might have more people who might get more confused. I mean, yes, we're growing steadily, but it's not like we're a huge company. We have 2,000 customers around the world or so. So it's not an impossible task to educate them on the rebrand and so on. And then to your question, I might like, what about the internal like excitement or resistance that you'd have to. Actually, you know, I've seen it before where there's a lot of resistance or excitement. This one was, I would say probably 90% excitement here in the company for it.

Nice.

Because it's not again, like, if you think about the name itself, LMS365 functional name, clear name. But it's not a really emotionally resonant name. And it's not, I could tell when I was speaking to people it wasn't like something that it was a brand that people were like proud to say. Like, it doesn't sound cutting edge. It doesn't sound cool. It's like I worked for LMS, which sounds like maybe something from the 90s, you know, or something. Like even the person who came up with the name, I spoke to them in the company, they're like, yeah, change it. I have no, I have no emotional connection. Chose the name because we wanted to say what it was that we and who we're selling to. We started as e learning force, then we focused on selling just to Microsoft. So we became LMS365. And he's like, but it's not like, I, I love the name. It's just, it was just a simple clear name and we can get the domain. You know, it's like, okay, that's not really a great reason to keep it. So we ended up of course changing it after a lot of like discussion and debate around like what it should be and so on.

I'm just trying sitting and reflecting. You've already rolled out a lot of marketing here. Like don't name a company after the present technology that you're changing. Seem, also seem you have a lot of natural interest in kind of the understanding of the emotional appeal that a company needs a brand needs for it to, for the story to travel. I'm sure you could probably pretty easy spit out a, like a list of when you know your positioning or category or it's not kind of fitting together with your brand name as well. Is it like it's, it's simple. Is that a like positioning messaging category? Is that a place you always start when you, you enter a new company in a leadership.

Yeah, yeah. Mostly because I mean that's. I'm a firm believer that most things start with positioning and messaging and that should reflect in your go to market your name, your taglines, your elevator pitches, your landing pages. Your website basically informs everything. I mean I could be biased and it's very likely that I am. But I mean because I came up through the ranks of product marketing. Right. And, and product marketing is oftentimes the glue that sits between all the different departments, but they're kind of like the core and then coming up with positioning and messaging and differentiation. And the key of course is how are you different. This is really what I think so many companies struggle with describing. And unless you can describe that, then decision to buy your product from a customer perspective is never as clear the way for them. For your champion to fight for you is never as clear. So positioning is a lot about honestly having a point of view, which means that some people might opt out and say you're not. For me, that's fine too. It's having a point of view. It's having some sharpness, having some clear edges to who you are and what you do. That's very different than anything else in the market. If you leave that to the mind of the audience to guess, your sales cycles are going to be really tough. Probably you're probably going to lose more deals than ever. So it's really about having a clarity around this and being bold in this, this messaging and positioning. But so much of it starts there and it did the same with our name and we Thought about, okay, well, if we're going to change our name, what should we change it to? Of course, it's a big, big question. Because the name that lasts, I got.

It on my list here as well.

Yeah, yeah, of course, it's the obvious one. It's like, well, what are you going to change it to? And how do you go about it? And we thought, well, we. We are all about human empowerment. We're all about human development and motivation. And when you think about the reason you are, Stefan, where you are in your life today, I assume maybe I'm wrong, but I assume this for you and for me and for most people, you are where you are because a lot of people have invested in you, giving you the growth, the skills, the nudges you need in your life to be successful, right? Sometimes willingly, and sometimes maybe not so willingly, right, when you've had asshole bosses. But there's always been people in your life, whether it's a friend, a teacher, a parent, a colleague, or whatever it is who's pushed you in the right direction, giving you the knowledge and skills you need to be successful. And we really came back to this idea of teaching or learning is kind of core to what we do, because it's how you people, humans, become better by learning new skills, having good teachers, mentors, coaches in our life. And we thought we want to be the company that really is that kind of mentor coach, this app that you really, at some point can't live without because it's nudging you in the right, putting on a path to where you can get personal performance, fulfillment, personal growth, personal development, so you can become the best version of yourself and realize your dreams. And then we thought about, well, what. What words incorporate this, like knowledge or teaching or. Or learning and so on. Like, all these things, development. And one of the words we were inspired by was this Japanese word, sensei. Sensei, right? Which is like, it's a very respectful way of seeing teacher. And we thought, well, we don't want to just choose that name, right? Because we're not a Japanese company. It's not all about that. How can we take that kind of root of that word in some way and combine it with other things as well that connote or give you the sense that it's about teaching, it's about learning, it's about growth, it's about never really. It's about having a level of, like, satisfaction where you are, but also striving for something more. This, this idea, the word that we use a lot to describe our Brand internally is this idea of mastery. And mastery is never something you're done with. If you think about it like, I know you. You're. You've been in business for a long time. I as well, I'm never done. There's always a next level to get to.

