Corporate vs Product Marketing

Transcript

Opening

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard and welcome to Tea Time With Tech Marketing Leaders.

We have officially completed two full years of our podcast. I started this back in Q4 of 2019. And I'm proud to say that we have done it for two years. Congratulations to you, MKG Marketing, it's been a ride and I've learned a lot.

Keep your eyes peeled for a blog post I'm in the process of writing. I'm going to share later this year what I've learned these last two years and let me tell you, I've learned a lot on how to find guests, record a podcast, produce a podcast, and launch one. It's been a ride and I can't wait to share everything I learned with y'all. And thank you for your continued support.

This is Season nine, welcome. I have some amazing guests lined up. As always, we've dropped all eight episodes for your listening pleasure. Feel free to plow right on through or skip around whatever works for you.

First up, we have Marguerite Yeo. This is a special conversation to me as Marguerite and MKG Marketing have a long standing relationship. Having worked together since Marguerite's days at VMware back in 2014. Marguerite is now at Nutanix and has been for three months. Congratulations Marguerite. I hope all is going well. Can't wait to connect and hear more about it.

Marguerite and I talked a few months ago and in our conversation, Marguerite and I dissected what it means to work on Corporate Marketing versus Product Marketing. They are two totally different things. Who knew? Every time I talk to Marguerite, I learn something new. And in this case, I definitely learned the difference and why both are important and where Marguerite’s heart lives when it comes to how Demand Gen fits into these and what it means for her. And having worked both on the corporate marketing side versus the product marketing side. And it's a really lovely honest conversation. And it was an honor to have so let's take a listen.

Conversation

Kerry Guard: Hello, Marguerite, thank you for joining me on Tea Time With Tech Marketing Leaders.

Marguerite Yeo: Hi, Kerry, thanks for having me.

Kerry Guard: I’m so excited to have you that I don't think our listeners know this. But Marguerite and I go way back.

Marguerite Yeo: Yes, we do. How long back, maybe seven years?

Kerry Guard: Yeah, I think so. Amazing. Time flies.

Marguerite Yeo: Yes.

Kerry Guard: We're actually celebrating. I don’t know if you notice Marguerite, but we're celebrating our 10 year anniversary in July.

Marguerite Yeo: Oh, congratulations.

Kerry Guard: Crazy. It's crazy. Anyway, I'm so excited to have you. Even though we've been working together for over these last seven years off and on. I think every time I talk to you, I learn something new about you. And you always teach me something new as well. So, I'm super excited to take this live. This is gonna be awesome.

Marguerite Yeo: Awesome, thank you.

Kerry Guard: So before we kick off, even though I know your story and have heard it recently, why don't you share with our listeners? You know, what do you do, Marguerite? And how did you get there?

Marguerite Yeo: So I'm in marketing. I've been in marketing for 20 years now. And I really stumbled into marketing. I did my undergraduate in business in Vancouver, Canada. At a PE class that wasn't like, you know, super awesome. But when I went back to Singapore after school and worked for IBM and Compaq computer, I had the opportunity to do a little bit of marketing. So Compaq computer, I actually worked with partners in the Philippines, Brunei and Indonesia. And at IBM, I had the opportunity to basically launch a pretty big event called internet world that included all of the product groups within IBM as well as all the partners so that those two were my exposure into marketing, so to speak, and I actually liked it. So after four years of working in Singapore, I decided to get my graduate degree and I focused on marketing. So that's really kind of my journey.

Kerry Guard: So where are you? Where are you right now?

Marguerite Yeo: So I'm at Dell Technologies right now. I actually joined slightly over two years ago, to do Product Marketing for cloud, it still was, you know, expanding into the space. But prior to that, I had done a number of startups in Seattle, looked at a number of startups in Seattle. Also worked for larger companies like Microsoft and VMware, and basically did a combination of product marketing, as well as demand gen. But Demand Gen has really been my passion. And you know, I guess it's my strong suit as well, if I had to compare Product Marketing against, you know, lead gen and demand gen.

Kerry Guard: We're gonna get into that later. So I'm not going to dive into my questions like, I really want to, I'm going to hold and follow my flow, because my next question for you is, given where you are right now, what's one challenge you're currently facing?

