Stop Fighting with Your Collateral and Make Better Content
Learn from Eric Thum, Head of Marketing at VTS, about how to design better content.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Highplane Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
And today I'm joined by special guest, Eric, how are you?
>> Doing well, how about yourself?
>> He said it'd have you on the show.
Gonna chat VTS, chat your time at Salesforce, obviously,
talk marketing and everything in between.
And as always, our show has brought to you by our good friends at Qualified.
You can go to Qualified.com, learn about the number on conversational sales
marketing platform for companies for
new teams that use Salesforce.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
First question, what was your first job in marketing, Eric?
>> My first job in marketing was at Salesforce.
I was the second hire onto a cross product marketing team that was
being built out to focus on our product releases.
And so as the Salesforce portfolio grew horizontally,
adding more business units, made more acquisitions,
it was an increasing pressure to think about how we bring products and
features to market more thoughtfully and consistently so
that the company would show up like one company and not 10.
And so I was tasked with building out a release marketing program,
working across all the clouds and platforms and acquisitions to do that
consistently, which is a really cool onboarding into marketing.
So before that, I'd worked in investment banking, management consulting,
and somehow became a tech marketer.
So it was a good indoctrination, if you will, but good way to get started.
>> Yeah, seriously, that's so fun.
Flash forward to today, tell us about what it means to be,
how do marketing have VTS?
>> Yeah, so I lead our marketing team about 25 people across product marketing,
demand gen, PR events, creative marketing ops, digital, etc, etc.
So we have a strong, what I call, full stack marketing team.
I report to our CEO and my job as the head of marketing is to think about how
really the different components of marketing come together,
complement each other, augment each other, all to serve the business objectives
Pipeline of growth, of retention, and up leveling our brand.
And then with VTS for two and a half years,
I've been in this role for the vast majority of my time.
And it's been a lot of fun, a really great team that makes it worth it.
>> Love that.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, let's get to our first segment, the trust tree, where you go and
if you're honest and trusted, you could share this deep,
this deep, this deep, this type of thing.
>> Yeah. >> High-plane secrets.
Tell us a little bit more about VTS.
What does the company do and who are your customers?
>> Sure, so VTS is a vertical SAS platform focused on the real estate sector.
We historically were serving the office market recently.
We've expanded into multifamily to retail, to industrial.
And at the end of the day, we're trying to transform really the world's largest
asset class.
And I think is one of the last mega industries to go through technology
disruption.
And so VTS provides a suite of software from enabling asset managers and
brokers to source leads and close deals faster to digital marketing assets,
3D floor plans, things like that, all the way through tenant experience,
which is really where we've been focusing more and more for the last year.
So everyone who goes into an office, the app you're using,
sometimes you're tapping your phone at the turnstile,
you're using your phone to book a yoga class to engage with your employees.
Really everything related to buildings.
And so the way I personally view the mission of the company is to be,
one day the operating system of really every structure in the world.
Student housing is a space we could think about healthcare is a space we could
think about.
But really being the central nervous system of all of these buildings.
And so my job in marketing is to help balance different products, different
verticals,
different personas and how do you tile those together with a 25 person team.
Still in a way that delivers meaningful marketing.
>> Love it.
>> Yeah, it's fun.
>> Yeah, and those different types of customers,
what does that buying committee look like?
>> Totally depends on the asset class.
I think what's interesting in commercial real estate is you have this broker
persona.
Who on a good day serves as an influencer, an evangelist,
on a bad day services, completely disinterested and could be a detractor.
And so for most of our products, the buyer could be different than the user of
the technology.
And so we kind of have to have this two prong approach where the commercial
real estate
owner who owns these assets is paying for the software, but in some cases,
the brokers are the ones really using it.
And so we're trying to convince an industry that they need to change,
that technology is how they can change and that we are the technology platform
to do that.
So depending on which product we're in, it could be C-suite, it could be asset
management,
it could be marketing, it could be CIO, property management.
And I think now more and more we're going to see actually directly with tenants
and
with heads of workplace, building security, heads of HR.
So it's a pretty complex persona grid, I will say.
Within those, all of the different types of personas and specifically you
mentioned that broker one,
how do you resource your team around that?
Do you have different people thinking about the broker separately or how do you
think about it?
Yeah, we haven't gone by persona yet.
I think so currently the companies will organize across two different business
units.
On the one side we have our lease, market and data products.
The other side we have VTS activate, which is really our tenant experience,
workplace, multifamily solutions.
So most of the marketing team sits with either one B or the other.
But I've made the decision to generally organize people by function.
