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A Rebrand Success Story (with Revenue Coattails) · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: Coming to you live from downtown Phoenix, Arizona
• 0:19
  at the Forrester B2B Summit.
• 0:21
  I was trying Karen, to do my radio voice there.
• 0:23
  I don't know if it really came through.
• 0:24
  Karen Budell: I think you started off strong and then you were
• 0:26
  conscious of it, so, no, I was,
• 0:27
  Matt Heinz: that's exactly what happened.
• 0:29
  That's exactly what happened.
• 0:30
  Right before we went live Karen Budell, the CMO at Totango, she
• 0:33
  mentioned that she was a college DJ.
• 0:35
  Can we talk about that first, please?
• 0:36
  Karen Budell: Yes.
• 0:36
  I will tell you, I start off with the worst time slot ever.
• 0:40
  Some might call it Saturday night.
• 0:41
  Others might call it Sunday morning at 5:00 AM
• 0:44
  Matt Heinz: 5:00 AM
• 0:45
  Karen Budell: 5:00 AM
• 0:46
  Matt Heinz: Oh my God.
• 0:46
  Karen Budell: Five to eight 30.
• 0:48
  Wow.
• 0:48
  Yeah.
• 0:49
  Matt Heinz: This is like gospel brunch or what did you do?
• 0:51
  Karen Budell: I mean, there were times that I would come straight from a party.
• 0:54
  Yeah.
• 0:54
  And just keep the beats going.
• 0:56
  I'm really into Brit Pop, so I played a lot of stuff from the archives there.
• 1:01
  But eventually got smart and brought a co-host on to help
• 1:05
  keep me awake for that session.
• 1:06
  Matt Heinz: Can I tell you that when we do like the regular recordings of Sales
• 1:09
  Pipeline Radio remotely, we hardly ever have the time to get into this kind
• 1:12
  of stuff 'cause we just, I don't know.
• 1:14
  Yeah.
• 1:14
  This is amazing.
• 1:15
  Like Forrester, please bring us back next year.
• 1:17
  This is fantastic.
• 1:18
  Yeah.
• 1:18
  So excited to be here.
• 1:19
  We are recording a series of Sales Pipeline Radio episodes
• 1:22
  live on the marketplace floor of Forrester, B2B summit.
• 1:25
  So excited to be here and excited to have Karen Budell here as our guest.
• 1:29
  She is the CMO at Totango.
• 1:31
  Former college DJ.
• 1:32
  So I was not a college DJ.
• 1:34
  I have one step below that.
• 1:35
  I was in my high school radio broadcasting club.
• 1:38
  Ooh.
• 1:39
  There were five of us.
• 1:40
  Okay.
• 1:40
  And basically what we did is we just practiced reading
• 1:43
  commercials into a tape recorder.
• 1:44
  It was just about practicing the voice and the cadence Yes.
• 1:47
  And everything.
• 1:48
  But I really liked it.
• 1:49
  And then when podcasting came along, I'm like, finally something I can do.
• 1:52
  With some of that radio voice.
• 1:54
  That's amazing.
• 1:55
  We also bond here about our reMarkables, right?
• 1:57
  Yep.
• 1:57
  So like, I got my reMarkable taking us.
• 1:58
  You pulled yours out.
• 1:59
  What is one of your like power functions on the reMarkable for those that are
• 2:03
  listening that are also reMarkable fans.
• 2:05
  What's a power tip?
• 2:06
  Karen Budell: Well, I'm a former journalist.
• 2:08
  You're gonna learn a lot about me in this 15 minutes.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:10
  Former journalist, former content marketing practitioner.
• 2:13
  So I love importing PDFs.
• 2:16
  And doing markups.
• 2:17
  Yeah.
• 2:17
  And sharing that with the team.
• 2:19
  Okay.
• 2:19
  Hard to sometimes decipher, handwriting, but that's a quick tip.
• 2:23
  And then I have a running weekly to-do list.
• 2:26
  So start your week on The reMarkable, on the reMarkable.
• 2:29
  It's a template and then I can just fill it in.
