Freshworks' Stacey Epstein on the war of marketing
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An Introduction to Stacey Epstein
Winning a war requires attacking and defending on multiple fronts.
Ground infantry, Air Forces, Navy by sea—and maybe even Space Forces in the next couple of decades all need to be a focus. The fronts depend on what your opponent does, but in modern warfare if you don’t have your bases covered, you’ll never win.
B2B SaaS definitely isn’t war, but a multi-pronged attack and defense is definitely required in marketing within a competitive market. You can have the coolest events in all of SaaSlandia but if you can’t log and track your leads or set up a proper email campaign you’ll never end up driving the scale required to grow massive.
No one exemplifies this multi-pronged approach more than Stacey Epstein, CMO of Freshworks. I sat down with her recently and she wasn’t shy about sharing marketing deets on growing at scale through a multi-pronged attack. All that and more in this week's episode.
Key Term
What is empathetic marketing?
Empathetic marketing refers to creating marketing initiatives by first putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. It's essentially a customer-centric approach to marketing. It's about letting the customer lead you.
Why is it important?
Empathetic marketing is important because not only does it ensure that your marketing resources and efforts are targeting the correct audience, but that it’s also creating an emotional connection with them. By creating a connection you build trust, both of which will help you convert more customers and also keep them. It goes beyond just marketing your product or service. If you don’t understand your customer’s pain points, actual needs, and even how your messaging will impact them, it’s all for naught.
Action plan:
What to do today:
- Follow Stacey Epstein.
- Schedule a time to meet with your marketing team to review your marketing strategies and initiatives.
What to do next quarter:
Implement empathy into your marketing strategies.
We’re living in a world where it’s never been easier for businesses to reach potential customers through a myriad of channels. Yet, very few do it correctly. Your product or service may just be what a customer needs, but if you don’t understand your customer’s emotional motivators, your messaging is very likely missing the mark.
Companies and products are now developed with the customer at the core, so it’s logical that our marketing efforts become customer-centric through empathetic marketing. In fact, it’s absolutely crucial for success as more than three quarters of consumers say they’d buy from a brand they feel a connection with over a competitor.
So, how can you start to implement empathy into your marketing strategies? Below are some tips to help you get started.
Practice empathy
- Practice putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, both personally and professionally. Empathy is a powerful tool. When you’re able to develop a deep and emotional understanding of people’s needs, you’re opening up opportunities to connect in multiple ways, as well as better meet their needs.
Listen and observe to understand
- The key is to listen with the intent to learn and understand your customers’ pain points and emotional motivators. Depending on your company, this information is gathered through direct feedback, surveys, complaints, etc.
- Ask questions to uncover their needs.
- What do they feel? Why do they feel that way? Etc.
Humanize your brand
- Part of establishing connection is to sound like an actual human being. Ensure your content, messaging, and even automated communication include a personal touch, as well as your brand’s personality.
- Take the information you’ve learned and gathered about your customers to create content that addresses your customers’ emotional triggers.
- Make your marketing campaigns more of an invitation for conversation.
Nurture
- Customers stick around when they feel valued, so take care of them beyond what your product or service provides.
- Create content and provide assistance that truly helps your customers—whatever the situation—instead of just pushing an agenda.
What to do within the next year:
Develop and launch your next marketing initiative with customer empathy at its core. Develop the initiative from the get-go, based solely on the customer’s perspective and need. Measure the output (leads, conversions, etc.) as well as how it was received (engagement, feedback, etc.). As always, evaluate and iterate.
Who should own this?
Your marketing team.
Do us a favor?
Part of the way we measure success is by seeing if our content is shareable. If you got value from this episode and write up, we'd appreciate a share on Twitter or LinkedIn.
00;00;00;02 - 00;00;17;29
Patrick Campbell
Winning a war requires attacking and defending on multiple fronts. You have ground infantry, air forces, navy by sea, and even space Force in the next couple of decades. All of these need to be a focus and these fronts depend on what your opponent does, obviously. But in modern warfare, if you don't have your bases covered, you're never going to win.
00;00;18;18 - 00;00;38;00
Patrick Campbell
BTB SaaS Definitely isn't war, but a multi-pronged attack and defense is definitely required and marketing within a competitive market. You can have the coolest events in all of Sicily, India, but if you can't log in, track your leads or set up a proper email campaign, you're never going to end up driving scale that is required to grow massive.
