Welcome to today’s episode where we will explore how to tell a unified story while marketing several products to several audiences. Joining us is Ajay Kumar, Head of Global Marketing and Chief Evangelist at ManageEngine, to discuss this and more.
Ajay Kumar KG is the Head of Global Marketing and Chief Evangelist, ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation. He has been instrumental in creating a niche in the B2B and Enterprise IT Management marketing space. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry and more than 17 years with Zoho Corp., Ajay has a wealth of expertise in go-to-market strategies, brand positioning, demand generation, social media, product marketing, solutions marketing, and media & analyst relations.
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Welcome to today’s episode where we’re going to explore how to tell a unified story while marketing several products to several audiences. Joining us is Ajay Kumar, Head of Global Marketing and Chief Evangelist at ManageEngine to discuss this and more. AJ, welcome to the show. Thank you, Greg, for having me in your show. Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking about these topics with you. Before we get started, why don’t you give us a little background on yourself and your role at ManageEngine?
Ajay Kumar: So, as you mentioned, I handle the global marketing activities for the IT management software vendor called Manage Engine, which incidentally is the sister division of the SaaS major called Zoho. I started out as a software developer, incidentally, in the late 90s, I think, before the cloud took off, and then I transitioned to marketing, and I’ve been at it for the last two decades.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. Well, yeah, so let’s let’s dive in here. We’re going to talk about a few things here. And the big theme here is just, you know, maintaining consistency across audiences, product portfolios, things like that. So let’s start with talking about audiences. Can you talk about the importance of arriving at the right marketing messaging aimed at both SMBs and enterprises? Because that’s, you know, that’s what Managed Engine has a rather diverse audience set. So how do you characterize the importance of doing that?
Ajay Kumar: Nice, it’s a nice question. Yeah, so Mana Engine as an IT management vendor, we deal with both the SMB and the enterprise segment. To keep this very simple, I just got to deep dive a bit. If you look at an SMB, the usual classification of SMB, it actually changes from region to region. If you take US, an SMB is basically any company which is having less than 500 employees. But if you look at the rest of the world, it’ll be like any business having less than 250 is the set that we look at. So that’s the small complexity that comes in when you broadly classify, say, SMB and enterprise. So that’s something that we as marketers need to think about, because each country, each region, the classification is very different. And you should not do a broad stroke and plan your marketing campaigns with that data set in mind. The complexity that organization like managing has over and above the SMB and enterprise divide is we are an IT management vendor, which means the audience that we speak to are the IT decision makers. And the complexity which I just mentioned about is because If you look at enterprise, as I mentioned, at less than 250, or more than 250, or more than 500 in US or the rest of the world, the IT team size is a very crucial part in making your marketing messaging, identifying the decision makers. And for a set like an IT team, it’s eroding above 250 is enterprise, and less than 50 is the small and medium business. So these metrics and segmentations are very, very crucial when you plan a marketing message. And if you are a vendor which deals with B2B audience dealing with SMB and enterprise, these crucial nuggets of information is very, very important to that trend. So this is exactly what we deal with. And that’s the first thing that we look at before we start looking into the marketing messaging part. And I think if I deep dive a bit more, if you look at SMB as a segment, when I look at the IT teams in the SMB, they’re basically generalist because it’s a small team size, which means a person will wear multiple hats in decision making. He’ll be looking at networks, servers, applications, the cloud infrastructure all together. He’ll be like one or two persons looking at it. Whereas in an enterprise, it’s a specialized role, right? It’ll be a very structured team. There is delineations of responsibility and there’s a larger focus on strategic planning and innovations. So that’s the next big difference you need to look at when you look at the SMB and enterprise. So what I was speaking till now is about the segmentation of the audience, which is very, very crucial for a marketing role. And now comes the marketing message. So marketing message for an SMB is varied from the enterprise marketing message that you try. That’s because the expectation from the SMB audience and the enterprise audience is a bit different because of the complexities of the kind of IT infrastructure that they deal with. So an SMB, they may emphasize on efficiency, scalability, cost effectiveness. They’ll be looking at ease of implementation and use. They’ll be looking at comprehensive support and integration capabilities. This is what will be the top of the mind for an IT decision maker in an SMB. But when you take an enterprise, they are looking at more advanced features. Over and above what an SMP looks like, they’re looking at more advanced