Marguerite Yeo: I think it is, you know, figuring out how to make a bigger impact in a very, very large organization. It was easy, much easier, I would say, for me, to make an impact and see the impact, you know, in, in startups. Whereas in a large company, every bit counts. And the thing that teamwork and collaboration is important is definitely true. But it is harder to see the personal impact, if you will.

Kerry Guard: Yeah, versus being, not necessarily a one woman show in the startup world, but definitely on smaller teams. And wearing lots of hats, I imagine.

Marguerite Yeo: Right? Exactly. I mean, in the startup, even with teams of, I mean, I've led teams of up to eight, and bigger, but also very small teams of two or three, depending on the startup. It's so easy to see what you do moves the needle. Whether it's a campaign that delivers leads to sales, or a redesign of the website that's done by a team of four in under two months. Whereas I did the same thing at Dell last year, we launched the cloud portal. But that was a team of so many people, we had a team of, I don't know, 50 people in the web production, web development side of the house and a lot of content providers. Whereas at a startup, it's one content provider, one developer, so the scale is obviously much, much different.

Kerry Guard: I also imagine with startups, there's a lot more opportunity for quick growth, and quick milestones almost, right, in terms of your percentages of growth are a lot higher, like, we grew 50%, year over year versus when you're in a big organization, you're making these incremental, like, we grew 3%, which is actually in terms of money, a lot. But in terms of feeling the scale of that is much harder.

Marguerite Yeo: Yes, that's for sure. I mean, at a large company, we're starting from a base of millions, billions in revenue, right. And at a startup, you're talking under a million and every day is a challenge every day is a numbers focused game. Whereas, at a large company, when your basis is a billion moving 3% is huge. Moving through the percentage of startup, it's, you need to survive beyond. So, you definitely need growth of, 20, 30, 50%, that kind of numbers, and it's so exciting to see that kind of growth, where you grow something from nothing. I mean, I've had roles where you grow something from zero customers on the platform to over 400,000. I mean, that doesn't sound like a lot in a large company, but that's a lot in the startup world. And it's very fun to do that and be on that journey.

Kerry Guard: And so fast, like going from zero to 400, you can do 400,000 you can do, you know, somewhat quickly, which is just where that joy comes in, right? Because you see it happen. It's almost immediate.

Marguerite Yeo: Exactly.

Kerry Guard: Well, let's talk a little bit about this. Because in your journey, you've done all three. You've worked corporate in that corporate center of the marketing universe, you've worked product, and you've worked demand Gen, and you said, Your heart is really in demand Gen, which we'll dig into why in a second. But I'd like to, if you could just, especially if we're talking to people more in that startup field, and that growth, where demand Gen is the focus of their universe right now. They might be like, well, what is corporate? And why does that matter? So can you just break down the three fields we just talked about, and what importance they hold in an organization?

Marguerite Yeo: Yes, for sure. So I'll start with corporate marketing. For me, personally, my experience of corporate marketing is about brand, about brand awareness, protecting the brand, improving the brand experience. And it's also a lot about process and systems and sometimes unfortunately, having to be what I call the brand police that nobody likes, right? You know, delivering the brand book, the brand guidelines to do's and don'ts, and the imagery and font sizes, brand colors and all that stuff, right? So it has to be done. It's not super exciting for me personally. But it has to be done and it's important. And I will say this, because as a demand gen leader, I do need brand guidelines in order to execute my campaigns, right. So if, for example, if I'm working on revamping the website, I need to understand what the brand guidelines are, because I can go crazy with colors and my own font sizes and things like that, and font types even. And when I'm doing campaigns, for example, I need to understand my creative parameters, I can't just go do whatever creative I like. So while it's not my passion, it is absolutely necessary from a marketing standpoint, and as a person in the demand gen space, I do need it. And I definitely use it.

The other thing about corporate marketing is, I think it's one of those roles that have the least focus on metrics. And I'm very uncomfortable about that, because I love goals and numbers and something to work towards. And when I don't have those kinds of numbers, I don't know how well I'm actually performing. Because, you know, delivering a brand book is like, great, I checked that off my to do list. And I've actually done a brand book a couple of times, but I don't know what kind of value other than it's needed by people that it brings, so I kind of struggle with the whole lack of metrics part of it. And aside from corporate marketing, doing brand awareness and, and unaided awareness type of studies, there isn't a whole lot of metrics that that the role looks at.

