82. Know thy customer: big ideas from small business success

Dom Hawes:
00:00

Hello unicorners. I hope you're listening to this racked out on a beach towel with a mint julep or mojito in your hand. It's holiday time and we are getting into the holiday mood by bringing you a different type of show. Today we meet Sandra Vollrath, b two b strategist, expert marketer and more importantly, yoga studio owner. Sandra, I and the whole of the unicorny production team work together to create a show that is entertaining, informative and positive for body, mind and spirit. So refresh your glass, don your sunnies, pull down your sun hat, get ready to relax as wend our way through Sandra's story. You're listening to unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. You know, in the past I've been someone who slightly takes the piss out of people who like to draw business lessons from random fields as an excellent meme.

Dom Hawes:
00:54

A good example I saw recently that exemplifies this titled what I learned about b two b marketing from proposing on the beach. That was a piss take, but it illustrates the point well. I already outed myself as a failed adjacent field agnostic when I featured Simon Hartley in episodes 76 and 77. You may remember that he is the sports psychologist that, among others, looks after Bayern Munich and the fijian rugby sevens team who won a silver at the Olympics just a month ago. He made the leap from sporting excellence to business excellence years ago and he changed my mind about external influence and its ability to deliver lessons for us. And that's what I'm going to do today. We're going to hear what Sandra has learned about business and marketing from starting her own yoga studio.

Dom Hawes:
01:39

Don't get me wrong, this is not going to be too fluffy. We're not going to be talking about organic mats and incense. Sandra comes from a very serious marketing background with international experience. She's an expert in marketing operations and the technology required to run an operation at its very best. She's just been really good at bending all that knowledge to make it work for herself and her own venture. And I really believe that taking an entrepreneurial approach is probably the right approach for us all, especially those of us who are marketing at the enterprise level. So I think there's a lot we can learn here. Right, time to relax, think positive thoughts and let the knowledge flow. Today, we're over the moon to welcome Sandra Vollrath to the studio. Sandra, hello.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:23

Hello.

Dom Hawes:
02:24

You've been a fantastic supporter of the podcast. I have to say, you so frequently comment and sort of boost our posts online. So I'd like to say thank you from team unicorn. It's lovely to see you.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:34

Thank you for producing good content. That's actually worth listening to.

Dom Hawes:
02:38

We're definitely going to do that today. It's holiday time. Before we get stuck into the meat of the matter today, holiday plans.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:45

Every year I look for a new place to go to on holiday, and every year for the last, I don't know, 1012 years, we end up in exactly the same place in Portugal. Portugal.

Dom Hawes:
02:56

I love Portugal.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:57

Yes.

Dom Hawes:
02:58

Well, I'm not going there this year, sadly. I'm off to Ireland, where it's going to rain. But that's okay, too. You have, like many marketers that we get in this studio, there doesn't seem to be an established career. I don't think I've met anyone who studied marketing, went through and is now in a marketing leadership position. Your career journey was, I mean, distinctly unconventional for a marketer because you started out as a information systems specialist.

Sandra Vollrath:
03:24

That is right. And that is probably the second career I had, because way back when, I trained to be a primary school teacher as well.

Dom Hawes:
03:32

Oh.

Sandra Vollrath:
03:33

So, yes, in Germany, I went to uni and I have a masters in education and then came to the UK and, yes, then went back to university and did a masters information systems.

Dom Hawes:
03:45

So you have two master's degrees?

Sandra Vollrath:
03:46

Yes.

Dom Hawes:
03:47

It's a bit greedy. I've got none.

Sandra Vollrath:
03:49

Sorry about that.

Dom Hawes:
03:51

Anyway, you then ended up in B. Two B marketing at Bentley Systems. Tell me about Bentley and the role. I want to dig into that a little bit.

Sandra Vollrath:
03:58

Yeah. So Bentley Systems was interesting. I started working for them in the States. I was at the time on a spousal visa and I had come out of sort of Modi it and help desk and professional services world and we moved to the states. Travelling wasn't really an option in professional services. I was travelling a lot. A lot. I mean, week to week, just in and out client side. So that was an option. After I had children and we moved to America and I was looking for a job and came to a job at Bentley became available in their newly formed e marketing department. So this is a very long time ago. When was 2007. Oh, okay. They at the time really had a department that was looking after events and corporate marketing and their e marketing department was non existent. Essentially.

Sandra Vollrath:
04:58

It was a new concept, a new idea. So, yeah, I started as one of the first email managers.

Dom Hawes:
05:05

What did e marketing mean then?