So product marketing sits together, growth marketing sits together,
creative sits together, but then they each have kind of their designation.
So are you LMD or are you activate?
Broker and some of these other kind of interesting personas are really both
business units
responsibility to engage.
And so when we're designing a demand-gen strategy or product launch,
we're thinking about the product holistically and who are all the different
stakeholders
that this product touches, from who's paying for it,
to who's using it, to who's seeing the value from it, to who do we need to
market to?
Obviously the message is completely different by persona,
but we haven't organized the team structurally by persona or by component of
the buying committee, if you will.
Cool. We've debated it though.
Yeah, that's what I asked.
It's an interesting question, right?
We've also thought, I mean, being in verticals asks where there's a finite
number of accounts
we could sell to, but I think the revenue TAM is way more significant than the
account list TAM.
And so within those accounts, it's really, where do we start, which products
that we start with,
and that kind of dictates the expansion strategy.
But it's also a little bit different where the one to everyone marketing doesn
't work so well.
We have to be more targeted, more thoughtful and deliberate about how we
actually go to market,
who we talk to, how we talk about these things and so on.
So it's a little bit different than what I saw at Salesforce, which is
horizontal sass.
And in most cases, you're blasting everything to everybody on all channels all
the time,
so, which is really fun.
But this gives a totally different challenge and I think forces more intention
ality.
Yeah, and to your point, as you were working on with Salesforce,
sort of zipping it all up together and obviously, that's what customer 360 is.
And I don't obviously like you worked on it.
Yeah, as you say, I'm sure you worked on all that stuff.
I remember, when I was working on a bunch of projects for Salesforce,
I built a bunch of podcasts for them and I hosted a couple of them and stuff.
So, intimately familiar with a bunch of the stuff that was sort of going on
from a marketing perspective.
What's up?
The 360 clock.
Oh, yeah, the clock.
Oh, the thing about, I think we were doing five different products within the
clock.
And then you had essentials come out and essentials is like sort of cannibal
izing some existing business.
And there's all sorts of just complexity there.
Anywho.
But one of the things that was super fascinating, sort of about looking at that
is they did this number one CRM campaign,
which I'm sure you worked on, right?
And, you know, it's so obvious, like in retrospect, but you're like,
"Hey, we want to do a campaign that says we're number one," right?
And number one CRM and then this eventual 360 thing,
we're like kind of at odds with one another, right?
It is like, we don't want to just be seen as a CRM and we want to be seen as
this other thing,
but we're running this other campaign.
So, yeah, anyways.
There were some big debates, which I was part of.
And so, you know, I was hired to build this release marketing program.
And then my team and Remit expanded to really be a cross product, really
product launch team, corporate narrative.
How do our products tie together or go to market strategy really cohesively?
And so, I was in the room for, you know, what goes on the clock.
And that was a very contentious discussion, which went on for months.
But, you know, the CRM piece is interesting.
And I think there was a lot of discussion, which I was part of about, you know,
are we saying that we're expanding the definition of CRM,
where marketing cloud is a CRM technology, telos is CRM technology,
because ultimately everything Salesforce does is bringing the business closer
to the customer.
And that's CRM.
But I think most think of it as sales cloud, which is your Salesforce.
You can tool your deals, your your ops, et cetera.
And so, it was a very interesting, even the stock ticker is CRM.
And so, that's the main thing.
So, that that conversation, I was there for six years.
I'd say that conversation popped up once every six to nine months of, you know,
what does this mean exactly?
And now with their, you know, data, AI, CRM for everybody.
Story, I think is getting a little bit, a little bit more interesting,
but it's a healthy tension for sure as the product continues to expand and
expand,
it's harder to find that overarching moniker that really works.
Zoom it out. What's your marketing strategy overall?
It's a loaded question.
I would say we have a healthy blend of account-based market aid,
which is hugely important for, you know, a vertical SaaS business,
where you know the accounts, you know where the revenue is coming from.
And then we've started doing a lot more one-to-few,
where we're more, you know, cohorting based on the install-based products they
have,
the opportunities we see ahead for the year.
But then we're also focused on long-term brand building.
And so, I think when I came into the team two and a half years ago,
most of the product marketing work, I should say, was feature function.
And BTS had very quickly gone from one product to effectively four or five.
In a two-year span, they've made a couple of acquisitions.
I think they're really struggling to define that platform cross-product
narrative
of who is BTS.
You bought this company called Rise Buildings.
You bought Lane. You have Market.
You have-- how do these things all tie together?
