Jacob Nikolau - NovoED

In this episode of The Demand Generation Club podcast, Franco Caporale interviews Jacob Nikolau, the head of product marketing at NovoEd. Jacob shares his journey into B2B marketing and product marketing, emphasizing the importance of understanding customers' needs and effectively communicating complex technology products to the market. He also discusses the significance of niche positioning in the SaaS industry and how it can differentiate a company from its competitors. Additionally, Jacob explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in account-based marketing (ABM) and highlights the potential of AI-powered personalization in cold email campaigns. Finally, he offers career advice, noting that fluency in tools is not as valuable as the ability to evaluate their implementation and identify areas for improvement.

Transcript

INTRO: 
The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, Trust Cloud, Work Ramp, User Gems and more, as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024. This podcast is brought to you by SaaS MQL, the SaaS growth agency that helps B2B software companies land seven figure deals with highly targeted multi-channel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaS MQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generate millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to saasmql.com.

Franco Caporale: 

Hello, welcome to the Demand Generation Club podcast. I'm here today with Jacob Nikolau, who is the head of product marketing at NovoEd. Hey Jacob, welcome to The Demand Generation Club.

Jacob Nikolau: 

Hello, Franco. I'm excited to be here with you today.

Franco Caporale: 

Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about you and how did you get into B2B marketing and product marketing in particular?

Jacob Nikolau: 

Yeah, sure. I mean, for me it's a little bit of a happy accident. I was working in finance, I was working for a company that actually invested in technology companies, and I realized that go-to-market strategy, right alongside product strategy really is the heart and soul of what makes a technology business successful. And I was fascinated by that. And I had the opportunity to go and work for an advertising technology business based out of Los Angeles at that time. And I was working in first, I mean it was an earlier stage business, so it was all kind of integrated, the sales and the marketing, and the revenue operations, it was all one.

 And I've been working in revenue strategy and marketing, and marketing strategy ever since. And over time I migrated into product marketing through kind demand generation, into marketing strategy, into product marketing. Because product marketing is a nice strategic home both for driving top line, for figuring out how to really the dollars flow into the business, but also for things like messaging and positioning, understanding how you're communicating the market, which is very related to top line, but usually when you're coming up with a messaging matrix, you don't have dollars associated with that, but a specific quota against your positioning statement usually.

 And I really enjoy the intellectual work of having to figure out how to talk about complex technology products to the market when you need to really distill essential truths about what you do, you don't have the luxury of saying every single thing that could be true. You have to choose a specific story and stick with it, and scale that storytelling in a impactful fashion.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. I have a question about product marketing in particular, because all with demand generation, you can be a little bit industry agnostic, so you can change from industry to industry. With product marketing, you need to have some industry knowledge to be able to do the job effectively. How do you see that for your role in particular?

Jacob Nikolau:

 Yeah, I think that one of the most critical things to be a good product marketer is to have some kind of previous sales experience, or solution consulting experience where you were a customer facing front of house employee in a revenue generating position. Even like a non-commodity, like a high level enterprise CSM background I think would be fine, because in general your role is inherently linked to customer advocacy. Because product marketing done well should actually make it easier for your customers to do business, because they should have more intuition and understanding around what problem you're there to solve, how you solve it, how your product works, how to implement it, how to get value from that product. So there is a certain dimension to it where you always have to take into account your customer's point of view, and how you are going to help them be more successful, and how that relates to your prospects, and how that relates to who you're trying to go to market to.

 Because your current install base, especially in the software business, current group of people who you're selling into are not necessarily the same people you want to be your customers in 12 months or 24 months. So that reconciliation of those two audiences against each other happens in the mind of product marketing organization. That's where that intellectual work needs to happen. And if you can't really deeply internalize what your customers need, how to make them more successful, and the difference between that and your prospect pool, you're going to really struggle to be successful, I think. But besides that, I'm guessing the majority of your viewers are in the software business, is that correct?

Franco Caporale:

 Yes, SaaS, cloud software for sure.

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah. So when I think industry, I don't think industry like SaaS versus consumer packaged goods. I mean, really those are very different. Inside of SaaS product marketing really changes is in the type of customer that you're serving, specifically in their operating scale, in your sales cycle, and in your dollar amounts to close. So NovoEd for example, is a very complex solution that's used by global international corporations and specifically their HR departments. So what is a non-accretive function? So HR obviously does not have, typically doesn't make right. Selling to global compliance teams, or global finance team, or global companies, product, organization, any one of these functions that's not sales, or marketing, or supply chain, where they themselves are thinking in terms of having internal clients and being a service provider to other business units. Somebody like me could move around from any one of those providers to another and have a relatively short learning.

 Where there would be a really substantial learning curve is in going to work for a company that sells to consumers, or sells to SMB and is much more transactional, has two, three, five, 10, $15,000 deal sizes. Where you're dealing with a whole nother ball game of how you need to handle your product marketing approach, your product marketing strategy, your marketing strategy. It's a totally different revenue engine that you're dealing with. And the sophistication and specialization of your customer is very different. So your communication strategy and the way that you think, the way that you need to train yourself to think like your customer is radically different.