00;00;38;11 - 00;01;00;17
Patrick Campbell
No one exemplifies this multi-pronged approach more than Stacy Epstein, CMO of Fresh Works. I sat down with her recently and she wasn't shy about sharing marketing beats on growing at scale through a multi-pronged attack. All that and more. Coming up next for Profile well recur its protect the Hustle while we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator.
00;01;00;26 - 00;01;25;23
Patrick Campbell
On today's episode, Stacy Epstein dives deep on multipronged marketing. We talk about integrating sales, marketing and customer success, being easy, fast and affordable. The five major prongs of segment marketing instilling empathy in your marketing and the questions too asks uncover needs great trustworthy, generic Who are you and what you guys do?
00;01;25;25 - 00;01;55;15
Stacey Epstein
Stacy Epstein. I'm the CMO Fresh Works. We are builder of software. Our mission is to help companies delight their customers and employees, and we do that through several different application sets. We do customer experience and sales and marketing, so we have a full CRM. We also sell a product called Fresh Service, which is an I.T. service management employee service management space, starting to sort of dip our toes into some h.r.
00;01;55;15 - 00;02;09;21
Stacey Epstein
Management as well. And i think our value proposition is that we make it really fast and easy for companies to go live. So not a ton of i.t. resources needed, not a lot of money needed, not a lot of time needed.
00;02;09;21 - 00;02;25;29
Patrick Campbell
And yeah, and what I always really liked about fresh works is it's the multiproduct strategy, too. And what I'm kind of curious about is, you know, you started with one and then you got to three or four. And I think there's a lot now, and probably not all of them are like always the banner ones you're going after.
00;02;25;29 - 00;02;34;19
Patrick Campbell
But like as a customer, do they all kind of talk to each other? Like, is it all kind of work out or are they all kind of siloed or some siloed? Like how does that work from a customer perspective?
00;02;34;29 - 00;03;17;02
Stacey Epstein
All are built on our platform now and so they can easily integrate. Certainly sales, marketing and success are integrated in in the CRM, which of course you would want sales and marketing share that very deep customer record and you can really get a great integrated view of your data from marketing to sales to success, which is, you know, that customer 360, everybody talks about it, but having it actually really truly integrated versus sort of kluge together and presented as a common view is really valuable for companies, you know, I.T service management, you're servicing a different customer, you're servicing your internal employees versus your customers.
00;03;17;12 - 00;03;43;26
Stacey Epstein
So the the need to integrate, I mean, it's not the same record, right? It's that an employee record versus a customer record. But I think the value of leveraging the same platform is that your internal teams know how to use it, you know how to administer it, you know how to get it live. And so the it team has a lot less burden in managing the application and then that CDP or that integrated customer record will do the same thing with employee.
00;03;43;26 - 00;04;06;23
Stacey Epstein
So it won't just be itsm, it will also be your h.r. Solution as well. So you'll have that one really integrated customer record. You'll have an equally powerful integrated employee record. And that's really our vision and I think how we'll continue to differentiate ourselves.
00;04;06;23 - 00;04;29;02
Patrick Campbell
Well, what I like a lot about it is I mean, crm kind of went from like a sales focus to this whole, like CDP expansion, right? And you might hate this metaphor, but it helps me. It's like it's like finding your favorite like furniture maker or your favorite kitchen utensils or something like that. You just kind of like go to them to find the next thing because everything kind of works together.
00;04;29;11 - 00;04;47;09
Patrick Campbell
The, you know, bureau works really well with, you know, bedside table and like all that kind of fun stuff. And you can really tell the difference when something's like built with unification in mind from the beginning rather than like, let's like, build these silos and put them together or let's like buy a couple of silos and try to, like, force them together.
00;04;47;09 - 00;04;51;11
Patrick Campbell
And then you end up kind of just refactoring everything. And so it's it's pretty cool in my mind.
00;04;51;12 - 00;05;14;13
Stacey Epstein
Yeah, I think so too. I think really the difference for us though, as a CRM provider compared to some of the other vendors out there, is our just continued focus on that mission of of easy and fast and affordable. And you know, we got our success in the early days with small businesses and then over time moved upstream to mid-market and now into the enterprise.
00;05;14;17 - 00;05;42;02
Stacey Epstein
Not everybody has hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars and 12 to 18 months to integrate all these different systems just to have an integrated view. So not knocking some of those solutions. And there are definitely companies that need that deep customization and lots of different features that the truth is, a lot of times that just sends up a shelf where anyway, it's not what the user wants, the user just wants to solve the problem.
