3 - The difference between doing marketing in a start-up vs scale-up (with Emelie Malmquist, Head of Marketing at Adnami)

Emelie Malmquist is the Head of Marketing at Adnami. Before that she was Demand Generation Manager at Vainu.

On this episode we talk about:
- Learnings in taking the route from sales into marketing
- The difference between doing marketing in a start-up vs scale-up environment
- How to piggyback on other companies with co-creation
- Should we use agencies or hire FTEs in-house?

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Transcript

Intro: 0:01

The best b2b SaaS companies in the world have made the shift towards a demand generation strategy focused on revenue and revenue. And Europe is falling behind. What about you? What about? Isn't it about time you made the shift? On this podcast, we interviewed leaders at the forefront of modern demand generation to help you make the shift and join the movement join the movement, we need to drop the MQLs and focus on what matters leading you into the future. This is the demand generation movement. And this is your host, Adam Holmgren.

Adam Holmgren: 0:47

Hey, welcome to the demand generation movement. And this time, it's my pleasure to welcome Emily malmquist, Head of Marketing at a Nomi thank you for joining us, Emily.

Emelie Malmquist: 0:58

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. And thank you for the invite podcast is actually my favorite forum. So I'm really looking forward to this.

Adam Holmgren: 1:05

Yeah, it's great. I don't know if I pronounced that Nami. Right. But hopefully,

Emelie Malmquist: 1:10

I think so at Nami. Yeah.

Adam Holmgren: 1:13

I'm, I'm really looking forward to chat with you. Because you are a person that have actually taken the route from sales into marketing. Right. And I, I wanted us to deep dive into that debate. Right away, actually. So yes, can you can you tell us a little bit about how you kind of ended up going from sales into marketing? And if you have learned anything from that journey? I think it's a cool journey.

Emelie Malmquist: 1:38

Yeah, sure thing. Well, actually, I think I went from marketing to sales to marketing kinda. I marketing was always my plan. I got up to interest for marketing already. I think high school or something. A little did a lot of marketing things next to my studies, actually. But yeah, then I, when I was studying in Lund, I got the opportunity to join a sales consultancy company. But I actually didn't know exactly what they did before I applied, I saw something with business development, and I saw something with marketing and something with sales. I was like, Okay, maybe this is a good way. And but yeah, it turned out to just be b2b sales, which I am very happy about today. So I got like the intercourse at a tech company called that census, and got very much into b2b sales, I learned all of the basics. And then I started vinyl. And I felt like I got a master degree in sales almost. Because, you know, you know, the company, probably, but there's so much knowledge in house on how to do b2b sales and very impressive, impressive, like structure internally, and, you know, tooling and environment in general to learn about b2b sales. So yeah, I did that for a while. And then I got a role, which we called Real Time sales. And it's, it's a mix between sales and marketing. And today, I would probably say that it's even a little bit tied to, to demand gen, because we did, we did sales, like we closed our own deals, and we booked our own meetings, but we did it in like a little bit more, obviously, data driven manner, but also like a little bit more marketing driven. So we created like, webinars and sales tours, and a lot of content and so on. And then we use that to to do outreach with so we contacted, for example, sales directors and gave them you know, first kit on how to run a sales team, for example. And then, you know, educating our audience, which then created a demand from them. And then we booked meanings from it and closer on deals. So So I did that. And then from one day to another, I was offered a role to basically like build the local marketing for for vinyl in Sweden. And I was actually super hesitant at first because I just like, got into sales and I was closing deals and you know, everything was going very well. So I was like, Okay, are you taking away my budget? Are you taking away my commission? What, like what's happening? But yeah, it was super cool. And talking about learnings like, I think, you know, I have so much use of that time in b2b sales, because, you know, I have the revenue focus and I understand how a sales process process works. I understood like the ICP and like our personas challenges and what they, what they are talking about what their like, phrasings are and so on. So, I think I think I got a lot of use out of that as a marketeer. Actually.

Adam Holmgren: 4:40

Yeah. And I feel like that is an issue that many of us face that close relationship between sales and marketing, something that we really need to create to get success I guess, for you what what are some of the like key things how what you have done to achieve that in the past or Maybe now what your current role?

