JOCELYN KING
Insights Applied: Large Enterprise - Intel
Jocelyn King, Senior Director at Global Demand CenterJocelyn King from Intel shares her trials and best practices for understanding the market, aligning internally, and launching.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I′m really happy to be here, and it′s great to be networking with all of you. I come from a corporate marketing background, so I′m the person that Byron advocated and warned you about. So I′m very happy to be here with all of you talking about a significant change we had to do in launching a product at Altera. And Altera was acquired by Intel at the end of last year. It′s the largest acquisition in Intel′s history, and we are now a full business unit within the company. And what the Altera story is about is that we had a decentralized channel marketing approach. We would launch our products and really target our customers, but then we would also look at informing our channel and letting them do their own marketing programs. I have a quick question for you. How many of you have launched a derivative product? We′ve got a room full of product marketers. How many of you have launched a derivative product that needed to be sold to an entirely new audience? Okay, so that was the challenge that we had. It was a derivative product, but the ecosystem that we needed to plug ourselves into and where we needed to develop a name for ourselves with a new customer base and new decision makers. Even if they were at the same companies and accounts, they were different groups. They were different teams of decision makers. And we didn′t have a doubling of the budget in order to double the efforts. So we really had to look at how we could leverage our marketing efforts. And we did that through what Byron was reminding us of, which is that we need to have that single theme. And our theme here was reach, because we couldn′t reach this audience by ourselves without some creative ways to really get into the ecosystem and use that ecosystem to help us get our story out. And just briefly, because we′ve worked with Sirius, we were really transforming our marketing organization over a number of years. And by the time we had laid a foundation of understanding our buyers' journeys, having personas built out and building all of our launches and content for marketing aligned to those journeys, we then were able to really focus on the channel and look at our channel partners as a unique audience and having their own decision making process as well. So to launch to the new ecosystem, we really had to break it down. What this graph is meant to show you is the blue boxes are where we were really looking at adding to the number of people we had to engage, the types of personas that we had to engage with a different product. And how we solved it was really by engaging our partners in a new way. And that was really about changing from launching to our partners to really thinking about launching through our partners and how to really make our partners successful and really treat them as an extension of us in a way that we hadn't before. We certainly saw them as partners. We certainly did pre-planning with them. But this was about really engaging them in a new way and understanding their unique differences. Not all partners are equal. Some of them have different approaches to how they do their own customer engagement. So we really wanted to make sure we were optimizing the materials we were giving them, the communications we were giving them, training we were giving them, and the opportunities to touch our end customers and bring them together from an ecosystem so that we could help make them successful. And we did that on a scale that we hadn't done before. And we did it with the same amount of resources that we had used for traditional product launches. So really going from launching to to launching through and for. And what we ended up doing was really focusing on our efforts on what Sirius Decision uses as this model. Looking at not just stopping at the launching and the promoting and moving on to the next product, but really extending this for the whole rest of the year post launch of making sure that we were educating and engaging their end customers and those channel partners themselves. And that really developed a much richer engagement. And what we did in planning was look at the personas that we traditionally marketed to. We looked at the buyer decision making journey and we added the new decision makers. And we made sure that as we were building content for the launch and support materials for the launch and all the things that product marketing, corporate marketing with channel marketing, and channel sales were all working in lock step and collaboratively to make sure that we were engaging this audience and making them effective. So what we did pre-launch was a lot of the things that we always did, getting ready for the press releases, getting ready for the training materials. But then we really looked at making sure that we had materials that our partners could also leverage and that we could co-brand, that they could leverage in their own materials and adapt. We wanted to make each one of them successful and make sure that they also had their own differentiation from their peers. And as we were launching to them, we broke out what would have been more of a generic educational video into very targeted persona based materials so that we could launch to this new audience, we could launch to our traditional audience, we could make sure that the most technical of our channel partners would have something valuable to them, but also a salesperson who was not technical could also understand it. So we really looked at our entire content and launch planning through the lens of each persona so that we were making sure we were making them successful by themselves. And a major thing that we did was focus on how we could bring this ecosystem together, and we did that through a series of user conferences. And that's not new, obviously, but what was new about this was our entire metric for success about this was not just what the attendees at the event saw as