And so, you know, one of the first things we did was try to unify the different
stories
within the portfolio in a way that made sense.
And so, you know, taglines, you know, we landed on unlock the real potential of
real estate,
which we thought, you know, whether it's a little witty and fun,
but on top of that, whether you're focused on leasing and deal management,
you're focused on digitizing your marketing program,
you're focused on tenant experience, all what you're doing is unlocking
potential
in your business by tying these pieces together.
You know, it's also an industry that is very siloed.
The different teams don't really talk to each other.
It's not like they're using all these different technologies.
In some cases, our competitor is a notebook.
You would think I'm exaggerating, but that's kind of what it is.
Sometimes it's Excel. Sometimes it's competitor, but sometimes it is a notebook
And so, you know, what we were trying to do is humanize it a little bit
and make sure that the story was resonating.
And so, over the last, call it year, I think, we've gone from building that
narrative
to now thinking about how do we amplify it?
What is our channel mix?
We've really diversified the way we execute and bring our message to market,
thinking of different tactics.
Our event program is super, super critical to us at, you know, pipeline vision
aries.
That is our number one driver of pipeline every single year.
So, you have a very strong event program from conferences to trade shows
to exact field events, hospitality.
You know, I don't know that any of that is so unique to us,
but I think just given our model of we have a set of customers,
we know who they are, certainly we're trying to expand it.
The most important thing is to engage the accounts that we have.
And so, what I'm looking at, my marketing metrics dashboard every Monday,
the first thing I go to is account engagement.
Any other thoughts on strategy or structure of your team
or anything different from other places there?
A year ago, we shifted to this dual business unit model.
And I put a lot of thought into, should we be two marketing teams,
where, you know, I have a head of marketing for Business Unit 1
and a head of marketing for Business Unit 2 who report to me,
should it be by function, should it be by persona,
should it be new biz versus upsell expansion?
And, you know, we really beat up the structure for a while.
And I think what we landed on works really well,
which I was, you know, speaking to a little bit before,
but, you know, we have this approach where we generally align by function,
but then on the demand gen or growth marketing side,
we're more structured by BU.
So, we rebranded the team from demand generation to growth marketing,
so it's not only about generating demand for us,
it's also about growing the accounts we have.
And growth marketing is a more inclusive moniker for what the team actually
does.
For sure.
And so now within each business, for four each business unit,
I should say, you know, we have a head of growth.
We have one or two growth marketers,
i.e. campaign strategists, channel strategists,
a digital marketer, and then a dotted line to them with a creative resource.
And then those pods are managed by a VP of growth marketing.
And so,
meanwhile, other functions are still kind of sitting independently.
And this kind of hybrid matrix model actually has been working very well for us
I think what's been challenging is for folks who sit in shared services,
like our PR team or corporate marketing team,
where, you know, they covered both BU's
and so sometimes it could be a little confusing where to go.
But I think the kind of 3D matrix, if you will,
like we're kind of on the Z axis of work structure at this point.
But it seems to be working really well.
I think it's driven the right levels and types of collaboration.
All right, let's get to the playbook.
This is where you open up that playbook and talk about the taxis that help you
win.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget items?
So we have a really strong, more tech stack,
but I'll kind of set that on the side because I don't think that's so unique to
us.
But what I'll say in terms of channels,
you know, I view events as a channel, honestly,
and the way we think of our event program is to, you know,
amplify the ongoing campaigns, extend the product launches
and really engage our top accounts in person.
So events, I'd say, is number one.
Number two, I'd say sponsored content.
So knowing our primary buyers,
so, you know, the CEOs, the heads of asset management,
the heads of brokerage firms, you know,
it's a little bit more of an old school industry.
I don't know that they would all love me characterizing it as such,
but that's my perspective on it.
And so I think what is important for them is getting to where they go,
which is trade publications, which is Wall Street Journal, which is Forbes.
And so, you know, we do a fair amount of, you know, earned media,
but I think that the sponsored content play has been really, really impactful
for us
over the past year.
And we've seen more and more that it is proving to be a very valuable channel.
And so I think that would have to be my number two.
Number three, this is less a channel, but a tool,
which I'm going to throw in there because it has completely reinvented the way
we do marketing.
Yeah.
It's a tool called CEROS.
It is a interactive digital dynamic content tool,
which really enables you to go from
called static white papers to
these long form content types that are
so dynamic, so visual, so interactive.
And once we started doing that, we saw year over year for the same content
piece.
We have a few 10 poll content exercises we do over year.
The pipeline influence has gone up three to five X from the exact same report
year over year.