• 2:31
  This is what my focus is for each day of the week, and I just keep
• 2:34
  adding a new page every week.
• 2:36
  I'm gonna need to see this.
• 2:37
  We were talking about handwriting with your colleague here before we got started.
• 2:39
  Mine is also terrible.
• 2:40
  My first grade teacher told my parents, and I still remember sitting there
• 2:44
  where she told my parents that I was gonna have terrible handwriting.
• 2:46
  And I'm like, how dare she?
• 2:48
  And she's an oracle because if very clearly, I can barely
• 2:50
  read this half the time.
• 2:52
  Yeah.
• 2:52
  My first job outta school, I was a reporter for the Bremerton Sun.
• 2:55
  I studied journalism, political science, and was sure I wanted to be a
• 2:58
  journalist for the rest of my career.
• 2:59
  And guess what?
• 3:00
  Journalism beat it out of me.
• 3:01
  Yeah, same.
• 3:02
  I resigned on my one year anniversary after being a police reporter in the
• 3:06
  city of Chicago at the City News Service.
• 3:08
  Matt Heinz: I didn't even last that long.
• 3:09
  I literally didn't last that long.
• 3:10
  And then I remember calling my parents and telling them.
• 3:13
  I found a PR job.
• 3:14
  I got an intern job at a PR firm that does mostly Microsoft work,
• 3:17
  and I was terrified anyway.
• 3:18
  I wanted them to be supportive and my parents bless their hearts,
• 3:21
  Midwestern, same job for 35 years.
• 3:23
  They're like, but you chose journalism.
• 3:25
  This is what you chose to do.
• 3:26
  What are you doing?
• 3:27
  And that was the downward spiral to where we are sitting here today.
• 3:31
  It still comes in handy though, and you, gosh.
• 3:32
  You know, I like to talk about journalism gave me my foundation as a marketer
• 3:36
  because it helps you be innately curious and ask good questions and get to the
• 3:41
  why and find different angles of a story to piece together the full narrative.
• 3:46
  So I credit that it was one year in police reporting and then I pivoted
• 3:49
  to entertainment, which is a lot more fun in my early twenties.
• 3:52
  Yeah.
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  But yeah it's a strong foundation to build upon.
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  So.
• 3:55
  Yeah I totally agree with you.
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  Like I tell people, it's one thing to learn how to write, but what journalism
• 3:59
  taught me was how to tell stories and tell stories succinctly, a hundred percent.
• 4:03
  Like when I went to the Bremerton Sun, we'd have these complex issues
• 4:06
  happening in state government, and I'd have like four inches for the kids
• 4:09
  listening, four inches, basically, you literally measure the amount of space
• 4:12
  you have in the printed newspaper.
• 4:14
  I know a lot of what I just said is foreign, but basically like,
• 4:17
  think about it as like a character limit and a very small one, and
• 4:19
  you had to summarize complex issues into something that made sense.
• 4:23
  In, I dunno, what is that, like 150 words?
• 4:25
  Yeah.
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  It was like ridiculously small.
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  And so being able to story tell in a format like that I
• 4:31
  think that's a great skill.
• 4:32
  Anyway, all right.
• 4:33
  So we've already wasted five minutes talking about all this thing,
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  but hopefully that's interesting.
• 4:36
  That's the fun stuff.
• 4:37
  That is the fun stuff.
• 4:38
  Absolutely.
• 4:38
  I did wanna talk about a couple other things that I know you're very
• 4:41
  passionate about and I've done a great job on and are really important.
• 4:44
  I think to everybody listening, the first one is just.
• 4:47
  Cross-functional alignment.
• 4:49
  Karen Budell: Yeah,
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  Matt Heinz: we can sit here and have all the plans we want in the world, but we're
• 4:52
  not gonna tell anyone else what to do.
• 4:55
  And if we're building our plans and then forcing other people, we're
• 4:57
  kind of doing it backwards anyway.
• 4:59
  Talk about, the importance of cross departmental integration, but what
• 5:03
  are some of the keys that have made that successful for you at Totango?