So I'll go on to the next kind of marketing discipline we talked about, it's Product Marketing. So Product Marketing is focused on positioning the product, in this space outlining how you are different from the competition, what's the value that you bring? And the “so what”, right, why should customers care? So it's about messaging, it’s about content, developing a lot of content, whether it's short form, long form content, all the way from, ebooks, infographics, product sheets, to white papers, and things like that, and technical documents. It's also about the roadmap, understanding the product roadmap, working with engineering, understanding everything about your product, such as pricing, global availability, and including sales enablement, right. So it is, again, I mean, I've done a lot of this and I do enjoy it. But again, it's one of those things that it's really hard to determine if I'm doing a great job, other than “is sales happy”. Yes, they are great. I'm doing good sales enablement there. And then you can sell tests, and measure your content, right? If you place the content on a website, for example, you can tell if it's being downloaded or viewed, downloaded, and its customers are engaging in it. So to a certain extent, you can tell if the content you're producing is great, but a lot of the things like positioning messaging, roadmap, what pricing? It's, you don't really have a sense of, am I doing good? Or, am I just doing an okay job? It's, again, one of those roles that has not a ton of metrics attached to it. Is it important? Absolutely.

Kerry Guard: Sounds like a lot to like, you listed a lot of things that product marketing has to cover.

Marguerite Yeo: Yes, for sure. And it's definitely not done by one person, right? Especially at large companies like Dell, Microsoft, etc. You would have, you know, one person doing positioning messaging, you would have a team of, say eight people doing content, a team of people focused on a roadmap and things like that. So it's definitely, there's a lot, but it's also a lot seen at startups. I don't think product marketers do all of that at the same time. They probably do some better than others, and deprioritize others at the same time. So you can't do it all, right? And startups have probably worked anywhere from one to maybe three, four product marketers. But also, startups have less of a, I would say, product portfolio, right? So it's, you don't need as many product marketers in that regard.

Kerry Guard: Yeah, that definitely makes sense in terms of your team load. And once you're bigger and beat you're, I mean, it sounds like it's got to be a pretty big team to encompass all these moving pieces. And then, in terms of prioritizing when you're smaller, what does the company need at that moment makes a ton of sense. And, and so in terms of importance, would you say Product Marketing is as, I mean, do any of these have more importance over the other? Or do they all carry their own weight?

Marguerite Yeo: I think they carry their own weight. So, take my example, again, as the demand Gen leader, I asked for positioning and messaging, as well. I mean, actually, the the two things that I always ask for when I land in a new role is what can I have the positioning and messaging document, and the brand guidelines, and I also the positioning and messaging document, because, you know, you have to understand, first of all, your product, what it does, how is it differentiated? And what is the compelling story you want to say before you can even launch into any demand gen marketing, right? Otherwise, you know, it's an empty kind of a promise. And so I feel like both roles are important and equally important, and I definitely relied on deliverables by the two different teams in order to do my demand gen job. So, for sure.

Kerry Guard: Let's talk about demand Gen for a minute, and give that the proper due diligence of defining what role that is and how it plays into the organization.

Marguerite Yeo: So demand Gen to me is about the funnel, and working very closely with sales. I think of all of the roles, this one has the closest partnership with the sales team, because I view demand gen roles as having sales as your internal customer, right, you are responsible for delivering leads to the inside sales team. And also the outside sales team. And the focus is on top of the funnel, middle, as well as the bottom of the funnel. A lot of demand gen marketers stop at the top of the funnel, but I strongly believe that to be a good demand gen marketer, you have to focus on the entire funnel, your job doesn't stop at the top. And I think a lot of ways to look at it is what else do you do? You know, once you've delivered the leads, it's about nurturing, right? So it's the nurture marketing that happens if somebody doesn't convert right away. And it's about deeper level content that will bring the customer along the journey. So, to me, it's definitely funnel focused, pipeline focused, and a ton of metrics, right? You can have metrics from everything from, you know, campaign related, like, how is your email confirming? How is your account based marketing doing? What's the webinar attendance? And what's the lead I got from that? How is my paid search and organic search doing? How is social performing? All of these elements that form an integrated campaign have metrics around it. And websites, how are you growing, is the traffic staying, what are the engaging with on the site, converting to leads, those kinds of things. And then a lot of it is also about testing and learning. So in this role, there is a lot of AV testing. You can test anything from call to action on this site to, a copy, tweak, in an email, everything in that spectrum, and then it's about looking at marketing ROI and return on advertising spend, is my spend on paid search, delivering the effectiveness and the leads at the right efficiency, compared to say, my email on my webinar marketing, right. So that's a ton of metrics involved. And this is actually super exciting for me personally.

