Marketing planning in B2B: insights from experts at BESTMIX Software, Trystar, Kibo Commerce, and Digital Science | B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

Speaker A: Today we are talking about marketing planning in B2B.

Speaker B: It creates a lot of chaos when we've got shared resources and have a product boss. I have segment bosses, I have my boss.

Speaker C: If I give you a presentation and it's a good story, you know it's a good story, you don't need to say well how many people did this story convert?

Speaker D: What I hate is looking at only one um, metric. One metric does not tell you the full story. You could have amazing website traffic and it's not converting.

Speaker E: And they don't care about all other metrics. They just want to know very specific outcome on business people, period. That's it. So I have lots of freedom in this regards but then a very strong commitment to deliver what I promised.

Speaker A: Hi, welcome to the B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast. And today we are talking about uh, marketing planning in B2B. How companies approach it, who is involved, some priorities, experiments and the role of AI a little bit of course. And we have some great experts today. And let's start with the introductions. Doug, please start.

Speaker E: Sure.

Speaker B: Hi, good afternoon, good day, good morning wherever you are. Uh, Doug Kimble, Senior director of Product marketing and Digital science. I've been in marketing for let's just say 25 years. I don't overdate myself. Everything from a global VP to a CMO, uh, to product marketing. Big ah focus mainly has been on messaging and positioning and help to drive marketing growth.

Speaker A: Great, thank you. Thank you Doug. Hello.

Speaker D: Uh, hey everyone. Rahul. Um, great to be here. I work as a strategic marketing manager at Tristar. Um, been in marketing for pretty much the last 10ish years. Um, started my career in software, uh, done digital marketing, um demand gen, uh currently uh, sort of more on the strategic side of things but you know, um, all sorts of fun stuff with AI. All the cool stuff you'll see on LinkedIn. So fun.

Speaker A: Yeah. Great. Thank you for joining. Olga please.

Speaker E: So hi, I'm Olga and I'm uh head uh of marketing. Currently I'm head of marketing at Best Mix Software. Actually for the last 20 years. I think even when I was a student I already started my career in marketing and from my early 20s I actually taking roles of marketing leadership. So I love my job. I'm very passionate about this. I'm very happy to be here today.

Speaker A: Thank you, thank you. We are also happy to have you today. Today. Um, thank you. Matt please.

Speaker C: Hi. I guess we have two, two Olga bees today. So hello everybody, I'm Natalia Pavage and call me Nat. Uh, I've been in tech for over 20 years. But in that time I've done a little bit of everything. Sales, product. Now I lead product marketing for Kiba Commerce. Um, I have three AI patents and I have founded two podcasts, uh, Commerce Innovators and the Commerce Order which you can check out um, anywhere you listen to podcasts. So hello, I'm uh, very happy to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much for joining and for. It would be great to explore your podcast. I think we'll add the links uh, to the description. Let's just jump to the planning, uh, topic in B2B marketing. And it's very interesting because I believe that different companies, they approach B2B marketing planning differently. And how does this process work in your company this year? Who would you like to start?

Speaker C: I think you got to pick. Nobody's going to take the first cookie, right? So you got to pick, pick somebody.

Speaker B: I'll jump in because mine, I think mine is probably the most chaotic I've been been involved with in a couple years. We have five segments in the organization. We've got enterprise, academic, government, uh, publisher and B2C. And each of those have their own basically head of head of marketing and ahead of AVP overall. And so they each plan their go to market activities um, in their own group and then basically feed that down for lack of better word from market segment lead down to my team on product marketing but also to the growth marketing teams working with obviously the big picture goals. But they each have their own segment goals which on the service makes a lot of sense until you look at the fact that product marketing being a shared service goes across a lot of things and have a product boss. I have segment bosses, I have my boss. Um, it's interesting. So how does it work? It's working. I mean obviously we're doing well as a company but it's still, it creates a lot of chaos when we've got shared resources. In some cases product marketing specifically aligned against the segment. In some cases product line to go across sometimes 3, 4, 5 or only one segment. So it, it works.

Speaker C: I, I think um, I'm probably on the opposite spectrum. Uh, Kiba Commerce is probably a smaller organization. Um, it's very tight knit and so it really kind of starts with like overall, what are the company goals? Ah, so we would get together as a senior leadership leadership team. Obviously for us it's always pipe deals closed, acd, uh, being in product marketing, um, we touch a little bit of everything. So really we're kind of in a support position to make sure. We're always supporting the lead gen team, uh, in creating leads, the partner team in uh, you know, drumming up partner business. So in the sales team and how they're telling that story to the, to the customers. Um, so product marketing is involved in a little bit of everything. Um, but it's very tight, related to goals and then very much on who's, who's carrying what bag. So then there's like a set of responsibilities uh, and follow through and then we sort of record that throughout the year.

Speaker E: So in our case we also have pretty small organization, ah, like medium size. And in our case it's not that complex. It's not matrix, it's linear. And marketing in the driver's seat in many cases. Uh, because uh, normally we take business, uh, strategy, I mean business goals actually we translate it to marketing strategy and together with our product owners and together with our sales team because they're on different sides actually shaping plan based on goals. Indeed. Because that's the, that's the how to say starting point that what do we want to achieve? And afterwards we try to figure out how we want to achieve it, how we can achieve it. And it's, it's pretty straightforward. You know, being part of Microsoft um, for 10 years, I know that there, it's really can be a mess. But in small organization everything is much easier and simpler I would say.