So this is now the second full calendar year that we're using it.
And everyone was obsessed with this at the point of we now have to put guardra
ils for
when to use CEROS because we have a very talented creative team,
but we have a very small creative team.
And so these forms of collateral are highly,
highly designed.
It's almost more of a developer back end of building content than it is,
slides or G-Doc, etc.
And so they take a long time.
But I think onboarding the CEROS platform has been totally invaluable for us.
And we've seen from time spent on page to just the creativity that the platform
unlocks
has really, really been unique for us.
So digging in on those three events, anything that you're doing particular,
you mentioned this is sort of an old school industry.
And really, it's buy in real estate.
It's one of the oldest things of all time.
You know, you pen and paper sometimes, those sort of things, handshake, deal,
etc.
So I'm curious, what do you do for events when you know that that in-person
meeting
is so important, so critical in getting your people at bats?
Yeah, I think one of the first learnings I had about commercial real estate in
particular,
you know, not being remotely familiar with the industry before joining the
amount of FOMO
these people have is off the charts.
And they want to know what their peers are doing.
They want to know what their contemporaries are doing.
To the point of it, that in and of itself can drive deals, can drive
investments more
than any product pitch.
And so what we have found to be really successful, particularly with field
events, is anchoring
an event to a few really, really top speakers or top luminaries in their field.
I think the most successful field event we've done was last year we were
launching BTS
Activate, which is our kind of experience platform.
And we were trying a new format where we were going to have an exact dinner, a
really
nice restaurant, private dining room.
But before that, we wanted to have a panel discussion and we had our CEO, Nick
Romido,
alongside two very, very senior executives in the industry.
One, Jamie Hidari is a CEO of Industrious and then Emma Bachlin is the global
president
of Property Management for CBRE.
And we included that on the mailer.
If you're going to come for dinner, you're going to have nice drinks, you're
going to
meet your peers.
But we're also having this really exclusive panel in a closed door conversation
, just
20 of you.
And it was, I think, still today the most successful field event we've done,
where not
only the registrations, but the quality of people in the room, almost everybody
was a
CEO, a CIO, very, very senior executives.
And so we've learned from that of, to the extent that we can anchor these
events to
people who are, you know, I kind of maybe influencers a stretch, but influ
encers within
this industry really have a gravitational pull together people there.
And what we will try typically for these kind of more marquee field events is
we'll
lock in a couple of very senior CEOs and then a lot of the invites are done one
to one of
the account managers or even Nick, our CEO, will do the invites.
We'll say, hey, come to this event, you're going to be sitting alongside Scott
Rekor,
the CEO of RXR.
Or other, you know, big deal names in the industry and we have found that that
has driven attendance
really well and also makes people excited to be there.
I think one piece of feedback we always hear is that no one gets this quality
of people
in the same room like VTS.
And so a lot of times when we're going to these conferences, the point of the
conference
is not the conference, but the dinner we're hosting the night before, which
again, I don't
think is unique to us, but I think what is unique to us is the quality of
people we're
able to get to join us for these events and almost to be co-hosts without
saying it has
been really, really impactful.
And I think beyond that, I think from a brand perspective, you know, more and
more, we are
trying to really stand out in the industry and be bold, be new, be innovative,
be provocative,
push the buttons a little bit.
And so, you know, we do get creative and playful with event types, event
formats, the restaurants
we select, you know, we're not doing a lot of, you know, white tablecloth and
glove restaurants,
but really trying to, you know, push the envelope a little bit with where these
people might
be routinely invited to because they're all invited to these events constantly.
But what sets it apart is the experience and who will be in the room.
Then sponsor content.
Yeah.
Yeah, curious how you go about doing that, what's the type of content that
resonates,
why the particular publishers that you choose?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think what we found with sponsored content in particular is, so I think one
of the biggest
differentiators BTS has is our first party data set, which is generated by
users just
using our products.
And so, literally, no one else in this space has the same data and insights and
the ability
to predict market trends that we do.
So when we go to sponsored content, you know, commercial real estate, a lot of
times it's
commercial observer, it's the real deal, but we also, you know, have an ongoing
, my line
series in Forbes, for example, you know, the data is the hook, but then we use
that data
to really talk higher level thought leadership trends we're seeing in the
industry.
And because we are uniquely positioned to be able to predict where the market
is going
and our, our history issue, we're usually pretty accurate with what we think is
going
to happen.
I think it gives a more interesting lens than people who are just talking about
leadership,
just talking industry trends.
So the data is always the hook.
In terms of the publishers, it's a mix.