features. They’re looking at innovation. They’re looking for robust security. And because it’s an enterprise, maybe spread across different geographies, the local compliance has also come into play, which means they look for a vendor who’s compliant to the local laws. And so this is all factored in, has to be factored in when you start working on your marketing message. So this is exactly the challenge a vendor like ManaEngine, which is like been in the business since 2002, which I think the backstory here is we started off As a, I think, a small vendor startup, then we slowly grew into SMB. Now we are a 17,000 employee company, so we are an enterprise. So when I start looking at marketing messages, I actually look inward. I look at my organization’s growth, the expectations my IT team has got, right? And that actually helps me and guides me in framing those marketing messages. So unification, I think we can broadly say I can cover the unified story, but unified story is just an umbrella. But you need to go to the depths of your audience segmentation and plan your messaging, your multi-channel marketing activities. You need to know where our SMB and enterprise audience congregate and customize your messaging. So this is how I think we should be dealing with marketing messaging.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so a few things there. First of all, I think bringing up the nuance of SMB doesn’t mean the same thing in two different places necessarily. I think that makes it more complex. The other part here is definitely when you get to the individual customer, even to the segment level, you’re going to have different nuances and different, you know, specific points that you that you touch on to your earlier points. But at that highest level, you know, when you’re talking about a product that does appeal to both enterprise and SMB, you know, varying definition as it might be, how do you balance the needs of all of those when you’re thinking about like at the top of the pyramid, the you know, however you structure messaging and brand positioning and all those things like how do you how do you balance those needs between those two audiences?
Ajay Kumar: So I think the way I think, so I will take it from my experience of working in this company. The way we look at this segmentation and the balance that we need to provide. Let me go into the product part of it. The product are classified into varied tiers of solutions or additions. So that is, I think, from our example, we have a standard addition for a particular product, a professional addition, and an enterprise addition. So the choice is given to the customer on his journey from, say, he’s an SMB or he’s a small officer, a small organization, a small IT team. He would obviously want the very basic things to get his job done. So he will only look for a standard edition of a product, right? He’ll start off his journey with us with standard edition. And maybe that satisfies his current needs, right? And then as he grows, as his IT becomes more complex, he may venture into the upgraded versions, right? He may move to professional. And as his company grows exponentially and more employees are added to his organization, which means complexity has gone up, I think the scale just multiplies because he has different job, different locations. That’s when he starts exploring the enterprises, right? So one point first point I would like to highlight is Tired Solutions and Editions and we promote it accordingly right based on his life cycle our promotions we know that so this particular organization with so much of employees is looking only for this basic set of features or products capabilities we will our promotions are only centered around that. We don’t talk about the big things about, will this product scale for 10,000 employees, because that doesn’t make sense for an organization of this scale. So that’s how we start balancing it. And second is, I think, if you look at how to do marketing, for an SMB, we will just restrict ourselves to things like how-to guides, cost-saving tips, success stories from similar sites and businesses. But when you come to enterprise, they look for more in-depth content, like white papers, case studies, analyst reports, like the Gartlers and Forresters. They would like to see whether we are featured, whether this particular vendor I’m evaluating is featured in these reports. And that makes true sense because it’s been evaluated by a reputed analyst firm, which means half his job is done. Next thing is about getting a team, multiple stakeholders in. It’s just not a single person as I told you, like in a small and medium business. It’s multiple stakeholders that are involved. And they do a detailed evaluation for which as a vendor, we need to supply all those materials as marketing messages, battle cards, and all this stuff. And now third point, I would say, so I’ve talked about tired editions, I talked about content, then I would say, let me shift the focus on the communication channels. If you look at an SMB, I think from my experience, they prefer direct, straightforward communications. It could be your email marketing, social media, webinars, online content. Whereas an enterprise, they prefer to engage more through professional networks, right? Industry conferences. They need detailed white papers. They want direct sales outreach. They inquire about, do you have a dedicated support for my organization? So these are all things that may come in mind and this is something that your marketing program should balance out to ensure that both these audiences are satisfied, right? Contextually.
