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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#24: Telling a unified story across diverse audiences and product portfolios with Ajay Kumar, CMO at ManageEngine
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- [00:01]
Greg Kilstrom
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- [00:48]
Ajay Kumar
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show. Welcome to today's episode where we're going to explore how to tell a unified story while marketing several products to several audiences. Joining us is Ajay Kumar, head of Global Marketing and Chief Evangelist at ManageEngine, to discuss this and more. AJ, welcome to the show.
- [01:39]
Ajay Kumar
Thank you Greg for having me on your show.
- [01:41]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking about these topics with you. Before we get started, why don't you give us a little background on yourself and Your role at ManageEngine?
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Ajay Kumar
So as you mentioned, I handle the global marketing activities for the IT management software vendor called ManageEngine, which incidentally, incidentally is the sister division of the SaaS major called Zoho. I started out as a software developer, incidentally, and in the late 90s, I think before the cloud took off and then I transitioned to marketing and I've been at it for the last two decades.
- [02:15]
Greg Kilstrom
Great, great. Well, yeah, so let's dive in here. We're going to talk about a few things here and the big theme here is just, you know, maintaining consistency across audiences, product portfolios, things like that. So let's start with talking about audiences. Can you talk about the importance of arriving at the right marketing messaging aimed at both SMBs and enterprises? Because that's, you know, that's what Managed Engine has a Rather diverse audience set. So how do you characterize the importance of doing that?
- [02:47]
Ajay Kumar
Nice. It's a nice question. Yeah. So manageine, as an IT management vendor, we deal with both the SMB and the enterprise segment. To keep this very simple, I just got a deep dive a bit. If we look at an SMB, right, the usual classification of SMB, it actually changes from region to region, right? So if you take us and SMB is basically any company which is having less than 500 employees, but if you look at the rest of the world, it'll be like any business having less than 250 is the set that we look at. So that's the small complexity that comes in when you broadly classify saying SMB and enterprise, right? So that's something that we as marketers need to think about, right? Because each country, each region, the classification is very different and you should not do a broad stroke and plan your marketing campaigns with that data set in mind. Complexity that organization like managing has over and above the SMB and enterprise divide is we are an IT management vendor, which means the audience that we speak to are the IT decision makers. And the complexity which I just mentioned about is because if you look at enterprise, as I mentioned, less than 250 or less than more than 250 or more than 500 in US or the rest of the world, the IT team size is a very crucial part in making your marketing messaging, identifying decision makers. And for a set like an IT team, it's hovering around above 2t is enterprise and less than 50 is the small and medium business. So these metrics and segmentations are very, very good, crucial when you apply any marketing message. And if you are, if you are a vendor which deals with B2B audience, dealing with SMB and enterprise, these crucial nuggets of information is very, very important to factor in, right? So this is exactly what we deal with, right? And that's the first thing that we look at before we start looking at into the marketing messaging part. And I think if I deep dive a bit more, if you look at SMB as a segment, when I look at the IT teams in the SMB, they're basically generalist because it's a small team size, which means a person will wear multiple hats in decision making. He'll be looking at network servers, applications, the cloud infrastructure, all together, he'll be like one or two persons looking at it. Whereas in an enterprise it's a specialized role, right? It'll be a very structured team. There is delineations of responsibility and There's a larger focus on strategic planning and innovations. So that's the next big difference you need to look at when you look at the SMB and enterprise. So what I'm speaking till now is about the segmentation of your audience which is very, very crucial for a marketing role. Right. And now comes the marketing message. So marketing message for an SMB is varied, vary from the enterprise marketing message that you train. That's because the expectations from the SMB audience and enterprise audience is bit different because of the complexities of the kind of IT infrastructure that they deal with. Right. So SMB they may emphasis on efficiency, scalability, cost effectiveness. Right. They'll be looking at ease of implementation and use, they'll be looking at components of support and integration capabilities. This is what it will be the top of the mind for an IT decision maker in SMB. But when you take an enterprise, they are looking at more advanced features over and above what an SMB looks like. They're looking at more advanced features, they're looking at innovation, they're looking for robust security. And because it's an enterprise, maybe spread across