I have been doing a couple of podcast interviews with marketing executives over the past couple of weeks: one with Domo (a cloud BI company that I did hands-on tests several years ago) and Talend (a cloud data integration vendor). Both faced big challenges during the pandemic, such as turning their in-person user conferences into all virtual ones and changing their marketing to adjust to the new virtual way of doing business. You would think that the marketing would be pretty much the same even though both companies operate primarily in the cloud. But you would be wrong. When it comes to enterprise B2B software sales, you need road warriors and a personal high-touch. But the old school days of customer wine-and-dine are gone. You have to be more creative about building those connections these days.

Talend hired a completely new leadership team (which interestingly are all women) and as a result went through a series of rebranding efforts. “Data is the difference between surviving and thriving,” says Lauren Vaccarello, the CMO of Talend on our podcast. She watched one of her favorite tea shops close their doors in a couple of weeks and lay off hundreds of their staff. That motivated her to rethink their messaging and start fresh, assuming that everything will change. “We have a product that can help businesses with better and real-time access to their data.”

“We can’t rely on anything, we have to innovate and change what we did a year ago,” she said. For example, they could pull customer executives together in a webinar rather than rely on those who could attend a physical meeting. Not to mention that virtual events were a lot less costly and had a lot higher attendance and engagement too. “From an ROI perspective, we got 5x higher returns than from an in-person event.” Having an all-female executive team at Talend is an interesting experience for all of them. “None of us feel the need to be perfect around each other,” she said. That makes for more intense, authentic and productive collaboration too. “The dynamic is different.”

Domo had a similar experience and just a few days to transform their customer event into a virtual one. It went from about 3,000 attendees to more than 12,000 virtual visitors. And from three days’ worth of sessions to one 90 minute plenary session with dozens of break-out sessions that could be streamed on demand.

One of my biggest beefs with SaaS companies is how hard it is to price their services. Compare Domo’s pricing page with Talend’s  (shown here) — the latter is very transparent and very clear, and a rarity.

I want to bring in a post from Salesforce which talks about ways marketers can fight digital fatigue. The authors cite the average person now spends 7.5 hours daily in front of a screen. They have several suggestions on how to beef up your own marketing efforts during these pandemic times, including:

• Follow your customers as they change usage patterns and try new products. Stay top of mind and evolve with them. Don’t stop your marketing efforts.
• Personalization is critical. As customers curate their digital experiences, make sure you have a better understanding of their needs and what matters to them. But don’t cross over into being creepy.
• Agile is here to stay. Understand this evolution and how customers are responding to your content.
• Social media matters. Make sure you can engage your customers on the various social platforms where they talk about your products.
• Empathy is important. Show your customers that you care and respond to their concerns. Above all else, avoid the hard sell and be authentic.