Emelie Malmquist: 5:01

Yeah, I think if we're talking about vinyl, for example, I think we got a good relationship automatically, because half of our marketing team have been in sales before and even at the same company and sales. So like, like said, we knew quite a lot of, of the processes and to personas and so on, and we knew the people. So, you know, it was already a relationship there. But I think in general, I think the foundation is just like aligning around the same ICP, the same data, the same tooling. For example, at Nami, now, we're in the process of implementing HubSpot for sales, marketing, and support. And we did that basically, because we had so much issues before, like, information was in silos, we had sales in one tool, we had marketing and other tools, we had support in a totally different tools. And like, no one knew what the other people were working on. So I think that's, that's like a foundation for a good relationship, just making sure that you're talking to the same type of companies, you're using the same messaging, and you have the same data at once.

Adam Holmgren: 6:13

Yeah. And I feel like this is also a bit the basis of it called this podcast, because in a lot of companies, I think there are discrepancy between how sales are measured often through revenue and the deals that they make, and then we marketing are measured, or maybe MQL. Sound leads. But how do you how do you view like, what is demand generation to you? And the difference between lead generation? How do you view that?

Emelie Malmquist: 6:42

Well, there's probably a lot of definition definitions for this. But like, in the end, it's in the name dimension is about creating and capturing demand. I would even say like, dig gold with imagine this just like dominating a category. But you know, dimension is basically more in my eye, at least more customer focused, and obviously more revenue focused, as you said, as well. But it's more on the buyers, you know, kind of way of doing things. You know, you're moving your ICP buyers like down the buying journey at their own pace and the way they want with the message they need at the right time. So it's much more customer focused away. And you as a marketeer need to focus much more like educating their audience and capturing them when they're ready. While Legion, which I probably did a lot in the past, is, for me, today, I realized that at least it's more contact accurate acquisition in the end, like, it's not so revenue focused, it's quite old school metrics, you know, you focus on quantity focus on number of leads, like you said, number of contacts, how many email addresses you get, and so on, you're not really focusing on, you know, creating revenue. So,

Adam Holmgren: 8:02

there's a big, what would you, what would you say, Are your like, top measurements today for your success at Nami?

Emelie Malmquist: 8:11

Why are they so early on? And I'm still working on it a bit, just getting all the reporting in place, to be honest, but I think, yeah, just revenue. First of all, obviously, that can take time if you have a long sales cycle, but pipeline value win rates. I would even say like, you know, just compared to your regular pipeline, like how fast are you closing deals from marketing sources versus outbound sources? What is the ACV from your marketing sources versus your, your marketing pipeline? That pipeline value, I think is a

Adam Holmgren: 8:46

good one. Yeah, yeah. And it was six months ago or something right, but you started your new position. But Mommy, can you tell us a little bit about the difference in being at I guess, a smaller startup versus being at a more larger company or medium company and how you execute marketing there?

Emelie Malmquist: 9:09

Of course, well, a lot of differences. Like I came from a scale up where we had I think we were at max 13 People in the marketing team, including, you know, in house copywriters, and content managers like customer marketing, product marketing, marketing, ops, paid marketing, you know, local marketers or demand gents, and you know, local copywriters as well. And Adhami we're 3030 people in general, like all through the company, and marketing is so new. So obviously, like, we can't go all in with a bang and just like have 13 marketeers so today it's me and then I have a graphic designer on my team, who's She's a superstar she, she does everything from graphic design, but also helps out a lot with the website and sometimes like conversions and sales collateral needs to be creative, and so on. And then I actually have an agency who helps us an external agency, who helps with everything from copywriting to PR and events. And that's actually going really, really good. Good. They have so much industry knowledge. So it's very nice. But yeah, so it's different like, and then I'm doing quite a lot of this stuff myself, so very hands on as well. But yeah, the biggest difference, I think, is just like kind of realizing your limits, like, if you're a big marketing team, you can do so much, you can test so much, you probably have more tooling, you can track everything, like revenue, attribution is easier. And you know, you kind of like, you have the opportunity also to risk a little bit more with your marketing, you know, trying something new. While for me now, it's also so much about just like, putting out fires building the foundation, you know, making sure that there's no gaps in the funnel. And yeah, so I think that's the biggest challenge that I can't do everything, even though I have ideas. But other than that, I think, like to share some tips and tricks, I think you can kind of piggyback quite a lot on other companies. And you can do a lot of collaborations and so on. That's not as resource heavy. For example, like, everyone doesn't need to host their own webinars, everyone doesn't need a podcast, even though we all want a podcast. But everyone doesn't need to have like 10 ebooks or something like that. It's that just like, gather up with partners and CO create content, maybe have people writing different channels, and then chapters and then do one master content piece on gated, I think or join other people's webinars, go on events, network with people and so on.