00;05;42;05 - 00;06;08;08
Stacey Epstein
An integrated view and a very intuitive user experience is more important than the 59 features per page of a big RFP. And that's, I think where we've differentiated ourselves is we don't ever claim to be the like end all, be all every single kind of system and every bell and whistle. But we will probably promise modern, intuitive, fast and a focus on that.
00;06;08;08 - 00;06;11;21
Stacey Epstein
And that focus I think is unique in the CRM space.
00;06;11;27 - 00;06;36;07
Patrick Campbell
I think it's like it's this this old way of new wave of building to where, you know, if you think of, you know, the big giant in the CRM market, they who shall not be named, it's made for the VP, it's, you know, made for it folks to basically create anything you need to as max flexibility key. But at the end of the day, for 80 to 90% of us, that's not great, right?
00;06;36;07 - 00;06;52;29
Patrick Campbell
It's not a great experience. And there's a fun story. Again, I'm not going to name them, but a large three letter company that, you know, they sell 4000 seats and do all this customization and then like 200 seats are the only ones that are used. And then they keep the contract because they don't want to get rid of those 200 seats.
00;06;52;29 - 00;07;12;27
Patrick Campbell
But those days just are numbered when things are so easy to switch now. And so I really admire because Fresh Works was, you know, you had some old school folks, you know, a similar Chennai based company that did some similar things. You guys hit the wave right at the right time. And what I'm really curious about from your perspective is this is great for engineering.
00;07;12;27 - 00;07;30;04
Patrick Campbell
It seems like a hell for marketing to so many different brands and so many different products. Do you go first with the sales like in some ways it's actually kind of brilliant, right? Because you can, Oh, we didn't work out in sales. Let's now go for the marketing side and then we can go back. But then for you it's like, how do you have one message that isn't too generic sized?
00;07;30;04 - 00;07;42;01
Patrick Campbell
How do you make sure that like you're talking to, you know, potentially 6 to 12 different sales teams? Like how do you how do you manage all that? Because there's very few marketers who are doing that now, but we're all going to have to do it in the next ten years.
00;07;42;01 - 00;08;11;11
Stacey Epstein
I feel it's not the easiest. You know, one product, just create a tagline, communicate the value profits. Definitely a lot more complex than that. I do think, again, repeating our mission and you may have seen our tagline make Daylight easy. Part of arriving at that tagline was wanting to be all inclusive of our brand fresh works, which is what is it that we really do across every products that makes us unique?
00;08;11;21 - 00;08;30;25
Stacey Epstein
A lot of companies promise to deliver delight to their buyer, right? And so that's not that unique. But to do it in an easy, fast way that's focused on the user, that's what we do different than everybody else. And it's not necessarily, oh, we're CRM for SMB, which I think we people want to categorize us as SMB, but your.
00;08;30;25 - 00;08;31;25
Patrick Campbell
Competitors like to do.
00;08;31;25 - 00;08;56;08
Stacey Epstein
That. Well, yeah, there's plenty of enterprises that want fastness, so I think it's coming up with that overarching value proposition, which is where our tagline comes from. Delight made easy. We definitely, though, have a unique positioning for each product. The buyer of Freshdesk is wants to know that there's AI, that there's chat bots, that they want to understand how we do case management.
00;08;56;12 - 00;09;16;15
Stacey Epstein
They have specific requirement requirements that need to be satisfied and we have to make be sure to communicate that value. Same with sales, same with marketing. There is an overall value proposition for our CRM suite that again is focused on that integrated view. So it's almost like a hierarchy of positioning, right? It's the highest level is makes it easy.
00;09;16;23 - 00;09;33;23
Stacey Epstein
Then you get into smart selling, you get into effortless customer service. I think on the ITSM side, it's a little different because we're talking about employees versus customers. And so there are some tweaks there. We went public last week, so we had to really get ready for.
00;09;34;18 - 00;09;35;16
Patrick Campbell
All about that. I'm just.
00;09;35;16 - 00;09;37;04
Stacey Epstein
Go. I mean, I can tell you all about it.
00;09;37;04 - 00;09;37;11
Patrick Campbell
Yeah.
00;09;37;18 - 00;09;58;13
Stacey Epstein
There's things I can't really say, but, you know, we had we had a great IPO last week. I would say Fresh Works was a lesser known company to be at our size and scale. And so we really wanted to get it right. So we've spent a lot of time the last six months getting ready.