I think, you know, we have the trade publications, which are really important
to us because that's
where a lot of the people who use our product every day, they wake up and they,
that's what
they're reading.
So to the extent that we can, you know, use those channels to, you know, kind
of force
a distribution to people who maybe aren't in our database or aren't engaging
with us
on a topic that is unique, powered by data that they would never see otherwise,
I think
gives us a pretty strong competitive advantage.
Yeah, it's one of my favorite tenants of marketing.
And I learned that I learned this in the army if I were you can win.
But I think that so much of marketing when you have first party information
like that,
no one can copy it, right?
So no matter what, it's super unique to you.
And that's always valuable.
And you kind of need to be mining things for that type of information.
And it's not just data and surveys, although that stuff is those two things
particularly
are low hanging fruit, difficult to pull off still below hanging fruit.
There's other things that you can do and say like, what is something that only
we can
do?
Right.
And, you know, the further you go down that rabbit hole, the cooler stuff you
can create.
I think what's really unique about us is, you know, if you think about the
different
categories we play in, there are some strong competitors in every single
vertical.
No one is doing all of it.
And so what makes our narrative and our insight, I think very unique and more
interesting is
we're able to piece together insights from different parts of the real estate
pendulum,
if you will, and stitch them together.
So for example, we have two major annual pieces of content, which are first-
party research
efforts.
One is called the Global Landlord Report, talking to the top owners and
operators across
the world.
One is called the Global Workplace Report, where we're talking to heads of
workplace,
heads of HR, corporate security, access, et cetera.
What we're seeing is that when we ask the owner, what do you think tenants want
, that
it might be completely opposite from what tenants say what they want.
And so now we're sitting with two different first-party data sets, only we have
that
our customers and the people we're talking to are telling us, and we're able to
say,
"Uh-uh, this tenant is looking for X.
You're saying X doesn't matter to the tenant."
And I think being able to tease out those contrasts, again, just puts us in a
bit of
a different light and, you know, play to your strengths is that we're in all
these
spaces.
No one else is in every single space going after all these asset classes.
And what we're seeing more and more of just in the industry more broadly is
what we like
to call the Pangea or the convergence of asset classes, where I think where
people work
is changing, where people live, where they shop.
It's all kind of melding together.
And, you know, I think real estate owners historically have looked at the
tenant as
this monolith of you're a human who goes to the office and goes home.
But they don't realize you're going to the office one day, you're working home
the next
day, you're going to a mall, you're going out to eat, you're going to your
apartment.
In some cases, that's the same person going to all these buildings that you own
, right?
And so, to the extent that we can position ourselves as, regardless of where
you're
existing in the world, you're really drifting between buildings that are
operated by VTS
in one small way or another.
And so all that gives us this amazing data set that truly no one else has.
And I think, you know, going back to what you're asking about marketing
strategy, it's
the extent that we can really lean into that, where it's not about your office
portfolio,
it's not about your multifamily portfolio, it's all these portfolios are now
your platform.
And so you need one platform to manage your platform.
And I think that's kind of the next phase of corporate messaging and corporate
marketing
for us.
And, you know, for anyone who attended VTS Accelerate back in May, this was
largely what
our keynote was about, how the convergence of asset classes is totally redef
ining the
industry and you need a provider that can keep up with that.
I'd say we've actually been ahead of the curve there.
You know, final piece you talked about sort of using seros and power of content
, power
of sort of differentiated types of content, power of design specifically, which
is part
of the platform and also something.
I mean, how do you think about content broadly?
And your second uncuttable is also content as well.
It's just the delivery mechanism is through different publishers.
Yeah, so I'd say, you know, seros design formats typically don't go out through
our sponsored
content vehicles, but we might link to them from there.
I think the design is so important.
And so, you know, as someone who, you know, I run the marketing team here, I'm
on, I'm
personally probably on a lot of sales lists and distributions.
I get hit up constantly by SDRs who are sending me things.
If it doesn't look good, I'm not going to open it.
I don't really care what it is.
Like, I'm so busy drifting between emails and slacks and meetings.
And then, you know, my personal life as well, that if it's not, if it's not
designed in
a compelling intuitive way, I'm not going to fight with a piece of collateral
to get
to the point.
And so I think we have really, really tripled down on brand visual identity,
how the different
pieces of our story come together.
And seros is just an amazing tool for that.
And so I think when we talk about content more broadly, I mean, there are
different formats.
There's, you know, social posts, which could just be a customer quote there.
Our Instagram stories can be kind of fun and playful.
