B2B Inspired

Putting Marketing in the Middle - Unlocking Growth with Lucy Mansfield

• BlueOcean | The B2B Agency • Season 1 • Episode 22

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This episode is packed with invaluable advice for B2B marketers eager to innovate and grow in today’s fast-paced landscape. Join us as we chat with Lucy Mansfield, VP of Growth at Lumin, and dive deep into the pivotal role of marketing in driving company success. 

Lucy explains how Lumin leverages product-led growth strategies through data-driven insights while fostering a culture of inclusivity and ambition within her team. 

Discover the transformative potential of AI in business and the importance of integrating emotional, psychological, and functional aspects into growth marketing. 

Lucy shares how balancing rational and emotional factors can make B2B purchasing decisions more compelling, and provides practical techniques like customer conversations and A/B testing.

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

Dale Koerner:

Kia ora, and welcome back to W e Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins, outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, N ew Zealand. I'm your host, D ale Koerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you. F rom emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand, w e are here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Welcome to W e Do B2B. We are at Southern SaaS 2024 today for what we're calling the Southern SaaS Sessions, where we're talking to some really inspiring marketers, product owners, founders, CTOs, COOs, everything the whole gamut. And right now we are starting our conversations with Lucy Mansfield, who is the VP of Growth at Lumin. Lucy, welcome, yeah, thank you. It's always an interesting environment coming to something like this. You know you come in and you've got the coffee and you've always got that trade-off like how many muffins do I take? Should I have three, four? Always fun and games. But we'll start off by a little bit of background about you, L ucy. Tell us about yourself. We were just talking, before we switched the cameras on, about the journey from your bougie cubicle when Lumen started off to now what is a very, very flash office space, so it sounds like it's been quite the journey for you.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, it really has. So I was the first hire in New Zealand for Lumen. So Max Ferguson, the CEO, started Lumen in 2014 from his bedroom in Silicon Valley while he was studying his PhD, and I applied for the role and ended up getting it, but little did I know I would be the only one there in a bougie cubicle. You know it was great feng shui and it was just myself. So we kind of worked remotely together, growing the business and fast forward to today we have 15 people in New Zealand, we've got a really large office right in the city centre in Christchurch and over 100 people globally working for Lumen.

Dale Koerner:

What a journey. So, for the viewers at home who don't know, tell us what Lumen is. What does Lumen do?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yes, yeah, good question. So the simple way to put it is Adobe Acrobat and DocuSign. Had a younger child, we would be the more modern, sexier, faster version of that. So essentially we take documents, contracts, proposals, anything document related, and make it easy in the cloud. We integrate with Google Workspace, so everything that you do in Google Drive and Gmail and Calendar. You can transform that document into Lumen and then get it back into the Google ecosystem.

Dale Koerner:

Now I think about it. I'm pretty sure I've used it over the years as well. I can picture back in Australia when we were living over there, like 10 years ago, when we were buying houses and things like that. How am I going to sign this thing? So that's your space.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yes, that's our space, but on a commercial level presumably as well. Yes, Well, we have a free version, which is great because we think products like this should be accessible to everyone. Not everyone has a printer or a fax or a scanner.

Dale Koerner:

And they still suck in 2024. I'm sorry, printers are awful. I don't understand how they're still hard, so you bypass that completely, right?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yes, we remove the need to have that hardware as such and we replace it with a beautiful software that works every time and it's free. We have paid versions for more complex features like security and further editing.

Dale Koerner:

I love your analogy about being the sexier, the younger child. We were talking to David Downs from the New Zealand Story group a couple of weeks back and one of the things that they talk about the N new Z zealand story group is this concept of potiki tanga, which is like being the having the spirit of the younger child, um, being the one that's a little bit more rebellious, that kind of. You know, other people have blazed the trail so they can come through and be a little bit more free to to kind of chart their own course and do things differently. So I love that parallel there. So 15 people here in New Zealand now and all based down in Christchurch yes, and where's the rest of the team?

Lucy Mansfield:

So we have a really large team in Vietnam, okay, so Ho Chi Minh, yeah, and then we have a team in the Philippines, and then we've actually just hired our first hire in the US and he's based out of Denver.

Dale Koerner:

Oh, okay, okay. Well, that sounds like a terrible itinerary. You have to go and visit all the teams I mean, I'm just thinking through like the food in Vietnam and the Philippines. That sounds like a dream trip.

Lucy Mansfield:

It's great because it really exposes us to so many different cultures and way of working, which I think, when you look at it as a whole, it really creates the innovation and diversity for the product that we're building. Because we're operating at a global scale, it's so important for us to experience the diversity of these cultures and the way that working rhythms work in those different places as well.