• 5:07
  Karen Budell: Yeah, part of it I have to say is how I'm wired.
• 5:10
  So if anyone follows Pat Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team and
• 5:14
  Working Geniuses, I'm a galvanizer and I'm also strong in tenacity,
• 5:19
  so I really work hard on.
• 5:22
  Focusing on that alignment with team one, your executive team, who's leading sales,
• 5:26
  customer success, product marketing.
• 5:28
  We should all be in sync.
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  We should be on the same song sheet and making sure that our teams are working in
• 5:34
  alignment and interlocking their plans.
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  So part of that comes with building personal relationships with those
• 5:39
  individuals and then it is in finding points of alignment between
• 5:44
  the teams, what projects crossover.
• 5:47
  For example, we have a great customer community and we engage a lot of folks
• 5:52
  through ongoing education and resources that might also come to life in a webinar,
• 5:57
  and marketing is playing a role in that.
• 5:59
  So there's initiatives and programs.
• 6:01
  That naturally allow for that cross-functional collaboration, but
• 6:04
  I think you have to model it with your peers on the executive team.
• 6:07
  Matt Heinz: I love that you bring up sort of that team one, which is
• 6:09
  the peers, which I think a lot of people, it takes a while to learn.
• 6:13
  Great book called Team of Teams by Retired General McChrystal that
• 6:16
  talks a lot about how to integrate those teams and build that trust
• 6:20
  and alignment from the top down.
• 6:22
  One of the other places that I know you have focused a lot, I don't wanna come
• 6:25
  back to that in a minute, but I wanna talk about your focus on customer community.
• 6:29
  Our first episode here on the floor was with Conga and their customer
• 6:33
  success marketing team, and they won an award here, the Return on Integration
• 6:37
  award for the work they're doing.
• 6:39
  And one of the highlights for them was community.
• 6:42
  And you mentioned community as well.
• 6:43
  What are some of the keys to building strong community for Totango today?
• 6:47
  Karen Budell: Yeah, it feels weird talking about this with you 'cause
• 6:49
  you're an expert in community and I'm part of the CMO Coffee Talk
• 6:52
  community, but I often talk about community with a big C and a small C.
• 6:57
  So you can talk about the big C with a community platform
• 7:00
  and that organized function.
• 7:01
  You can also talk about all of the different touch points.
• 7:04
  That create community amongst your buyers or your customers.
• 7:09
  And so with that, we have a few critical elements.
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  We do have a community platform.
• 7:13
  They're able to engage in conversations and content.
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  We also have a customer advisory board that helps create connections
• 7:20
  with our key accounts at that executive level and their peers.
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  And then we like to engage in the broader community of customer
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  success and go to market so that we're fostering conversations and
• 7:31
  connections about what are the pain points people are grappling with.
• 7:34
  I mean, in the age of AI and in the market that we've all been dealing with,
• 7:37
  there seems like there's a new challenge popping up every day, like whack-a-mole.
• 7:41
  And so finding ways to bring folks together for a virtual round table or
• 7:45
  grab a table at a live industry conference and just fostering that and connecting
• 7:50
  the dots for people is really key.
• 7:52
  Matt Heinz: And I think one thing people don't realize is that if you
• 7:54
  create a community that is about the community and not about you.
• 7:59
  It still reflects on you, right?
• 8:01
  And it sometimes seems counterintuitive.
• 8:02
  When I talk to people about building a community and say, well, we really
• 8:05
  wanna bring our product into it.
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  I'm like, take your product out of it.
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  Create a community of your customers and let them commune with each other.
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  Like the most successful, sustained communities I know are those.
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  That foster that connection and care amongst community members,
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  and there isn't a single community that does that well, that doesn't
• 8:20
  directly benefit from that people.
• 8:22
  People don't want to leave the company because they don't wanna
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  leave the community, and they value that as part of their connection
• 8:28
  to the product or service as well.
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  Karen Budell: Yep.
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  People aren't just buying your software these days.
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  They're buying the experience, the expertise that you provide,
• 8:36
  and some of those community connections that you offer as well.