valuable, it was our entire measurement was around do our partners who were coming to this event find it successful, and are they going to come back. And by doing that, of course we have to engage the attendees because that matters to our partners, but by making sure that our partners wanted to return, saw high value in this, really felt we had partnered with them, heard them in a new way, gave them a great opportunity to show what they were doing with our products, we engaged this ecosystem beyond the high bar that we had set for ourselves. And that allowed us to have a very successful post launch engagement, you know, three months, six months, nine months, one year after launching the product, we were having all these new customers come in, it was a new solution for them, and our partners got to be the heroes of helping them have solutions for their end markets, for their applications, and we really got to make them the heroes of the reach of our product. And we launched this globally, we had one in each of our major regions, and what was really helpful here was that the partner sponsors and the exhibitors, first all we had twice as many as we had originally targeted, we had people coming in wanting to get into the next one because they couldn't make this one after they were hearing about it, and so we exceeded all of our attendance objectives, and we had a tremendous amount of positive coverage in the press and with attendees and social media, and that was globally and in multiple languages. So the outcomes were that we were really able to leverage the finite resources that we had to create the, you know, to really engage this whole new ecosystem, and we did that in a way by designing a single launch program that was really aimed at each persona and then allowing each of our GOs to adapt to their local market, but we really made sure that we were engaging each of the markets. So as an example, in China we had, you know, we had Chinese and English presenters, so we did simultaneous UN style translation, and we had a lot of people telling us, well, they hadn't been to an event that was really focused on making sure that they fully understood everything, and so there was a lot of engagement, and that came from allowing our local teams to really say, what is going to make your event the most successful? What have you heard before about other companies' events? How can we make sure that all of our sponsors, when they're speaking, regardless of language, are feeling like they're getting the reach of the entire room? And so we had a number of creative ideas come from our own team just by putting the right end goals in place about truly engaging our partners. We had over 97 percent of the partners plan to sponsor again, which was well beyond our aggressive goal, and we had over 90 percent of the attendees see value in attending again. So for a first event on a modest resource and modest budget, this was really a huge success for us. And then we also for Lesson Learned, we, you know, one month before we sat down and we made sure we were looking at it through the lens of all the attendees and the sponsors again, and we said, is every, are we doing everything right? Because as you've heard from John and Byron and Jeff already this morning, we can get very caught up on the inside out, you know, the way groups work together, the way budgets are allocated, and we realized that we had made some decisions about things we were cutting, doing, not doing based on internal org structure or cost center decisions, and we realized there were just a few things we needed to change. We removed the barriers and we made the event much more successful. So the premortem was really helpful where we got together and we said, the event's over, what went well, or the event's over, what went wrong, what happened? And we allowed all the creativity of our own teams and our partners to come out and help us make a much richer, a much richer channel experience and event for our customers. So the key thing to launching to this new ecosystem was really getting reach. So we had, you know, we heard from Byron, what's that one word theme? This was about reach. We didn't have additional resources internally. We didn't, we had to look at how to put this into our existing resource model, our existing busy calendar of other product activities and our existing marketing budgets, and we were able to do it by really making sure that we were focused on the personas, the buyer journey, engagement, and how can we really engage our channel because the way we're going to reach all of these new customers and new decision makers who are going to be picking our product over other solutions was going to be through our partners. So it was truly that focus on the partner, and we talk a lot about always wanting to satisfy and delight customers. This was about wanting to satisfy and delight partners, and you know, very often internally we think of partners as working for us. They need to do what we tell them to do, ask them to do, you know, contractually agree to do. This was about total change in engagement, and they really felt it. The comments that they gave us were that, well, they had never had groups partner with them in such a way, and they felt really listened to. They felt that the things they were asking for were really being delivered. So that was a big learning for us and something that we said, definitely going to keep doing. So with that, I am on the clock, and I'd be happy to talk to any of you at the break, and what we've subsequently done is take, you know, how we want to engage the channel and the partner, and now that Altera is part of Intel and a business unit there, we're now incorporating that even into the group that I'm leading at Intel, the Global Demand Center, which is looking at, you know, where we really need to grow the markets, how do we engage the customers, and how do we engage the channel to follow up on those customers that we don't call on directly. And that's what the best product marketing and demand marketing are all about in the partnership. So thank you, and I really appreciate being part of your conference. Thank you.