Speaker A: Great, thank you, thank you for sharing. Rahul, would you like to continue?

Speaker D: No. So somewhere, somewhere in the middle, uh, of those two extremes, uh, our leadership team meets at the end of each year. They kind of look at some of the macro trends, competitive moves, um, growth levers and you know, this is our vision for the next year. Based on that it kind of flows down to functional heads. Um, you know, marketing, sales, um, it's kind of pros and cons because there's a lot of ownership with each functional head. You know, this is our vision, this is what we want to do. You do it on your own. Now how you achieve this goal, um, but then there's also some cross functional, um, collaboration. Obviously the marketing team will set up their goals. But then you know, for example, how do we position ourselves in a given market? What's our goal there? That's a product influence. And then what does the customer need? What are the pain points? That's kind of a sales input. And then we sort of come up with our goals and campaigns and content.

Speaker A: Xyz, thank you so much. And what time horizon do you usually plan for? Is it a year or a quarter or Maybe longer period of time.

Speaker D: Um for us annual um, we meet quarterly where we'll sort of revise. Um, but otherwise you know we kind of meet at the end of the year and have that plan sort of ready to go.

Speaker C: We have a combination so definitely half year. So half year um, and then quarterly checkpoints. So um, similar, similar to what Rule does at tristar. Um, but we also have a lot of monthly um so we do a lot of Scrum methodology across the entire organization. So basically how product works, the rest of the organization works. Um and so you know when we're going towards a goal we'll have a uh, daily Scrum uh as a marketing team um with everybody involved and then we also have a lot of pivots so uh, we do a lot of um which basically do agile. Right. So if something's not working we'll change in month M. Um, last year we actually rebuilt the website twice because we were not happy with uh the first time and we were willing to say let's scratch that and let's try again because it wasn't good enough. Um and so you have to be willing to let go of the losses that you've incurred in order to really come in and make something better.

Speaker E: Actually I have to say I guess we have exactly the same case. We had to crush our new website

Speaker C: because do we work at the same company? Olga?

Speaker E: I'm under covered. Yeah. Uh, but it was exactly the same case and in three weeks we are launching our new website. Uh, because it was just not a big success I have to say. See a lot of dead ends and uh, not three weeks.

Speaker C: We did four weeks so you beat us to that.

Speaker E: But you move out for eight months.

Speaker C: Oh, eight months. No, we did it in four weeks.

Speaker A: Yeah, probably

Speaker C: it was a lot of AI and then human uh, and then human. But there was a lot of generation uh with AI in the beginning.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. No for our in us in our case it's just developer and sorry Olga, for the off topic it's a pain point for me now so no worries, no worries.

Speaker A: That's fun.

Speaker E: Regarding the um planning for us, it has different layers. With third party media partners we have to do early um planning like for the entire year. Otherwise the good spots will be gone, good dates will be gone. So we really have to do it very fast, very early and on annual basis. For other activities we do quarterly uh planning with also verification to see where we are, what is the outcome, how we are going in terms of achieving the goal. So that's, that's again, pretty much similar with Natalia. So. Indeed. Maybe we'll see each other in, in the office.

Speaker C: Maybe, uh, I'll see you at the next meeting.

Speaker B: For us, it's, it's generally quarterly, but since we've got, you know, both B2B and B2C, with B2C, obviously we've got to be a bit more flexible. And that, you know, pivot is the word of the day for us in product marketing for sure. But, um, generally it's quarterly. Some of the challenges we run into because we do a lot of product launch. Let me rephrase that. Releases and launches. One, uh, of the things I changed when I came on board is that product owned the commercial launch when I came on board of like. No, that doesn't happen anymore. So we're trying to do less launches and more commercial focus on that and generally trying to take that to either a quarterly or a bi monthly piece because that helps us to plan for. There was days we'd have two webinars, completely different products, completely different segments of the same day, and we'd lose attention. So we're getting to more of a generally quarterly cadence for our planning. So it allows us to be both nimble but also respectful. The different segment needs and the audiences they have, which, you know, making progress. And there's a lot of pivots that have happened in the last year here. I've only been there since August, but that's, that's part of why we're making those changes. To move from product centric to the market centric mindset.

Speaker E: Mm. Yeah.

Speaker A: I really love that all of you have flexibility in planning. Because I believe in marketing, especially in B2B. It's about testing different hypotheses, testing what works, what doesn't work, and just, uh, getting rid of something that doesn't work. Yeah, very fast.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's why I think it's really great. And what goals do you set for B2B marketing? So it's more about, for example, revenue related goals or brand awareness or something. A combination of everything. So please share as well.