• 8:39
  Matt Heinz: Talking on this episode of our Special Sales Pipeline Radio at
• 8:42
  Forrester, B2B Summit with Karen Budell.
• 8:44
  She is the former college DJ and current.
• 8:47
  CMO, chief Marketing Officer at Totango.
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  Let's talk about another element of community, which
• 8:51
  is customer advisory boards.
• 8:53
  Yeah.
• 8:53
  I talked to a lot of companies that wanna do it and then aren't necessarily
• 8:56
  sure how to invest in it or sustain it.
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  Talk about the importance of that at Totango, how that got
• 9:02
  started and how you sustain that.
• 9:03
  Karen Budell: Yeah.
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  Well, I was lucky when I joined the company almost three years
• 9:06
  ago that there was a CAB in place.
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  But what I wanted to do was really create more of a mission and a purpose
• 9:12
  for the customer advisory board.
• 9:13
  You touched on it.
• 9:14
  This should be about them.
• 9:16
  This is not about us.
• 9:18
  Sure.
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  We wanna bring them in on the conversation early, show them a sneak
• 9:21
  peek of the roadmap, get their input.
• 9:23
  But at the end of the day, it's creating a community to connect
• 9:27
  these executives that are focused on driving the industry forward.
• 9:31
  And that's all about how do we deliver recurring value to our customer base?
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  How do we invest in our customers to ultimately drive growth for them?
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  And for us.
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  And so that's what really brings us together.
• 9:41
  At the end of the day, we went through and formalized a charter that details
• 9:46
  the mission, the purpose of the CAB, the expectations for attendance.
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  We have quarterly meetings, three virtual one a year is in person
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  and the topics that we'll cover.
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  And so that charter goes out every year when we invite members to rejoin
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  or when we invite new ones to join the cohort so they know there's a
• 10:03
  little bit of a contract in place.
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  And I think that helps set everyone up for open discussions for really
• 10:09
  being a little bit vulnerable in some of those community discussions.
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  And we learn so much from each other.
• 10:15
  And I love seeing when two CAB members connect offline
• 10:18
  and carry on the conversation.
• 10:20
  'cause they found a way to help each other through a situation.
• 10:23
  Matt Heinz: I love all that 'cause I feel like a lot of customer advisory
• 10:25
  boards are somewhat performative.
• 10:28
  That they're set up as a, PR thing, right?
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  Where we just wanna have a nice dinner and talk about things.
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  And what is talked about isn't activated afterward.
• 10:37
  There isn't a direct connection you create amongst those customers.
• 10:41
  And so those elements we talked about earlier of a great customer community
• 10:44
  or great industry community, you want to have that amongst your CAB as well.
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  Not only so you build that trusted respect, but also so that you
• 10:51
  get the real actionable insights.
• 10:52
  Out of it.
• 10:53
  'cause if you're not getting like hard truths out of that group, like this isn't
• 10:57
  a everything's hunky dory thing, you want them to bring up those hard conversations.
• 11:00
  I think sometimes I tell people, think of this as like a
• 11:02
  different board meeting, right?
• 11:04
  When you go to the board, like you don't want this to be, everything's fine.
• 11:07
  You want the hard questions to come up.
• 11:08
  You want to grapple with things together in a collaborative, constructive way.
• 11:12
  I think CABs need to be like that too, right?
• 11:14
  Karen Budell: A hundred percent.
• 11:15
  And they should really be a bellwether for you and your teams on what's happening
• 11:19
  in the industry within your product base, within the way that those CAB
• 11:23
  members and their teams are interacting with folks across your company.
• 11:26
  What is the collective brand and customer experience that they're going through?
• 11:29
  The perceptions of you that they see and market, but also what are they seeing
• 11:34
  and hearing in the way that their own companies are navigating challenges
• 11:38
  outside of your products relationship that you might have with them.
• 11:42
  Matt Heinz: So you're now a member of a customer advisory board as well.
• 11:44
  I know you work with G2.
• 11:45
  What have you learned from that experience?