And yeah, absolutely.

The same with personal development, personal growth, professional development, professional growth. There's always another level. There's this idea that mastery. We want to put you on a path to mastery, and that happens sometimes to the right learning the right skills, the right mentors, the right knowledge at the right time, and so on. And so we were, like, talking about a lot of words, and we're like, how can we incorporate lots of different things? So the word itself, sensai, is actually a combination of words. Sen. It's kind of a state of calm or being Right. And of course, it sounds a little bit like sensei, but it's not actually the same word. So it goes to word sen, then also sai, Sai, which means knowledge in Italian, which is pretty interesting. There's also a hidden. Hidden AI in the word as well.

Right.

It's a combination of, like, lots of different words. There's really not a word that exists out there that says if you do a Google search, it's like. So we also wanted a word that we kind of own in some ways that's unique to us and where we could get the domain where we thought it sounds different, emotionally resonant and so on, that you could have. Like, one of the best validations I get for this is we did. I did an event here in Copenhagen two weeks ago, a big HR tech company called Deal and another one. Yeah. So really cool. And there was a woman who came up to me at the event, and because I said, I'm from Sensei, and she's like. And she'd never heard of. She just said, I think this is the coolest name I've ever seen in a. In a. In a. In a tech company before. Because it's just like, it's so aspirational. I said, oh, thank you. So, yeah, we changed it a few months ago from lms. Oh, I didn't know. But the idea that she didn't even know. Right. It's. I think it's simpler when people know where we come from, where we are. But it was just like, such a validation, like, okay, we've chosen something that we can stand by, that we. That we're proud of.

Very nice. I think that's a. That's a very good choice of brand name then I don't know if it's just because we are so deep into it. But then there's this architecture of what is a brand and there's like there's a name but then comes at least to some there's a category like what is the thing? And then there's positioning and then there's the messaging layer. And I've actually on these shows I've had April Dunford join as well. And like she says one don't stress too much about the category. But also like if you can avoid inventing a new category. But it seems like you guys at the Sensei actually you're trying to make it that somewhat of a category, this human success platform. And why did you decide that path as opposed to just maybe continuously calling it a learning management system or the likes of that.

