Good morning Bay Area product marketeers. Fantastic to be here. Just last month, November 2016, marked the 20th anniversary of my first day in product marketing. That was it. Literally two decades ago. First time, walked into the job and said, OK, now I′m doing this product marketing thing, let′s figure this out. It was nice. I marked the anniversary, nice quiet dinner. I wrote an MRD for old times sake. A little SWOT analysis, just to get those old feelings back. No, I think I marked it by looking in the mirror going, wow, you′re getting old. How are you not better at this stuff after 20 years? But I was taught on day one, I was taught on my first day that rule number one for marketing was to know your audience. That′s a little bit of what I′m going to talk about today. At the time, I internalized that as I need to understand the different audiences that I talk to as a product marketer. So a conversation with product management is different than a conversation with a salesperson. A journalist is going to understand things in a different way than an analyst. And talking to a prospect is going to be different than talking to a customer. What I realized later was that the more important piece of knowing your audience was really knowing the audience out there, right? All the people that you actually want to get to part with money for your company′s products and services. I′m Lance Walter. I am the CEO and CMO at a company called Capriza. Briefly what we do, we sit on top of any web-based application, could be a custom app, could be SAP, could be Salesforce Workday. And what we do is turn big complex enterprise workflows into beautiful personalized task-oriented micro apps for mobile devices. We tend to sell the global 5,000 great brand name companies very much in enterprise play, six figure ASP in a SaaS model delivered in the cloud. We are a mature startup. We fit the profile. So we are series C, funded to just a little shy of 80 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. And what we are going to talk about‬… sorry, let′s get this going. So first rule of marketing, know your audience. So now, reframing back to understanding that audience out there. What are some of the things we do as marketers, right, because the market is big and broad. What are some of the things we do to try and better understand how to approach that market. What do we do as marketers and product marketers. What are some of the tools, tricks, techniques we use? OK, surveys, great. Those teach us things. What do we learn from surveys? What does that tell us? How might we group customers? Right, we do segmentation. OK, below a billion, above a billion, those kinds of things. We heard on stage earlier today, heard the conversation about buyer personas. Who are the people who participate in a buying process? What motivates them? How do we crawl inside their head as product marketers and motivate them to participate in the sales cycle? And we group them by industries. We go, hey, you know, you're a chemical manufacturing company. We've got a great chemical manufacturing company as a customer. Let me tell you about what they're doing. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that we sometimes miss, I think, as organizations and as marketers in terms of understanding that marketplace, understanding that audience. And I'm going to do it. I think what we're going to talk about is relevant to any product marketing. That said, I'm going to do it through the lens, specifically, of a competitive replacement campaign. So let me ask you guys, how many of you are either actively working on competitive replacement campaigns or might be thinking about them for 2017? Anybody doing competitive replacement? OK, great. A lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of technology out there. There's not too many brand new market segments, right? There's a lot of cloud disrupting this on-prem thing. There's always a better mousetrap, but there aren't too many brand new mousetraps. So we were working on a competitive replacement campaign. I was at another mature startup, so this isn't a Capriza story, but that said, what you care about is relevance more so than Capriza. What happened was a conversation got going in the cubes, at headquarters, down in Redwood City. We had looked at the fact that we had replaced the market share leader in our space. It happened to be a product line from Oracle. We had replaced that at a handful of companies. We had done a few deals, and they were good deals. They were brand name companies and six figure transactions, and they were great. And what happened was somebody made a passing, that hallway mention of, wow, we're replacing the Oracle guy. God, we should do a program around it. We should get a campaign going. And then somebody just said that casually. Then all of a sudden, people in the cubes start doing that prairie dog thing, where their head comes up. You know what? That's a great idea. I want to do that. All of a sudden, one of our most senior pre-sales women gets excited. One of our sales guys is sitting right there. Yeah, we got to do it. We got to do it. So they're talking about it. And I will say the dynamics of a replacement campaign like this were challenging, because we happen to be selling applications to the Department of Finance. And Finance, the CEO of the company at the time, he would talk about how finance is like the goalie on the soccer field. They don't get to score goals. They don't get the glamour and attention that sales and marketing tends to have. They're just trying to prevent bad things from happening. They're playing defense. They're trying to minimize risk. And so they're extremely conservative. They don't want bleeding edge. Plus, marketers, if you come to me and go, I've got a secret weapon that none of your competitors have yet, OK, great. Let me check it out. Let me see what I can do. Finance, no. They know that people get bloody when they're on the bleeding edge. So very conservative audience. And we knew that there were a lot of different angles that we could take. We could go kind of classic cloud motherhood and apple pie, lower cost of ownership, less dependence on IT. It just so happened that the Oracle product we were trying to replace was going through a disruption in its lifecycle where these products were end of life, where there were replacement products, but it was essentially a re-implementation. But what it meant was people on the old products were either approaching or at essentially a desupport deadline. And then there were other things we could do, looking at some of the things that our product