Speaker B: I'll jump in because mine the easiest because I think, Olga, I've talked before and I mentioned this in my presentations and in my book. I hate metrics. I just, I've never been good at metrics. I had to become as a CMO and as a vp. I just, I just don't like metrics because what product marketing does can be harder to measure. So I'll just put my qualifications out there front looking for everybody else's. Perspectives. But ultimately it's around how what we do ties to pipeline creation and conversion all through the process. So everything from website metrics to conversion from demo requests into requesting a require and requesting a, uh, call to action for, let's have a salesperson measuring all those and decreasing that time from being a browser to clicking that I want to demo because for us, um, demo requests are converting the most high right now. And uh, customer success, customer tickets coming in, those are our two highest conversions. So focusing our content on those and our funnel, funnel activities on those is where we're, we're going to see the most activity. But I'm just not a fan of metrics.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: Um, you know, it's funny, Doug, that you talk about metrics. I think from my perspective, product marketing is more difficult to measure. I think that there's an element of like, people are always asking me, well, how are you impacting lead gen? And that's really difficult to quantify. Right. Um, but I think of metrics more from like a scientific hat, um, perspective. I have a background in physics. Sometimes you can look at a system and a metric will tell you how it's performing regardless of your impact on it. So, for example, you know, let's say, you know, we had this metric like our close rate. What's our close rate? And so you might say, well, you know, our close rate is 25%. Well, gee, that's really high. Um, and is that a good thing? It does that actually mean that we're not pursuing enough business? Right. So if we're only pursuing the business that we know we can close and are we leaving money on the table? Could we be closing more net, um, but have a lower, ah, conversion at the end? So it, you know, metrics are not necessarily always meant to be optimized in the direction that you think they should be. So you kind of have to think carefully about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great idea because of course if the volume increases, the conversion will be lower.

Speaker C: It's just you got to look at multiple numbers. Exactly.

Speaker D: That's exactly what I was going to say. That is exactly what I was going to say. I am not. I do like metrics, uh, because I come from a analytics background, so I can't, um, survive without analytics. But what I hate is looking at only one metric. Just boil down your success to only revenue. Fine. I want to measure revenue pipeline.

Speaker E: Great.

Speaker D: Um, but one metric does not tell you the full story. You could have amazing website traffic and you know, it's not converting you could have good lead conversion, as Nat said. Um, but are, ah, you actually leaving money on the table? Could you be reaching out to more folks? Um, so definitely that's something that I have insisted from day one as part of the team, that we do not measure one thing. It could be multiple metrics. You can combine those into a, uh, you know, index and have like a sort of consolidated view of things. Uh, but yeah, full funnel awareness, engagement, conversion. Um, and as we are maturing, we are starting to look more towards sales velocity pipeline conversion ratios. Um, but yeah, definitely one number. No, sir, that's not happening.

Speaker C: I think, uh, I always think about, um, the book, the, um, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don't know if anybody here has heard of it. And I always think about, read it. Honestly, I always think about this part that talks about quality is inherently obvious. If you look at something, you can tell if it's, if it's quality. And I think that's very true for product marketing. Um, if I give you a presentation and it's a good story, you know, it's a good story, you don't need to say, well, how many people did this story convert? Or can we change the story, make it a worse story? Like, that's not a meaningful question to ask. Right. So I think sometimes, um, you do have to think, you know, outside of metrics and having. Having carried a sales bag for a significant number of years, I think what's important is sometimes your business might not be booming for a variety of reasons. And so you have to look at secondary metrics. Are we as an operation, behaving to the maximum of our ability and to the maximum of our quality output? Right. So are we in those situations, really firing on all cylinders despite the fact that maybe top line metrics are not revealing? Xyz. Right. So you always have to look, to Raul's point, not just look at one metric, but at everything. For a salesperson, it would be, I'm not hitting my number, but am I making my calls? Am I making my meetings? Am I talking to enough people? Am I talking to enough leads? And that eventually will lead up to a return to the top line number that you're looking for.

Speaker B: I just want to stop and applaud. I've said that. Nailed it.

Speaker C: Oh, thank you, Doug.

Speaker B: It's not just one thing.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: And again, I've been product marketing for almost 18 years and I know I and my team do great work and we can show results, but sometimes it's like being a project manager. If you're not there doing your daily job, all kinds of things fall apart at the end of the day. I can't always say like I moved the needle, but if I wasn't here the needle wouldn't even do anything but applaud.

Speaker A: And the question is about how to balance between for example of course we need to invest in for example brand and some awareness activities. And we also need to invest in um, something like lead generation and more sales related activities. And how do you balance these two streams and how do you choose for example what part of the budget allocate to more brand and awareness ah, related um, activities and what part of the budget to allocate to lead generation and more maybe fast results activities. What do you think about it?

Speaker E: I didn't answer the previous question so um, I will just return back if you don't mind quickly. That enough. We have one metric report because nobody cares about reach, uh, clicks, uh even conversion rates, uh from demo requested to demo delivered to demo success and etc. So it all remains within commercial team. The only metric which uh, everybody cares is uh, what is the marketing influence Revenue. But of course in marketing we have multiple um, different KPIs which we measure and I would say that we speak split this into quantity and quality metrics. So that's pretty much I think the same what Natalia mentioned. And obviously again we see how we go in terms of our big goal which is revenue and uh, then you know we just track specific metrics on the journey which support some hypothesis which we build let's say um, the, the challenge in marketing can do. There are so many things you can measure that sometimes it just drives you crazy and sometimes you do measurement sake of doing measurements. And that's why I dropped many metrics which from my point of view didn't serve anything. Just making beautiful reports. So that's that part. And in terms of lead generation versus awareness, um, our business is quite unique. What we noticed that awareness activities driving much better conversions than lead generation activities. So that's why in our case we do lots of investment. I would say around 60% goes to awareness to brand, uh, awareness to thought leadership, uh and then around 40% we allocate to lead generation which again doesn't show as good efficiency as awareness related activities.

Speaker C: Olga, could we swap our budgets? Could we swap.

Speaker E: We can solve companies.