But when you're getting into thought leadership, I think the era of attaching a
PDF or a static
white paper, one pager, those are so long gone.
And so I think in an industry that is a bit old school as well, I think
standing out as
a more dynamic marketing function, where we're putting out pieces of collateral
that not
only does the user want to read the insight because the data we have is so
unique to us,
no one else is putting out content that looks like ours does.
So I think those two converge, and I guess now I'm kind of circling all these
things
together, those converged in a really compelling way that I think gives us
quite an edge with
content.
I think we're still scratching the surface of what we can do, and we continue
to, you
know, think of new ways of delivering these data points, this insight, these
predictions,
et cetera.
But, you know, from two years ago to today, it's a completely different content
machine.
Yeah, that's very cool.
I think also, as you mentioned, sort of in your space, it's just endlessly
complex, right?
It's like the different asset types and geography or, you know, there's just so
many different
things that you could create content about.
Absolutely.
And I, it's just going to get more and more complicated with this convergence
of asset
classes and people who historically only care about office now really care
about multifamily
and will really care about retail and so on.
And, you know, if we're not delivering these stories in a way that's
comprehensive and
dynamic and engaging, it's just not going to get picked up.
Okay, what about one budget item that is not working or fading away?
I would say, and this is not really one item, but one category, we have a lot
of agencies.
And on the production side of things, I think because, you know, at some start-
ups, you
might say a 25-person marketing team is huge for us.
It honestly feels extremely lean.
And so we need to rely on a lot of external support.
And so, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, a lot of these functions, I do
think
would not only be more effective, but also more cost effective to, you know,
bring in
houses, FTEs.
And so, yeah, it is a priority of mine to think about.
All of our partners are truly excellent.
It's not about cutting any one partner.
So if you're a partner and you're listening, don't take it that way.
But I think if there are ways to, you know, transition some of that work to in-
house,
to an FTE who reports into the team who joins our all-hands calls, who comes to
our team
happy hours and can kind of, you know, suck up the energy of the team, I do
think that
would be in some facets of the organization a bit more effective.
But you know, we're in the same environment as everyone else, and being able to
wax and
win your budget as needed is really, really important, so I understand why we
are where
we are.
But I do think in certain pockets, it could be more effective to hire versus
outsource.
Being in the office, understanding, you know, the culture, the dynamics,
hearing the all-hands
calls, the meetings that, you know, even for folks who work remotely, there's
still something
of being a full-time employee versus, I think, you know, some of our agencies,
it's more
kind of task-driven.
So our agencies have done tremendous work of really making inroads as being an
integral
part of the team, and that's, you know, phenomenal for us, and it's been hugely
impactful.
But, you know, I think, you know, some of it in terms of like the production
agencies,
I think some would maybe be more effective if it was more in-house.
Okay, what about your 10%, 5% crazy experiment budget?
What do you got going on?
I'd say we did a really fun activation for a conference back in April of this
year called
RATCON.
So we had our CEO doing an on-stage keynote with a huge attendee who has, it
was right
in Times Square at the Marriott Marquis, and we did this branded car out-of-
home activation
where we had a fleet of, I think it was eight or nine cars that were fully
wrapped in BTS
branding.
And we sent them to pick up some of our top customers to bring them to the
conference.
And then in the car, there were these iPads loaded with interactive product
demos.
And so when I was explaining to our CFO why this was a good use of money,
because it was
not a cheap activation, I said, "Well, we're combining brand without a home,
with account-based
marketing, with a product demo, for the fraction of a cost of a booth."
And he was like, "Okay, I'm sure you're doing.
I'm not going to go for it."
So I think that was the most recent, kind of fun, crazy idea we've had.
I think out-of-home in general is when I want to flex a little bit more on,
depending on
how budgets shake out over the year.
Because I think there is a brand awareness gap as we start to get outside of
office and
more towards retail or industrial, where we need to prove that we're there for
a reason.
And so I think if we could be hyper-targeted out-of-home with how I'm thinking
about it,
I think it would be really cool.
Another piece we're doing is, you know, in some office buildings, they have
elevators
with like TV screens built in there.
So we're taking an ABM approach with that, where if there is an owner who is, I
'd say,
like relatively down funnel and an opportunity for activate, which is the
tenant experience
product, in small pockets, we're going to start blasting those elevators with
pitches
for BTS activate.
That way we're specifically targeting the owner.
They're quite expensive buys, and so we have to be careful with it.
But that way we can target the specific owner for whom is likely in a late
stage evaluation.
And now they're seeing it in the building, they're going to work a few times a
week
or every day, they're seeing it again in the elevator, people are asking about
it hopefully.