Dale Koerner:

I mean things like what do people have access to, and even things like how many screens to the people in those worlds and office spaces have in the Philippines versus. You know, there's all of those different things that I suppose you have to kind of take into consideration.

Lucy Mansfield:

Absolutely, and even just you know, having a product in multiple languages, it's something that a lot of businesses in New Zealand don't think about.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah.

Lucy Mansfield:

But not everyone in the world can speak English. In fact, not many people can.

Dale Koerner:

Proportionately, I suppose, when you put it that way, absolutely so. One of the things that we are going to get into a little bit later on is the topic of education and access and empowering the next generation which we will get to, but I'd like to know a little bit more, first and foremost, about your role as VP of growth. What does that involve? What does a day in the life look like for you?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, growth is. It's an interesting term, so it's heavily used in the US and essentially it repositions the general marketing term and it takes the growth team and puts it at the center of the business and we're centered around the key metrics of marketing like acquisition, conversion, retention and expansion. But we're not limited to just a marketing team I love that.

Dale Koerner:

Um, I just the idea of making marketing the hub and everything else is a spoke right, genius, that lights me up. And have you worked in in organizations where that wasn't the case? Because you've obviously had some experience before lumen as well.

Lucy Mansfield:

So yeah, I have. So I've kind of I've worked with the larger corporates and then smaller startups and everything in between, and I found that kind of the larger organizations with more of the corporate structure. Marketing was a byproduct of the company, in the sense their only job is to bring in leads to essentially support the sales team, and it's so much more than that. When you look at what's happening in terms of the market itself. How do we position a product? How do we go to market with the product? What do our customers actually need? What's the journey that they go through to get to finding that product?

Dale Koerner:

No, I think it makes so much sense to see it kind of, like you said, smack bang in the middle and make marketing the the hero of that scenario. What are the other business functions that you couldn't do without? The other business functions that we couldn't do without from a marketing perspective, who adds the most value to the marketing skill set and thinking in your camp, without throwing anyone under the bus by exclusion.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, I think at Lumen we go through periods of really focusing on one particular function and we kind of put all of our efforts into doing that until we see success and then we focus on something else. So right now, something that is working really well for us is product-led growth in the sense of SEO, research and going to market with products that people have high intent and demand for. So we do a lot of research, we do a lot of data analysis, we use AI to cleanse that data and then we create essentially marketing strategies driven by seo and intent to fuel that demand.

Dale Koerner:

Cool what are you most proud of that you've achieved as vp of growth at lumen?

Lucy Mansfield:

I'm sorry, I know it's like the, it's like the the award speech kind of question, but Okay, well, yeah, I mean I love the data, the creativity, but at the end of the day, I'm a people person and for me, having a culture that fosters inclusivity and ambition and helps people grow and be passionate in their role really fills me up. So I think you know, know, starting out as the only hire and then now I'm leading a team of seven people, helping them grow into their career and learn, and provide a culture that really fosters that passion and ambition.

Dale Koerner:

That's what gets me going and that's and it's a lovely segue as well, because we put the question out in advance of recording this. What did you want to talk about and what did you want to kind of cover off? And, like we touched on earlier on, education and empowering the next generation is something that you'd flagged as. Let's talk about that. So I think great segue from what you're saying there around building a culture and being proud of that kind of growth of people aspect. So take me through the education space. Why is that a topic that you wanted to cover off on?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, look, it's something that it's kind of sat with me for a long time. When I was at high school, I never knew that working in tech or software was an option. I didn't even know that it existed. You know, I was studying, still didn't think about it, wasn't aware of it, no one talked to me about it, there was no education, there was no awareness. And I think, coming through now and figuring it out myself and going down this career journey and it's very similar for a lot of the people in the Lumen office we're all kind of mid-30s or younger. We didn't know that tech exists. And now, when I look at what's happening in high school and primary school and even university, there's no communities, there's no awareness, there's no one speaking and empowering them about what a career in tech could look like and that you don't just need to be a developer, you don't need to know how to code. We need skills like business management, marketing, design, project management, finance. These are skills that tech companies, software companies, need right now and we can't find them.

Dale Koerner:

I mean really interesting. You know the starting intro speech from Bruce, this morning was talking about that exact challenge that we've got this incredible pipeline of software as a service and tech firms growing in New Zealand, but we're going to run out of people.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, he was saying by in 15 years we need an extra 60,000 people. Where are these people coming from, you know?

