Erik Wagner - Onclusive

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Erik Wagner, Head of Growth at Onclusive. Wagner built the marketing and sales development teams at Onclusive prior to their acquisition in 2021. 

Onclusive’s technology, insights and expertise makes sense of the fractured, fast-moving media world we work in. The company is a trusted partner for PR and Communications success, helping clients to elevate their performance and prove their value. 

Erik has 14 years experience building marketing strategies and leading marketing and sales teams for growth-oriented technology companies. He is a seasoned marketer who has proven success directing marketing campaigns, building demand generation programs, managing product launches, defining brand voice and message, managing marketing & sales operations and leading transformational projects. 

Transcript

Franco Caporale:

Hello and welcome to new episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Erik Wagner, Head of Growth at Onclusive. Erik built the marketing and sales development teams at Onclusive prior to their acquisition in 2021. Onclusive's technology, insights and expertise, makes sense of the fractured, fast moving media world we work in. The company's a trusted partner for PR and communication success, helping clients to elevate their performance, improve their value. Erik has 14 years of experience building marketing strategies and leading marketing and sales team for growth oriented technology companies. He's a seasoned marketer who has proven success directing campaigns, building demand generation programs, managing product launches, defining brand voice and message, and managing marketing and sales operations. So I'm really happy to welcome today, Erik Wagner, Vice President of Marketing at Onclusive.

Erik, it's great to have you on the Demand Generation Cloud podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Erik Wagner:

Hey, thank you so much.

Franco Caporale:

So let's begin right away with a little more about you and your background and what is your career trajectory to then become the head of growth at Onclusive?

Erik Wagner:

Appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, a bit about myself. So I graduated in 2007 from Union College and almost immediately moved to Texas where, at that point just was looking for any role that I could get in marketing for better or worse. I ended up landing a job at a digital marketing agency here in Austin and spent my first seven years there and just to kind of touch on a couple of, I guess, highlights or lowlights, whatever you want to call them. But basically on day one, I was given about, I think a 10 person client roster. And we, at that point, were offering primarily search engine optimization and analytics type services. So with very little experience, kind of had to learn on the fly and pick up all the nuances to SEO in 2007, 2008 timeline, which was very early on, I'd say, still at that point. So it was a fun experience. Fast forwarding maybe two years there, we had started to introduce a lot more of full service agency services. So things like paid search on Google, conversion rate optimization, content strategy, things of that nature. We started adding those kind of to the repertoire for the agency there.

A couple years later, marketing automation started to hit the scene. So I'm going to guess this is around 2011, 2012 when I started to get more of an idea that, hey, this demand generation thing is a real thing. It's something that I'd like to learn more about. We started to see a lot of companies begin at around that time, tie those top of funnel metrics back down to what your middle and bottom of funnel metrics, looking at things like how many MQLs and SQLs and opportunities in pipeline and really starting to adopt more of that demand generation waterfall framework there.

And so that was something that I noticed. And I remember somewhere right around 2012 or so, 2013 when I went to my boss and I said, "Hey, we need to start to adopt and build some more, I don't even know if I knew the word demand generation at that point, "but more of these marketing automation services and really start to offer things like email marketing, really start to tie things back to bottom line results." So we're not just simply pointing at clicks and impressions and conversions every single day, because I still believe it. If you can show that bottom line impact, it's going to improve things like client retention, it's going to improve and allow for us to upsell new services to our customers. And so that's what we did. And that was sort of my first foray into demand generation.

A couple years later, I decided that it was time for a new challenge and I wanted a little more ownership over the strategy, the budget, the execution, and the outcomes that I was building. And so after seven years in the agency world, decided to make the jump to the client side, as we like to call it. And I joined a company called Lifesize. If you're not familiar with Lifesize, they're a video conferencing company. My first day that I joined Lifesize also happened to coincide with my first day... I took the evening MBA program at the University of Texas at Austin. So it was a fun day to say the least. It was a very tiring day. One of the interesting things about Lifesize and my time, they were founded in the early two thousands and in the early two thousands, there really wasn't such a thing like cloud video conferencing software, it just wasn't a thing.

So how video conferencing was done effectively, they had on premise servers that would talk to on-premise servers somewhere else, and that's how they were transfer that video signal. And I'm really oversimplifying this, I'm sure some of the folks that were on the hardware side are going to haze me here now. But what I'm getting at was when I joined Lifesize, not only had they just been, or sorry, not only had they just launched their new cloud software, but they were now rethinking what their go-to-market strategy was going to be like because now they're becoming a SaaS company. And demand generation had always been a big piece of their go-to-market strategy, but they did not have any brochures, one sheets, any information even publicly available on their website when I joined the company about their cloud video conferencing software that they had just released. In fact, we had, I think one customer at the time that was on there.