So that's kind of the next up big, not crazy idea, but kind of big, fun
experimental idea
we have.
Yeah.
It's so, the out-of-home stuff is so tough.
Yes.
Yeah, because it is so complex.
Very hard to measure.
Yeah, it's super hard to measure, and it's like, it's not a, the thing is, it's
never
a bad idea.
Right.
Ever, right.
Because it's like, it's always good to surround your customers with ads.
The question is always, what could you do with the money if you didn't do that?
And that's why it's fun to throw it into your experimental budget, right?
It's like, hey, this is something that we want to get those extra impressions,
we want
someone to be thinking about us more often, because those are the things that
sort of,
those are the like, the true art and science of marketing where you're like,
totally agree.
How much of that stuff really impacts the human psyche, you know?
It's like, I don't know if we ever really done the studies, but.
No, I mean, I think awareness is super, super important.
I mean, even for accounts who know us, I think because we are so differentiated
from a brand
perspective, it's good to remind them that, you know, we're not just any old
software
platform, we're standing out, we're going to be provocative.
We've also been kind of, I think, up leveling a lot of our campaign activations
to make
them look.
In some cases, a little spicier where, you know, even if we get a reaction, hey
, you're
talking about it.
So I think that's, that's the approach I want to be driving a team towards more
of really,
really standing off from the pack.
Because I think on the surface, you Google leasing asset management software,
you Google
10 experience software, it all looks the same.
Right.
So how do you, how do you actually stand out and instead to do things
differently that
are probably going to make some people uncomfortable, probably going to make a
few people scratch
their heads and say, is that the right thing to do?
Is that a smart thing to do?
But in my view, if you're provoking a conversation, it was a good use of time
and money.
100%.
So my other show is called Remarkable means you got to make something worth
talking about.
They got to go actually talk to somebody else.
They have to remark about it to somebody else.
That's the goal.
Love it.
How do you view your website?
The website has been a labor of love.
Our, our head of creative has this funny analogy where we've been slowly, but
surely rebuilding
the website over the last few years.
And the way he says it is, we are going and killing poor cruxes throughout the
website,
I.E.
Terribly designed pages that are wrong, inaccurate, incomplete, just poorly
designed.
And so we've honestly been going frankly one by one.
It's been a bit of a side project for our creative team and corporate marketing
to go
and redo in.
So we started with the homepage ever since we, you know, implemented the new
homepage at
BTS.com.
We've seen significantly higher traffic, higher time spent on page, relatively
trying to
drive to the product pages.
That's where, you know, form fills and demo requests and gated content, et c
etera.
And we've seen that traffic increase tremendously as well.
So we redid our homepage.
We redid about us.
We are still redoing the product pages, I should say, of adding to them.
We redid our PR page, our blog, our careers page.
So we're kind of slowly but surely killing the horcruxes.
And I think when Charlie, we as our creative team came out with that, it was
like, it is
the most perfect analogy.
And so we were just going to keep going one by one and removing them until the
page is
perfect.
I think the site is perfect, I should say.
I think as part of this, we also spend time redesigning our knabs.
I think the knabs were quite confusing.
And I remember when I was interviewing with BTS, you know, I don't know, two
and a half,
almost three years ago at this point, it was really confusing.
There's products, there's solutions, there's industries, there's personas, and
half these
buttons are driving at the same place.
It just, it really didn't make a lot of sense.
And so we, we re-streamlined and I think shortened and simplified the knabs.
So, you know, we do have one by product and one by sector.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
But we've taken out some of the noise and I think, spend a lot of time thinking
about
the click path of, you know, where are you going to come from?
Where are you going to go?
You know, I had the benefit when I was at Salesforce working with our Web UX
team quite
a bit and seeing some of the amazing research they do, which is possible when
you're a 75,000
person company.
You have, you know, a hundred UX researchers at your disposal.
And so, you know, trying to bring some of those best practices to BTS.
I think where the page is now is really, really excellent.
I think the next step for us is being more thoughtful about conversion rate and
optimization
is something we've really focused on.
I don't know that we have the in-house skill set to do so currently.
So, that could be something to backtrack when I just said something where we
look to an
agency partner for it.
But I think that's probably the next, the next step for the website is once we
make sure
that the story is right, the look and feel is right, how are we actually
squeezing the
most juice out of it?
What about AI?
What, AI tools are you using right now or recommending to your friends?
Yeah.
So, it's funny, we actually had a training a few weeks ago.