Speaker C: All right, sounds good

Speaker A: merchant. So yeah, thank you. Thank you Olga. That's amazing that brand related activities they convert better. So uh, who'd like to continue on

Speaker C: this balance between I was gonna Let Doug talk. But I'll jump in before I think, because I do think he's still on the, on the line for his next comment. But, um, when I was at Salesforce, you know, we went through a period of brand building. I think when I started at Salesforce in 2016, nobody really, in Canada at least, people didn't really know what Salesforce was. Um, and so at the same other time, Sarah Franklin spent a lot of money. Brand awareness. So that's where you get the like super bowl commercials, you get the Dreamforce. Um, there is an element of like that kind of budget doesn't make sense for like a company like Kibo. Right. So it doesn't make sense for us to have our own dream force. In order to have a dream force, you really have to go all out. Um, and if you don't go all out, it's a half measure. So the actual roi, it's almost like there's a cutoff. If you do not spend this much, just don't spend any of it at all because you won't get the roi. So it all depends on like the size of the company, but also your market, your target market. Is it everyone? Is it a small, is it a niche? And then you need to be more targeted with how you're investing. And when you're brand building is also like, you could go through different phases of brand building. You could be in a brand building phase and then at some point you need to coast. Because now everybody does know what a Salesforce is. Now the game is different. I was recently reading a Wall Street Journal article that mentioned IBM, uh, without, without the acronym. They actually listed it out, International Business Machines. And I thought to myself, like, did people forget what IBM is? Um, and I think the answer is yes, they did. Um, in fact, the new, like the new generation that's now reading it needs to be reminded of what they do as a value proposition. So there's definitely like a boom and bust period that uh, a brand can go through within the tech world. I'm going to pass it to Doug though.

Speaker B: No, I'm going to jump that awareness piece. And again, a little bit jealous because I've always been a fan of awareness as a big focus. Which actually plays into the next question which you're talking about budgeting and planning for things. One of the things that I'm pushing for now is, is I'm going to kick start an analyst relations program at the company of Digital science, because we don't have one. And for a company that's been around for 10 years and you know we're about 100 million company. Wow. I mean we need to. And I'm not being negative, it's just they've been doing other things but it's one of those things. Now to, to Olga's point, um, making sure they understand this is not an AR program is not gonna be a lead generation machine. It's, it's gonna be taking time to even get to the awareness stage. But it is going to have an impact. I've done AR for years. It's got an impact on awareness and engagement and thought uh, leadership and all those things that drive to hey, I should go find digital science for these particular reasons. So big, big fan of awareness. How do you sell that idea? It's taken me some time to get there. My enterprise segment is all in because they understand very much plays in the B2B side Academic and government. They're like. So now my job is to explain to them the, the medium term value they can get from what by engaging in these conversations, having analysts mention us. So it's, it's really just an explanation game at this point.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's what wanted to add something to.

Speaker C: I was gonna say, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I, I think that the AR business can get you leads. Um, I think we've gotten to a stage where because we are one of the top contenders within the quadrants certainly um, challengers um and movers, um we do get invited shortlisted in the first five, 10 because people know of Kibo. But also I find that um, generative or what's called now answer engine optimization is I believe the term that has officially won as I have been told. Analyst um reports factor heavily into that. So it will help you boost you know when people are asking questions, um, AR stuff will factor into that.

Speaker A: Yeah, good point. And Rahul please, um, jump in.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean it's actually a very interesting question for us because uh, it kind of depends on two things. One, where we are as an organization we're sort of in our growth states. So we are kind of kicking off that process of investing in the brand. Um but on the flip side the business we are in which is manufacturing of power distribution solutions, um the nature of the product and the solution itself is actually very compliance and tech heavy. Um and so one of the areas where we do a significant amount of business is data center and utilities, you know, uh, quite literally powering the AI that everyone is using. But those guys don't necessarily care so much about a brand? Is there a premium people would pay? Is there a value in that brand equity? I think that's kind of a very interesting dynamic for us which we're sort of just starting to figure out and get into. Um, but more from a tactical perspective. Definitely SEO, aeo, geo, whatever you want to call it, Thought leadership, uh, that's kind of a space. Um, we have a massive uh, sort of uh, goal to move into. You know, example, Schneider Electric. That's a, that's a name that everyone just knows. So we are not trying to be Schneider Electric, obviously TriStar. But that's kind of a uh, sort of aspirational target that we kind of look to for inspiration.

Speaker C: Yeah, you guys should just make a toaster just to get out there. Yeah, just make like a TriStar toaster. TriStar toaster, yeah. Yeah. Make a B2C product.

Speaker D: We, we actually had an idea to do something similar that uh, at the Minneapolis airport. We're based out of Minnesota. We would actually provide charging stations and, and we would even provide you coffee. You know, we power AI. We can power humans as well. That's not a bad idea. But obviously my, my boss didn't necessarily give me the budget to actually go out and do that.

Speaker E: So.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe later sometime. Yeah. So um, let's talk about how to uh, make it transparent. For example, your plan and budget, uh, transparent to leadership. What helps you to do so, for example, some reporting meetings or some other interesting tactics and approaches. Please share.