Franco Caporale:

And obviously HR space is extremely competitive, but you have an interesting take on positioning, right? You mentioned, we were talking a few days ago, you mentioned that if you position your solution properly, you shouldn't have any competitor. And obviously a lot of companies struggle with competition. So how do you approach that?

Jacob Nikolau:

So I do believe that as a marketer, so there are certain businesses where... What would be a really great example? Like, NeverBounce would be a great example, where what they do is legitimately a commodity, a pure commodity service, where there are a lot of companies who all do exactly the same thing with extremely little differentiation. But that's not true for a vast, vast, vast majority, say for 99.5% of SaaS businesses. That's not the case. The big problem is that solutions often have a best fit and then they have all of the different things that you could do with that product. And oftentimes, because technology products are complex and they can be used for different applications and different use cases, people try to bite off a chunk of too many different solution spaces, and try to play in all of them all at once. That's especially true for early and mid-stage, I think early to series B, series C kind of businesses, where you really shouldn't be trying to serve everyone who could potentially buy.

 I think the best example of this right now in the market is actually Intercom. So we're speaking to dimension people, so everybody here knows Intercom, just like they all know Drift, right? So if you go on Intercom and Drift's websites, these really are pure product. We all know that the chatbot business is relatively commodified, but Intercom is entirely going after mid-market and enterprise customer service business. Whilst Drift is entirely going after SMB and mid-market SaaS, top funnel revenue, demand gen, and ABM. Despite the fact that both solutions can be used for the same thing, they've actually differentiated and segmented across into two very different markets with two very different TAMs, different buyer personas, different go-to-market strategies. And over time their product roadmap, and actually the way that their go-to-market team is organized, is going to diverge on the basis of serving these different audiences and having different experiences, different requests for features, different customer needs, different churn reasons, different those reasons, loss reasons, and so on and so forth.

 So in general, in the SaaS market, if you're sufficiently niched down in terms of the story that you tell the market, your story isn't going to sound like anybody else's story, especially if you actually have a good product. For example, a friend of mine actually worked for a chatbot business recently that only sold to dentists. That was their entire business. It's a huge dental practice, I think pediatric offices, these kinds of businesses. And again, is their product radically different from a Drift or an Intercom? No, it's really not. But their go-to-market strategy, their client services model, their operations were different. They were segmented for a different market, and so they were really dominant in that space. So the role of a good market or a good product marketer in particular is to find the largest way of understanding your total and serviceable addressable market, such that you really are the best solution for that serviceable addressable market.

 And the way that you do that, depending on the kind of solution that you have, needs to be different. So I'm thinking about something like even sales tech, right? If you take sales tech or MarTech as a whole category, you can in theory say HubSpot, and Outreach, and ZoomInfo are all competitors. And while that's very technically true, there is a reason that a lot of people listening to this today pay all three of those companies, because they use them for different applications. Nobody's seriously considering consolidating all of those different elements under one of those providers. Even though in a theoretical world it could potentially be possible, because really you're integrating together with what companies are best at. You're not using a solution for every single thing that solution could possibly do.

Franco Caporale:

But these are hard decisions to make, especially for early stage company, right? It means almost like cutting out piece of potential customers, especially when you see one or two, three customer coming through from a different segment, let's say Intercom, they see some customer using it with marketing. It's not an easy decision to make to say, "We're not going to focus on that. We're only going to focus on this smaller segment here."

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah, it's a very difficult decision and ultimately that's what separates I think, the most successful high growth SaaS businesses from the ones that are stagnant, because somebody is going to test every single thesis at some point. So there are going to be, there probably are hundreds of chatbot businesses, all of which are going after totally different segments. So if you try to do everything and you have a strong thesis that you can pursue, don't be surprised if somebody else comes in and pursues that strong thesis, and just pushes you out of the market. Happens a lot.

Franco Caporale:

I have now a tactical question on this. So let's say you join a company and they're struggling with positioning. What would be your first move to really execute on this kind of approach?

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah, so I think the first step is going and speaking to customers, and then the second step is going to speaking to people who aren't your customers, and who you've never spoken to before. The third step is going to speaking to the people who did not buy your solution, who actually were closed deals, closed lost opportunities, and really understanding rigorously why they either went with a different provider or they went with no provider for this problem. And then once you've understood that kind of integrated market behavior, and how your customers are different from people who use other providers, and from people who didn't buy, then you need to come up with some sort of value framework where you can explain very clearly and succinctly, and a framework doesn't need to be a big complicated thing. I mean, sometimes product marketers make these big messaging matrices that nobody uses.