Dale Koerner:

So, from your perspective, how does that, how does that conversation change? How do we I mean, I've got four young kids, yes, how do, how does my eight-year-old daughter find out that there's a pathway for her in this, in this industry, which at that age, is so intangible?

Lucy Mansfield:

yes, and that's where I think Having role models and a community in this space, people that can communicate and inspire so probably of a younger age going into these schools, into these universities, and creating a network or a community or a program or a certificate Getting them excited about what it's like how they're interacting with these technology tools every day, speaking their language. I think we need more role models in this space.

Dale Koerner:

And who do you see sort of filling that space of the role model? Hey me, Yours truly.

Lucy Mansfield:

Oh, I love to mention that, but I love that.

Dale Koerner:

To be honest, I think sometimes it takes a few protagonists within a space to be able to put their neck on the line and put their hand up and say, hey, I actually think we should do something here.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, absolutely. Talent pool, this up-and-coming talent pool. It's almost an investment for them to it's in their best interest to empower and inspire and educate this generation. To consider them as an option.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, and, like you said, it's beyond just that. It's just, it's beyond the just the dev side of things as well. I mean there's fantastic careers to be had in that, don't get me wrong, very, very well paid and, like bruce would always say, low, low access barriers, I suppose, is the right way to put that. You can do that through short courses and everything else like that. But it's some of those other things that sit around the periphery.

Dale Koerner:

Like you said, it's that encouraging that marketing mindset, it's that that commercialization aspect as well, I suppose yeah, and there's some great I think great endeavors that do go on in that space, but it's how do you pair that with a sector that the kids don't yet understand?

Lucy Mansfield:

I mean. Well, they do like they know how to use the iPhone, probably better than us yeah, that's true, you know yeah, they know that, they know what technology can do. They just don't know how it's built, where. Where it's built, you know the kind of framework and the foundation of what it's built on more of the technical side, and they almost think it's just second nature. They don't know that someone's had to create it or think about it.

Dale Koerner:

I've done our children a disservice. I'm interested to know, then. So we've kind of talked about the younger end of the spectrum. How about through the universities, how about the sort of higher education sector? Because it feels to me like there's a little bit of a gap there sometimes and things kind of slow down. They're not necessarily as current with a lot of the things that are being discussed and used in in the practical world as the practical world is yeah, no, you're right.

Lucy Mansfield:

And again, I think it comes down to how do they communicate and absorb information. Yes, going to university is the conventional, traditional way, but they're on social media. They probably need a role model on social media, talking through what technology looks like, how it works, how they can get into it. They want to consume this information, probably outside of the lecture on social, but then they also would probably want someone coming in and maybe a bit of a network or a community that they can join, but it needs to be aspirational and they need to speak the same language.

Dale Koerner:

So what you're saying is that we need to put loads more people through the we Do B2B podcast to share the story?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yes, or start a new one aimed at the younger generation, even.

Dale Koerner:

I love that aspect of the whole community. Here, though, I mean, I'm so grateful to people like yourself who are happy to come and, you know, put themselves out of their comfort zone, sit in a boardroom at a conference that they should be listening to and take the time to actually kind of share some of those stories and share those perspectives, because, I mean, for us, that's definitely part of the drive here is that knowledge dissemination piece, and I'd love to think that a conversation here right now with you could impact someone in 10 years time. You know and I don't know if we have that legacy here's, you know, crossing fingers, here's hoping, but it would be great to see that, you know, having these conversations is actually starting to shift the understanding of what's possible.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, absolutely.

Dale Koerner:

For that younger generation.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, I agree, just on that. Have you? Are you on Spotify or Apple both?

Dale Koerner:

We're on both yeah.

Lucy Mansfield:

Do you do keyword research for those platforms?

Dale Koerner:

Oh, you're going to embarrass me now, because I know it. Producer Louis is looking at me raising his eyebrows and going have you? Sorry, I didn't mean to put you no. No, I love that. How would?

Lucy Mansfield:

you do it. Sorry, didn't mean to put you off?

Dale Koerner:

No, no, I love that. How would you do it?

Lucy Mansfield:

Well, so what I've started doing is researching platforms to do this, and there's not many that exist, so now it's a manual process for me going into Spotify and Apple and doing it manually.

Dale Koerner:

All right, okay, I can hear a plan hatching here, but it's really useful.

