Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora and former CMO of Salesforce spoke this morning at Bowery Capital’s CMO Summit. He distilled five actionable takeaways for attendees from his experience in marketing enterprise software:
Telling the Story
Tzuo advocates telling an authentic story yourself. He likens this process to a gallery with three rooms: the high-level market, the direct value proposition and the product features and functions itself. It’s critical to tell a holistic story and not to get bogged down in any one of these rooms individually.
Pricing and Packaging
In a world of infinite pricing options, it’s important to optimize pricing and packaging options. At a high level determine whether you are running a capacity or usage based model and then experiment with floors and bundles. Understanding the type of commitment that you want from your customers, will help guide you through this process.
Nailing the Go To Market
Your distribution channel hinges on what Tzuo calls, “the 100 million dollar question” – what do you look like as a company doing $100m in sales? Do you have $100m customers or do you have 100,000 ten dollar customers? Talk with your customers frequently to determine what your fundamental value proposition is worth and try to triangulate and optimize up to that dollar amount.
Knowing Your Funnel
Be vigilant about your funnel. Ideally, you should be measuring individual segments on a weekly basis to understand both quarter to quarter and year over year progress.
Teaching Customer Evangelism
Understand where your leads are coming from. If you do a great job you should be receiving significant amounts of inbound interest from SEO and word of mouth marketing, driven by press and customer evangelism. Engaging with customers and creating platforms for evangelism will help you garner both small donations like a company logo on your website or even big commitments like a video sales pitch. Having a hand in this process will enable you to craft customer stories that put your business in a positive light. Encouraging customer evangelism as a core competency that starts with your salespeople, but should be a team-wide goal.