00;09;58;13 - 00;10;16;15
Patrick Campbell
Just trying to think is like a marker. If I was trying to teach how to market something like fresh works, like in a very effective way, right? Is it is it something where you have this overarching, you know, kind of message, this positioning on like a quarter to quarter basis? Do you have like separate demand gen or performance marketing team services?
00;10;16;24 - 00;10;21;07
Patrick Campbell
Like do you have things that go cross product? Tell me because yeah, okay. Yeah.
00;10;21;28 - 00;10;44;26
Stacey Epstein
I mean, I can tell you about how our our marketing team is structured. Of course we have all of the different components, right? We have communications, we have product marketing, we have growth marketing, we have event marketing and we have brand. Those are kind of the five major prongs. We have them organized by product, which we call segment marketing.
00;10;45;03 - 00;10;57;06
Stacey Epstein
We have them organized by region, right? So you need somebody in France who speaks French and we you need to translate product marketing team is is pretty purely focused.
00;10;57;06 - 00;11;07;01
Patrick Campbell
On if I'm the French product marketer, I talk to the U.S. product marketer like often or no or is that something where I interface with the brand marketing team and then I do my thing for France.
00;11;07;01 - 00;11;08;22
Stacey Epstein
There aren't product.
00;11;09;02 - 00;11;09;15
Patrick Campbell
Sorry.
00;11;09;15 - 00;11;33;26
Stacey Epstein
Yeah, but there are field marketers. Sure. Okay. So if you are the French field marketing leader, you're you are interacting a lot with a few people with the segment marketers. Okay, So like, I want to run a Freshdesk campaign or a CRM campaign in France, you're going to work with the segment marketers and the product marketers. There's also a digital marketing team.
00;11;34;15 - 00;11;41;07
Stacey Epstein
They do all the growth stuff. They help run campaigns, so they you'd be working with them and then you'd go to the brand team for all the assets.
00;11;41;09 - 00;11;45;17
Patrick Campbell
You just have a lot of really good directors, like how do you manage? Like, I just don't know how you keep up with it.
00;11;45;21 - 00;11;49;19
Stacey Epstein
It's funny, I saw Barack Obama. I am not going to compare myself to.
00;11;49;29 - 00;11;50;22
Patrick Campbell
Not go for it.
00;11;50;22 - 00;11;52;02
Stacey Epstein
Just yeah, just in advance.
00;11;52;02 - 00;11;52;29
Patrick Campbell
But it made you think of it.
00;11;53;14 - 00;12;14;15
Stacey Epstein
It's like, I hope he doesn't think I'm going to do that. I mean, I would love to be like, but I saw him speak once, and one of the questions was, you know, you have you're responsible for so, so many things, like how do you possibly make all these decisions? And his answer was only the really, really big important decisions bubble up to me.
00;12;14;26 - 00;12;36;05
Stacey Epstein
And I focus on having great people making the decisions all the way down the chain. And I kind of I really took it to heart. I think it's all about talent. The bigger the organization, the harder it is to be successful. Unless you have a great team at every levels. I start with my own team. You know, my focus in coming to Fresh works was do I have the very best team of leaders under me?
00;12;36;05 - 00;13;01;27
Stacey Epstein
Do I have the best guy running brand, the the best gal running communications? You know, I have a really amazing chief of staff that, like, keeps that keeps it all together. We meet all the time. We're really close. And then I support them in making sure that they have the same under them. And then at Flow, I mean, there's almost 500 people in marketing If you're just focused on talent all the way down, that's where you're going to see the success here.
00;13;01;28 - 00;13;02;21
Stacey Epstein
General Yeah.
00;13;02;21 - 00;13;04;28
Patrick Campbell
So I love your, your. Brigadier-General Yeah, that.
00;13;04;28 - 00;13;06;08
Stacey Epstein
Kind of stuff in direct reports.
00;13;06;08 - 00;13;06;18
Patrick Campbell
Yeah.
00;13;06;22 - 00;13;20;01
Stacey Epstein
And I pretty much, you know, I spent a lot of time with them and, and meeting with their teams as appropriate. I spent a lot of time being a peer to the other executives.
00;13;20;01 - 00;13;39;23
Patrick Campbell
And yeah, it's really interesting because we presume you don't know much about us. If anything, we're multiproduct. And so it's we chose to multiproduct very early in our lifecycle like when we were pre 10 million. Now we're post 10 million and it's just like we're starting to find some of these like, oh interesting. Like that product is just not getting any love.