Lucy Mansfield:

So we now have a team that does this for us. We don't have uh, we're not on spotify, but for the app store we do it, um, so we have a team that do this for us and we see great results from it, because people are searching keywords so you're, you're basing your product strategy on search, basically well. So for the App Store it's almost like a Google search in the sense of PDF editor or e-sign. So we just make sure that we are competing for those keywords organically and paid.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, okay, no, it makes good sense, and are you finding that there's opportunity in there for innovation? Are you finding anything that kind of sits on the periphery that isn't currently core business or core product?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, absolutely, and that's where a lot of our jobs to be done approach comes in. Are you familiar with that? I love Clayton Christensen.

Dale Koerner:

Yes, may he rest in peace. Right, it's part of our orientation 101, that value proposition design. Everyone must read that before they turn up on day one. Absolutely.

Lucy Mansfield:

And there's a good podcast on it too. Okay, yeah, look, we live by that and we're constantly educating everyone in the company what it's about. Now everyone's on board with it and it's a beautiful thing, right. It's psychological, it's emotional, it's functional and it brings everything into one distilled kind of concept of what someone's trying to achieve. So we really live and breathe that, and then a lot of our data analysis seo, trend analysis kind of feeds in around the outside to solidify what we're doing in the middle what was the most unexpected job to be done that you guys have discovered, because I'm fascinated by this stuff.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, so okay, it's probably not overly fascinating, but it was something that we've noticed. I hope this doesn't give away our trade secret.

Dale Koerner:

We can always strip it out if it does.

Lucy Mansfield:

No, no, no, it's fine, we'll do it better anyway.

Dale Koerner:

We'll swap the word PDF for crocodile or something like I'm. We'll do it better anyway. Um, we'll swap the word pdf for crocodile or something like that.

Lucy Mansfield:

We'll be fine um, so reputation, so social, financial, being the hero in the workplace, having a reputation of I'm the king, I'm the boss, I've got it. You know, that kind of the ego driven reputation is a huge thing in business. In the workplace no one wants to look like the underdog, no one wants to sound like the underdog. So really playing into that and fueling in a in a wholesome holistic way right, we're not wanting to feed the ego, but really playing on setting reputation as the key driver what?

Dale Koerner:

what really interests me in that whole line of conversation is that you know, when you look at the traditional, we'll come back to the education space. You come back to that traditional view of b2b and I was taught at the university of bath, which is one of the top marketing schools in the uk. We were taught that business to business purchasing is rational and we were taught that business to business purchasing is rational and we were taught that it's logical and that it's factual, not egotistical and socially driven and concerned about my own reputation and image. So how do you balance that emotional, social, functional mix?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yes, that is a challenge and I think it comes down to the messaging and the creative really needs to speak to the kind of emotional side and then when we capture their interest, we start to speak to more of the kind of functional, practical. You know, the pricing, the security, does it have what they actually need to get it across the line? So I think it's that perfect mixture of both. Sometimes we swap out the order, we do a lot of A-B tests around, you know, do they want this first or do they want that first? But that really kind of feeds into the experience of them understanding the product and doing more information to get that insight.

Dale Koerner:

We always will try when we're working on and again, you've said messaging and creative, which are like two of my hot buttons yeah, um, we'll always try and position for the head and the heart, so we'll always try and have that emotional driver that's understanding. What is this person actually trying to aspire to? What makes them feel it might be, what makes them feel safe, what makes them feel excited, what makes them feel proud and then what also helps them go. Hey, sign off please.

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, um it's so beautiful, isn't it? Is it? It's funny when we talk to um our developers around you know a new feature that they want to release, or whatever it might be. Quite often when we ask them okay, so why have we done this? They're like oh, because it means that they can um it, like, flatten this Okay, and what they're doing is amazing work. But having the questions to ask them and get out the information around why they actually did it is such an exercise and the end result is really beneficial to the customer. But it's just. It takes a complete mindset shift to be able to think like this right.

Dale Koerner:

Coming back to the jobs to be done piece, how do you orientate people to that in terms of what is a job to be done?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, so when we onboard a new person within the growth marketing team, we get them to read the book, we get them to listen to the podcast and then we're bringing them into customer conversations. So it's more of a kind of organic journey into understanding it and it's a bit of a lifelong thing to really wrap your head around it, like, even now I'm still having to shift my perspective into okay, you know, is this functional, is this psychological, is it emotional or is it just straight technical?

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, just need to do a thing. Yeah, is it psychological, is it emotional, or is it just straight technical? Yeah, just need to do a thing. Yeah, I really like that approach, though, of giving people the I suppose the theoretical understanding. Did you show the milkshake video? Yes, the milkshake video?

Lucy Mansfield:

Yeah, of course.