Some of our marketing ops team has been building out a custom GPT that is, you
know, the link
model is trained on our tone, our products, how we talk, you know, using it to
ingest a
lot of the best content we've produced.
And the team is pretty amazed by it.
I think we're still kind of validating the best use cases for it.
But that's going to be really exciting for the team.
It's never meant to create content, but using it as thought starters, using it
as, you know,
amplification, just giving more fodder if you will for brainstorm.
So we're really excited about bringing that GPT online for the team.
I think another one on the creative side.
So, you know, because we are so account based, there is a lot of, you know,
account specific
sales collateral that has to get produced and we work with our sales and
solutions counterparts,
but, you know, we're looking at some, we don't have a solution in play yet, but
looking at,
you know, what tools are out there that could be, that could make that process
move more
quickly where if we're, you know, it's not just swapping a logo, in a lot of
case for
us, it's also swapping the buildings on the slides because we want the slide
where it'll
look like that owner's portfolio.
And so thinking through how we do that in a way that is not redesigning a full
deck every
time or when we're using Seros, you know, can't create a new Seros format for
every sales
meeting.
So how do we use tools to kind of, I don't want to say mass update, but make
those changes
much, much more easily than redoing it from scratch.
And so I think Jerry is still out.
And if we're going to find something that works for us there, because it's a
pretty specific
use case, but I think that would be really impactful for the team.
Let's get to the desktop.
We're talking about healthy tension, whether that's with your board or sales
teams, your
competitors or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable desktop in your career?
Oh boy.
I'll go back to the sales horse days.
And so a large part of what my team's role was in terms of building this, you
know, cross
product go to market motion is looking at all of the product launches from all
of the
categories and trying to rationalize what gets in Mark's keynote, what gets in
the earnings
call firm.
It gets on the home page, what gets a login takeover.
And I can think of multiple times sitting in the room with the GMs.
And these are all multi-billion dollar businesses and these GMs are objectively
CEOs in their
own right, trying to mediate as to why I was a senior manager at this point,
like why I
was coming in and saying, you know, Mr. GM over here, we're not going to
highlight your
product because Ms. GM over here hers is actually taking the spotlight and
providing
a sound business rationale where I think on one level, they're like, you know,
who the
F is this guy?
But on the other hand, it was my job to balance the competing needs of the
portfolios and
how do you compare Slack to service cloud?
They're completely different beasts.
At the end of the day, we have one home page.
And so really being thoughtful about how we tiered our product launches and how
we then
use those tiers to dictate the marketing support and amplification that they
get.
A lot of really interesting learnings.
You know, I always reminded myself, everyone's here for the right reasons and
everyone is
frankly comped on their business units number.
So I get why they're doing what they're doing.
But, you know, it was my job to kind of mediate that.
And I think they learned a lot of soft skills through those exercises, for sure
All right, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how qualified helps companies generate pipeline quickly.
You can go to qualified.com to learn more.
Tap into your greatest essaying website and identify your most valuable
visitors and instantly.
And I mean instantly here.
Start sales conversations.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits, Eric.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Let's do it.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
When I was in college, I was in an acapella group.
And then high school, I sang the national anthem at a Giants game.
Oh, pretty cool.
Yeah.
Name of the group.
It was called them.
They have a favorite book, podcast, or TV show that you'd recommend.
Ooh.
Favorite ever is challenging.
I will say I have been hooked on the gentleman on Netflix.
So that has been my weeknight.
Sit back on the couch and mentally decompress for a minute.
If you weren't in marketing or business at all, what do you think you'd be
doing?
Lawyer.
I had honestly planned on being a lawyer my entire life and then wound up in
investment
banking almost by mistake and spent a little bit nonlinear since then.
But I always planned on being a lawyer.
What is your best advice for a first time had of marketing?
I think really understand the ins and outs of the different functions on your
team.
And I think at the end of the day, you need to respect what your head of demand
, your
head of PR, your head of creative say.
But it's also your responsibility to make tough decisions.
And that means a lot of the times you're going to make people upset.
But it's your job as the head of the organization to balance the different
needs of the different
parts.
Eric, that's it.
That's all we got for today.
Thanks so much for joining for listeners.
Go check out VTS, VTS.com, unlock the real potential of real estate.
Eric, can you final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Anything to plug.
I think keep an eye on the VTS activate space.
I think there's a lot of really interesting functionality, use case, a lot of
cool stories
coming.
I think it's going to be a product that will take us from a real estate company
too and
everything company.
So keep an eye on the activate.
Fantastic.
Eric, thanks again.
You got it.
Take care.
Thanks for coming.
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