Adam Holmgren: 11:54

I think that's a great idea. And we usually have so you know, similar audiences that we want to reach out to so. So that's really cool. And if we go back to that, you said that you're also using agencies, which I think most of us, of course, are in somewhere. Do you do your future as you will do most of that in house? Or do you think you will always do parts of your work with agencies?

Emelie Malmquist: 12:18

I think, for now, and for at least the upcoming years, probably. I think agency like the setup works pretty well. For us. I think it depends what you're outsourcing. I was so sure before I started at Nami that I would hire a copywriter internally, and just have someone like producing so much content for every channel. But it works very well with the agency we have now. And they are so good with the industry. And they also invest quite a lot of time themselves in actually educating themselves, which creates better content for us. But I think also if I would have a copywriter internally, I know that all the proofreading, like first type, proofreading, first step, proofreading would end up end up on me. And now there's an agency who does all that first filtering kinda. So the content I get is actually really high quality. And then obviously, there might be comments. And I think it's the same kind of if you outsource, like paid, for example, then you have someone that's actually expert in it, and they can do a lot of work and and it's a collaboration. So I think my role is very much like Project Leader instead of people leader, which fits quite well into stage actually.

Adam Holmgren: 13:32

It feels like as long as you're able to educate agency. If they don't know your industry, perhaps or your product, then it can work really well. So yeah, definitely.

Emelie Malmquist: 13:42

And I think if before hiring freelancers, or agencies, like of course, do do some kind of test or you know, find case studies or reviews or whatever. But But I think it can be a really good setup if you find the right partner.

Adam Holmgren: 13:58

And when you when you were out looking for agencies, did you like view a lot of different ones? Or how did you find your current one?

Emelie Malmquist: 14:06

So this one was actually they were working together with an arm even before I did. And I think that was upon recommendation. They're UK based and we have an office there. But for example now I'm also looking for an agency or freelancer, probably an agency to help with paid because that's part of the mix and my knowledge only gets me so far with paid. But then yeah, I'm looking into a few different ones. And then just first of all, like trying to learn what the differences are, but also trying to find someone that kind of matches my way of of doing sales and marketing. For example, I had an interview or a call or sales call with another agency now and he mentioned like sales and marketing kolab and that it would be valuable for them to have some inputs from sales on their processes and their you know, basically their wordings and terminology, you know I was like, okay, that's super nice, because that's how I like to work. So yeah, it's I think needing a few different ones and just trusting, you know, combine read like reviews and what they're saying and what they think is possible price and your gut feel,

Adam Holmgren: 15:16

I think, I think that's a great approach, we have had a similar approach to get except at get except where we usually have agencies. So they can challenge us some sometimes, you know, we need someone from the outside, just look at what we do and say, Maybe you should try this instead. That's really cool. I agree. But if we, if we also go back a bit to the KPIs that we talked about before, I think there's a lot of debate around, you know, we want to be able to measure as much as possible, of course, and tie it to revenue and attribution, you said that you're working on building that up? But then we of course, at the same time want to focus on brand awareness, being creative, doing fun stuff, that maybe we can't measure? How do you do that? And how much autonomy can you do like without saying it have yielded this much in return as an example?