Speaker C: I was like a SWOT analysis. Um, this may not be very good tactically but I do like to lean into discussing weaknesses early on. Um, so I think for example two things that have come up is the, the talent situation now is significantly different. Um, we are you know, heavily looking at talent that's used to AI or knows how to leverage AI effectively. That's not working in the traditional old way. Another, I'm just like telling you all of our weaknesses now, but another one is like the um, agency, um, landscape has significantly been upended. Um, so you know, obviously as a, you know, all of us in marketing here rely on agencies. Some agencies are still functioning in the old school, old fashioned way and that's not helpful uh, to companies. And so we've had uh, to sort of rethink the uh, agencies that we're using, how we're using them, how, how they're functioning and whether or not they're on top of the latest technology because they have to change significantly.

Speaker A: Yeah, great, great idea. So uh, what do you Think about maybe presenting and making it transparent to leadership. So Olga, you would like to continue?

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, I can continue. And uh, you know in our case it's very simple. I can't say that our leadership cares much about marketing plan. They care about results that you going to bring. So I already I think shared in another conversation with you that for me uh, approving marketing budget takes around five minutes. Uh, uh, plan, um, I just say okay, with this plan we can generate so much uh, influence marketing revenue and go ahead. I mean of course that's becomes uh, a difficult story for me to um, show library. Yeah. But otherwise I again I can't say that my leadership involved very much into details into marketing plans. I don't see, see that they're really interested about this. They're interested about the impact that you will bring with this plan. And this is all what matters. So transparency of course, uh, transparency throughout the years monthly reporting where we say okay, this is the so many leads, so many. This um, is the marketing pipeline. This is the closed revenue. Again they don't care about all other metrics. They just want to know very specific, say outcome on business period. That's it. So I have lots of freedom in this regards but then a very strong commitment to deliver what I promised.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think this really comes down to when you sell it, it's got to be what's in it for me. And I mean me as in the executive you're speaking to. What is it going to, Is this going to reduce reveal volatility, is going to improve predictability, is going to improve conversions, what's in it for me? And it's been, you know, I made a lot of mistakes earlier in my career. I would tell the executives here's everything I want you to know. And they didn't, they didn't care. They want to know what's going to do for.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker E: And to ensure you make um, more with the list. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Always with zero budget. Ideally. Yeah. Uh, Rahul, would you like to share as well?

Speaker D: Yeah. Pretty straightforward and similar to what Olga already mentioned. I mean um, we you know have the annual planning that goes to the leadership team. They'll you know put their stamp and blessings on it that yeah, we like this, go for it. Um, uh, but in the end, same thing. Uh, you know, monthly reports, they look at some of those numbers but they don't necessarily care about how many keywords I've ranked 1 on or how much uh, sort of top page articles I have or even click through rates on my Newsletter I've had even though those metrics are going up, great, thumbs up, uh, full support. But in the end, yeah, pipeline, uh, leads generated and are we moving the needle on revenue in the segments we care about. Simple as that. But otherwise, yeah, monthly reports, uh, full of integrity, transparency. Good enough.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: And for example, if you are planning an initiative and you are not sure about the results yet, so do you have uh, some maybe part of the budget for experiments or do you sell it somehow to leadership that you need to for example spend some budget without a specific uh, forecast for results? How do you do it?

Speaker D: In our case it is actually a very defined bucket because we're sort of growing um, so that experimentation culture is actually a part. So we, when we do assign the budget, I don't want to give up the exact numbers but we actually have a ratio of X X to Y to Z amount which we put in some sort of transformative innovative experiments. And that's kind of across the organization. How you sort of split it in the end and what you do with it is kind of your ownership. Uh, but there is definitely an experimentation bucket of the budget. It's a small segment from, it's not very prescriptive. Generally you want to keep it on the lower end obviously. Uh, but there's definitely least some experimentation happening. Um, so for example when you know the AI wave was picking up back in 2022, 2023, um, sort of going mainstream, let's not say pick it up, picking it up. Um, we had a specific budget assigned that hey, this is what we will invest in AI and these are the use cases we will focus on. So really good support that I have to say.

Speaker E: Mhm. Yeah.

Speaker A: That's great to catch have as part of budget.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. And in our case uh, again we're very, I'm working very conservative uh industry and uh, we don't have that many experiments. If we do, uh, and I do need to get a budget for that, then I, and I don't know what the outcome would be. The only thing which I say to my CEO, I say look, I have no clue what would be the outcome and what I can promise to you that the least what I will bring is knowledge and learnings from this execution. So it's also very helpful. Yeah, maybe it will cost us a lot of money but at least we uh, can learn something and this is the minimum that you will get and it always works because I'm very lucky to have ah, CEO which we have because he's very open to this Stuff and he says he's very open to the attitude then I will learn from this. Even if it doesn't perform as we would love.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: Learnings. It's very important. Yeah. To learn from mistakes and experiments. Zach would like also to continue with. Um.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was. I would just refer back to the, the analyst relations program I mentioned because again and great analytics point I can, yeah, I have done these enough. Uh, times. I can say here's what I've seen as far as results but I can't guarantee anything. I mean it may flop. It's entirely possible the analysts aren't going to care. Unlikely. It's entirely. But um, I've got to say here's what based on my experience that I've seen happen based on research in the marketplace. Here's what you know, to Logo's point, here's what should happen based on market conditions and hopefully uh, understand they've got some flexibility. I just had a conversation with my, my m. Newer boss today. One of the most empowering conversations I had a while. I basically asked the question, it's okay if we do this kind of things. I've got several strategic projects laying out there that I know based on my experience should have an impact. But don't fall specifically into product marketing per se, but based on my experience. And she's basically saying if they make sense, let's try to do what we can do to make them happen. Like that's awesome.