00;13;39;23 - 00;13;53;06
Patrick Campbell
Like, do we? GM Like marketing. GM Each product. You guys, in my opinion, are like the case study for figuring out how this works because most companies is where they're going. Like HubSpot followed you. Salesforce was kind of doing this, but more from an M&A perspective.
00;13;53;06 - 00;14;13;08
Stacey Epstein
And so we had a joke that like, you know, oh, there's one of our one of our products. We were seeing some signs that maybe growth might be slowing. We got a double down. Oh, there's another product that, wow, it seems to be like growth is expanding. Oh, we got a double down and like at some point you can't just double down on.
00;14;13;14 - 00;14;32;10
Stacey Epstein
The answer isn't always double down. You have to just be more strategic than that and figure out, you know, hey, what can what can be more of a an attach sale to with another product or what's the better product to maybe go harder at the customer base versus trying to get net new. Like you got to really get down into strategy in order to make that work.
00;14;32;18 - 00;14;39;01
Patrick Campbell
Do you do you currently have multiple websites? I think everything's under one Web three. How does that work?
00;14;39;01 - 00;15;04;08
Stacey Epstein
As you probably remember, we originally were called Freshdesk. We had one product. We have a little bit of a legacy of having, you know, the Freshdesk website, which has a lot of brand value, has its own SEO. And so it's been like, you don't want to really get rid of that. I will probably eventually get some. But as of today we have fresh works dot com and then we have new URLs for a couple of our other tightly integrated website.
00;15;04;08 - 00;15;16;16
Patrick Campbell
Because that was always a funny thing. Like even with like early e-commerce, like Wayfair, right, they had a 500 different websites and then they went all the way down and those two quarters were pretty painful, but they were able to like, figure it out. So it's always interesting.
00;15;16;16 - 00;15;20;20
Stacey Epstein
Yeah, name names and name changes are brutal.
00;15;20;20 - 00;15;38;19
Patrick Campbell
Brutal. Yeah, we we had a name change in our past and it was the best advice I got was it's two years. It's not an announcement, but it's going to be two years of just get everyone's LinkedIn change, like take care of things, but it's just going to be keep talking and talking and talking and how do you get to fresh works?
00;15;38;19 - 00;15;40;19
Patrick Campbell
Like what's what's the story?
00;15;40;19 - 00;16;04;00
Stacey Epstein
I had been doing enterprise software marketing for decades, had left my role as CMO of service next to go start a company, and then we got acquired by Service Max. So I found myself back in the same seats. And I love service. Max I mean, I had pretty much joined after the founding team, so it was in some ways great to be back.
00;16;04;00 - 00;16;31;14
Stacey Epstein
And in other ways it was like I had I was going back to something I had already done, so I knew I wasn't going to stay forever. So I stayed two years and just said, Yeah, I'm just going to figure this out. I'm either going to go be a CEO again or mostly because I had mostly been really early, you know, build it up to the liquidity event or the IPO, and then go back to early.
00;16;31;14 - 00;16;47;26
Stacey Epstein
Like I've always consider myself an early stage builder and I just wanted to do something different. So I really was only entertaining. Very late stage CMO opportunities. The recruiter had called me like few months prior and I wasn't quite ready to leave and I was like, Wait, who are they?
00;16;47;27 - 00;17;03;12
Patrick Campbell
I know FreshBooks is always fighting the like, right? Brand We're not in use, you know, like, and like it got a little this very person like, you know, even charge me there was always like their competitors. I always kind of use their location against them, which gets a little problematic. But anyway, sorry.
00;17;03;16 - 00;17;25;07
Stacey Epstein
That's all right. Well, so I said no. And then when I started looking coincidentally has a morales, our CEO, who I had met, but barely we were acquaintances. But he sent me an email and said, Hey, I saw your name on a list of CMO candidates. And, you know, I knew him and I really liked him and saw and I was looking.
00;17;25;07 - 00;17;53;15
Stacey Epstein
So I called him and he was just like, Let me run down these numbers for you. Let me tell you. And and I said, Well, I might as well engage. And then I met G Great. Become G It it really felt like a combination of the big late stage, very pre-IPO, but also a lot of building, a lot of a lot of what you do in an early stage, like even all that we talked about before, all that positioning, all that kind of needed to get done.