different geographies, the local compliance is also coming to play, which means they look for a vendor who's compliant to the local laws. And so this is all factored in, has to be factored in when you start working on your marketing message. So this is exactly the challenge. A vendor like Manaengine, which is like been in the business since 2002, which I think the backstory here is we started off as I think a small vendor startup, then we slowly grew into SMB. Now we are a 17,000 employee company, so we are an enterprise. So when I start looking at marketing messages, I actually look inward, look at my organization's growth, the expectations my IT team has got. Right. And that actually helps me or guides me in framing those marketing messages. So unification, I think we can broadly say I can come with a unified story, but unified story is just an umbrella. But you need to go to the depths of your audience segmentation and plan your messaging, your multi channel marketing activities. You need to know where our SMB and enterprise audience congregate and customize your message. So this is how I think we should be dealing with marketing messaging.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, so you know, a few, a few things there. I mean first of all, like I think bringing up the nuance of SMB doesn't mean the same thing in two different places necessarily. I mean that, I think that makes it more complex. The other part here is, you know, definitely when you get to the, you know, the individual customer, even to the segment level. Like you're, you're going to have different nuances and different, you know, specific points that you, that you touch on to your earlier points. But at that highest level, you know, when you're talking about a product that does appeal to both enterprise and SMB, varying definition as it might be, how do you balance the needs of all of those? When you're thinking about like at the top of the pyramid, the you know, however you structure messaging and brand positioning and all those things like how do you, how do you balance those needs between those two audiences?
- [08:52]
Ajay Kumar
So I think the way I think. So I will take it from my experience of working in this company, right? The way we look at this, the segmentation and the balance that we need to provide. Let me go into the product part of it, right? The product are classified into varied tires or solutions or editions. So that is I think from our example we have a standard edition for a particular product, a professional edition and an enterprise edition. So choice is given to the customer on his journey from say he's an SMB or he's a small officer, the small organization is a small IT team. He would obviously want the very basic things to get his job done. So he will only look for a standard edition of a product, right. He'll start off his journey with us with standard edition and maybe that satisfies his current needs, right. And then as he grows, as his IT becomes more complex, he may venture into the upgraded versions, right. He may move to professional. And as his company grows exponentially and more employees are added to his organization, which means complexities is gone up. I think the scale just multiplies because it has different geographical locations. That's when he starts exploring the enterprises. So one point, first point I would like to highlight is tired solutions and additions and we promote it accordingly based on his life cycle. Our promotions we know. So this particular organization with so much of employees is looking only for this basic set of features or products capabilities. Our promotions are only centered around that. We don't talk about the big things about will this product scale for our 10,000 employees. Because that doesn't make sense for an organization of its scale. So that's how we start balancing it. And second is I think if you look at how do you do marketing for SMB we will just restrict ourselves to things like how to guides, cost saving tips, success stories from similar sized businesses. But when you come to enterprise they look for more in depth content like white papers, case studies, analyst reports, right? Like the Gartners and Foresters, they would like to see whether we are featured, whether this particular vendor I'm evaluating is featured in these reports. Right. And that makes true sense because it's been evaluated by a reputed analyst firm, which means half his job is done. Next thing is about getting his team. Multiple stakeholders in is just not a single person, as I told you, like in a small and medium business, it's multiple stakeholders that are involved and they do a detailed evaluation for which as a vendor we need to supply all those materials as marketing messages, battle cards and all this stuff. And now third point, I would say so I talked about tired editions, I talked about content. Then I would say let me shift the focus on the communication channels. If you look at an SMB, I think from my experience they prefer direct, straightforward communications. It could be your email marketing, social media, webinars, online content. Whereas an enterprise, they prefer to engage more through professional networks, right? Industry conferences, they need detailed white papers, they want direct sales outreach. They, they inquire about do you have a dedicated support for my organization? So these are all things that may come in mind and this is something that your marketing program should balance out to ensure that both these audiences are satisfied. Right?