Kerry Guard: So there's a couple things that live just like you need information from corporate and product to do. Let me rephrase that. The demand Gen team in order for them to do their job, they need a lot from corporate and product.

Marguerite Yeo: Sure.

Kerry Guard: The metrics that come out of demand Gen, do those get attributed to what corporate and product essentially gave you because I feel like even though corporate and product don't necessarily have their own metrics and metrics that demand Gen is able to get can be attributed to the work that the product and the corporate team have done. Am I making sense?

Marguerite Yeo: Yeah, no, absolutely you are. I think from a brand perspective it is a little bit harder. I mean, you could attribute some of the demand gen work to the growing brand awareness, right? For sure. Because when you do things like email marketing, and webinars and social, when you post a lot on social channels, and when you do event marketing, and account based marketing, all of those impact the brand, right. It impacts the brand, the visibility of the brand, the experience of the brand, and the overall awareness. So, absolutely, it is not a direct correlation. I don't think there is an easy way today to measure that, but I think everything that demand gen does, does move the needle for brand marketers in terms of visibility and awareness, absolutely, and unaided awareness as well. And definitely on the content site for product marketers. So, I actually do share some of these metrics with the product marketing team as well and let them know, like, hey, these are the types of assets and content types that are resonating on our website. So absolutely, there is a kind of a linkage back to the other two disciplines.

Kerry Guard: When you're going from startup to corporate, it sounds like in a corporate world, not in a corporate world, in a bigger business, because I want to be careful about the language. I'm using corporate to talk about corporate marketing. I don't want to confuse people. I'm talking about an organization you know, this enterprise organization like Microsoft or a VMware, like you mentioned. Those sounds, because of how big they are, and all the different products that they have. Having all three of these seems to make a ton of sense. When you're in the startup world or even in that initial growth place, do you have all three of these things? Is one doing it all, or is one more important? What do you think? What sort of happens in that realm?

Marguerite Yeo: Yeah, so In the startup world, what I found often, especially if it's an initial stage startup, definitely not, I'm not talking about late stages here. Initial stage startup, the brand is intense to be the least, you know, of the founders concern. And, you know, I would say that if I was in the shoes, I would almost do the same thing. Because, you really, it's about survival, right? It's about cash flow. It's about acquisition. And reporting to the board about how you're doing. And the board, mostly, at this stage, are not so much concerned about brand, branding, and all that stuff They want to know, are you acquiring customers? Are we getting the revenue? This is business. You have the right cash flow, are we able to survive, two years, five years, that kind of story. So, absolutely, in early stage startup, I found that the brand tends to get pushed aside. Product Marketing is definitely, you know, on the radar, because people do understand that we need to have a roadmap and understanding what's coming, we need to position it. But a lot of times, what I found is they either assign one person, or they have one person do it all. Kind of like, doing the demand gen, as well as the positioning and messaging and all that stuff. And you know, it's tough, right? When you start out with a team of 10, 15, 20, most of them are going to be engineers, and that's how it is in the startup world. Later stage startups, though, which I've also been a part of, can afford, and definitely are more aware of the importance of brand experience, especially when you are planning to IPO, right, you all have those T's and I's needs to be crossed and daughter, right? And so, absolutely, I do see a difference, depending on the state of the startup. But really, when you are 10 people demand gen is absolutely critical.

Kerry Guard: When we first decided to have this conversation, you mentioned reading an article that sort of hit home for you when it came to demand Gen. Could you remind me what that article was? What about it that struck you as like that “aha” moment?