00;17;53;22 - 00;18;07;12
Stacey Epstein
So it felt like a great combination for me, but also just such humble, authentic, really, as we've discussed, unique value proposition that really sort of spoke to me.
00;18;07;21 - 00;18;11;21
Patrick Campbell
Did you always know you wanted to like, get into business, get into marketing now?
00;18;12;03 - 00;18;13;19
Stacey Epstein
I wanted to be a sportscaster.
00;18;13;25 - 00;18;15;13
Patrick Campbell
Okay. Yeah, I like it.
00;18;15;13 - 00;18;30;16
Stacey Epstein
I played soccer or college and I was an English major and I was like, Yeah, all those. Or I'll just combine those two things and but I graduated and was like, okay, I'm going to get a job. And it's like and I had moved to San Francisco just because I thought it seemed like a cool place to live.
00;18;30;16 - 00;18;35;19
Stacey Epstein
So I got a job as actually an admin to an admin at Oracle.
00;18;35;21 - 00;18;36;14
Patrick Campbell
So you got to see some.
00;18;36;18 - 00;18;44;12
Stacey Epstein
Functions. The and I was fax and things for her. I love her and like putting stance on letters, but I, you know, I got in.
00;18;44;12 - 00;18;44;23
Patrick Campbell
The door.
00;18;45;01 - 00;19;09;23
Stacey Epstein
And it was early nineties and it was insane. I never really thought business would be interesting to me, but I loved it. Like I really got into the strategy of what my group was doing and just so many opportunities to advance and I ended up being there for six years just eventually marketing sales.
00;19;09;23 - 00;19;19;02
Patrick Campbell
Something you mentioned, you know, and you've been talking about for a while is empathetic marketing. What is it? Why is it important? Let's jump in to that. Yeah.
00;19;19;22 - 00;19;28;00
Stacey Epstein
Yeah. For me, it goes back to the core of empathy and what that word means. And and I think people want to think that it's like some touchy feely.
00;19;28;00 - 00;19;28;19
Patrick Campbell
Crystal's.
00;19;28;20 - 00;19;56;08
Stacey Epstein
Warm. Yeah. But for me, it's more about really putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. I mean, we do it with the products that we build. I talked earlier about building for the user and really understanding what does that customer service agent, what does that sales rep What does that I.T service management, what do they need to get their job done quickly, you know, does I in chat help them solve customer problems faster?
00;19;56;08 - 00;20;21;18
Stacey Epstein
Yes, it does. Okay, let's build it in a way like that is that's empathetic product. But empathetic marketing is really similar. It's putting yourself into the shoes of the audience. The buyer is typically who you're talking to when you're marketing software. What resonates for them? What is their life like? How do we help them meet their needs? Understanding their KPIs, understanding what their goals are for their own careers.
00;20;21;23 - 00;20;36;22
Stacey Epstein
That's really whenever I'm judging something that we're working on or I'm helping create something, it's I'm always trying to think of how is this going to resonate? Is this going to hit home? Can I run this by two or three of our customers and get their feedback?
00;20;36;25 - 00;20;38;27
Patrick Campbell
What am most people doing? Like, what's the alternative?
00;20;38;27 - 00;20;49;23
Stacey Epstein
I guess they just are thinking about. I mean, let's be honest, most people think about themselves most of the time, and so they're just they write something down and they think, Yeah, that's the.
00;20;49;23 - 00;20;50;10
Patrick Campbell
Coolest thing.
00;20;50;10 - 00;21;11;10
Stacey Epstein
To me. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, but you're not the buyer. I was running marketing at SuccessFactors for a long time. Early stage through the IPO. It was very easy to be empathetic because that was a tool to help leaders manage their people. And as we've discussed, that's always been talent management. So I was just like the buyer.
00;21;11;14 - 00;21;25;20
Stacey Epstein
And so if it resonated to me, well, it must be that probably good chance is going to resonate with the buyer. Very easy. Then you go to service, Max, and you're selling to field service. It's different. I don't know. I don't know what it's like to drive a white van around and try to solve problems all day. No idea.
00;21;25;20 - 00;21;45;14
Stacey Epstein
You have to meet with your customer, sit with your customers, talk with your customers. You got to run your stuff by them all the time. And over time you start to learn. And then by the end, I was like, I know exactly what they want. Like, No, no, no, that's not going to. Right? But in the beginning, I was just like, I know, I don't know this demographic.