Dale Koerner:

But then pairing it up with customer conversations is a great way of just really getting people to fine tune their ears and listening for it. Once you've gotten that technical understanding, I really like that approach. Actually, sorry, my cogs are wearing. I'm sat there thinking, okay, well, how can we do that?

Lucy Mansfield:

on our onboarding process yes, well, and it's funny because when you get on customer calls and you go, okay, so how can I help you today? What are you looking for? They go oh, I, just for your own sense it'll be. Oh, I need to make more sales. You're like okay, why?

Dale Koerner:

Yeah, why Are?

Lucy Mansfield:

you losing money? Are you feeling like your industry is declining and you start to ask these questions, which is following the job to be done framework and the amount of insight that you get. Is life changing to this business.

Dale Koerner:

I remember one of my first jobs at a university. I was working at a company in Australia that manufactured and sold dry docking systems.

Lucy Mansfield:

A dry docking system.

Dale Koerner:

Waterproof parking spaces for boats. Basically like to put a long story short. And I remember taking a call from a client. I was just like the marketing assistant. I'd started on $35,000 a year. It was gone anyway, super junior burgers job, but it was a great start for me. And I remember taking this phone call from somebody who called in and like, oh, I've got a 24 foot sea ray and I'm looking for a price on one of the models. I'm like, oh, I know that one, I know that one that's $16,900. Thanks, thanks. Phone call ends and I trotted through into the sales manager's office pleased as punch. I'm like I've given someone a price and they're like what boat do they use? Where do they park it? Do they use it with the kids? And they're asking me all of these questions that like after you know 15 years in the field, that they just knew intuitively to ask. And I'm sat there thinking, oh, god painted a very black and white picture here and it's exactly what they said.

Dale Koerner:

They're like you've got to find the color you've got to be able to find the nuance and the actual drivers that are causing that person to want to do this thing. And that, I think, is the beauty of that Jobs to Be Done framework and that kind of curiosity, question asking mindset in marketing.

Lucy Mansfield:

It's the curiosity, isn't it? It's building a story around the need that they have.

Dale Koerner:

Absolutely On the subject of need. I'm going to ask a couple of kind of closing questions here because, believe it or not, we've nearly gone through our time, which is actually a shame because I'm really enjoying this conversation. Maybe we'll have to do another follow up on at some point. But looking at the New Zealand software as a service landscape, where do you see the industry going? What do you see the gaps are? What's your outlook for it?

Lucy Mansfield:

going? What do you see the gaps are? What's your outlook for it? Oh look, I'm not political in the sense of coming in and talking about the money that the government's putting in. Other people do that. Where do I see it going? I think we are on the edge of a very interesting time with AI and I really feel like we're still not quite there yet. Give it maybe another six months to a year and I think we'll start to see the way business has done change dramatically. If you look at what's happening, with three news being shut down, I think that's quite a pivotal point where it's like okay, traditional media no longer can make money.

Lucy Mansfield:

How is that going to affect other industries where particular jobs are getting replaced by AI or other channels, more innovative options? So I think we're just right on the edge of a massive shift into more automation, more kind of user-generated content, more demand, almost more community-based softwares and practices that serve the people rather than large corporations, you know, kind of government-owned entities.

Dale Koerner:

It's almost a democratisation.

Lucy Mansfield:

It is yeah, I think it's slowly starting to happen and it will be giving the power to people to create no-code apps to find the answers that they want. Using AI to create a website, create a product. There's so many more options for people.

Dale Koerner:

And then one last question how do you see the role of, of community organizations like kiwi, sas then being part of that, being part of that change?

Lucy Mansfield:

yeah, I think what bruce is doing is amazing and it's really fulfilling a need that the new zealand tech sector has been missing for a long time. So I think, looking at kind of the next few years, of what they're hoping to achieve within the economy and connecting people together and sharing information, I'm really hoping that it allows people to kind of level up in terms of learning new practices and working together, finding talent, hopefully bringing younger talent into the New Zealand tech sector. But there's a lot of opportunity there and there's a lot more growth that can happen. But you know, it takes time, it takes investment, it takes the right people to come on board. So it's great to be a part of it.

Dale Koerner:

Fantastic. Look, I think that's us on time. Producer Louie's given me the raise of the the eyebrow, but thank you so much for the conversation. Really, really enjoyed that, uh on so many different levels. So, um, thank you and enjoy the rest of the. Enjoy the rest of the session today yeah, thanks dale that's that.

Dale Koerner:

Thanks for listening to. We do b2b by blue ocean. Now brace for ct8. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more B2B goodness, be sure to follow Blue Ocean, the B2B agency, on LinkedIn. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this thing grows. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.

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