First of all, big shout out to April Dunford. I'm a huge fan of Herzwells and yeah, me too many years is amazing. One of the best I would say this way. There's a couple of different thoughts I have around this topic. One is you can either try to go into an existing category that's fairly crowded and try to win that. That's tough. Or you try to create a new category that doesn't exist. That's also tough. They're both tough. Right. But tough for different reasons. If you go into an existing category, you're oftentimes playing on the battlefield of where the leader, the so called leaders are. Right. Which means that you're being compared against them. And it can work if you have like something that's remarkably better or different. Right. So that's one way. But it has to be so remarkably different. I think by creating a category you can kind of change the battlefield a little bit. When I think about my experiences at Salesforce and Box and so on, even we work right. Creating the co working category. I would say you change how you get compared to others. Right. Suddenly they get compared to you versus you being compared to them. A very tough thing as a small company for us when we go up against some of these big vendors because if it's a checklist war against some of them, I'm sure you probably experienced as well. Sometimes we did. Some of these platform suites are so big. Yeah. We can't win but we know from our customers and data that the stuff that we deliver is so much more usable and different and user friendly. It friendly. If we can change the conversation it allows us to put out a vision that's more inspiring and different and then hopefully those other companies will get compared to us saying, well, what's your stance on human success? We want to. Our whole thesis is HR is broken and it has been broken for a long time. If HR was really working the way it's supposed to or that we've been talking about for a long time, all these stats you see all the time about how unhappy people are, how many people want to quit, how deeply people are, they would have been going in the right direction, but actually getting worse. The last stat that just came out from Gallup a few weeks ago was that it's worse than ever. And so I'm like, there's obviously there's something that's not going right in the way that we're treating employees or thinking about employee growth and motivation. Because the underlying data shows that most people want to quit or feel stuck because they don't feel like there's any growth in what they're doing. There's no development, they're not learning anything new. There's no path to getting promoted or getting to the next level. We want to be on the side of the platform that stands for getting people to the next level, getting the most out of people, getting people productive, happy and ultimately really successful. And our counter programming to what's out there is around human success. But just to recap the point, I mean it's hard getting into an existing category or you create your own. Either sometimes I've been successful going into an existing category and sometimes it's about creating your own category. Both are honestly hard. I don't think either of those are easy. Right. Unless it's, unless you're going into a brand new field that basically exists completely greenfield. But this one is not right. So we've come from selling a learning platform to now we sell a much broader platform. We also sell performance management, employee engagement and the combination of this, we call this our human success platform. But if you had to put it in existing category, I would put it in the category of 10 talent development. And that's like, then who do we compete against? Well, it becomes maybe Lattice, maybe Cornerstone, maybe Workday, SAP, Oracle, some of these things. But if you take the individual products like our employee engagement, you know, then it's maybe Culture app and Pecan and some of these other ones. So yeah, we can tell also that there's a movement from single product, best of breed, towards more suites. So many of our customers are saying that it's also because it's simple for it to manage, simple for the CFO or The finance team to manage one vendor.

It's not so many. Yeah.

So our footprint becoming bigger and becoming much more of a suite of products versus a single product means we can be more sticky, we can have more loyalty and so on within the customer. But the second thought, just to kind of recap. So thinking is you can win in many different levels. You can win by competing at the feature level, the product level, the category level, or at the movement level. The reason you ultimately want to move up, which is a journey that takes probably years, maybe even decades to do so to get to movement leaders, talking about Salesforce, Airbnb, Patagonia, you name it. Right? Yeah. Nike loyalty is higher and revenue potential is higher. If you get stuck at the feature level, you can build a very successful business. But the moment something better comes along, if people are not emotionally bought into the category you're leading or the movement you've created, then the moment something better comes along, it's easy to switch because I'm like, I don't have any emotional connection to the thing. Doesn't mean you can't be successful. You can deliver a very successful product, even have really successful growth. But it's hard to create that long term love and loyalty if you're only competing at features. So over time, my point is you have to figure out as a company, how do you win at each of these different levels? What features do you offer? Because you do have to of course, offer some features or functionality to people that they can't get anywhere else. What product did that add up to? What is the category that. That existence? Back to April Dunford's kind of position, what category do you exist in? But ultimately, if you want to create a movement where you become such an integral part of people's work life or private life that they can't imagine a world without you, the loyalty that you'll receive even when things don't go well, it's crazy. Like Apple comes out with a lot of shitty products. I stay with them because I'm like a loyal Apple customer or I love Patagonia. It's not like all their products are great, but I'm like, I feel part of something bigger than myself when I buy those products. Right. The special feeling.

Such an interesting and also somewhat painful topic sometimes because there's not a textbook of how you do these things. And if your product sits at the intersection of joining different technologies, then like sometimes you're, are you a CRM or are you like a learning management platform? Or you're like employee surveys Software like which one do you go for? And no one will ever come and tell you years from now whether you the human success successful platform was the right explanation or explanation for what you do. I would say though but that the category is one thing but, but you can always, you can still go tactical to market with your the different sub products and you can still buy six search ads for learning management software and put them on a landings page that talks about that product. So it's more the, I guess the brand name and category is more a grouping of the suite of things that your product does.