Speaker C: I do think that Doug, I feel like you and I should have like a sidebar. But like I do. I do feel like um, product marketing is evolving somewhat like I think it's becoming more technical and there's. It's almost like we're carrying a bigger bag than we used to. I um, know last year we were asked to write all of the technical documentation for keep of commerce including um, security, um, basically anything that would be used late stage opportunities like hey, give me your security documents. What's your business continuity like? What's your business resilience like? And I think um, I do think product marketing is an interesting kind of mix of we could do a little bit more than just the, the bid that we are sort of given to um. I know for myself. Uh, Kibo, um, product marketing is also heavily involved and we actually lead um, public relations, social media and analyst relations. Right. So I think it all sort of depends on your organization and how they've divided up uh, the roles and responsibilities and what they choose to as we move forward. And I know Raul is Passionate. He'll talk your ear off about AI But AI will change, will change sort of the size of the teams and the makeup of the teams. So you'll have um, generalists and you'll have people that are aided by tools and you might um, have. Growth is going to look different for different companies. You know we're always thinking what are the tools that we need this year? What are the people plus tools that we're going to be hiring and employing and what are the automations that we need to um, execute and have functioning in our company? Um, and that's sort of significantly. And that's going to be. Every organization is going to be rethinking um, how they grow and to what extent.

Speaker D: In m. My defense of the 30 minute conversation, I only talked about AI for like 28 and a half minutes.

Speaker C: So only 28 minutes straight.

Speaker D: Yeah,

Speaker A: let's actually talk about AI a little bit more. I have a question to you all. Uh, how do you use AI in marketing planning? Do you use it in the process somehow?

Speaker C: Huge, uh, huge. I use it uh, to understand the competitive landscape, uh, to understand weaknesses, uh, and how the competition is positioning themselves and analyzing our current uh, business activity where we need to do, to do better or where we need to do things um, differently. I think um, there's a tendency sometimes to say our stack or our categories commoditized and so but I think once you start to get into truly how different um, technology stacks can be, uh, I think you can find the wedge anywhere. So something that we've um, changed is giving more swagger uh, to the team to say we are actually the best E commerce platform out there. And it's just that the market doesn't know it yet. Right. And so it's leaning into that narrative and explaining why that is the case and making sure that that comes across early and often in the presentations. And I think sometimes it's like oh no we're not, you know, let's, let's let Shop Shopify win or let's let Salesforce win. But people are starting to pay attention to um, traditional underdogs because they're unwilling to spend exorbitant amounts of money for marginal increases with very large companies. Ah, so why would I spend another million dollars to overhaul when I could say modularly improve what I have? And so they are looking to companies like Kibo that offer that, you know, elegant architecture. I think one thing we do have is a beautiful product. And so for me it's just really making sure that um, that Comes across to market.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds great. For analytics for competitor overview. Yeah. Thank you. And uh, some other AI related scenarios use AI in planning.

Speaker E: We use it the same way for market analysis. And I have to say AI is really great. Uh, it saves you lots of time. I remember when we've been doing this work without AI and it would take weeks and now you really can do within the great profound overview. Also great thing that you can learn uh, something about your company with help of AI. Right. Because it gives you some insights. And we were amazed for instance when the, the competitive analysis was done and they put us as the most expensive solution which never been ever disclaimed anywhere, no pricing, nothing. And nevertheless AI gave us this perspective that your solution considered to be the best but so far the most expensive one as well. That was kind of an eye opening. Um, um, yeah.

Speaker A: Inside which just like an external perception.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that's. And surprise was like I, I have no clue where this information comes from because never been disclaimed anywhere. We checked all the resources. Never been disclaimed. But nevertheless it's in there.

Speaker B: One of the things that I'm really digital science doing a great job. They just started, it's now three weeks ago, AI Tuesdays. And it's quite literally you block off your calendar and all you do on Tuesdays is explore AI. Let's play with AI and not. And they had, they did a nice job of not saying at the end of this you have to deliver X or Y or Z. Um, and so it's the entire company, I mean sales is doing this. I'm seeing presentation examples. Um, one of my team just uh, tied our go to market processes better together as a draft. We're seeing. We've been doing things with AI before but they put a concerted effort behind everybody and we just got cloud enterprise which is awesome. Uh, so we're spending a lot of time and investment. So I give them a big pat in the back for supporting that and enabling that. Um, so we're doing everything you guys just mentioned. We're doing that. We're digging into Olga. We've got Clue as a competitive intelligence tool. It's doing some of what I need, not everything. And we could probably do what I want to do a lot cheaper, faster and easier. So yeah, in 12 weeks I'll have a whole different answer to this question.

Speaker A: And for um, marketing planning. So do you use it for analysis and research or some other scenarios as well?

Speaker B: All, all those things. Analysis, research, competitive intelligence. We just had an example. I Was just talking to my team members today. We did an acquisition recently and she put together a market plan by going out, looking at GitHub and looking at the usage on GitHub, dropped that information into cloud, did an analysis, work back, a marketing plan like in one day.

Speaker A: Oh that's amazing. Yeah, sounds really impressive. M. Thank you. Thank you for sharing Rahul.