• 11:47
  What has that specific experience helped you think about what you might wanna do
• 11:50
  differently for Totango's CAB as well?
• 11:52
  Karen Budell: Yeah, it's fun to sit on the other side of the table.
• 11:54
  I will say that, and we just had our Q1 virtual meeting, which was awesome.
• 11:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:59
  It was nice to learn a little bit about G2's research and what
• 12:03
  they're seeing in the marketplace.
• 12:04
  That teed up a really rich discussion with our peers around the impact
• 12:08
  of SEO and the age of AI and how companies are dealing with that.
• 12:12
  So we had an incredible discussion, and I loved how open it was and how engaged
• 12:17
  every member and the G2 execs that showed up were in that conversation.
• 12:21
  Mm-hmm.
• 12:21
  It had nothing to do with products and you know what you were gonna buy.
• 12:25
  It was what are we grappling with today and tomorrow, and how can
• 12:28
  we help each other be better?
• 12:31
  Matt Heinz: So we're sitting here in Phoenix.
• 12:33
  We're past sort of calendar Q1.
• 12:35
  We're well into the year so far.
• 12:37
  What are you seeing in the market as a B2B seller, as someone who's managing,
• 12:41
  cross-collaborative go-to-market teams?
• 12:43
  What are we seeing in the market overall and what do you expect
• 12:45
  to see the rest this year?
• 12:47
  Karen Budell: I am seeing still a lot of challenges with driving that
• 12:51
  alignment across the go to market org.
• 12:53
  But what's been interesting is.
• 12:55
  The rise of rev ops that I've been seeing, whether the Rev ops team is rolling up
• 13:00
  through a CFO to play Switzerland with the GTM team, or they might roll up through
• 13:04
  A CRO Increasingly, because data's so important and how we leverage AI and
• 13:09
  automation, the rev ops leader is really the glue that helps everyone stay in tune
• 13:15
  get ahead of problems before they come up.
• 13:17
  And so that's been interesting.
• 13:19
  I don't know if we found the magic sauce for that one yet though,
• 13:24
  because I think it really does depend on where that team sits.
• 13:27
  And go back to our previous conversation on is there alignment.
• 13:30
  Matt Heinz: Well, part of the reason why we continue to struggle with fixing
• 13:33
  that is the rules continue to change.
• 13:35
  Yeah.
• 13:36
  And you think about layers of a, I dunno if it's layers of the
• 13:38
  cake or just parts of the matrix.
• 13:39
  You need all that data to talk together.
• 13:41
  Right.
• 13:41
  I need data from my different marketing campaigns to talk to each other.
• 13:44
  I need data across sales and marketing to talk to each other.
• 13:47
  I need all that data to be leveraged by the CS team immediately to
• 13:50
  seamlessly onboard customers.
• 13:52
  Yes, and that's just the data you have.
• 13:54
  Now, let's talk about the data exists about your customers, your
• 13:57
  prospects, your market, your partners, et cetera, out in the ecosystem.
• 14:00
  Let's talk about how AI can like, translate that into insights that
• 14:03
  didn't exist elsewhere, but where machines can see some of that and
• 14:07
  how do you integrate that together?
• 14:08
  Literally in the last interview with Conga, Nora brought her
• 14:11
  Cs ops counterpart and talked about the same challenge, right?
• 14:14
  Yeah.
• 14:14
  And I think that, to me, solving that problem has to be a very high
• 14:18
  priority for go-to-market teams.
• 14:20
  Data is the new coin of the realm in B2B, it used to be how much budget do you have?
• 14:24
  How much media are you buying, how well we.
• 14:27
  Capture, activate and leverage that data feels really, really
• 14:30
  important moving forward.
• 14:31
  Karen Budell: A hundred percent.
• 14:32
  And there's too, you know, you've got your structured data and
• 14:35
  your unstructured data as well.
• 14:37
  So if you think about all the people in your company that are engaging with
• 14:39
  a customer account at different points in their journey, you need to stitch
• 14:43
  together not only the utilization and consumption but sentiment.