And we do all that if we, if we get an RFP for example, we would probably say describe as either an HR tech platform or a talent development platform. Right. So of course there is also this, I mean when you're doing category creation, you're trying to of course fit into something because you want to win deals. I mean that's very important to win customers. But you also want to change the narrative. But it doesn't happen in days or weeks. I mean I learned this early on when I was against Salesforce was a very formative experience in my career because I was there very early in my career and also when they were fairly early figuring out we were moving from on premise to cloud. Right. And yeah, and honestly if we had gone in as a vendor competing against Siebel, SAP, Oracle, even Microsoft on a feature by feature list like Checklist, we would have lost probably most time because they had way more features. So we had to change the narrative around. We are different kind of company to do businesses. Our model is fundamentally different. We are in this together because the old model was here buy from us. And I don't really care if you use it because now you've paid me the new model and now everyone takes it for granted because we're in 2024. But it's like we only win if you use it, Stefan. Like you want to scale up, you.

Can just quit if you want.

Yeah. If you don't like it, you turn it off. Right. We only win if you're happy with it. So we're in this together, right? So it changed. Like we want you to succeed. We're with you every step of the way. Our model is different. It's all based on you being successful. And it changed the conversation from being about features to be like, wow, this is a different company to do business with. And they might go talk to Siebel or Oracle and be like, and you're just trying to sell a shit. Right? It's like that's not the same thing. So.

And what I'm thinking, Robin, is kind of so you, you talk a lot about this emotional appeal, which I completely agree with. But how do companies translate their brands into something that has that emotional hook in you that makes you kind of gain loyalty and like makes you want to come back and, and buy more? I know this is a huge question, but there's maybe in relation to the, this rebrand, was there anything where you kind of thought about how do we get then get. Maybe that's the question. How do you get your present users to adopt this new brand and start hopefully liking the new brand as they did with the. Or at least they used the product in the past?

Yeah, I mean, again, I don't think you fall in love with that brand like just by one interaction. It's by being consistent over time. Right. And showing up with the values over time that you hopefully fall in love with the brand itself and what it stands for. But ultimately on a day to day basis, you're using products. Right. So you hopefully fall in love with them. That's why I'm saying there's different levels. The brand itself is something that you want to be a part of because it helps with your identity in some way. Maybe your professional identity, maybe your personal identity, the feelings you have around that and how it makes you happy, better, more productive and so on. But, but also there's emotional connection to that when you think about all the brands you love in your life. So one of the things, when I go and do some workshops or branding presentations and so on, oftentimes ask the audience, tell me three brands you love and I can tell you I've done this hundreds of times, not quite thousands, I've bought hundreds of times. And every time it's like, I love Nike, Patagonia, Apple, you know, Tesla, Lululemon. It's always consumer brand. And the reason why is consumer brands are really good at creating an emotional connection with you because you can feel that. And so even though I've only ever marketed B2B companies in my, in my career, I've always had the philosophy we should market ourselves like a consumer brand. Like be very emotional around the benefits to people, create a story that they want to be a part of because I think that creates long term love and loyalty, that it feels like it's something bigger than yourself. I think honestly, a lot of stuff have been said about wework, but we were very good at that. Creating this idea that it was never just about office space. It Was about being part of a movement that wanted to work.

Yeah, completely.

Right. But it's not like a consumer buys office space. That's very much a big company decision. So the idea of, like, marketing in an emotional way, something that's always kind of stuck with me because I think those are the brands that people fall in love with. There's three stages to a brand. Becoming a super brand is first, you have to know that a brand exists. That's number one. Then number two, you have to understand what the brand does. And then number three, you have to fall in love with them. And you fall in love with them in the last part is because they consistently show up, deliver something and experience to you that goes above and beyond what you expect. There's so many brands in your life that gets to stage two. Think about that, that you know who they are, you understand what they do, but you don't really love. Think about airlines. Right. Like an example of I know what they do. Like, do I love them? No, but they're functionally there. Right. You know, or my mobile phone provider or whatever it is. Right. Trading love is actually a really hard thing. But we all have love brands that we love because we feel like there's something that they're adding to our lives. It can work or private, that we can't get anything anywhere else.

That's very interesting. I would also say Patagonia, but also.

One thing, one for rebrand. I didn't mention we. I was also working at WeWork when we changed the overall company name to We. Right. And in some ways, you know, it's because, again, we had large aspirations that were larger than just being an office space company. And in hindsight, I'm like, there's some good and bad things about it. Like, WeWork is actually a very strong, easy to remember, powerful brand. We is a little bit more diffuse, if you ask me.

Yeah, totally.