Luckily enough, they had a pretty big historical customer roster. And so we spent a lot of the next couple years there basically farming that and helping to move people from that traditional on premise video conferencing type hardware and replacing that with the Lifesize cloud video software. And on top of that, we were adding to that top line funnel as well. So it was a lot of fun and definitely one of the highlights of my career. Just to fast forward a bit more here, I had a former client of mine from my agency days that reached out to me and while I was at Lifesize, and she came up to me and she said like, "Hey, listen, we're recruiting for a new director of demand generation role. This is going to be a global role." Her company had been acquired in a slew of mergers and acquisitions over the course of about a year by a publicly traded company out of Sweden called Intellecta.

And they had built this 450 person digital agency that primarily built enterprise level digital solutions on different CMSs like Sitecore and Druple and WordPress, et cetera. So they had built this pretty big team, but they didn't have anyone leading marketing and they really had almost no inbound leads for this brand-new brand. And so she reached out to me, we started talking and decided it was the right time to make the move. And so I joined FFW and that was played, from an international perspective, the most international company that I had been in. At that point, we had folks and I think it was like 25 different countries or something like that. It was pretty internationally distributed, to say the least. So it was a lot of fun. Came on board there again to lead demand generation, but being effectively the first marketing hire across all these agencies. I was responsible for a pretty wide variety of functional areas, everything from sales operations. I remember I merged seven different CRMs into one instance of Salesforce, marketing operations. We merged, I think three or four different marketing automation platforms when I first joined. Content strategy, you name it.

Franco Caporale:

And so it was in 2019 that you joined Onclusive, right?

Erik Wagner:

Yep. 2019 I joined Onclusive. Yep.

Franco Caporale:

What does the Onclusive do? What the platform?

Erik Wagner:

Yep. So Onclusive is effectively a VC SaaS startup that has a pretty advanced media monitoring and PR analytics software that effectively scrolls through millions of pieces of content daily and leverages AI to better understand the sentiment of any piece of earned media that gets published about your brand or a topic that you care about, keyword, et cetera.

Franco Caporale:

Can you tell us more about your role there? You are currently the head of growth, so what part of you is in charge from a growth perspective?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, that's a good question. And I feel like the definition's kind of changed over the last few years a bit. But the way that we've defined it effectively, most of the marketing as well as the sales development piece rolls into me. And similar to what I mentioned with FFW, we're fairly early and I guess we're a series C startup here, so we leverage a lot of contractors in addition to kind of augment the team where we don't have a full-time hire in place.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. So I would like to ask you a little bit of a specific topic, because I really like your experience in particular from an agency perspective and some of the previous experience that you have, but you have dealt with a lot of internationalization and expansion internationally of your team and your demand generation. So I would like to discuss about some of your advice for a company that wants to expand their demand generation, their growth strategy internationally. And so how do you build a global demand generation strategy?

Erik Wagner:

Sure.

Franco Caporale:

You have experience with countries like Germany, France, Denmark, UK, Sweden, Australia, and many others. So my first question for you would be, when you are ready to expand, how do you choose the right country to begin with to prioritize?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, and that's a great question, and I'm sure the answer is not going to be right for everyone, but I'll give you a couple of, I guess, anecdotes from my time and what I've seen be most successful. First, I would say you want to look at obviously the market size and the readiness of the market. And my anecdote that I'll provide looking at FFW and my time there, we were building enterprise level digital platforms effectively on Druple and WordPress and other CMSs. And so we did a lot of analysis around that market and where they stood from a digital maturity perspective and if they were even ready for something that was as complex as what we had to offer at the price point that we had to offer as well. The second piece that I would suggest, and this is a really, really important one, and maybe it should have been ordered differently, but make sure that you have the right person on your team that really understands the market and can provide you with a lot of insights as to some of the local nuances. So that's another super important one.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. So let's say you chose the first country you want to expand to, what are some best practice here because I know there are some common mistakes and maybe things that you've seen in the past. What are your advice here to do it right?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So I mentioned really understanding the market and what I would recommend and what we did was we hired someone who happened to, well, in each of the countries that we had expanded to, we would hire someone who really understood the market and would basically be that market expert for us. And so we could speak to them and they would help us with a variety of different things. So we call this our country managers effectively. So they were managing the budget there, but as well as providing a lot of those insights as in terms of how ready was the market for a particular product, thinking about things like how to go to market there, connecting us with potential customers so that we could do interviews and better understand what some of the problems were that they were facing. If you're lucky and you have a couple of folks that can help, then that really does help quite a bit.