- [12:31]
Greg Kilstrom
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- [14:34]
Ajay Kumar
So I will give you a few examples of what we as a company. So as I mentioned, Man Engine is a division of Zoho. The parent company is called Zoho Core, right? So we have been in the business since 1996. Then it was called Advernet, now it's called Zoho Core. But that was a common thread that we as company followed. It's about privacy over profits, right? Ethics is very, very crucial for us. So we know we are part of a larger ecosystem by supporting our customers. So one thing that we started off when we started off our journey is we also, we knew, we started off a startup, we moved to SMBs and Enterprise. We knew the difficulties of the purchasing power of costly SO software and we knew the ecosystem of open software which I think most startups consume. So giving back was one thing that was very, very crucial. And if you look at our website, we have a section for free tools, right? So we have around over 60 IT management free tools which you offer to any startup or any mid sized companies looking to just do their basic set of IT infrastructure management with the free tools. So that's been in practice right from the first days of when we started off saying that, right? When you put this engineering effort, let's also look at free tools, even our commercial products which I talked about about the pricing structure, right? Where standard professional enterprise, we also have free editions, right? Only thing is it'll be limited by number of users, right? Maybe a standard product could allow maybe 15, 20 users to on a paid basis. Whereas for us a free edition, we say five users, you can take it for free if your organization just got monitoring for five users or five help desk technicians. So those kind of things are something that's there in the system. So that's on the business development side of things where we focus on these kind of things where we want to give it back to the society. As a corporate we have other initiatives too, right? So we strongly believe in something called rural revival. So though I think what we have noticed, right, talent is universal, they are available across. It's just that opportunities are limited. So we have this process where we encourage, right, we go to a, say, Tire 2, Tier 3 town, we start investing in something like agriculture and we provide employments for the local villages. Incidentally, for an example, Zoho has got around 110 acres farm in deep south of India and in Tamil Nadu, where I'm based out of, and which employs around 50, 60 agrarian people who are employed and which is like, that's something that we take great pride about, right? It's just not making money through business. It's about giving back to society. And I think agriculture is one area where there is a rural rail that we do. We also have something called as the transnational localism. So basically the concept is think local, think global, hire local. So it's basically what we've done now is we have spread our offices in India. We have been doing this experiment for the last, I think just before the pandemic hit, right from 2018. This transnational localism is something that our founder had initiated where we had gone to set up offices in tier 2, tier 3 Towns and cities with the idea that why should a qualified person move out of his hometown searching for a job, come to the cities, which means he's creating a void in his local town. And why don't we as corporates go there, right, where we know there's a lot of talent who we can give employment to. So that's transnational localism for us. And this is something that it's very unique to our company.
- [18:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, great. So one other topic I wanted to talk about with you. So, you know, we talked about the diverse audiences and how to understand as well as target those meaningfully. I also wanted to talk about, you know, ManageEngine has a portfolio of over 50 IT management products. So how do you look at, you know, it's kind of the same question as with audiences, but, you know, about product. You know, how do you put together a unified story of these 50 different products and yet, you know, kind of balance the unique attributes of each.
- [19:17]
Ajay Kumar
To be very frank, it's still a work in progress, right?
- [19:20]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
- [19:22]
Ajay Kumar
When we started our journey in 2002, at that point as a startup, it was survival. So we are just focused on putting our individual point products, right, which address the very specific need of our then predominantly small and medium businesses. But as the products matured, right. So it's been like 22 years now so obviously these products are well matured. So we started attracting more complex organizations which need demanded point products, but which are well integrated and they communicate with each of these point products. Right. So that's how our customers started pushing our products to integrate. So though it looks like 50, 60 products out there, each products, I think they communicate with each other. And slowly what happened with the integrations coming in, it became a solution set, right. So which means we now broadly have seven solutions under which 50 or 60 products can be attached to. And then as more complex organizations gave way to enterprises, so nowadays we see a lot of big enterprises coming into our ecosystem, the demand shifted from not just integration, they wanted a platform they didn't want seeking for a point product. They just came and told that we are looking for a digital transformation to happen in our organization where we understand it all starts with it. Right. So which means you as an IT management vendor would need to support our IT organization to help us achieve additional transformation. Right. Addition transformation could include zero trust, right. Could be one, one way where they want to bring in a zero trust process in the organization. They want paperless office where all things reports, everything's available digitally. Right. So that's the kind of push that came from our customers. It's actually our customers who actually gave momentum to I think bring this unified story. So the unified story now we currently have, I think what we provide to our customers is about taking control of their IT infrastructure end to end. That's what I think we as managen stand for for our customers. The reason being that we manage the entire stack right. From network servers, applications, we go up till the cloud. So we have all the tools that any organization would need, right. Of scale from a small and medium to medium to large, large to very large enterprises. Based on your points of scale, we'll be able to provide you maybe a single product, multiple products, well integrated solutions or a platform. So this is how we would like to go to the world, go to our customers saying that we are this end to end IT management vendor.