00;21;45;14 - 00;21;58;28
Stacey Epstein
I got to go figure it out. And if you're not in the demographic of your buyer, you just don't know. You got to educate yourself and you have to constantly be asking yourself, is this really going to resonate with the audience? Not with me and my friends?
00;21;58;28 - 00;22;12;22
Patrick Campbell
And there's always a debate, benefits, features, whatever it's. But the debate doesn't matter because it's exactly what you're talking about. It's like, what did they want to hear? What's going to make them look good, What's going to make them feel comfortable? And I just, you know, I don't know if it's just the the ego part that you mentioned.
00;22;12;22 - 00;22;14;28
Patrick Campbell
I think it's also like it's harder.
00;22;15;03 - 00;22;38;18
Stacey Epstein
People and especially marketers, are inclined to want to talk about their own products and their own features, and they just want to advertise over it does this and it does that and does this and it does that. Aren't you ready to buy? And you're kind of like, it's funny because none of those things matter to me. I need to understand you to understand which features are going to matter.
00;22;38;18 - 00;23;02;23
Stacey Epstein
You know, it's like if you went to go buy a car and what you really wanted was an electric vehicle, and that was your number one requirement. And you went to a place where somebody was like, and look at the fuel injection on this car and just was like showing you all these great features of the car That was everything except the one thing you wanted.
00;23;02;23 - 00;23;02;26
Stacey Epstein
Well.
00;23;04;08 - 00;23;19;24
Patrick Campbell
This is why the most annoying salespeople are the ones that, like, don't ask you any questions and just like, go, go, go, go. And you're like to spend 5 minutes. How do you infuse this? They're like, Really? What did you do at service? Max And probably to extent fresh works because yeah, you're kind of the customer, but not at that level.
00;23;19;28 - 00;23;45;25
Stacey Epstein
Yeah, no, I mean, I don't run a customer support team or an IT, you know, I'm a marketer so I in that product I can, I mean a lot of it is in enablement with the sales team and it's not easy. Like we still work on it every day. I mean, at service, Max, we had a required first slide and the pitch deck, which was pretty much blank, trying to make it so easy for them to do that qualification.
00;23;45;25 - 00;24;02;15
Stacey Epstein
And they still don't always do it like it. You know, it's just easier to say, let me tell you about all our features. It's so much more effective if I first learn what you want and then I'm like, Oh, now, now I know you want that. So enablement, you know, kind of trying to force them to do it.
00;24;02;27 - 00;24;11;29
Stacey Epstein
A lot of sales manager enablement to make sure they're making sure the reps are qualifying for qualifying first.
00;24;12;01 - 00;24;24;01
Patrick Campbell
And what are those? What are those pieces of enablement Because I imagine with a 500 person team like it, it starts top down. You know, you're trying to figure it out. Is it like a positioning deck on each product that everyone needs to of?
00;24;24;01 - 00;24;31;12
Stacey Epstein
That's not what it is. It's not positioning the product, it's learning how to ask questions to uncover the need.
00;24;31;22 - 00;24;33;03
Patrick Campbell
So you're kind of teaching them how to fish or.
00;24;33;04 - 00;24;54;26
Stacey Epstein
Teaching them how to have empathy for their buyer and we did at Service, Max. We did a very extensive training and literally most of it it was days of training and most of it was like asking questions to uncover needs and requirements and every which way possible and not leading the witness like don't you want.
00;24;55;20 - 00;24;55;27
Patrick Campbell
Yeah.
00;24;56;09 - 00;25;22;03
Stacey Epstein
Like we're talking features again. No, like, what's your problem? Your problem is that you have a lot of customers who have the same problem over and over again. Okay, well, if you had an AI enabled chat bot that could just quickly answer those questions or solve those problems without even bothering an agent. Can I help you with your time to service with your.
00;25;22;03 - 00;25;38;04
Stacey Epstein
All right. But first I need to know that's an issue for you. Because what if you say to me in chat doesn't work, I need to have an actual physical conversation because every problem is so unique that an AI enabled chat bot is not going to right then I'm not going to try to sell you that. But I don't.
00;25;38;04 - 00;25;51;13
Stacey Epstein
If I didn't ask you, I don't know. So I think the big mistake is sales teams that don't understand how to ask and it's something we still work on. And then it's harder for marketing people because I'm not in an opportunity very often to ask.
00;25;51;13 - 00;25;54;27
Patrick Campbell
So on the marketing side then, yeah, you don't have reps, right? You don't have.