Marguerite Yeo: Oh, yes. So it was a blog post by a guy named Jason Lemkin. He is a SaaS founder, and an investor in Silicon Valley. The title of the blog, though, was super interesting, and it was what caught my attention. It was something like that: Hire The Right Type of VP of Marketing, Or You'll Just End Up With A Bunch Of Blue Pens With Your Logo On Them - something to that effect, and I was like, whoa, that's a pretty strong statement to make. And you know, if I would have been marketing, a little bit upset, maybe but, so anyway, I read it, and essentially, the gist of it was he was giving startups advice on the type of marketers to hire and he actually talked about the three types corporate marketers, product marketers, and demand gen. Basically, why it resonated with me was exactly what we just talked about. Yes, this is exact, it was very clear how he outlined the three roles and why startups need to hire a demand Gen person versus a generic - I’m just gonna hire VP of Marketing. They need to be super clear about what kind of marketer they want and the three roles do very different things and have very different skill sets. And so if you really want a demand gen person, don't hire a corporate marketer, if you want a product marketing person, don't hire a demand gen person, something like that. So that was what resonated very well with me. I don't think I've read anything that defined the three roles so clearly.

Kerry Guard: One of the things I remember you say, or maybe I made this up and you're gonna correct me, but it was something about demand Gen being close to the product. Is that ringing a bell? Whereas with corporate, corporate’s more about the overarching brand itself versus, demand Gen being more about selling those products.

Marguerite Yeo: Yes. I don't know that Jason Lemkin covered that, I don't really remember. But that, I personally believe in. I feel like in corporate marketing roles, you're not close to the product, or any product, it's more about the overall brand. Whereas when you are in product marketing, you are passionate about the product that you are supporting. So for example, take me, if I were in cloud marketing versus storage, versus data protection or services, my focus is on cloud. I'm definitely into everything about cloud. I know the messaging, the positioning, the competitive space, I know what competitors are launching, when the events are what they're talking about. We even go in with our websites and look at what they are promoting, but if you are in networking or services or any other product marketing, you don't really care about other people's products, because you just don't have time. In demand gen, though, I personally feel that I like to be close to the product, whether I'm naturally close to or not. I make an effort to be, because it is hard to be a good demand Gen marketer, if you don't know what you are marketing. And you totally, you definitely need to understand the compelling differentiation in order to highlight that in the marketing that you do. So I absolutely feel, yes, whether I'm naturally in the Product Marketing Group doing demand gen or sitting outside of it, I like to be close to the product.

Kerry Guard: I love that. And we've worked together over the years and some of the products you've worked on are doozies in terms of the elements of really needing to understand what they do. I mean, that in and of itself, sometimes to me feels like a whole project in terms of onboarding. So how have you, do you feel like, from the start, because you started in tech 20 years ago, at IBM that you have, that's easy for you to understand these complex tech clients? Or is it a learning curve every time?

Marguerite Yeo: I think it gets easier every time. There are, you know, obviously, nuances. I mean, it's so funny, because I don't consider myself technical. I do understand technical terms, obviously, I do understand a lot of the acronyms, and I know, at a base level, a lot of these how things work. But I'm not technical enough to write a white paper, put it that way. But when I tell a lot of my colleagues that I'm not technical, they actually say no, you are actually pretty technical. Well, you know more than I do. So I guess it really depends, I would love to be a little bit more technical, but when it gets beyond a certain point, I just can't, you know, I cannot grok the details. But I absolutely try to understand, because when, to me, if you know how something works, it's easier to explain it, whether you are working on a video, or you're working on an email, it's easier to highlight and bring to the surface. What's so special about what you're marketing, and if you don't know, you're just literally either making things up or marketing something that it's so fluffy, that you sound like any other tech company. I don't like it when I pick up my marketing stuff, and it sounds, and if you hide the logo and the company name and all of that, if you can't tell your product apart from your competitors, then it's almost like whitewashing to me. And I think a lot of us are guilty. I mean myself included at some point, right? I'm throwing out terms like, oh efficient, it gives you higher better productivity, it's faster or better. I mean, everybody says the same thing. So unless you can articulate exactly what it is that gives you better efficiency faster, more uptime and all of that stuff, then you're really it's a blend, right? You're blending in with everybody else and you're not standing out. And how I try really to understand the product is, I sit. I like to sit with the product team and sometimes I ask them to do a demo for me. Pretend that you are presenting to a sales customer. How would you explain to the customer what this is? So I see a demo. Sometimes engineering does demo sessions as well, which is really cool. And then also sitting with the sales team and listening into the inside sales calls, you really understand some of the questions that prospects are asking, or customers are asking, and that helps me hone and tighten my message a little bit more.