Emelie Malmquist: 16:08

Yeah. So I come from a background, which I'm very thankful for now. But I learned, you know, the importance of having data and creating data and taking data driven decisions. And that, like, that gets you very far, like, obviously, like if you can measure what's giving you success, and then copy that that's, you know, that's the best way but, but I think at the naamyaa, I also saw more of the importance of branding. And a lot of our customers are also b2b, b2c companies and larger ones. So they're also investing more in branding, obviously. But I don't know, I think like, we're all human, and when we, when we buy something, we often do it on subconsciously. And I think branding is such a big role or has such a big role in that. Like, for example, like, if you think of electric cars, you think of Tesla, if you think of CRMs, you obviously think about, you know, Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, and chatbots are drift and you know, so on. So having a, like, good brand is something that you should not take for granted, and is something you should not ignore, even though you can't measure it. Because like branding, you know, it obviously, often ends up in some kind of like, direct, you know, regional source or something. So I think it's a combination. And I think it goes quite up to management and your KPIs, like, if you're just measured on number of demo requests, or, you know, conversions or so on, it's super impossible to do any type of branding, because obviously, it takes time, it's difficult to measure. But I think it needs to be in the mix somehow. And you need to kind of invest money in it, and then just don't see it as a cost, see it as an opportunity instead,

Adam Holmgren: 18:00

do you have any tips for maybe ways that you have managed to build the brand in a way what have worked for you previously? Or maybe now also in in brand building and breathe it building that awareness?

Emelie Malmquist: 18:13

Good question. I think it's all about educating. I think like finding, for example, like your tone of voice and your story, as a company, and finding what you believe is the right way to do. Whatever you do if it's b2b sales, or marketing, or advertising or so on. I think at an army, it's still so early days, but what we're doing, for example, is a lot of customer resource, customer research stories. So for example, we've teamed up with lumen research and user needs and those kinds of companies. And then we're doing customer stories where we actually using like proper data, so we've used like eye tracking to measure how well our solution is working for the end audience. And then actually, like showcasing those results without talking too much about ourselves more about, you know, what results like high impact could give, for example, that's a way of doing branding, because you're educating the audience, while you're kind of, you know, promoting your narrative of something. But besides that, I think doing branding is like proving really, really good core quality content in one core topic, for example, that builds you like very good brand for that I know you had get except I've done that with your digital sales room, for example, like when I hear a digital sales room now, I had no idea what it was before, but I just think I'll get accepted because you really like made so much content about in so many different channels. So

Adam Holmgren: 19:45

and I guess that's what you want. Like if we people think about something, your name should pop up there, then you have done a splendid job in terms of branding.

Emelie Malmquist: 19:54

Definitely. And it's, I mean, it's also about being consistent, you know, not just consistent with shape and color. and found even though that's also part of it, but being consistent about your story and your solution and what you think is the right way to do something.

Adam Holmgren: 20:08

Yeah. And if we if we talk about said tonality and branding, do you think it's a must to, to localize all your marketing activities to this specific market? Or, you know, if you sell in a global market? Or do you? Can you go with English as an example? Everywhere? What's your take on that?

Emelie Malmquist: 20:30

Well, this is always like something I'm so thorough to learn about. And maybe I'll give you like a boring example. And just say that it depends. But I think it really depends, like if you're a large company, and you have the resources for it. And also probably if your audience might not be us, when it comes to language, for example, if they're not as used to using English vendors, or English suppliers and so on, then maybe it makes a lot of sense localizing it. But if you have the resources for it, it can also be smart, like, try one market and localize it and test it for a while, and then see what what the results are format. And then if you see any difference, then maybe expand it. But all in all, I would say like, if you always ask yourself, why before you localize anything, you can also get pretty far just by doing that. Like, for example, localizing a landing page from an ad could make a lot of sense. But localizing your UI, or your entire product might not make so much sense. But, but yeah, it's it's really dependent on what resources you have and what audience you have. Like, for example, if you're selling sales, sales tool, your customers might already be using Salesforce or HubSpot, or draft or whatever in English. So then it doesn't make sense translating everything you're doing,

Adam Holmgren: 21:58

and what and what approach have you taken the Nami.

Emelie Malmquist: 22:01

So everything is English for now. And we're in so many different markets. So yeah, everything is in English. But now, we're trying to like hit home a little bit more in Germany. And that's a market where we're seeing more need of it, at least talk for now we need to do to do more localization. But I don't think it's a like showstopper. Like we went to Germany and did a in person event and we spoke English, and it went so well, like we already got ROI from the event. So I think like, if you do localization, maybe start small. Ask yourself why and test it out before you go all in, at least.