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Greg Kihlstrom: And so one more key audience that more and more companies are keeping in mind is society at large or the general public and the idea of giving back to society. So how do you, going beyond sales and the target audiences, how do you look at society as maybe a third audience category?
Ajay Kumar: So I will give you a few examples of what we as a company. So as I mentioned, Mana Engine is a division of Zoho. The parent company is called Zoho Car. So we have been in the business since 1996. Then it was called AdventNet. Now it’s called Zoho Car. But there was a common thread that we as a company followed. It’s about privacy over profits. Ethics is very, very crucial for us. So we know we are part of a larger ecosystem by supporting our customers. So one thing that we started off, when we started off our journey is we also, we knew, we started off as a startup, we moved to SMBs and enterprise. We knew the difficulties of the purchasing power of costly software. And we knew the ecosystem of open software, which I think most startups consume. So giving back was one thing that was very, very crucial. And we, if you look at our website, we have a section for free tools, right? So we have over 60 IT management free tools, which you offer to any startup or any midsize companies looking to just do their basic set of IT infrastructure management with the free tools. So, that’s been in practice right from the first days of when we started off saying that, right, when you put this engineering effort, let’s also look at free tools. Even our commercial products, which I talked about, about the pricing structure, right, that standard professional enterprise, we also have free editions, right. Only thing is it’ll be limited by number of users, right? Maybe a standard product could allow maybe 15, 20 users on a paid basis. Whereas for us, a free edition, we’ll say five users, you can take it for free. If your organization’s just got a monitoring for five users or five help desk technicians. So those kind of things is something that’s there in the system. So that’s on the business development side of things where we focus on these kind of things, where we want to give it back to the society. As a corporate, we have other initiatives too, right? So, we strongly believe in something called rural revival. So, though I think what we have noticed, right, talent is universal. They are available across. It’s just that opportunities are limited. So, we have this process where we encourage, right, we go to a, say, tier two, tier three town, we start investing in something like agriculture. And we provide employments for the local villages. Incidentally, for an example, Zoho has got around 110 acres farm in deep south of India, in Tamil Nadu, where I’m based out of, and which employs around 50-60 agrarian people. who are employed and which is like that’s something that we take great pride about right it’s just not making money through business it’s about giving back to society and I think agriculture is one area where there is a rural that we do. We also have something called as the transnational localism. So basically the concept is think local, think global, hire local. So it’s basically what we’ve done now is we have spread our offices. In India, we have been doing this experiment for the last I think just before the pandemic hit, right, from 2018, this transnational localism was something that our founder had initiated, where we had gone to set up offices in tier 2, tier 3 towns and cities with the idea that why should a qualified person move out of his hometown, searching for a job, come to the cities, which means he’s creating a void in his local town. and we don’t be as corporates go there right where we know there’s a lot of talent who we can give employment to so that’s that’s transnational localism for us and this is something that it’s very unique to our company.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, great. So one other topic I wanted to talk about with you. So, you know, we talked about the diverse audiences and how to understand as well as target those meaningfully. I also wanted to talk about, you know, Manage Engine has a portfolio of over 50 IT management products. So how do you look at You know, it’s kind of the same question as with audiences, but you know, about product, you know, how do you put together a unified story of these 50 different products, and yet, you know, kind of balance the the unique attributes of each.