Right. It's like, what does it mean? What does it stand for? And then when we changed the tagline, which I did not come up with, to elevate the world's consciousness, which moved away from offering basically delightful office space that people could see themselves being in, that gave them more joy and so on, it became too hard to imagine what that actually meant. I think part of branding and messaging is really being clear about what you stand for. And when it becomes too unclear and the people themselves have to figure out, like, when we changed our kind of, it wasn't really a broad tagline, but, like, elevating the world's consciousness, like what does that mean? I don't really know what that means for me. What does that mean for my company? It's like it became too hard to imagine what that would be. I think you have to be clear. So it's like it's a. It's a fine balance. I guess what I'm saying is a fine balance. Being aspirational and being real as well, about what it is that you offer in a way that people can relate to.

Cool. So now there's a question here from Jeremy and I'll just read it out loud. Have you been able to measure the impact of the rebrand quantitatively or quality? I guess maybe overall, maybe the question is kind of are there metrics in a rebrand process that someone should keep an eye on? Or like, what does success look like in a, in a rebrand process?

It's a great question, I would say just for, for the current one I'm going through. No, it's, it's too early to tell. I don't have the data. But ultimately it's about. You can do, of course, surveys and talk to your customers and see what they think about it. I think that's a very good source of it and lots of great tools out there to do so. And you can also see it in your nps. I mean, our NPS is trending in the right direction. Does it have anything to do with it? It's very hard to correlate those two. I would say related right. Over time. I mean, if we're successful, then I think we start showing up much more in some of the way that our customers talk about us. They want to be associated with this brand, the influencers, whether that's, you know, superstars in the industry, CHROs CPOs or maybe even like the, the Gartners, Foresters, Crossways of the world and so on, because they start talking about us. Those are really good signs. For example, I got a. I got an email from one of the superstar HR thought leaders right after we revamped and said this is such a great move. I mean, it's like that email is worth it's weight in gold to me. Right. Because this person has nearly a million followers across the world.

I Keep hearing the LMS365 anecdote explanation you did before in my brain. And yeah, I see Sensei has potential to, to travel more.

So it's a really great question, Jeremy, and I appreciate you saying that. It's a hard one to actually put a number for. I mean, I would go back to See, how has. You know when. When again because. So. So that was because maybe I haven't explained this. Our product name. So we. So we now have three product names and the product name. So we changed the LMS365 product name to Learn365 because we're still. It's still a learning product. Then we have learn 365 perform 365 engage 365 we just announced in the last two months integrate 365 which kind of integration product and flow 365 which is a product for frontline workers. So we're keeping this connection to 365 because we are a company that only sells products to companies who use Microsoft 365 so we want to keep that connection. And so ultimately what we'll be marketing, the landing pages will be about the products and the features of the products. They won't be around the name Sensei itself. Right. That's more of a higher level order.

Right.

It's not like again that you use Google or you use Facebook or Instagram and so you don't go use Meta. Right. But Sensei is the company name of the umbrella of all the products that we sell. So. And then of course there it's about recognition and affinity and understanding of the brand. But it's still too early to tell. But over time we want to of course be able to like see how what is the affinity and understanding and so on of that brand. But really I care more at this point around like do people actually get to our landing pages? Do they click on our products or because they're interested in what they can offer them? More so than getting the name of the brand out there.

Yeah. One as you kind of explain stuff it makes so much sense because like there's the Sensei which is the umbrella or like the North Star. And then you can still be tactical about the Learn365 integrations. 365 etc.

Exactly. Exactly. It's also a way to get our customers on the journey with us, to be frank. Right. It's, you know, we've thought a lot about like. Yeah. Yes. I mean even though it's not a super brand and there's not millions of customers, we still do still have 2,000 customers, over 2 million users. How do we make them feel still part of the journey? That's why we changed it from LMS365 to learn365. They could see the connection. It's not like a 180 where it's like completely different overnight, but so the product name that they're using changes very slightly, but over time. Right. They can see the progression into something else.

Robin, I want to do one thing before we stop, which is like, force you to help. Like, what is the back of an envelope, Project description of what tasks you actually need to do when you rebrand, and how long does things like this take? But before jumping in that. And I would just put it in your brain so you can start cooking on it. But Andrea is asking, why is it so hard for B2B to attempt this emotional connection? And then she writes, my favorite brand is Airtable. And I try to bring it everywhere I go. I love Airtable. What's wrong with B2B companies since they. They can't grasp this emotional appeal?

