“How to Create B2B Marketing That Doesn’t S**k” with Vanta’s CMO

Hey, Saster. So two years ago I was sitting where you're sitting at Saster, and I just joined Vanta a few months earlier as the first product marketer. We were trying to do everything as this amazingly well resourced team of two, from revamping our website to planning for our first in person conference, propping up demand gen. And I was pretty sure at that point I had just made a creative decision that was about to get me fired. But what? Come back to that in a minute. And frankly, there were a lot of days that I had wondered why I had taken this job at Vanta at all. Because prior to Vanta, I had been leading consumer marketing teams at Google doing the type of marketing that I had gotten into. Marketing to do super bowl ads, doing city takeovers. I was flying around the world and attending focus groups and hearing from our users about what made them tick, what made them emotionally connect with our brand, and trying to craft creative campaigns like Android Speed together, not the same campaign that really spoke to that emotional need. And maybe you relate to this as well. But early on in my marketing career, I certainly felt like there were two paths in front of me. There was a path to go into consumer marketing and you got to do cool stuff like that because consumers are irrational, right? And the reason why we buy a certain body wash or a certain cell phone or use a certain app is because it says something about us and it makes us feel a certain way. Or you can go into B2B marketing and you might make a little more money, but at the end of the day, your buyer is a completely rational enterprise. They're not buying based on what this app says about them, what it projects to their boss or their coworkers. They're buying based on ROI and speeds and feeds. And so your job as a marketer is just to tell them those three things and then get out of the way and let the product do the talking. But I rejected that notion because even at Google doing these large consumer activations, I knew that I was the same person at work, that I was at home. And there were products that I used during the day that made me feel a certain way. And I felt like I wasn't being spoken to that way, you know, from their marketing departments. And so I issued a challenge to myself. It was kind of a proof of concept that I wanted to run. Can you make emotionally resonant marketing as a B2B marketer? And so in order to do that, you know, I wanted to go join an early stage B2B startup where I felt like I would have the latitude to try new things. So of course I joined one in just like the sexiest, most emotionally charged space there was, Compliance. And that's how I found myself at Vanta. And so anyways, back to Saster 2021. You know, as I said, team of two trying to do everything. Used to working with big agencies and brand departments, but now we're designing the booth. We're getting Christina our CEO's keynote talk written. And Delaney, my demand gen counterpart, comes to me and she tells me, okay, I bought a billboard on the 101. And it was just for the two weeks around the conference, just off the exit in San Mateo. And at first I was a little annoyed because it was just like, oh, my God, this is one more thing we have to think about. But I knew it was kind of an opportunity for us to try out that proof of concept. Can you make emotionally resonant B2B marketing? What would we put on a billboard for two weeks if we knew it would come down? And so we hosted a brainstorm. We invited people across the company. We're all, like, throwing out ideas like you do in a brainstorm, mostly centered around what the product does, right? Like, Vanta automates 90% of the evidence you need to get SOC 2 compliant. Like, oh, yeah, that's catchy. Like, let's put that on the billboard. You know, Vanta simplifies security for overworked teams. It's like, yeah, like, write that down. And we're going back and forth. And then an idea just popped into my head, so I shouted it out in the brainstorm, which is compliance that doesn't suck too much. And we all laughed. It was kind of this, like, great moment. And then we moved on because it was very provocative to think that we were going to run a billboard as a compliance company that implied that compliance sucked. But the idea stuck with me. And so that night I got home and my husband Pat is actually a Vanta user. And so I asked him, I was like, hey, Pat, okay, it's a little out there, but what would you think about compliance that doesn't suck too much as the tagline. And he loved it. And so it gave me the confidence to ask a few other customers. And they all loved it. They really responded to it. So I went to Christina, our CEO. It was a Friday afternoon, and so I asked her, I was like, okay, what would you think if we ran compliance that doesn't talk too much on the billboard? And she laughed kind of nervously and then was like, okay, let me think about it over the weekend. And thankfully, I didn't have to wait till Monday, because the next morning, Saturday morning, I woke up from a slack from Christina that said, okay, it's funny. Let's run it. And so we did. This was the first billboard we ever ran at Vanta, right off the San Mateo exit. Just for the two weeks around the conference, we put it up. We kind of arrived to Saastr, set up our booths very nervously awaiting seeing if we would get any response. You know, it was a big spend for us at the time. We were like a team of two. And 24 hours later, it had gone viral. So people were posting it on Twitter. A community of security compliance auditors on Reddit had found it. They were sharing it. People were coming up to our booth right here at Saster and saying, like, oh, I don't need SOC 2. But I just had to meet the team that ran that billboard. And it was such an amazing feeling. As marketers, you all know when you create something that really resonates with. With an audience, it's just like, incredible, indescribable. And the good news is it didn't really just stop at that awareness, because a few weeks later, the CTO of what became our largest enterprise customer was driving down the 101, saw the billboard, laughed, got home, Googled Vanta, and a few weeks later, they became customers. And it highlighted for me what I kind of knew intuitively, which is that it was emotion and not rationality. That's our biggest driver as human beings, whether we're at work or at home. And in the blink of an eye, literally in the time it can take someone to drive past a billboard, you can go from awareness to deeper action. And so we took that inside out, Fanta. We took the fact that we had created something emotionally resonant that had moved people to action, and we ran with it. And we made Joy Delight a huge part of our brand identity. We introduced the world to Ilma. She's our guard llama that guards over our flock of Vanta customers. And we looked at every touch point we had, from our top of funnel marketing to the way we wanted to make customers feel at renewal, to make sure that across the company, we were always portraying this brand voice as trusted experts, which, with a wink. And it's worked for us in part because Joy and delight aren't two emotions that people expect to feel from a B2B software company, let alone a compliance company. But of course, you know, Vanta's not the only company in the world that has glommed onto this idea. And I'm sure there are many of you in the audience today that have great examples from your own work of how this emotionally resonant marketing can solve real business