• 14:49
  You need to understand if someone emails a CSM or an AE on your
• 14:53
  team and drops a hint that they're unhappy this isn't, how do we feel?
• 14:58
  This is the data.
• 14:59
  Surfacing those insights, stitching it together with some of your
• 15:02
  other metrics, and finding a way to get ahead of signaling your team
• 15:05
  that there's risk in the system.
• 15:07
  That's right.
• 15:07
  So it's gonna help us all get more proactive, but right now I think we're
• 15:12
  all swimming in this murky sea and trying to figure out how it all works together.
• 15:17
  Matt Heinz: Last question for you here as we kind of wrap up.
• 15:19
  Have Karen Budell, the CMO at Totango.
• 15:22
  Why do you come to events like this?
• 15:23
  I feel like since, you know, since Covid happened, like all of a sudden
• 15:27
  video conferencing is everywhere.
• 15:28
  The keynote you could watch on YouTube, why is getting out of the
• 15:31
  office or getting on a plane and coming something like this continue
• 15:34
  to be so important for folks?
• 15:35
  Karen Budell: This stuff energizes me.
• 15:37
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:37
  And gives me that boost that I need to keep going.
• 15:40
  I was never built to work from home.
• 15:42
  For the entirety of my career.
• 15:44
  So I do come to get energized, get inspired seeing people in real life,
• 15:49
  bringing that LinkedIn profile pic or a one inch zoom thumbnail to life
• 15:54
  is so magical and I think that it helps us all take a big leap forward.
• 15:58
  When our executive team gets together for a couple of days to have a
• 16:02
  discussion, or if I get to see my team like I am today, I think we are
• 16:06
  able to just take a huge leap forward that could take two, three weeks over
• 16:10
  coordinating calendars and Zoom calls.
• 16:12
  Matt Heinz: I completely agree.
• 16:13
  I am an introvert.
• 16:14
  I consider myself a fairly socially anxious person and somehow I get to
• 16:17
  places like this and I do feel energized.
• 16:19
  Like you get to see people.
• 16:20
  And I think even for those of us that like are comfortable like
• 16:24
  working with sweat shorts at home our lizard brains wanna see other people.
• 16:28
  Yes, our lizard brains want to connect with other people and just
• 16:31
  doing it on a screen isn't enough.
• 16:33
  Like literally seeing people shaking hands, seeing the whites of our
• 16:35
  eyes in person, it is meaningful.
• 16:37
  It doesn't mean I wanna be on the road every week, but it means
• 16:40
  things like this where a group like Forrester can get like this many
• 16:42
  people with the same job together.
• 16:44
  Yep.
• 16:45
  Really, really valuable.
• 16:46
  Karen Budell: I'll say one more thing if I can.
• 16:47
  Yeah.
• 16:48
  When you hit leave on that video call.
• 16:51
  You're probably alone in your room or your home office.
• 16:53
  Yeah.
• 16:54
  You come to an event like this and you find community in a shared
• 16:58
  challenge and it's validating.
• 17:00
  And I think it gives us all that confidence that we're not alone and
• 17:03
  we're gonna find that solution together.
• 17:05
  Matt Heinz: Well, I used to think about like, we're about to click
• 17:07
  stop here on this recording.
• 17:08
  Right.
• 17:08
  And normally if we were doing this remotely, we'd be like, okay, great.
• 17:10
  We're off to our next meeting.
• 17:11
  We're probably gonna talk a little bit about journalism and reMarkables
• 17:13
  and other things again, right?
• 17:14
  Yeah.
• 17:14
  And so it's that connection and that is the connective glue.
• 17:17
  That I think is like, forget business.
• 17:19
  That's just at the heart of being alive.
• 17:21
  I don't mean to make this too existential, but I think, the longer
• 17:23
  I live, the more mistakes I make.
• 17:25
  Those connections are everything.
• 17:26
  So Karen Budell, CMO, at Totango.
• 17:28
  Thank you so much for joining us.
• 17:29
  Thanks for stopping by.
• 17:29
  Karen Budell: Thanks so much for having me, Matt.
• 17:31
  This was fun.