Sandra Vollrath:
05:06

Email. It was email. It was email because some of us had HTML skills. So I was able to script and code my own templates.

Dom Hawes:
05:15

Oh, I see. Okay. Because you have this dual background of being a technology as well as a marketer.

Sandra Vollrath:
05:19

That's right, yeah.

Dom Hawes:
05:21

You were there a number of years. How did emarketing develop from 2008 onwards?

Sandra Vollrath:
05:24

Yeah, it evolved relatively quickly, as you can imagine, because the e wave took off and Bentley as a company had so many different products. So it was finding that where are the email marketing managers going to sit? Is it the breadth of the whole product range or is it into the depth of a certain vertical? Or they were really trying to find feed. But what we knew very quickly was that we needed to establish a global function because Bentley was global. I relatively soon moved into a global marketing, global campaign management role and then it went into breadth and depth of marketing. Global campaign management eventually moved into marketing systems, which is now probably more likely called marketing operations. It was trying to find ways and processes and establish governance and taxonomy around how we're going to train 150 marketing colleagues worldwide.

Sandra Vollrath:
06:26

How are we going to use our new shiny CRM, which was SAP at the time, SAP CRM. So training everybody, onboarding new people, all of that became a marketing systems role. And I did that for quite a while and then moved into product marketing management to look after their flagship product, microstation.

Dom Hawes:
06:47

Yeah, I remember microstation CAD, right.

Sandra Vollrath:
06:50

It is, yes.

Dom Hawes:
06:51

Oh, I was on the other side at the moment, at that time. Yeah, I was doing pr for. Not then, actually about a decade before for Autodesk. So you started e marketing in 2008 when there were probably about five vendors.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:03

Yes, I was doing a little bit.

Dom Hawes:
07:04

Of that stuff too then. And there were more than five, but not many more.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:07

I cannot remember who we used as a.

Dom Hawes:
07:09

No, I can't remember. I don't think we need to cut it out because I can't remember either.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:13

I have no idea how we send emails.

Dom Hawes:
07:15

I'm not an e commerce business. I know we bought Netsuite to replace something, but I can't remember what it was called. It was really big at the time. It was like just pre mailchimp, I think.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:24

Well, eventually it was all run through SAP CRM. If you think back that many years, it was all clunky as it would have been because nobody really knew it was all new.

Dom Hawes:
07:35

Yeah, well, maybe there's a lesson there as well that we can't remember the tools that we spent our life in. Blimey. I think you'd be horrified to know that if you're a martyr vendor today and there are lots of them.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:45

Yes.

Dom Hawes:
07:46

14,000 apparently. You told me. Yes, in 50 categories. I've got a bit of a beef with this. That number is bandied around quite a lot. And I know now you are a marketing technology specialist these days, so I'm hoping you can help me out here. Like, so what? There's 14,000.

Sandra Vollrath:
08:03

Ultimately, I think you're right, Dom. So what, 14,000 martech tools out there? Is anyone that is ever going to look for a piece of marketing technology going to sit there and go through all of them and pick the one that's right for them? It's not going to happen. What I found is that when people approach a consultant, help me with something, I need a piece of tech or I need a CRM, they come with a feeling of a problem that they perceive they have. Maybe they've discussed it amongst the team members and maybe somebody higher up, a CMO or a marketing leader will have said, oh, that sounds like we need a CRM. And it's kind of that way. It kind of is the other way around. It's a feeling like we need a CRM, but it's.

Dom Hawes:
08:50

So they've got a bunch of problems. They've identified themselves, they need it. So they come in market, but they're looking for something very specific.

Sandra Vollrath:
08:56

Yes.

Dom Hawes:
08:57

So that 14,000 number actually is kind of a bit of a red herring, because when most people come into market, there's a problem they're trying to solve. Right?

Sandra Vollrath:
09:03

Yeah, they come with a feeling. Right. I feel the pain every day. I can't personalise my marketing communication. I cannot pull a list that makes sense. I can't segment properly. So they come with a feeling of something that's bothering them day today, bothering the team. And then, yeah, they come up with a solution that may or may not be right. CRM may be the right solution for them, but they don't actually know until they dig into it.

Dom Hawes:
09:32

We're going to talk a little bit later about a business that you started, but on this podcast, we've been advocating our listeners to think about marketing as though it is the business, as though they are the entrepreneur. And I think when we start talking about marketing technology, I think that's particularly apposite because it's very easy to spend a lot of money on stuff that either doesn't work or you don't need. Marketing technology and automation have made many promises that they can't keep, and I have tried to build end to end automation systems with intent data at one end and mailing systems at the other with cognism or some such in the middle to try and identify decision making units and. But none of it at the moment seems quite to join up.

