MANAV KHURANA
Insight Applied: Mid-size Enterprise - Twilio
Manav Khurana, VP Product Marketing at TwilioManav Khurana, VP of Product Marketing from Twilio shares his trials and best practices for understanding the market, aligning internally, and launching.
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Product Marketing CommunityView transcript
Wow, Rowan took my punch line away. So, I don‒t know what I want to talk about. Thank you, Rowan. It‒s great to be here. You know, what I thought I‒d redo is step back two and a half years ago to when I started working at product marketing at Twilio. I was the first product marketer there. Now we are a team of 15, trying to go to 19, as Rowan said, in the next few weeks here. And it was not my first product marketing gig. I was in the first product marketing gig. I had done this two times previously at two other startups, part of really incredible teams that took the company public. We saw a lot of success in what we were doing and I really learned a lot. And when I came into Twilio, I got this. I had done this a couple of times before. I‒m going to jump right in, use my playbook and go. I was so excited. Yes, let‒s go. Let‒s do it. And I got here two and a half years ago and I realized not only do I need to learn about this business, about the customers, about the technology, but I need to unlearn everything that I knew in my product marketing playbook for one single reason. And that reason is that the way our customers, our customers, and in fact, a lot of organizations in this world are buying software has changed or is changing very, very fast. And because they are buying software differently, the way you market that software or you do product marketing has to change differently. It‒s still the same why and the same what. It‒s just the how is very different because customers are not buying software. They are building software. It‒s kind of a silly question, but how many of you know Uber and Airbnb? How many of you think of them as a transportation or hospitality company? Over in San Francisco, I figured very few hands would raise because they are software companies. You go visit them and they are full of product managers and software developers. They are building software for running their business in transportation and hospitality. And that‒s not just a Soma phenomenon in San Francisco or Williamsburg, Brooklyn phenomenon. Many major brands around the world are shifting to being digital first and software first. Nike has more software developers than shoe designers. Goldman Sachs, one of the most conservative financial companies in the world, they have more software developers than Facebook because they build their own business process in software. GE wants to be a top ten software company. Examples keep on going and we see this every day. Major global 2000 brands are switching to building and composing software rather than buying software because if they bought software, they would have the exact same thing as their competitor down the street. They want the customization. They want the ability to do different unique things and do so very quickly. And the way they are building software is different than it was back in the 80s or 70s when Oracle came out and said don't reinvent the wheel. They are not building software in the hammer pants era with C or C++. They are building software with cloud platforms. Platforms like AWS for compute and storage. Platforms like Google for location and maps. Cloud platforms like New Relic for analytics, like for payments and Twilio for communications. That's where we fit in. That's how software is being built these days. Now, here's an interesting thing about these cloud platforms. Not only do they provide building blocks for companies to build their new software and change it, but the way these platforms are sold, the business model behind these platforms is upside down. There is no upfront subscription or capital investment that a customer needs to make to adopt these platforms. The customer literally goes online, sets up an account, starts using the product or the service, and when they are successful with the service, they start paying on a per usage basis. Per payment, per megabyte of storage, per communication, per data portion of analytics that they run. That's the model in which they are adopting the software. So, you know when Rowan said earlier, 57% of the sales cycle is over before sales engages a customer or customers learn about you a lot before you get to reach them? It got extremely exaggerated for us at Twilio because sales gets involved with these companies, our customers, a lot later in the cycle. Not when they discover us. It's when they're already successful with us. Are they ready for a transaction and sales gets involved? I just could not figure out how to do product marketing in an environment where sales does not get involved for a sale. They get involved much later on. So then, we say, okay, let's get ahead in the game. Let's figure this out. And here are four or five ways how we do product marketing differently and why I think this is going to be pretty important moving forward. First up, you know, every product marketing team learns about customers. Whether they learn about the way, you know, Pragmatic and Sirius was telling us to do it or some of their own way but they learn about customers. You cannot do marketing unless you know the market. Pretty obvious. In my previous careers, the way we learned about customers in product marketing was we used to talk to sales and we used to go on sales meetings. And that was a great way of aggregating information back on what is happening in the market and what customers care about. But now because sales gets involved a lot later in the sales cycle, when the transaction