I think one of the anecdotes that I shared earlier was localization is extremely important, and this is an area where when we were first launching in a couple different markets, we were always super cognizant of because I had an experience where, you produce some content in English and think that you have a well thought out white paper or asset, and then you just translate it. And the verbatim translation may not necessarily work for that target market, if that makes sense. And so you need to have someone that truly understands the nuances of the local language and can then help reframe some of the conversations so that it uses some of the local dialect and things of that nature.

Franco Caporale:

Something you were mentioning in terms of during our conversation was that obviously translation is important, but it goes beyond that, right. It's also understanding what content might work and what maybe is not so hot in other countries. Even the whole topic of what you choose, right?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah. We had produced an asset about atomic design, which is a design theory, and we had produced it in English and we had spoken to our local country manager in a couple different markets and we had said, okay, here's what we're going to produce, this great white paper. And then we started to translate, started to localize it, shipped it out to a couple of markets. A few of them were like, "This is amazing." We got to, I think it was Denmark, and they said, "Well, we're not quite doing this at this point." They were, I'd say ahead of the US in many respects, but that particular type of design theory wasn't something that their developers and designers had started to adopt at that point. And so that one kind of fell flat on its face and it's obviously something that you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you learn from it. And then next time, okay, I need to pick my topics a little more carefully when you're trying to build a global marketing campaign,

Franco Caporale:

What I saw also differently is how in general people react to different channel, for example, or different type of content. I remember when we did a webinar in Japan. In US, typically we had a 50% of the people that registered that show up during the live webinar. In Japan, it was 95%. When people register in Japan, they attend. They don't just watch the recording. I don't know if you had a similar experience with different behavior than what we expect in the US.

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I recognized when we were moving into these different markets was you definitely need to test your channels because some countries, they have their blinders on for certain channels versus others. And so a good example is, I'd say the US and the UK market, when we were launching ads on Google or LinkedIn, they would react relatively similarly within a couple percentage either way to those ads in terms of things like cost per acquisition and clicks, impressions and things like that. This is relative to the budgets obviously. But when we would launch those exact same design, same ad, obviously different language in Denmark, we would see a much different result. And I remember talking with our country manager at the time in a couple of the SDRs that were located in that local region, and I remember, "What's going on? Why aren't we getting the clicks that we should be getting for the budget that we're spending? It's the same target, it's similar titles, obviously within the translation there."

But what I realized was, in that instance, we were just using the wrong channel entirely. In Denmark they just don't respond as well to ads as they do other forms of marketing. And when I started to dig a little bit deeper and peel a few of those layers, I realized that a lot of it had to do with how they do business in Denmark. Small country, small population from one [inaudible 00:20:56] or another, people know each other if they're in the space, they know each other. And this particular market, which was really specific around Druple and site core development in Denmark, they didn't want to have an ad display, they wanted to do business in person. They wanted to do things like lunch and learns and other types of in-person events. And that's where when we started a test and try a couple different tactics in channels, we started to see a lot more success in that particular instance.

Franco Caporale:

So would you say that you have to basically test from scratch completely every country that you expand to? Because obviously you have your data in the US and you have the channels that are working with some level of predictability. Now you go to a new country, are you starting from scratch every time?

Erik Wagner:

There's almost always going to be new channels for you to explore. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier. For instance, in Germany, they don't always use LinkedIn. There's other platforms. And so yes and no, you can probably apply some of the learnings, but your metrics may look very, very different. And so absolutely the value behind testing and understanding what those different channels are is incredibly important.

Franco Caporale:

And so that leads me to the next question about obviously allocating budget, right, because you are going to probably have a specific pool of budget that you can allocate to each country. How do you approach that at the beginning in particular when you don't have a ton of data on what works? Do you just divide it into small tests across different channels, or how do you approach that?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, so the way that we would roll out different countries and markets was we wouldn't do them all at the same time. Meaning if I picked five or six countries and I said, "Okay, we're going to produce great content in all five or six this month." I mean, we'd be so overwhelmed, we'd never be able to produce a well thought out campaign. So we would set revenue targets by country and we would roll out individual countries in that manner. So the budget would essentially be allocated based off of those revenue targets. So say the global marketing budget is $10,000, this is really low and we have 10 different markets, but the US is $5,000 is their revenue target, then they would get half of the marketing budget. That's just for an example here. But you get what I mean by the basing, the budget distribution, the allocation, based off of the end result that we're trying to drive.