Sandra Vollrath:
10:13

It's almost impossible. As a marketing team you have been given a function, communicate with whatever it is, our customer base or do the branding. Difficult to have a foot in both camps, right? You need to speak tech and you need to understand the creative process, the content chain, where does it come from, where does it go, how is it produced? And speaking both languages almost is sometimes hard and sometimes what I see as being a challenge in marketing teams. So where do you bring it all together?

Dom Hawes:
10:51

Is that the rise of marketing operations then? I mean, it hasn't like we've been talking about mops or marketing operations for several years. I know it's existed for longer than that, but it doesn't really seem to have caught on in the same way or captured marketers imaginations in the same way that some of the techniques like ABM or ABX or whatever you want to call it these days does people talk. There's a whole conference dedicated to that. There's a whole conference dedicated to marketing technology, but it's vendor led. It's not about the plumbing and the plumbing is the bit that makes it work.

Sandra Vollrath:
11:21

To me, it's nowadays absolutely key. If you want your marketing department to be a strategic business function that can support the marketing function but also the whole business in creating value, whatever value means to you need to have. At the very least you need to have a very good understanding of marketing operations. Ideally you have a marketing operational person in there, or even a marketing operations function within your marketing department who understand.

Dom Hawes:
11:53

The needs of marketers and they're building out the tech stack.

Sandra Vollrath:
11:56

That's one part of it.

Dom Hawes:
11:57

Okay, educate me. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Sandra Vollrath:
12:00

I'll explain it. So marketing operations is technology. Correct. But to me far more important is to understand the processes behind. How does it hang together? You said it's the plumbing. What are the workflows? So coming back to the idea of workflow and work management, how does it all hang together? How do people talk to each other? What approvals are needed? So technology processes, the data is important and people, you need the right people with the right skills at the right time in your department to be able to run that technology, to understand the processes and to activate those processes. So you are becoming efficient and effective. And to me, the most important thing is for happy teams. I truly believe if you put technology into a marketing department and add more technology, you end up, and I've seen it with monstrous tech stacks.

Sandra Vollrath:
12:57

Somebody new comes in and they add new tech for whatever reason. Right? And you end up with these monstrous tech stacks that are very expensive and that nobody can run and it makes people really unhappy. And to me, ultimately, and maybe that's why I'm in this role, is how can I make someone's job a little bit easier and make them a little bit happier, that when they go to work they can smile.

Dom Hawes:
13:18

Yeah, it's a big area and it's a complicated one. We're going to come back right in a minute because I want to talk about a business that you started in 2019. And I trailed it in the intro. You know, I don't normally like drawing lessons for what we can all do in our day to day, but it's uncanny. And we'll be back in just a sec. Okay, well, I think that sets us up nicely. Do you see what I mean about Sandra being a savvy marketing operations leader? She really knows her stuff and understands the issues facing large organisations trying to do CRM type work at scale. I think her biggest insight for me so far comes from her experience with tech. Lots of us feel the issue with our marketing programmes.

Dom Hawes:
13:58

We feel the pain, as Sandra puts it, and the instinct seems to be to grab a tech solution off the shelf, a CRM programme that we can feed data into and expect it to sort all of our problems out. But with all her experience of tech, Sandra is saying that's the wrong way to approach our problems. There is not a technological plug in and forget solution. As she says, you've got to have a person in there, a person on your team, who understands how the plumbing of marketing operations works. In fact, just adding more tech to a department, it's a recipe for disaster. It's going to add complexity rather than reduce it.

Dom Hawes:
14:35

Having established SARS credentials, I want to get into what I talked about in the intro, how she pulled her knowledge in a very different direction, how she brought her entrepreneurial chops into play, how she started her own business as a marketer, and what we can learn from her entrepreneurialism as employees of large, seemingly less entrepreneurial businesses. Let's get back to the studio. So I did promise you that were going to get stuck into yoga because it is holiday season. So picture this. I was meeting Sandra for a drink in the groucho and were talking about our lives in general. And it so happened that a unicorn, someone who's been in this very studio, I'm not going to name her. I don't really have her permission. Maybe you do. I don't know Sandra.

Sandra Vollrath:
15:19

I do.

Dom Hawes:
15:19

But one of our previous guests is a customer of Sandra's in her yoga studio. And we started talking about the yoga studio, and Sandra's story about how she learned how to make this thing work is a case study in entrepreneurialism for marketers. Sandra, tell me the story from the start, and I'm going to try my hardest not to interrupt you.