Ajay Kumar: To be very frank, it’s still a work in progress. When we started our journey in 2002, at that point as a startup, it was survival. So we are just focused on putting our individual point products, which addressed a very specific need of our then predominantly small and medium businesses. But as our products matured, so it’s been like 22 years now, so obviously these products are well matured. So we started attracting more complex organizations which need demanded point products but which are well integrated and they communicate with each of these point products. So that’s how our customers started pushing our products to integrate. So though it looks like 50, 60 products out there, each products, I think they communicate with each other. And slowly what happened with the integrations coming in, it became a solution set, right? So which means we now broadly have seven solutions set under which 50 or 60 products can be attached to. And then, as more complex organizations gave way to enterprises, so nowadays we see a lot of big enterprises coming into our ecosystem, the demand shifted from not just integration, they wanted a platform. They didn’t want cup-seeking for a point product. And they just came and told that we are looking for a digital transformation to happen in an organization where we understand it all starts with IT. So which means you as an IT management vendor would need to support our IT organization to help us achieve a digital transformation. A digital transformation could include zero trust. Could be one way where they want to bring in a zero trust process in the organization. they want paperless office where all things reports everything’s available digitally right so that’s the kind of push that came from our customers it’s actually our customers who actually gave momentum to i think bring this unified story so the unified story now we currently have i think but we provide to our customers is about taking control of their IT infrastructure end to end, right? That’s what I think we as MAD Engines stand for, for our customers. The reason being that we manage the entire stack, right? From networks, servers, applications, we go up to the cloud. So we have all the tools that any organization would need, right? Of scale, from a small to medium, to medium to large, to large to very large enterprises. Based on your points of scale, we will be able to provide you maybe a single product, multiple products, well-integrated solutions, or a platform. So this is how we would like to go to the world, go to our customers saying that we are this end-to-end IT management vendor.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So one last question for you here. Being in, you know, B2B marketing, you know, as you mentioned, Manage Engine has been around since 2002, you know, and certainly in your career, having done this as well, what trends are you seeing in B2B audiences and, you know, in particular to how, you know, B2B marketing is approached and how audiences are reacting to those approaches?
Ajay Kumar: Yeah, so I think what I’ve noticed, right, the trends keep shifting, right? So I think one basic tenets that I think which we noticed some customers, I think they prefer personalized content when it comes to content marketing. So one thing is I would say to the audience or marketers listening to this podcast is Personalizing content and communication based on the data that’s available is very crucial. As for you to identify biopersonals or targeting specific accounts, personalized content will definitely help you connect with your target audience quicker. The next thing that I would point out is ABM strategies, account-based marketing that will help you focus on identifying high-value accounts, creating customized marketing strategy which ties down to the personalized content which I mentioned about. And again, coming back to content, please do some detailed research and ensure that you come up with valuable value additions like white papers and ebooks and webinars and case studies which provide some in-depth insights for the audience to make quicker decisions. So I think the other one is thought leadership is definitely welcomed. And so that’s what I think when it comes to events or podcasts, even this podcast, right? Why do people come to this? Because they are here for to gain more knowledge, more information. So thought leadership content is definitely a good play word that you should look at. Something which I have noticed, in the current trend that I’ve noticed is people do not have a lot of time. So people need nuggets of information given to them quicker. So what I’ve noticed is a trend of video marketing. Why do you think Instagram reels are very popular? Because it gives quick content, right? To the point, to the brief. So video marketing is definitely picking up a trend, which I’ve noticed. And this is an area that I think as marketers, we’ve got to start shifting or bringing that into a gamut of activities that a marketing team has to do. Yeah. These are all the five or six. There are a lot out there, but I can say this is like top of the mind things that you should look at, right? Trends that I’ve been noticing and which could help marketers and wannabe marketers to focus on.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s great. Well, Ajay, really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining. One last question before we wrap up here. What advice would you give for those marketers out there that have diverse audiences in the B2B space, managing a pretty diverse product portfolio? What would your advice be for them to do today?
Ajay Kumar: I would say be ready to experiment. Be ready to accept failures with humility. Please have an open mind to learn from failed projects. I think they are the best learning materials for you. And invite those learnings to better the outcome of the next one. I think failures should be accepted. Experiments should be encouraged. But learn from it and ensure that you don’t repeat those in your next try. That’s my major advice to marketers. Second, I think, which I think most people, most marketers miss out is the cultural sensitivity. Prioritize cultural sensitivity in your marketing and business approach. It’s it’s it’ll be a good thing that you have a deep understanding and respect for local cultures and enhance your brands acceptance and longevity in the market because you understand the local culture that really really connects with your core audience because you can’t do a one-size-fit-all marketing where your marketing say to China and marketing to Australia cannot be the same right because audience sensitivity is a very very different that they will do they look at a problem is very different and So that is a very crucial advice which I would encourage marketing teams to look into, that investment of time and effort to do some basic research. Don’t just look at metrics, right? Just go beyond metrics. I think that’s a milestone that everyone should be looking forward to. That is something that I always watch out for when I do some marketing campaigns.
