MAIN INSIGHT 30
Gemma Brown
CHIEF STORYTELLER;
CUSTOMER MARKETING DIRECTOR
What is the importance of delivering positive experiences to your enterprise sales customers, and do you have any anecdotes that you can share?
When potential customers start interacting with us, they ask for reference calls or testimonials. That kind of human interaction I don't think will ever go away. I lead customer advocacy, and my role is working with existing customers who are happy and have a great story to tell. I work with them to try and find the most appropriate way for them to share their successes so that it really highlights them as thought leaders in a way that is aligned to their own ambitions. Since we often tell stories through video, it's essential that I talk to and brief my customers before we start shooting. I get them to tell me their story in their own words, allowing me to ask additional questions and tease out the bits I need. I craft the flow of the video before we even start recording.
Before Anaplan, I had a customer video experience that was truly a learning lesson. I had been booked to direct an interview but couldn't use my regular business crew and didn't get a chance to brief the team or the customer, which resulted in a lot of improvising and problem-solving at the last minute. The whole experience was irritating for everyone, especially the customer. However, despite this horrible experience, that customer and I ended up laughing about it together and creating a fantastic relationship, and we've now done many more videos together. I like this anecdote because it shows how the human element, the human relationship aspect, can really turn around a situation. Good customer marketers tend to have a lot of soft skills and people skills to adapt how to best communicate with and treat different customers. Enterprise sales organisations need to leverage that.
How can brand messaging be a point of competitive differentiation in your market?
When we create something like a case study, I always say that if we can take our name out and put our competitors' name in, and the story still makes sense, then we've failed. It's not worthwhile, and we need to find something else that sets us aside from competitors. We try to find that uniqueness in our messaging in all of our stories. We pride ourselves in having truly connected planning and achieving cross-functional collaboration, so that needs to come across in our messaging.
I also try to coach people to see the value of Anaplan. Getting them to quantify the number of hours, days, or months they are saving and have them think, "Okay, what can I do now with all the freed-up time? What can I do now that I couldn't do before?" This adds value to the business and transforms the organization's operations; I help them see that.
We try to find that uniqueness in our messaging in all of our stories. We pride ourselves in having truly connected planning and achieving cross-functional collaboration, so that needs to come across in our messaging.
We want to showcase the challenges people faced and how we were able to solve those problems and eventually achieve excellent outcomes as an organization. That's real and gives potential customers a more robust sense of security that they will be taken care of.
What is the role of human engagement in customer acquisition in a B2B setting?
At Anaplan, we have customer advocates who, I think, are probably one of the most prominent voices in the customer acquisition process. If you think about it, even as a consumer, most of us won't buy anything unless we read the reviews, right? We need to know other people's experiences, which is no different in B2B, especially when you think about the cost of enterprise services. Just like with consumer products, customers want to know if the technology they're investing in is worth the spend. They want to know what others' experiences have been, and my job is to make sure that we've got the right customers telling us the right stories to enable new customers to know exactly what it is they are getting into. I don’t want just the positive stories that say, "Oh my goodness, everything's been amazing, and everything was perfect." We know that life isn't like that, so we want to showcase the challenges people faced and how we were able to solve those problems and eventually achieve excellent outcomes as an organization. That's real and gives potential customers a more robust sense of security that they will be taken care of.
Anaplan is building a future where connected leaders and teams are able to constantly adapt, transform and reinvent their businesses. The Anaplan platform supports detailed hyperscale models that can see business from edge to edge, and plan with signals down to the transactional level. With Anaplan, finance and operational leaders across the organization can model complex scenarios, forecast continuously with added intelligence, and make agile decisions with confidence.