 It can be very simple. It can be one PowerPoint slide, but that articulates this is how we uniquely provide value to our customers. Here's how our customers are different from other people's customers, and here is how the way that we provide value is different from the way other providers provide value. You need to train your sales and your CX organization to think and speak from that point of view, of here is what makes us really special. And not just pulling that from one source, but integrating together a broader perspective from people who are not your clients, and also people who evaluated you and decided you're not the provider for them.

Franco Caporale:

I want to switch topic a bit and talk about AI and B2B marketing, because obviously is a buzzword, everyone is trying to incorporate in one way or another, but you have some interesting take about how AI can help account-based marketing in particular, and how are you using it for that?

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah, first of all, I genuinely believe that text-based anything is terrible. I don't know about you, but imagine if you go on a company's homepage and it's just a wall, right? You intuitively understand that's a bad idea. So does everyone listening to this. So the utility of a lot of these generative AI solutions that produce walls of text is inherently limiting in marketing, because walls of text are very unappealing thing to interact with. Now, where I think there is a huge value proposition is using artificial intelligence to do mass personalization at scale. And there's actually a solution right now, clay.com, which lets you do that. Where you can define a very, very, very specific ICP, both in terms of company and persona. And Clay allows you to integrate data sources and web scraping together to define that persona. So for example, your persona can be as specific as heads of customer success at seed through series C software companies in North America, who've changed jobs in the last 45 days to a company that uses HubSpot on their website.

 And with Clay, you can have a relatively updated list of people who fit exactly that persona. And then, through an integration with ChatGPT, you can produce personalized emails that speak to their unique pain points that you've identified as a provider who's targeting that specific. And you can have this fed directly into your SDR's workflow, or you can completely automate it. You can just have an automated cold email workflow, where you use a solution like an instantly, where you're spinning up and warming different domains all the time, and you have this outbound cold email system that uses hyper-personalization at scale. And as far as I know, there is no ability to one, identify potential target accounts that quickly, and be personalized specifically to the personas inside of those accounts at scale. That does not involve the use of generated AI. So I think old email, it's a huge, huge winner.

Franco Caporale:

What I'm still not convinced is on those email personalization, because I know for now all the data they're ingesting is all about personal profiles, LinkedIn, et cetera, and it still sounds very awkward.

Jacob Nikolau:

You as the provider need to provide the contact in the prompt for the personalization. So you need to provide, for example, here are the top 10 pain points for this persona, and then prompt the AI to generate hold email copy with a specific tone that references the specific pain points that you've identified.

Franco Caporale:

So you're feeding the data upfront in the prompt to the AI, to the ChatGPT or the solution-

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah, and you're integrating together both all of that information that you're able to web scrape and that you're able to pull from data providers, with your own knowledge of the problems that the market has. ChatGPT is not going to invent the problem that you're fixing, and explain how you fix it for you, but you can give it enough context that it can generate copy that reflects that reality.

Franco Caporale:

What is the results you've seen so far testing this solution for ABM?

Jacob Nikolau:

Yeah, so we're still relatively early stages. I actually took this from a colleague of mine who is a very good friend, who works for an earlier stage startup, and he also does consulting on the side, where he has a cold email consulting business. They probably send, I don't know, a million or two million cold emails a week. It's a relatively substantial thing and it performs, it performs pretty well.

I mean, you need to have the right IT stack, because if you're sending volume cold email out of your primary domain, you're going to have deliverability issues and things like that. But if you personalize better, it always performs better, right? In fact, that's probably the main thing that SCRs do nowadays, is develop and implement personalization strategies for high value target accounts. So if you're able to incorporate automation, either to make the SCR research much easier or eliminate that part of the SEOs workflow together, you're obviously going to have a-

Franco Caporale:

I hope this can inspire some people to test it out, some of these solutions, especially for ABM where it requires a lot of time to personalize, find the right information, put together the list, et cetera. I have one last question for you, Jacob, which is more on the career side, and is what is the one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your B2B marketing career?

Jacob Nikolau:

Oh, this is going to be a little bit cynical, Franco. I wish I knew that being really, really fluent in using certain kinds of tools is actually not that valuable. I spent a lot of time getting really good at using HubSpot, and Salesforce, and things like Marketo, really understanding what these solutions can do. And ultimately, when you are in any kind of marketing leadership role, you are very rarely, if ever going to spend time inside of a solution, because you're dealing with many, many, many campaigns all at once and multiple different work streams and strategies, and you're not going to be the individual contributor implementing these things in these solutions anyway. You just really need to be able to rigorously evaluate if it's being implemented correctly and where there is room for improvement, which is actually a different skillset than actually being able to yourself.

Franco Caporale:

I 100% agree. I had the same exact experience with Marketo, so I know what you're talking about. But Jacob, this was great. I really learned a lot. So thank you again for joining us today at The Demand Generation Club.

Jacob Nikolau:

Thank you, Franco. Enjoy the rest of your day.

CLOSING:
That's a wrap for today's episode of The Demand Generation Club podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website saasmql.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.com. We share tons of content every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.