It's very simple, honestly. It sounds trite, but it's because I think so many B2B companies think that they have to be serious because they're dealing with a committee of people trying to buy their products and we're company selling to other companies. So we have to be all serious about it. This is kind of the usual, the big fallback. And that's why I usually ask that question. Tell me three brands you love. Because everyone always comes back with consumer brands. And like, yes, exactly. You should market yourself like a consumer company at the highest level. It doesn't mean, of course. So you're a B2B company or B2C company. The first connection you have with it, I would always market as a consumer company because they're much better at creating that connection. I'm fully aware that the journey of a B2B sale is way more complicated. Right. You have so many stakeholders and buyers of sales cycles are longer and so on. So beneath that, the Next, like, maybe five to 50 steps are very different. But at the highest level, the way you get somebody's attention, the way you get somebody's understanding of you, and maybe it sounds cool and emotional. B2C brands do that much better. But I think it's because we start thinking about when we go through the whole cycle of how we sell odd, then we have to talk to a cfo, then we have to talk to an IT person, and there's this person and this person. It starts getting. So you try to water it down and become something for everyone, which is never a good idea in messaging or positioning, where you try to be everything for everyone. You have to, like, think about your main person. And at the end of the day, that main person, whether or not you're selling to a CMO or Chro or cfo. They're also a person, they're also human. They also care about same things in their life, the same brands in their life and so on. But I think we forget that we have, we think that we are business, so we have to be serious. They're a business. They will only take us seriously if we're serious. So, so it becomes this kind of weird self reinforcing policies like okay, they will only take us serious if they know we're serious. Right. We have to act as a grownup, especially like startup, we have to act all grown up. So you end up becoming, putting on this facade, you know, of having to be serious. I always have this philosophy. You can be serious about what it is that you're solving for, but it doesn't mean you have to take yourself so seriously. People respond really well to humor through self deprecation, to emotional words, you know, and so on. Doesn't mean that you can't be solving serious things, which most B2B companies of course do. Right. But it's a difference in how you market it.

And I guess it's just you have to have both. So emotional appeal, a good story, something people can relate to. But if you're not able to follow through in the sales process with sales collateral, sales enablement, stuff that all these stakeholders want to see as well, then yeah, you can create a lot of awareness. But the salespeople will really struggle to win the deals.

I guess that's true. That's true. No, it's true. I mean, if it was easy, it would be simple, right?

Yeah. Okay. I'll just throw in one more question, Robin, and then we go to the master recipe for the rebrand. This is Christine. From your experience, how do you strike a balance between maintaining brand heritage and introducing new elements in a brand? And there's another Patagonia thing.

I love Patagonia as well. I mean, who doesn't, right? Because they stand for something bigger than selling a product. That's why we all fall in love with it. Because they're about a movement. They were never about just selling products. Product, that's part of it, but that's how they get to the movement. So I love pedigree. I think it's about being, you know, changing things slightly at the edges slowly. Like if you have a super brand and you still want to optimize that going forward in the future, there are things you can do at the edges. So if you think about a good Example is Nike or it's one of my favorite brands, right? And if you go to the Nike store in Paris, you'll see like I would say 90 to 95% of the stuff that they sell is the same as you get in. But then they have some Nike pair of shirts, I bought one, you know, when I was there last time. Or they've got like maybe some local swag or so on and it starts adding a little bit of local flair to it. And I think the same is around kind of how you evolve a brand over time. You don't do it wholesale. If you have a brand that there's a lot of strong emotional love towards, even though you want to optimize it, that's very different, I think, than if you have a brand that is actually not liked or nobody cares about, then I think you have much more permission to actually go bold and change it to something completely new. So it's not an easy. I can't give you a straight answer because it depends on kind of where, what the brand is. But if you have a brand that's like unknown, not well liked, not big, I think you can, you have the permission. This is why I personally love coming in to companies that are a little bit smaller, that don't have super brands. Because the problem when I've worked in some of these bigger brands, the two biggest ones I've probably worked for at that point in time, where we work in LinkedIn because Salesforce was small at the time, but we work in LinkedIn not only when you're number one in your super brand, all you're doing oftentimes is defending yourself all day long and your permission to be bold and try something new. It gets very dicey, I think, versus like if you're a small brand or a medium sized brand, you can try a little bit more, a little bit more bolder without losing the trust or the love of the people who are kind of part of your tribe. But a great question though, I'm just.