Speaker D: Yeah, um, same. Um, a lot of analysis, research, competitive intel, um, and actually pretty something similar to what Doug mentioned. We have like this AI Council where you have one rep from each function and you just sort of meet every Friday. You know this is what I experimented with, this kind of a prompt. This is how I was able to get a better visual, a uh, better answer. And if we like something which is good enough, we sort of memorialize it, standardize it and then hey, this is a great prompt for competitive analysis. Let's go and use this. Hand it over to every sales guy when they're doing prospecting or some sort of uh, outreach. This is what they can use. Um, so AI Council, great initiative. And then again research, uh, campaign creation. You know, I have this custom GPD where I plug in all the information I have and it'll come up with a sort of two page campaign brief and high um, level, sort of 10,000ft view summary that these are your Personas. This is the kind of content that consume, um, based on some market data. This is the sort of frequency of consumption. You know, three pieces of content a month is more than enough to consume, convert, um, and based on this xyz, uh, blah blah blah. So that's like a, an hour long process versus a week long process. That's insane.

Speaker E: Mhm.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds amazing. And this huge transformation. I think that marketing process, marketing planning process used to look differently uh, comparing to what you are sharing right now. Yeah. And that's exciting. I have a question, it's one of the final questions about the mistakes. Uh, for example, not mistakes actually some external factors. Because right now I think that the world is changing all the time. Something happens all the time. Yeah. And have you had a situation when for example the plan just broke because of some external factors and how did you handle it?

Speaker C: Um, actually so I was just, I was just having FOMO of missing the, the failures episode that you guys had. I was looking over the content and I was like, oh, I wish I participated in that. So I'm happy that you brought up this question. Um, I actually one of the first projects that I did Akibo was we talked a little bit about the website I think. And we had to rebuild the website twice last year. I um, sort of flew into a structure that was less than optimal. Um, we had had our, an agency rewrite our messaging and I think outsourcing messaging and that may have been just sort of where Keba was having not had product marketing for a year, um, but outsourc your core value messaging to an organization that may not understand your space, uh, was probably not the best thing to do. And then the um, the um, short turnaround I had to basically rubber stamp and reduce scope on what was going to, going to happen on the website. So I think that the learnings from that are you know, more ownership of internally um, understanding and having the tools that agencies have so that you can fact check them and then being more um, asking different questions. Basically both of the agencies, um, we changed them later and worked with different agencies to have a different outcome the second time around. But I will say obviously rebuilding a website comes with its own challenges like uh, you do lose a lot of backlinks. So there is an element of when you're looking at metrics to ensure that you will see a dip uh, before you see the rise. So that has to be continuous work. So we've, we've changed our team structure responsibilities, who does what and what we outsource to the agencies and we've increased the in house the tools uh, that we use so that we can do more monitoring um, and that makes us more effective around the second time around or in managing the website moving forward.

Speaker B: And I'll jump in Alex. I got to hop off Olga for my next call. But um, because of a significant government uh area when the whole shutdown and all the things with DOGE happened it severely impacted uh, our customers, our potential's ability to spend or decision to spend and comfort. So there's a very large pivot that happened. We had to make a quick pivot, not quick pivot to how do we focus on European government activities more and Asia Pacific government activities more. Because we can market to anywhere we can solutions for those. But it was a, we intended potentially coming but it was created a pivot in how we. Well we had this for the plan for North America and then that went out the window. Uh so it did make us, let's try different thought leaders, different places to go market to different ways of doing lead generation, different ways of talking to people and obviously culturally adjusting the languages and the styles we're doing. It was a big pivot. Uh, so that was fun. Unfortunately I've got to Jump off. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah. And yeah, the questions to Rahul. Yeah, Rahul, would you like to continue on the external factors?

Speaker D: Yeah, um, I think for us, one example I can think of is some of the sort of regulatory and compliance related changes with respect to sustainability and renewable energy. Um, again that's a space we are just starting to move into. But based on some of the sort of macro factors, specifically with respect to regulatory components, you know, um, tax credits and sustainability decarbonization goals and the support behind those initiatives, we sort of had to adjust our uh, product roadmap a bit which kind of impacted the marketing of uh, those product launches. Whether it was the research part, whether it was the GTM part, whether it was some of the content we were creating. So in the end we sort of just moved up certain things uh, ahead of schedule. It was not that complex and because of AI we were able to do that quickly. Quite frankly, it was not that complex. Uh, you know, you had the roadmap, you have a campaign, let's do it a couple of months ago. So that's kind of the closest um, I have as an example. But the, but the sort of learning from it was don't be overly prescriptive on things and just keep it simple and stuff.

Speaker B: Significant.

Speaker D: If you have too many complex, you know, slides and details that just makes it messy to fix things.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And I like how AI gives your flexibility to change very fast. That's true. So thank you Olga. Uh, would you like to continue on the external factors? Have you had the situations where you needed to change a lot in your marketing plan?

Speaker E: Well, I had, but in uh, my previous job, not in my current job. I don't know if this example is still relevant. It's from Microsoft. I can provide this example because it was a disaster.

Speaker C: I love how you could just be like my previous employer. What a disaster it was Microsoft.

Speaker D: I don't know.

Speaker C: I love it.

Speaker D: It was Microsoft disaster.