Franco Caporale:

No, that makes sense. But obviously a lot of the budget goes into hiring and recruiting, I expect. How does forming a team work? Do you always have a country manager first that helps you laying the ground into the new country? Or do you start from a sales rep and SDR or you hire a marketing coordinator? Tell us a little more what's your strategy here.

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, so our strategy then was we would almost always start with a country manager and they could help put the footwork down, understand the market, hopefully find, and this didn't happen in every market, but if we were lucky, we had a big enough market, for instance, Germany's a giant economy. So we would always have, in those instances, someone that could help us from an HR perspective as well. There's also a lot of challenges, obviously, and I'm not even to get into it, but legally speaking, when you're opening any market and you're trying to hire people, there's a lot of hoops to jump through there as well, which I probably should have added that earlier, but that's another good one to keep in mind when you start to go down that road.

Franco Caporale:

And So from, again, the team perspective, you are running the campaigns, obviously you're holding. So I think you mentioned that having an SDR helps a lot at the beginning as one of the first hire. What else do you think you need at the beginning to really get that country off the ground?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, yeah, SDR was almost certainly always one of the first hires that we would choose because they would be speaking directly to the prospects. They would be, whether that was through inbound or outbound or a combination of both, they were calling and emailing and getting a better understanding of what was on their mind and they could relay that information to us, meaning myself and the rest of kind of the team that was helping to produce the marketing campaign and helping to produce the content. They were also responsible for those inbound phone calls, those inbound emails, contact forms, they're responding as those come through. And so without them, they're a pretty essential part of the business from that perspective. Outside of that, from a content perspective, that's always kind of the next big hire in a market because there's a lot of things that you can do without maybe knowing the language, but writing content is not one of them. So that was always a really important hire for us.

Franco Caporale:

From a technical perspective instead, I don't know, for example, on your website, do you translate each page into the new language and start having a session there? Or you just create landing pages and also your marketing automation? How do you start segmenting the context based on language, countries, et cetera?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, yeah. We didn't even get into GDPR as well, which is another topic. But yeah, so from the website perspective, and it was not like a verbatim one for one for us in each country for a number of different reasons. But we would effectively have on the same domain, but a different version of the website and based off of where someone was visiting the website from, it would hopefully serve up the right experience for them based off of their local language selections. Sorry. And then the second question?

Franco Caporale:

On the marketing automation, how do you segment your database and your email campaigns? Everything?

Erik Wagner:

Yeah, that's a really good question. And again, it was based off of the country information that generally was provided to us. When someone, say for instance, fills out a form, obviously we have all the great GDPR rules and regulations in place there that we had to comply with. And so they were offering up whether or not they wanted to be contacted, if they were coming from a particular country and things of that nature, which we had to capture. Excuse me.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, GDPR, add some fun layer of complexity on top of it-

Erik Wagner:

It really does.

Franco Caporale:

To what's already complex. Also, and I think these are great points that you raise and yeah, I know a lot of companies that are trying to expand and UK is usually the first step and it is a little easier, but then you go into the more challenging one where the culture tends to be different, obviously from US. And I'm from Italy and I can see quite a bit of difference already there. Cool.

I want to close this interview with a question that I really like to ask is in your current role as a head of growth are Onclusive, what is one thing that is really top of mind for you right now? Something that keeps you up at night that you're trying to solve or something that one opportunity you really want to leverage?

Erik Wagner:

And that's a great question, again. I think probably the biggest one being kind of the young startup is brand recognition. And there's a couple of very large, either publicly traded or formerly publicly traded companies that we go up against. And that always comes up in every single deal that we go into. And every single conversation that we have with our sales team is like, "Hey, how can we be be better known?" And we think that we have the better technology, but we don't necessarily have that brand recognition yet. And so that's one of the things that it's a tough one to solve when your budgets are much smaller, but certainly one that keeps me up at night.

Franco Caporale:

It's boiling the ocean at the beginning. You're trying to go against some companies that have really hefty budget and you're trying to get the same level of recognition with much, much smaller pool of money.

Erik Wagner:

Yep.

Franco Caporale:

Cool. Well Erik, this was really great. Thank you so much again for taking the time and joining this episode. I really, really enjoyed the conversation. So thanks again.

Erik Wagner:

Thank you. Appreciate it.