Like thinking out loud here. But it's also like you could probably also have even like a roadmap for positioning change or category change. So like you can define where you want to go and as you say that, then you can take small steps every quarter where you kind of adjust the messaging and what you say the brand is and does so you don't have to do all of it at the same time, but you can like pick out small pieces. And then in two years time this is what people are gonna perceive us as.

It's not even. You're doing it all the same time. It doesn't work that way. Superbrand is created. A category is created over a long period of time. So it just takes the effort. But you have to start right. It's not like you say, okay, July 1st, we're going to create this brand and everyone's going to know it and love it. It takes time. So, for example, the three strategies that we have to create the category around human success is that, number one is we want to create the center for Human Success that becomes kind of the institute or standard for how people or how companies think about becoming human success. First, the playbooks, the frameworks, the guides. Human success is bigger than just a product itself. That's number one. Number two is we want to create this. We want to drive the conversation that it's not about hr, that's kind of antiquated, but it's really around this idea of empowering people to be the best they can be. You can do it through TikTok, LinkedIn. You know what, that's my channel. Lots of different ways you can do that, but put out great thought leader content to drive that conversation. Again, it's not something that happens in a day or a week. It takes time to do so. Then the final strategy we have is really like, how do we create the trust within with our core audience, which is chros or chief people officers and CIOs. And that's about myself getting out there, speaking, meeting with them, sometimes in small intimate groups and sometimes it's a big event and so on. But Evangeline, we just hired a fantastic leader called Nina Caro. She's our chief human Success officer. She's out there on the road now speaking to her cohort about how they can think about this. But again, it's not like something that you just do for a couple of weeks and then it's done. It's like this is the beginning of this journey that's going to take, I think, many years to really institute this idea of human success.

Yeah.

But it starts with us leaning into it. Because what I see so oftentimes happen with brands is it's never a good time to invest in brands. So they always keep postponing it and they invest in kind of the short term tactics and then a year goes by or two years go by and they're like, we should invest in brand early. Yeah. Because it takes a long time to create a superman. Name one that has happened kind of overnight. I can't think of any Not a single one.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Because they're gone.

Exactly.

Wonderful, Robin. Okay, so I want to finish off with kind of this to, to lay out the, the. The project plan for people. So this is. Does. Doesn't have to be exact science, but if you are to come up with like three to five areas of work that you need to do, if you want to switch the brand from one thing to another, what are the buckets of work that you think lies ahead of or what should they people be. Be considering?

So, so there's a couple of things I would say you need somebody who's a solid project manager because there's so many moving parts. You've got to think about customers, you got to think about your sales team, nothing about your customer success team. You got to think about all your internal processes, if such a small thing as invoicing and all this kind of stuff. Right. And of course all your go to market, like that's got to be rebranded your materials, your website, all that. So just gazillion different workshops. Starts by having a really clear sense of what do we want to do and what do we want to become, when do we want to do this by? And then you have a good project manager or maybe a team of managers. And then of course, depending on the size of your company, the scale matters. Like if you're, let's say a salesforce now with nearly 100,000 people versus a LMS with 200 people, the scale is a little different. Right. But it doesn't change the fact that what are your considerations? Okay, for us, it was the website is the core element of this. Right. Because that is kind of the main artifact that is going to, that people will go to first. New branding, new messaging. It's where we'll highlight why we've done the change and what we stand for and all those things. And there's a fixed date that we want to launch this by. And that becomes a moving target as you kind of get close to. Because sometimes some things take longer than you expect, of course. But the website was kind of the core element then around that, okay, well, we got to update all the content, we got to update our social channels, like all these things. I see that becomes part of the product. But of course, marketing is a key consideration. The next one is you got to get your organization ready for it. And the main people who need to get ready for it are probably your commercial team, meaning your sellers, your customer success people, your customer support people, people who are engaging with customers. They need to be fully up to speed on what it is when it's happening and so on. So they can actually start preparing the customers ahead of time. Right? Because you don't want to surprise them.