could do, maybe, that Oracle's product couldn't. And here's how that could change your, for example, financial planning process or your business measurement process. A lot of different opportunities we could take. And we knew, of course, that it was critical to align with sales. So it was great that there were a couple of salespeople already in this high energy conversation because competitive replacement, right? Marketing's going to try and create some tools, create some awareness, create some interest. Sales is going to have to execute that, play back what they heard in the conversations, that you can get better and better. So you guys have seen this movie before. What happens when you get a few smart people with a lot of energy around some kind of marketing idea happening out in the queue? What do we do next? So what's next? We go to the whiteboard. Hey, everybody into the conference room. This one's not booked. Let's whiteboard. You're smart. I'm smart. She's smart. He's smart. Let's whiteboard. So people start scribbling. We're talking. What are some offers? What's some messaging? What are the kinds of things we could do from a campaign perspective? Oh, I could see an email going out with this kind of imagery, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of, you know, it's one of the fun things I love about working in high tech, especially at startups, is there's just so much energy and passion and enthusiasm. It also created a great opportunity for product marketing to really earn its paycheck and to really show the value that marketing, and specifically product marketing, can bring to the table. I also had a longtime mentor of mine, former CMO. He said, never forget that marketing is the one job in the company that everyone thinks they could do. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Oh, I can use alliteration to come up with a catchy tagline. I can point at a website and go, that one looks pretty to me. How hard can it be, right? So this was a chance for product marketing to earn its paycheck. So the rest of the team really was looking at this tactically. Hey, we won a few deals. We'd like to win some more deals. Let's do something. Product marketing's in that conversation. Go, wait a second. But let's think about it. Let's think big picture here. Because, for example, is going after this opportunity, is it going to be in line? Is it going to reinforce the way we've positioned the company and the way we talk about the product offering? Is it going to be sort of synergistic and build on what we've already done? Or is it going to be just orthogonal? It's just sort of a different thing. Or is it potentially going to be something that undermines the positioning and the brand that we've spent so much time building out? So product marketing's there asking these questions. Rest of the room, hey, we're a startup. We move fast. We do things fast. Product marketing's in the room saying, hey, what's really, really important is that we do it right. Because at the end of the day, we have to make sure that it moves the needle for the business. Ad hoc approach. Hey, somebody in the room said, I'll just scribble down some notes. I'll send out an email. And we'll just kind of go from there. Marketing says, hey, wait a second. We're going to be accountable for what we execute here. So we need to sweat the details. We need to think about how we involve our partners, like Jocelyn mentioned. We need to worry about how we message the existing customer successes who moved over, because they don't want to trash other vendors. So it was really, hey, let's bring some discipline into the process. Listen to sales. I love listening to salespeople. My kids have clothes and eat food because of enterprise software salespeople and have for many, many years. So I appreciate tremendously what salespeople do. Salespeople are a phenomenal proxy for the market and piece of market input. But they are not the market itself. So product marketing's in the room saying, this is all awesome. Got to listen to the market. And see if it works. Sort of, hey, let's just do something. Let's try it. Let's do a drive-by. See if it works. And if it works, we'll double down. Whereas marketing is saying, hey, let's build a plan. I mean, you think competitive replacement. I mean, in my consumer life, I'm a DirecTV customer, Comcast that's trying to get me to switch. It wasn't like one touch. They send me mailers. Salesperson actually came to the house. They call. You don't just do competitive replacement as a one-shot drive-by. So product marketing was saying, hey, we're going to build a plan to execute against this. And it's not about, we're not trying to achieve ISO certification. We're not trying to be big company people. We're trying to build a plan so that we get the outcome that we want. We started talking about messaging. And there was a lot of sales energy in the room because sales had won some of these replacement deals. What do enterprise software salespeople like in terms of all the different buyer motivation, all the different reasons, core reasons a buyer would say, I'm going to cut you a check and buy your product. What's the favorite type of motivating emotion that sales likes among buyers? Come on. FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Sales loves fear. And what sales brought to the conversation was we need to go with fear. That will create a sense of urgency. So people were talking about things like, we should tell them that the products that they're on have been desupported by Oracle. We should tell them that you're going to have a lot of friction in your next audit because they're going to look at your consolidating and reconciling your financials on software that's no longer supported by the vendor. My favorite fear one, salesperson got up and said, we need to tell them, you, Mr. CFO, you are on a burning platform. Your whole department is running on a burning platform. Oh my god, burning platform. Jesus. I don't want to be on a burning platform. So the thought was, let's motivate them through fear. Andre on my team, product marketer, came out of a consumer background. I would echo what Byron said about the different perspectives that people who come out of the consumer space can bring and some of the expertise. You've done a lot of product launches. Consumer product launches, they're their own animal. People out of B2C also spend a lot more time on market research. So what Andre said was, hey, let's talk to some of the customers who have switched and get inside their head. And what we found, we talked to five customers, five for five, said, yeah, we