challenges. But I'd like to share with you a few other examples that I've seen from B2B companies that I think are particularly successful. So let's start with Asana. If you're an Asana user, you probably recognize this screenshot. These are Asana's Celebration Creatures. And anytime you complete a milestone in Asana, or periodically when you complete a task, a little otter, a little yeti fly across your screen and. And I can tell you as an Asana user, it feels so good to get that kind of recognition, that kind of sense of accomplishment throughout your day. And what you might not know is that actually it was kind of a mistake on Asana's part. So they introduced Celebration Creatures as an April Fool's joke, I believe, in 2010 or thereabouts. And much like our Billboard, very little kind of investment, very little idea of how it would pay off. And very quickly they realized they had struck a chord with people. There was such an immediate emotional response. And it went from this small thing that they tried out once to, I would say, the most recognizable part of their brand identity. I use Asana, my team uses Asana. I couldn't tell you if it's the most feature complete task tracker in the market and there are probably a lot of them out there, but it's this sense of joy and delight that keeps me engaged and that keeps me using it day in and day out. So let's take an example on the other end of the emotional spectrum, right? In 2016, the VC question du jour was what would you do if Microsoft or Google entered your space? And for Slack, this was very much not a hypothetical because Microsoft was launching teams, which was their very thinly veiled Slack killer, and doing so with kind of a very aggressive go to market motion. And everyone was looking at Slack to try and see how they would respond. Like, would they cower? Were they just going to take out some subterfuge SEM ads against Microsoft and instead they took out a full page ad in the New York Times. And it was incredibly controversial, I think, but I feel like it was successful on two fronts. The first thing it did is that it got people talking. And whether you were pro Slack, whether you are pro Microsoft, it elicited an emotional response from you. And if you were a Slack user. It made you feel like you were part of something bigger than yourself. The second thing it did is it called out in black and white what Slack felt like their competitive advantage was. And that was the love of their users, because they had talked to tens of thousands of users and they had crafted a consistent brand experience from the way that they responded to people when they tweeted feature suggestions at them to the humor that they injected in their release notes. And that was ultimately what they felt was their most sustainable competitive advantage. Not speeds and feeds, not features, but emotion. Let's do one more example. So if you lived in the bay area in 2018, you probably recognize these ads. They were everywhere. There were ads saying, good morning la. There are ads saying, go Dodgers. Like a bunch of different things targeted towards the LA market, running all over the Bay Area. And the first time I saw it, I was a little confused and a little annoyed because it seemed like a pretty easy blender to fix. But then, because I had felt those emotions, I leaned in a little further and I read the subtext, which is, what good is bad data? And of course, in that moment, Segment had landed their entire product positioning to me. Because bad data is no good. It leads marketing teams to make dumb decisions like running LA advertising in San Francisco or vice versa. And you know, as a marketer seeing this, I understood like, hey, I need a platform, a data platform that will help me make decisions with better data. It is so hard to capture the essence of your product in a pithy slogan, you know, which is why we almost ran Vanta automates, 90% of the evidence you need to get SoC2 compliant on a billboard. And the reason why this is so successful is not just because it's a creative activation. It's because it draws the user in with emotion. In this case, confusion and a little bit of annoyance. And those are emotions that we don't typically associate with marketing. That's not how we want our marketing to make people feel. But it's better than feeling nothing at all, because it leads you to lean in a little bit closer and then in this case, get the payoff. So I hope these examples resonate with you. As I said, there are probably a lot more. There are more in this room today. But I think the real takeaway is that emotion isn't just the job of the brand team. It's not something you just want to leverage as a tool to drive awareness, and it's not something you want to outsource to an agency. Everything from the customer stories you write that can center your customer as the hero in the journey rather than just an example of ROI to the discovery questions your sales team asks to unlock real customer pain and need. Every team at your company will benefit from injecting a little bit of empathy in a customer centric approach. There are three questions that we ask ourselves at Vanta all the time to make sure that our marketing is hitting the mark. The first question we ask is, will it make them smile? You know, as I said earlier, Joy is such a powerful motivator and it's something that's so under leveraged in B2B marketing because we assume that we're selling into a corporate entity, an automaton. The second question we ask is, will it make them nod their head? We're so focused on impressions, we're so focused on eyeballs or, you know, the number of listeners that we forgot for, forget to stop and ask, are we connecting? Are we penetrating the outer level and sharing a message that will make people feel understood and listened to? And the third question is, will it make them tell a friend? Because obviously the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive word of mouth. And if you've created something that will make someone want to tell a friend, that will make someone want to share something as an extension of their own self image to a coworker, to a boss on social media, you know, you've created something that's landing. And so I want to share one more example from Vanta. This is Don and his team. They recently achieved SOC 2 with Vanta. And so of course we sent them some socks that say Soc1 and Soc2 on them and they sent us back this photo. And if we think about the three questions we asked up top, will it make them smile? Yes, I think pretty clearly. Will it make them nod their heads? We sent this at a moment where they had just achieved a milestone in using our product, but more importantly, they had achieved a milestone for their company. And so yes, I think we connected with them. We got them to nod their heads. Finally, they shared it on social media when they announced their sock too. So clearly they told a friend. So I want to thank you all for your time today. We only have a few minutes together. I'd love to continue the conversation either later at the Vanta booth or right now. I hope I've shared some examples that get you excited to inject some marketing or sorry, to inject some emotion into your own marketing. It's not just the job of the brand team. It's not something you need an expensive agency budget for. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it is about listening to your customers, driving empathy for them, and then communicating back to them them in the way that we all like to be communicated with as humans. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.