Sandra Vollrath:
15:41

We were talking a little bit about Bentley Systems, and in 2019, I took redundancy from Bentley Systems. Here I was looking for a new job doing my yoga, which I'd done for many years and loved it. And essentially what happened was I did get a new job very quickly. And as I was driving home from having received a job offer, I called my other half and I said, I don't want to do it. I just do not want to do this. I want to do something completely different. I'm going to look for a yoga studio premises. And that's what we did the next day. We went out, we looked for premises, we found premises. I set up the limited company. And so it went from there, refurbished a place and kitted it out. And then here I was running the dream, my yoga studio.

Sandra Vollrath:
16:32

And the first lesson we taught at the studio was in January 2020. And you can imagine how that went.

Dom Hawes:
16:41

Oh, nice. I said I wasn't going to work, but I am. Okay, so you're a marketer. You decided to take to do something new. I'm assuming you approached your business as a marketer. Talk me through the P's and how you thought about the business.

Sandra Vollrath:
16:53

Yes, I did. I was very diligent and I did write a business plan. The business plan heavily featured the methodologies and strategies and ideas that I had learned when I did my professional diploma in marketing. And the four P's heavily featured. So place was important because I knew I needed to find somewhere where people could park, they could easily get to it. It was big enough and all those things, so that was key. The other three P's kind of featured as well, but place was the one I focused on most. And promotion. Yeah, I kind of messed around with it for a bit. Came from b two b and b two b was very different, which I fairly quickly realised, but it was a very steep learning curve. I'm actually talking to people now and it felt very different and it was very different.

Sandra Vollrath:
17:45

But I've kind of since turned around and thought I learned so much from running my own business and from marketing in a b two c environment versus a b two b environment. But yes, promotion. It was more about what I thought yoga was and how I felt about yoga. It was never actually asking the people that I wanted to come to my studio. I never asked them. So that came years later. And I think it's good to have that learning curve. Over the five years I've learned so much about promoting, learning about your customer, in and out. Speak to them. I do surveys fairly regularly, but that's not enough. Actually, I am in a fortunate position to get to speak to them.

Sandra Vollrath:
18:29

Like Barbara, who was on this podcast before and who's kindly given me permission to tell you what she felt when she first kind of got involved with my studio and became a student, that she even said to her husband, there is so much value in this professionalism. She could feel it. Actually, we've only sort of talked about knowing each other, knowing you a few weeks ago that she said she could feel that there was a professional approach to marketing behind the yoga studio. There was kind of a funnel, if you want to call it that. There was a way of how you lead into the studio with a trial, that you then get lots of emails to convince you to come back and become a member.

Dom Hawes:
19:14

So what I really liked when we started discussing this story is that when you started it, and we all do it, right, we're all marketers, but we do that, build it and they will come. So I'm going to build the perfect product. And there are plenty of people out there probably listening to this podcast who are still thinking that way. If I build the purpose, certainly product marketers and certainly technologists, if we build this and make it perfect, people will come to our door and buy it. You hear technologists say all the time, you don't need marketing, just build great products, build itself. And that's into out. It's inside out thinking and actually where you got to, I think, which is the fascinating thing, is about going outside in. Like what do customers need?

Dom Hawes:
19:49

What does yoga mean to them and how do I provide that?

Sandra Vollrath:
19:52

Exactly. So now everything we do at the studio is approached that way. What does the student need, the customer need? And then looking at what products can we now offer? Knowing my products inside and out and making sure that everyone who teaches at the studio also knows the products inside and out so we can talk to people about our products all the time. And it's also a branding story because the brand is now well known. It's a very local business. Clearly it's a brick and mortar yoga studio. But when you speak to people that have never been to the studio, they still recognise it because they say, oh, you're unwind, because we've heard about it, because it's got this brand that unwind. It's in the name, so people know about it. And I think that's where I'm now years in.

Sandra Vollrath:
20:40

It feels really satisfying to say I've approached this the right way. The message is getting out. People want to come to us because we're offering the right thing. Our pricing is very on par. We're not the cheapest, but I've stuck, even through the pandemic to the pricing strategy, to the product stacks that we had. And it's really important to not undersell. When you understand the value that you're offering to your customers and you know exactly that's what they want, then you're confident in your pricing and being involved in the pricing strategy throughout end to end. I think that's what we sometimes miss. When you're a marketer in a big team for a big business, you don't really get involved in it, but it is so important to understand all these aspects.

Dom Hawes:
21:27

I can't believe I'm doing a things that we learn about b two b marketing from starting a yoga studio, but that's exactly what we're going to do. So what have you been able to take into your professional life, if you like daytime, from running the studio, a few things.