were aware of desupport. We were aware of, you know, our audit could be a headache. We were aware of all those things. But we were motivated by a vision of a better future. We wanted a better process that worked better for the people and it would help the finance team make more of a difference and have a positive impact in the company. So the buyers were very much in kind of aspirational messaging, aspirational marketing. And the great news about the digital world that we live in that Manav touched on is that we could also AB test this digitally. We could just put some offers on the website, catch people. We could try negative messaging, fear messaging, and aspirational messaging and see what happened. And our digital signals lined up with our high touch signals, which was that the positive aspirational message was the way to go. Results were really outstanding. What you can see here is that we got better and better as we went. So we were happy with the first quarter, but we got better at it as an organization. We got more proof points and our SDRs got more comfortable with the pitch and salespeople got more educated around how to talk to these kinds of buyers. So we had dozens of wins in the first year, pretty good high dollar wins for a SAS model, six figures in ARR, close to a quarter million in bookings or TCV. 70% of those replacements were uncontested, which is another one like, it gives me some pause. You've got to take great care of your customers because you won't necessarily get the chance to defend your turf. And that's what we saw. We were replacing the market leading product, and by the time customers talked to us and were thinking about switching, Oracle was out of the picture. Oracle wasn't going to get a chance to re-enter the octagon and fight it out and defend that turf. That customer had emotionally moved on, and the opportunity was there for us or somebody else, but not Oracle. The one other thing I'd say about this is that it's a great example of product marketing being architects of growth. I saw the theme of the conference, architects of growth. I like it. Like a lot of great marketing to observers, it sounds simple. Rowan probably came up with that. He's probably driving to work one day. Let's go with architects of growth. Everybody likes growth. Make sense? My guess is that, like a lot of great marketing, there was a lot of thought that went into that. And deliberate choices. Why architects? OK, well, architects create a vision, and they have a plan. When you build a house, I don't know a lot about it, but you don't just start mapping out a foundation or worse yet, putting up drywall, OK, we're going to have a living room over here. You build a plan that shows you what the outcome is supposed to be. And architects of growth, growth is not an event. Growth is a process. So it's not a one-time drive-by thing. It's a, what's a plan that's going to help us drive growth? We were very fortunate to see that. In closing, so to give you a hopefully I've provoked some thinking here, and given you some thoughts on how to better understand the marketplace, on that general theme, I will tell you, like in the category of if I could go into a time machine back 15 years and give myself some advice, two best things I would tell you. First, do competitive win-loss analysis, and specifically, do third-party competitive win-loss analysis. How many of you use an outside firm to do win-loss analysis? So a few people. So Alan, you've got a great opportunity. At Capriza, we're a happy. Second works customer. Alan's going to take the stage later and tell you about it. I've also worked with Velocity Partners. They're good. So figure out who's the right fit for you, but get a third party to do your win-loss analysis. Your salespeople aren't trying to lie to you, but they won't have the full picture. Salesperson, in almost all cases in prior lives, salespeople, you know why we lost? We lost on price. Competition, bad guys dropped their pants. They bought the business. They gave the product away, and that's why I lost the sale. And that might even be what the customer said. The customer might have said, hey, they just came to us with an offer that we couldn't say no to. But when you work through a third party who doesn't have a relationship with that customer, who takes a professional, non-biased approach and hasn't drank your marketing and sales cool aid for years, you get a totally different picture of why you lost and even why you won. Even the deals that you won, right? Your salespeople, what they loved is our Excel integration. What they knew was that we were the only enterprise-grade solution. They may believe that. They may think that's true. It may even be what their customer told them. Third party win-loss analysis will tell you. And the other is, and this is borrowed from the consumer space, awareness surveys. We had something come up one week. Salesperson's going, you know, our competitor, our other cloud competitor is more visible than we are. Okay, Brett, why do you think that? Well, you know this week, I got three Google alerts on them and two Google alerts on us. Okay, so this week, you got three Google alerts on them, two on us, that's your scientific sample. But it was something we wanted to understand, not just to pacify a salesperson, but to understand. We did a third party awareness survey to try and understand where we were relative to other cloud competitors in our segment. The biggest thing that we learned, what really came back from it, was that the mainstream of the market had never heard of any of us. So we're sitting in Silicon Valley, go cloud, woohoo! We're awesome, we're taking over the world. Our mainstream finance buyer in the Rust Belt had no idea that any of the cloud companies even existed. And so it let us refocus instead of like, you know, the sort of rock-em-sock-em robots with another startup competitor. Hey, let's reach the mainstream of the market. So do third party awareness surveys if you want to understand how many people are really aware of your solution. Wrapping up, what you guys are doing today is a great investment. When you think about the value of all the time that's in this room for today, the to-do list, the weekend work that's gonna get done because people took the time to be in this conference, all of the good things I've ever learned in my marketing career came from working for and with really talented people like you. So thanks for making the investment to be here. Thanks for listening to me. Hope you get a chance to say hi on the lunch break. Enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.