Adam Holmgren: 22:42

Yeah, that's a really great insight. I feel like because I think sometimes we, we view it as impossible if you don't localize. But maybe that's not the case anymore. If you depending on your target group, of course,

Emelie Malmquist: 22:53

exactly. And localizing your product is really, really, really difficult, like making sure that all the names are correct, then deciding what to translate or not so.

Adam Holmgren: 23:05

And now, we are just starting out in 2022. What are some new things or maybe channels you are looking to test or grow into during 2022?

Emelie Malmquist: 23:18

Well, a lot of things. But I think I also need to hold myself back a little bit. Because like I mentioned, it's so much in the early days for an army. So I, I don't want to be the person who test out all the new channels. But one thing that's quite obvious is that I obviously want to test doing high impact campaigns for ourselves. So using our own products, and, you know, we're we're helping other companies like agencies and brands and publishers to do high impact, but we haven't really used it ourselves. And it makes sense because we're actually not our own ICP. So we're excused. But now we've actually hired a head of creative and we have so much more of that in house and I think it would be very, very cool to do like very targeted high impact campaigns as a branding exercise for anatomy to actually test like we can do super cool creatives on like, you know, marketing sites, for example, and then reach out directly to our audience and I think that would be something

Adam Holmgren: 24:16

to do just explain what a high impact campaign is to our listeners, so everyone gets it

Emelie Malmquist: 24:21

so it's basically like a non standard ad format so instead of doing display ads like everyone is so tired all these like tiny boxes and it doesn't give so much. It's like you basically like imagine if you go into like a site for example, like new site or something, the guardian for example. And then you know, the first thing that shows up is like this huge like video, for example, or it can even be like interactive, like rich media or HTML or so on. And then it's more like a way of doing branding towards from advertising. So maybe you've created like a super cool video and you just want to get it through or if you have like some kind of interaction. So it's more about getting attention rather than getting conversions. And yeah, for b2c brand, like, especially like car brands, or, you know, these huge companies that has worked very, very well in improving their branding.

Adam Holmgren: 25:20

That's really cool. And apart from your own product, then what are some other channels you also looking to try out in, in the coming year?

Emelie Malmquist: 25:28

Um, well, I think we need to also figure out a little bit like how to do like LinkedIn and to master social selling. I know, it's not a new strategy, but I think it's something that as a b2b company, you can't really avoid it anymore. And I feel like people misunderstand social media and social selling in b2b Because it's not so much about your company page, it's not so much about like, just putting all your content out there. It's more about actually like, your employees and what you stand for, and building an audience and voice on social media. And it's something that we haven't done so much like, it's hard to build an entire social media strategy. But that's something I think could give us quite a lot, because our audience is also so active on LinkedIn, for example. So that's something and then also just in general, keeping up with trends and everything and like seeing what works. I think it's also going to be a lot of focus on events this year. First of all, because we're getting back to it. And also because the industry we're in is also very dependent on events actually in relationships. So I really look forward to doing that again.

Adam Holmgren: 26:39

Yeah, really cool. And I want to end this episode with one. One final question. And that is from from you, what is one company or person in in Europe that you think are crushing it right now in marketing, or demand yen or b2b in general that we can all follow and learn from? Do you have such a company or or person?

Emelie Malmquist: 27:01

Hmm, really good question. Huh, caught me a little bit by surprise. But I think company wise, I think there's so many European examples. I think Leo has always been so good at what they're doing. And going back to branding. I think that's a really good example of b2b branding. So that would probably be my answer. And then when it comes to people, I feel like there's so many really good people that I follow at the moment. I think you're doing so well at the moment with or in general with your podcast, but yeah,

Adam Holmgren: 27:40

I I can take myself as the answer. That's all. Thank you. Yeah. But this was awesome to have you, Emily, thank you so much for for joining us.

Emelie Malmquist: 27:52

Thank you so much. It's I really enjoyed it. And thank you for having me. Thank you.

Outro: 27:59

Thank you for listening to this episode of the demand generation movement, the podcast where you can learn everything about demand gen and how to make the shift towards revenue. Are you ready to step into the future and join the movement? Subscribe on demand generation movement.com. This is your host, Adam Holmgren, signing off