Kerry Guard: I love that. And then it brings everything together too in terms of how all these things work together, which is more saying so beautifully.

Marguerite, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you breaking down the three types of marketing teams to us and how they all work together and where your passion lies.

Before we close out I do have my three questions. Are you ready?

Marguerite Yeo: Yes.

Kerry Guard: Okay, first one is in the last year given the pandemic, have you picked up any new hobbies?

Marguerite Yeo: Oh, yes, I have. I've picked up one new hobby. And I've actually done more of something that I like doing so I started doing more paddle boarding last year because of the lockdown and the distancing and all that. And paddle boarding is so easy, you can bring a friend paddle board out on the lake and it's open air, it's safe. So I've been, definitely I did a lot of that last year, every chance I could get. But the new hobby that I picked up was baking. And a lot of people are shocked and surprised because I actually don't cook. I'm terrible at cooking. I just started on, I remember March 29 and I started with something really simple. And then I just got into it and I also started watching the Great British baking show. And some of the technical challenges and the really challenging bakes kind of intrigued me and I said, I'm gonna try it. And then once you get success at something, you know how it is right you're like, Oh, I can do this. So I'm going to try harder and harder once and more challenging things and then it just became a thing so I still bake today over a year later and I'm enjoying it.

Kerry Guard: And I'm friends with Marguerite on Facebook and I got to tell you some of these creations that she has made looked amazing. I might have to grab some photos from you Marguerite because they, I wish would have married each other, I would totally be your taste tester for you.

Marguerite Yeo: Thank you.

Kerry Guard: Second question for you is, I know you've worked remotely most of your career at least recently but if you could be in the office with your team and walking the floor and going desk to desk, what song would you want playing overhead to set sort of the vibe of the office.

Marguerite Yeo: Oh, Beautiful Day by U2, for sure. It's one of my favorite bands, I've liked them since I was young, and that song, I mean, I think it's 20 years old. It is old but is still very relevant today. And the phrase “Don't let it get away” is a lot of times how I feel especially when I get up in the morning, the sun shining, blue skies, beautiful day in Seattle which we don't get a lot of. I tell myself okay, I'm gonna get off work early and go out and enjoy the weather. And it's, this “don't let it get away thing” resonates. Absolutely. So I definitely do want to play that if I had a chance and it's about hope and its beauty and it's about being joyful about the little things in life for sure.

Kerry Guard: I totally agree. I love that song. Alright, last question for you is if you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?

Marguerite Yeo: Oh, that's an easy one, I would love to go to Morocco. So I'm a planner, I plan my trips. Oh, I make it a point to visit a place I've never been every year and I'm a planner as well so I plan my trips ahead of time, I booked my tickets five months in advance, and I have a full set of itinerary done. I know what I'm doing each day, where I'm going, how I'm going to get there, by train, by bus, by driver or whatever the case is. And I had my trip all planned out in early February last year for my Morocco trip in May. And you know, and then I hear news about COVID and and all that and I thought oh maybe it's like Ebola, you know, it'll die down and then it's nothing, but well, we all know what happened. So yeah, I had to cancel the trip. And haven't really been anywhere last year. Definitely not to a place that I had not been. So I'm definitely looking to go into Morocco. I look forward to the architecture, the food, you know, all that nice stuff that I see in pictures.

Kerry Guard: Well, I'm so glad we're connected on Facebook because when that trip happens, I get to see those pictures too. It's gonna be glorious.

Marguerite Yeo: Yeah, absolutely.

Kerry Guard: Marguerite, thank you again for joining me. I loved this conversation.

Marguerite Yeo: Thank you for having me, Kerry, I appreciate it. So happy to get a chance to speak with you.

Outro

That was my conversation with Marguerite. Isn't she lovely? So great chatting with her and sharing her perspective. If you'd like to learn more about Marguerite and see what she's up to, you can find her on LinkedIn. Link is in the show notes. You can also find our Spotify playlist as well and get rocking out to our guests picks this season. All eight are there, check it out.

Thank you for tuning in to the first episode of Season nine. In the next episode, I chat with Chris Ott on the importance of brand marketing, especially when a company is in a hyper growth stage and needing funding and you didn't get their name out there. So keep listening.