Speaker E: Not because of Microsoft, because of external factors. We're talking about external factors. Right. So it was a moment. I um, was responsible for social media in central and Eastern Europe. And uh, at certain moments Microsoft discontinues to use such social medias as Facebook. Uh, uh, Instagram, I think. Actually I think also YouTube, uh, because of the policies, they had an algorithms and uh, because imagine we drive our lead generation and the awareness everything was on these channels. Facebook. Yeah. Ah, Instagram, YouTube. Yes. So and uh, then it looked like um, we have no job to do because you can't place anything in there. It just was not possible. So, and I have to say overnight we had to rebuild the entire strategy for social media. We start developing new channels on Twitter for uh, eastern countries. We went to telegram, so it was really kind of a, A very, very hectic, I would say day because we can't stop doing what we're doing. And I noticed that many people were in the mood that, oh, now we have nothing to do, but no, you just need to find another way to do that. So, yeah, so we had to rebuild the entire portfolio of our social media channels for months. Then luckily it went back to normal. But this one month was just, honestly speaking with disaster because we couldn't bring the result which we committed. We have to because you have goals. And um, yeah, things were still moving. Yeah. And we had also to put more in paid media, uh, more efforts in that area. But I would can tell you it was probably the biggest external disaster which happened in my career. Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: It was really extreme. But you handle it. It's. That's amazing. Yeah.

Speaker E: You have not first. Right.

Speaker D: Uh,

Speaker A: and uh, at the end of our podcast episode, it would be great if you share some, something maybe an advice or recommendation for those who are starting a planning process. Maybe new marketer or someone who is setting up the process from scratch what they uh, need to focus on.

Speaker C: Um, um, I think the way that the budgeting has been traditionally done has always been let's take a look at our last year's budget and then you, you sort of modify there. But I think um, something I learned from Salesforce and from the new product marketing executive that took over was that you can actually do it the other way, which is instead of even looking at your previous budget, is building from the ground up of what you want to do this year. And that might look very different. And that gives you the freedom to not be boxed in by what you have done prior, but to think and align yourself with the current goals. So you're sort of, instead of doing top down budgeting, you do bottom up and you might surprise yourself. You might be asking for more money or you might be asking for less money and not need as much this year. So that would be, uh, one piece of advice that I think works really well.

Speaker A: Great going from the results you're expecting to activities.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So building the. So starting from scratch instead of looking at previous budgets is erasing it and saying what is it that we need to do this year? And that might be fundamentally different.

Speaker E: Yeah, I agree with. Because we do this every year. We just Kind of start a new life of uh, you know, budgeting. We never looking back, we look back only when we have to request the budget and we say, okay, this is the increase, but otherwise we really don't look at this. We understand how we want, uh, to achieve the goal and then we understand how much it will cost and this is how we do this. I really uh, support this advice and another thing which I would love to share from my experience that make sure that your marketing planning is connected to your business strategy. Because I see in many organizations it's just two different streams. Uh, we do this because we have to do this. Those guys, they probably even don't know what they want to achieve. So and my advice to everybody, always to ensure that there is a clear business goal, which is translated to clear marketing goal. And only after that you can really build something meaningful. Um, otherwise it, it will be just execution, sake of execution.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. Thank you. Thank you, Olga and Rahul.

Speaker D: Um, I think um, there's a tendency for people to still do marketing planning in isolation. Um, so make sure you're sort of collaborating with other functions in whatever capacity you can, whether it's engineering, sales, product and not just for the sort of sake of checking a box. Um, but there's just some really great insights. If you ask the right questions without being defensive, you can learn some really interesting things which in the end make your marketing 10 times more effective if done right. So absolutely. Big fan of collaboration. Um, I think that's ah, a, that's a small thing that can actually add a ton of value.

Speaker C: Olga, um, Bandareva, um, what about you? What advice would you give us and the audience because you are, you know, obviously running your own company.

Speaker A: You mean in um, terms of marketing planning? I believe that, yeah. Thank you Ned, for the question as well. Uh, usually no one asked me questions. Yeah. And I think that um, yeah, in terms of planning, it's important that there are some long term initiatives that for example, if you just stop them, they won't bring the results. Um, after, for example several years, for example, we are building our own community, we are building a podcast. And of course if we are just assessing the results for the next year, for example, some, we are forecasting how m many leads or sales it will bring us. Uh, of course we need to just get rid of these activities because they are not the main, uh, drivers of business. But we know that uh, if we do, for example, it systematically for at least a year and a half or a couple of years or three years, eventually it will bring us some great results. So that's why I believe that some activities need to be just planned, um, maybe strategically, not just for a year, but for a longer period of time. And even if, uh, they don't bring the results, maybe it's. I don't know what it is. How to, for example, explain it to leadership that you have this belief that that's, for example, we need our own community. So I know how to explain it better because I'm the business owner. I need. I don't need to explain it to anybody, but I just believe and I do it.

Speaker C: That's true, actually,

Speaker A: I will.

Speaker C: I'm gonna copy you, by the way. I'm just putting that out there. So I'll ping you on the side about, uh, ways in which I will copy you.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Interesting. So, yeah. And, uh, that's why I don't know how to, um, actually use this approach in marketing in the organizations. But, yeah, there are some initiatives you need to believe in and, um, do some systematically. Yeah. So thank you so much and, uh, thank you for sharing your insights and expertise. It's very valuable and I'm glad that, uh, the approaches are different and we can learn from different companies. And actually, EI is everywhere and, uh, uh, it helps to speed up the processes and make it more flexible. That's just amazing how everything works. And thank you. Thank you for your time and expertise.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker E: Thank you, Olga.

Speaker D: Thanks, guys.

Speaker A: Thank you. Goodbye, everybody.