happens, not when the success happens or the first adoption of the product happens, at that point, the only way we had to learn how to do, we had to figure out how to learn from customers was by going on the website, looking at the patterns of what our customers are doing on the website, analytics, throwing up surveys on the website using tools like Qualaroo. When we do message testing, we don't go to our sales team and ask them to test with customers, we set up interviews and calls and set up surveys to learn about customers. It's very different but also it's a lot, lot faster to do so. I imagine that our counterparts in B2C companies do a lot of this. So we have to really adopt that practice in B2B. The other major thing that product marketing teams do is they write a lot of content, product content specifically. It used to be very important every time we did a launch or every time we were talking about a product to describe what product and features had been built by the engineering team and by the product team and we applied a lot of creativity in describing what was built already. Well, in this particular case, when our customer is adopting a cloud platform, that is not the end product. They're using the cloud platform as building blocks to build a final product. What's more important in our business is to inspire our customers and what they can build in the future with the building blocks we provide rather than talking about competitive battle cards and talking about product data sheets that we did in the past. What's important shifts quite a bit. Somebody was talking about flavored water earlier. They just don't talk about the features of flavored water. They talk about how you feel about it and what you can do with that flavored water. It's more of a lifestyle brand that you start creating about products. Again, something what B2C companies do, we have to adopt that methodology in B2B. Demand-gen content. We do a lot of demand-gen content as product marketers. In fact, our demand creation teams often depend on us to create demand-gen content for creating MQLs that turn into SQLs, that turn into sales enablement content. Extremely important. But if your customer is learning about you before your sales team meets them, what's way more important in this business, in this new way that people are building software, is to create content for discovery, create content for onboarding so that customers can have the best experience and the fastest experience to get what they want right away without some human in your organization talking to them. Just again, a shift of focus of how we do it. So digital content and digital approaches to content change completely. Then upsell and cross-sell. I love this. As a product marketer, thinking about all the different triggers and opportunities that we can find programmatically to understand when a customer wants to solve an adjacent problem and figure out what adjacent product we have or what adjacent capability we can offer to solve that extra problem, not only helping the customer but also creating new revenue streams from an existing customer. We always did that in the past through sales enablement because sales was right there talking customers every day. When you have tens of thousands of people signing up every day and millions of people using your platform, there's no way the sales team can talk to every sales, every customer. So the way we changed our focus was to start looking at automated workflows, things that are inside the product or inside the service, things that are if they do action A, all of a sudden see action content B on the website. Those are the kinds of automated workflows that we think about first before we do sales enablement for upsell and cross-sell. The list goes on. I can spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes giving you example by example. But really, to summarize it all, the new product marketing playbook is that the product marketing team at Twilio doesn't support the product brand, they own the product brand. It's their words that customers see before they choose to adopt the product. And then they also own product adoption because the sale comes after the adoption. That's where sales gets involved is after the adoption and product marketing owns the adoption. So just think about that. If you as a product marketer own the brand for your product and you own the adoption of your product, what's really the definition of product marketing? I'll give you a simple one. Product marketers in the future or situations where customers are making choices before they talk to your sales team are the CMO of their products. That's the new playbook, that's the new mantra that we have within the company and how we think we're going to scale product marketing at Twilio. And how we get there is also different. It's very hard to really make all of these new things to do, get all these new things that product marketers do get done with the same approach to product marketing in the past, but also is a different skill set or different mindset that's required. So our measure usually when we try to hire, we're all about growth not only of the business but also scaling the organization, we look at folks who can bring business intuition, technology curiosity, curiosity of what makes a product tick, and creativity and operate on all those three vectors together. When you see a product marketer, this is not just at Twilio, anywhere operating at all three aspects together at the intersection of the three, that's when they do their best work and that's what we get to do every day at Twilio. Happy to take any questions. My name is Manav. I run product marketing at Twilio. As Rowan said, we are hiring so if you have, want to come chat with me, always here. Thank you.