- [22:13]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So one, one last question for you here. Being in, you know, B2B marketing, you know, as you mentioned, Manage Engine has, has been around since 2002, you know, and certainly in your career having having done this as well, what, what trends are you seeing in B2B audiences and you know, in particular to how, you know, B2B marketing is approached and how audiences are reacting to those approaches?
- [22:45]
Ajay Kumar
Yeah, so I think what I've noticed, right, the trends keep shifting, right. So I think one basic Tenets that I think which we noticed from customers is I think they prefer personalized content when it comes to content marketing. So one thing is I would say to the audience or marketers listening to this podcast is personalizing content and communication based on the data that's available, right. Is very, very crucial, right. As for you to identify buyer personals targeting specific accounts, personalized content. Personalized content will definitely help you connect with your target audience quicker. The next thing that I would point out is ABM strategies account based marketing that will help you focus on identifying high value accounts, creating customized marketing strategy which ties down to the personalized content which I mentioned about. And again coming back to content, please do some detailed research and ensure that you come up with valuable value additions like white papers and ebooks and webinars and case studies which provide some in depth insights for your audience to make quicker decisions. So I think the other one is thought leadership is definitely welcomed. And so that's what I think when it comes to events or podcasts, even this podcast, right? Where do people come to this because they are here for to gain more knowledge, more information. So thought leadership content is definitely a good playwright that you should look at. Something which I have noticed right in the current trend that I've noticed is people do not have a lot of time so people need nuggets of information given to them quicker. Right? So what I've noticed is a trend of video marketing. Why do you think Instagram reels are very popular? Because it gives quick content right to the point, to the brief. So video marketing is definitely picking up a trend which I've noticed and this is an area that I think as marketers we got to start shifting or bringing that into a gamut of activities that a marketing team has to do. So these are all five or six. There are lot out there. But I can say this is like top of the mind things that you should look at trends that I've been noticing and which could help marketeers, wannabe marketeers to focus on.
- [25:06]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well AJ really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining. One last question before we wrap up here. What advice would you give, you know, for those marketers out there that you know, have diverse audiences in the B2B space, managing, you know, a pretty diverse product portfolio. What, what would your advice be for them to to do today?
- [25:30]
Ajay Kumar
I would say be ready to experiment, be ready to accept failures with humility. Please have an open mind to learn from failed projects. I think they're the best learning materials for you and imbibe those learnings to better the outcome. The next one. I think failure should be accepted. Experiment should be encouraged, but learn from it and ensure that you don't repeat those in your next try. That's my major advice to marketers. Second, I think which I think most people, most marketers miss out is the cultural sensitivity. Prioritize cultural sensitivity in your marketing and business approach. It'll be a good thing that you have a deep understanding and respect for local cultures and enhance your brand's acceptance and longevity in the market because you understand the local culture that really, really connects with your core audience. Because you can't do a one size fit all marketing where you're marketing, say to China and marketing to Australia cannot be the same, right? Because audience sensitivity is very, very different. The way they look at a problem is very different. So that is a very crucial advice which I would encourage marketing teams to look into that investment of time and effort to do some basic research. Don't just look at metrics, just go beyond metrics. I think that's the milestone that everyone should be looking forward to. That is something that I always watch out for when I do some marketing campaigns.
- [26:55]
Greg Kilstrom
That's great. Well again, I'd like to thank Ajay Kumar, Head of Global Marketing and Chief Evangelist at ManageEngine, for joining us today. You can learn more about AJ and ManageEngine by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.