The moment you do it, they will have to answer questions immediately.

You don't want to surprise your customers. The third work stream is how do we give our customers a heads up? How do we give our partners that we also sell a lot of our product to partners, give them a heads up and give them the right tools and the toolboxes that they can also our partners can update their materials. But our customers, how do we get them a heads up? For example, Tsunosa that the product name is changing from LMS365 to learn365. You don't want to do it too soon but you also don't want to do it like the moment it happens. So it's like probably depending on how many customers who you're dealing with, probably within a one month time span. Meaning maybe you give them a heads up a month before, maybe it's a week before or something. You also want to make sure that it's not a surprise that they're like what is this brand now? Who is this company? Oh, I paid for something and now it's different. And so. So customers is a key consideration as well. And then a lot of, I would say internal excitement and education swag, you know like so we announced this to our company. We made the decision probably six months before we went live. We announced it the company about two months before. And then those two months there was a lot of internal hype, new posters, new swag, getting people excited about it. Again I think in our case 90 plus percent excitement around the new brand or some people who are like maybe connected to the old one or maybe I wouldn't even say they were not excited. They were just. They just needed a little bit more understanding of what it was which is totally, totally fair. It's a very fair human emotion. So we spent about two months internally doing kind of the rebrand as well and getting people excited about this in all hands can and we have a very distributed. Most of our team is fully remote. So it's a lot of like you know, we spent a lot of time and money on swag as well getting people like excited about it where the right thing so on.

So there was actually a period of. You said it took like six months from the decision to. To life and then only two months where all everybody knew. So was it like a little Bit of a secret project.

It was, it was, I mean, it's probably the worst kept secret. I wanted to start spreading. Right. Because first we got, we got board approval for this, which again, it's not really approval because it's not really the board's decision to make, but we want to give them, we want them to, to support it. The executive team was fully behind it. Then you bring more people into the tent and you start, you know, getting more firm on the project dates and the things that have to happen and so on your partners, because, you know, we have a lot of partners that we work with in terms of like our agencies and so on. But we also knew that we didn't want to tell the full team in too early because until it became real and we had like a firm date for launch and didn't want to distract people or think, get them free, like. But by the time that we announced it, we're like, here's exactly what's going to happen. Here's when we're launching, here's when we're telling customers, here's what we're telling customers, here's what we stand for. Like we had like everything kind of buttoned up, you know, in a way that gave people the confidence that it wasn't just like, oh, in six months we're changing the name of the company. Like what?

I think that if we just hold that a bit, then there's a good leadership lesson there that like you want the general company to be working at their full productivity and if you start seeding in every might, going to change the brand and how it's going to be orange or it's going to be, then all these employees that actually just need to be focused on what to be productive right now, they don't have to think about this. And then you don't do it before you actually have answers to the most obvious questions that, that people will be asking as well.

Totally agree. And it's just like, you know, something I, I write a lot about because I care a lot about this. It's one of the like key tenants of leadership. And it's not always easy to do, honestly, but it's, it's the fact that people like good news, they don't like bad news, but they hate uncertainty. Yeah, uncertainty is the worst. Right. And so if we come out too soon and say we change the name and even said what the name was going to be, but we didn't have any clear answers, it would just leave people feeling uncertain and it's like the worst zone to live in is uncertainty.

Absolutely wonderful. Robin. I don't want to take more of your time, but it's been super interesting to hear the insights of this work. If people want to follow up and continue the conversation with you, what path do you want them to take?

LinkedIn is my jam. You can just connect with me on LinkedIn, write me on LinkedIn. You can also write me@robinsensai.com go check out our new website, let me know what you think of the brand. But thank you Stefan for hosting me, man.

Yeah, and just for the plug, which companies should consider looking at?

Sensei, It's a great question. We really sell to. I would say we're a B2B company that sells a learning management, performance management, employee engagement platform. So companies that usually have anywhere from 50 employees or up and you care about their learning, growth, development. And if you are using Microsoft, we only sell companies who use Microsoft Stack. So if that's you, we should talk.

Great Robin, thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really, really learned a lot and I hope everybody who listened did as well.

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