Sandra Vollrath:
21:42

So whether it's b, two b or b two c, or small business or large business, there are some fundamental truths. And those are know thy customer. I know we see this on LinkedIn all the time and you hear it left, right and centre. But it is so true. Once you know the customer really well, inside and out, and what they need and what their pain points are, that's when you start speaking the language. That's when you stop talking to them. Top down. I now even go into our database and pick out words that they use when they feed back to me in my marketing, that then again goes out. So that's really powerful and it's been one of the most powerful changes that I've made in the business. Secondly, know the products in and out, because I know my products so well.

Sandra Vollrath:
22:32

I mean, I've developed them. So it's a little bit unfair maybe, but I think that goes back to the entrepreneurial thinking. Once you're involved in developing the product, or at the very least, understanding the whole breadth and depth of the products that you're selling it becomes almost easier to write your marketing because it's more authentic, it feels better, it doesn't feel tacky and salesy anymore. And really for me also, it is operationally tech. There's two things I did very early on, before we even opened the doors. It was branding. I worked with a brand designer and the second thing was tech. So I got a piece of tech. In my case, that's a studio management software. And everything runs through the studio management software. It's essentially a CRM. All the leads come into the system.

Sandra Vollrath:
23:24

I can see exactly who buys what, when they fill in a form where they tell me where they've heard about us. And all those bits, all this valuable information sits in there and we use it. And also all of that then informs the processes, how we further have communication with the customers and how we then bring them into the studio. Because that's the whole point. We need to get bums on mats, essentially.

Dom Hawes:
23:49

Bums on mats. I love it. And our purpose, of course, as marketers is to create happy customers.

Sandra Vollrath:
23:53

That's it. Most importantly is I said it earlier, happy customers, happy team. There you go. Happy business.

Dom Hawes:
24:06

And here I stand before you, the crumbs of a large slice of humble pie upon my chin. I swore I would never ever do a what we can learn about b two b marketing from a yoga studio podcast. But here it is. And by the way, I'm very glad I was wrong. Partly because of the quality of Sandra's insights and partly because of the value of examining things in microcosm. Mostly we're talking to cmos and experts about large enterprises. We're talking about marketing at scale. And that's great because scale brings its own set of real world challenges. And it's so important to recognise that and not just talk about marketing in the abstract, but it can be so big that we can't always get our arms around it.

Dom Hawes:
24:49

We're just not able to tackle all of the aspects, in fact, some of the traditional functions of marketing, like place and price, as I discussed in previous episodes, they've been removed from us. Yet in the microcosm of a small business, we can see everything in action and we can see the interpolation play between all the aspects of marketing. And wasn't it great to hear Sandra walk us through the four p's and tell us what she did with each p? How many of us can truly say we've ever experienced that level of control? And by the way, many of our listeners come from small entrepreneurial businesses, too. God, they must have had a good listen today. And I think it's refreshing to hear Sandra get back to the basics of our work.

Dom Hawes:
25:24

Know thy customer and know thy product are two maxims that we could argue are so essential that they don't need saying. But I often find the moments we don't talk about things, especially the pure basics, is the precise moment when we stop doing them. We can get so embroiled in the politics of our jobs or in the finer details where we're looking to perfect things, we sort of start to gloss over the basics. But starting a business means you've got to work on the foundational elements. Sure, being an entrepreneur means being bold and all that good stuff, but it also means you've got to be good at the stuff that really matters. Seeing as today we've deemed it okay to draw parallels from young yoga, I don't see why we can't grab a few thoughts from top level sport for good measure.

Dom Hawes:
26:05

And one of the things I hear an awful lot around this very the best teams, like the All Blacks in rugby, for example, have a reputation for being able to do incredible things. But ask any commentator or professional observer and they'll say the same thing. The All Blacks are masters of doing the basics really well. I think regularly re examining the basics would be an incredibly valuable exercise for any large marketing department to challenge itself, to say, how well do we really know our customer? How well do we really know our products? Pose that question to your team every quarter. Make it a mantra, something you're always working on. Because if we're going to be good inside out marketers, we need to permanently have our finger on the pulse of both what our customers want and how our products can deliver that right.

Dom Hawes:
26:55

That's it for part one of this pot. And in part two, we're going to continue to ask, what can entrepreneurship teach us about marketing? It's a fundamental question because I think essentially, entrepreneurship and marketing, they're one and the same thing. A good entrepreneur has to take their business to market, and isn't that what we're all trying to do? You have been listening to unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer. Producer Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.