00;25;54;28 - 00;25;56;01
Stacey Epstein
Yeah, you don't.
00;25;56;01 - 00;26;08;12
Patrick Campbell
And so with marketing, like is it doing customer development? Like when you're putting together a new campaign or something like that, or is it just always doing some sort of like interviews or something each week? Like how do you how do you do that?
00;26;08;12 - 00;26;40;00
Stacey Epstein
It's harder. I think it's you're relying on like your product marketing team and you're hoping that they're doing the job of understanding the customer, right? We can't have 5000 marketers just like having a weekly call once a month. Our executive meeting, our weekly meeting is focused on customers and we have customers come in and present to us and three fourths of the time they're unhappy customers, which I've never been part of a company that did that and, you know, sometimes brutal.
00;26;40;00 - 00;26;56;24
Stacey Epstein
Sometimes we joke like, that's not the best way to start the day. That's empathy. You got to hear the good, the bad, the ugly. It's great when we have the ones that come on and just tell us how awesome we are. But I think when you take the time to listen to the negative ones, that's when you can really make the big changes.
00;26;57;01 - 00;27;18;04
Patrick Campbell
So if I'm kind of trying to design this for my own company here, sales questions Question Discovery. So crucial. Once you have Discovery, make sure you're aligning things to those conversations, marketing its product, marketing, make sure they're doing the research and then finding the best ways to kind of disseminate that across a marketing team, product team probably as well.
00;27;18;14 - 00;27;33;25
Patrick Campbell
And then exact team just always keeping this top of mind because as an exact it's pretty easy to get disconnected and you know it, you know, smell your own, you know, great product and all that kind of thing rather than like what stinks and needs to be fixed. So is that is that kind of the stack is a time.
00;27;34;11 - 00;27;56;24
Stacey Epstein
I think it's also just having the mindset of asking for input and like just not doing things in silos. So if I'm working on a marketing campaign and it's really sounding and looking great to me and I don't have a customer readily handy that I can ask, I'm going to go ask the sales team, is this going to work for you?
00;27;56;24 - 00;28;05;04
Stacey Epstein
And sometimes you get to know and you got to be ready for the now, or sometimes you get a helpful shaping that makes it even better.
00;28;05;11 - 00;28;22;08
Patrick Campbell
The constant precipice of like low ego, but also like knowing you're going to figure it out. And in between they're struggling every piece of feedback to like filter it, right? Because I'm sure there's some things where you have customers come in that are like aggravated that you're just like the end of it isn't. We're going to change anything.
00;28;22;08 - 00;28;35;11
Patrick Campbell
The end of it is like that type of customer we just shouldn't have, right? Which is painful because like as an exact team, you're like, We're everyone. We should be for everyone, right? And it's like, No, maybe not or no, we can't build that because I would alienate this other group and stuff.
00;28;35;11 - 00;29;06;12
Stacey Epstein
So, I mean, nine times out of ten when we have an unhappy customer, we really look at did we let them buy even though Fast, Easy, Affordable wasn't what they wanted? And I mean, all companies are going to take that risk sometimes, like, you know, especially in sales, we're all aggressively selling. But it's the more you can train your salespeople to ask the right questions and then match it to features, I think the more success you have in selling the right people the right price, Sure.
00;29;06;22 - 00;29;12;04
Patrick Campbell
This is great. I really appreciate that. Said, we're going to find you and anything you want to plug.
00;29;12;09 - 00;29;14;23
Stacey Epstein
Well, our office is right across the street. There you go.
00;29;15;08 - 00;29;15;22
Patrick Campbell
We're down here.
00;29;16;04 - 00;29;30;10
Stacey Epstein
I was never there. You can find me on Twitter at Stacey Epstein. Stacey Y Epstein, also on LinkedIn. Stacey Epstein. Great. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. Appreciate that. Great to talk to you.
00;29;30;10 - 00;29;59;08
Patrick Campbell
A huge shout out to Stacey for doing the podcast. Now you have what it takes to strategize your multipronged marketing strategy. Today we talked about integrating sales, marketing and customer success being easy, fast and affordable. The five major prongs of segment marketing, instilling empathy in your marketing and the questions to ask to uncover needs. Oh, and if you want to support profitable and the show, we'd appreciate it if you leave a five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch the podcast.
00;29;59;08 - 00;30;15;04
Patrick Campbell
Gods tend to like that type of thing. And hey, we like to appease the podcast Cops. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle. A podcast from Profile will recur the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.
