Episode 8: Launching Emerging Products

Jeff Kelly, Nutanix

Episode 8: Navigating Emerging Product Launches with Jeff Kelly

In this episode of the Launch Gravy Podcast, host Larry Weber chats with Jeff Kelly, Head of marketing for databases at Nutanix. Jeff shares his unique journey from journalism to tech marketing and dives deep into the challenges and strategies of launching emerging products in the enterprise sector. They discuss the importance of understanding different personas, internal sales enablement, creating emotional connections in tech marketing, and building credibility in new markets. Jeff offers valuable insights on the importance of building a cohesive go-to-market strategy and fostering strong cross-functional relationships.

Connect with Jeff Online: Jeff Kelly’s LinkedIn

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Transcript:

• Introduction to the Launch Gravy Podcast

  Larry: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. And welcome to the launch gravy podcast. I'm your host, Larry Weber. And on today's show, I'm going to be speaking with Jeff Kelly, the head of marketing for databases at Nutanix. Jeff has a rich background in enterprise software, cloud data analytics, working at companies like Pivotal and AWS.

  And prior to that, as a research analyst at Silicon Angle and the cube, Jeff, so glad to have you on. Welcome to the launch gravy podcast.

  Jeff: Hey, Larry. Great to be here.

  Larry: Hey, so, so let's get into it. Tell me how you got to where you are now. Get into what is your origin story here?

• Jeff Kelly's Unique Career Journey

  Jeff: Sure. Well, I have a little bit of a, I don't know if it's a unique origin story, but maybe a little bit different than a lot of marketers.

  I actually started my career in journalism. I was not a tech person per se. I was more of a journalist looking to get into that field. This is back. Cool. I don't want to date myself too much, but it was quite, quite a while [00:01:00] ago. Let's see. It was, Perhaps during the George W. Bush administration. So that tells you how long ago that was.

  But in any event, I ended up getting into tech journalism. There were some opportunities there. I didn't know much about tech at the time, but I figured, Hey, let's give it a shot. So that's how I started my career working at TechTarget where I covered a bunch of different enterprise topics. If you're familiar with TechTarget, they cover the gamut.

  They run the gamut in terms of enterprise IT coverage. So I covered data management and business intelligence, uh, development, Storage, a whole bunch of different, uh, topics there. So I did that for about seven or eight years. Learned a ton kind of starting at zero, learned a lot, really enjoyed that. I went and actually got my master's in journalism, uh, at Northeastern university here, uh, here in Boston.

  And so did that for about seven years. And then I had an opportunity, as you mentioned, Silicon angle in the cube. So Silicon angle in the cube is an interesting organization. It's kind of a hybrid media slash research firm. So at the time they also had a, had a. Analyst wing called Wikibon, where we [00:02:00] would, uh, you can think of it sort of like a Gartner or a Forrester, obviously a lot smaller, more boutique, but, but in that, in that kind of, uh, in that line of business.

  And so I went to work there as kind of an analyst media journalist hybrid. So I was covering big data products at the time. This is where Hadoop was a big, The big craze. Yeah. People were talking about no SQL databases were coming out. And so I started covering that space as a, as an analyst. As well as again, sort of a journalist as well.

  I would do some research pieces, but I also did some more traditional kind of reporting type pieces. And we also had something called the cube, which is the live video platform where we would go to different events like AWS reinvents. We would go to. You name it. We went to the events and we would cover it.

  We used to call it, what do we call it? The ESPN of tech is what we called it. So we would kind of drop in the studio and we'd interview people and cover the events that way. So I did that for. Five or six years. And as part of that experience, so, you know, being an analyst, you build a client base and, and both on the end user side, as well [00:03:00] as on the vendor side.

  So I had a number of vendor clients that I was working with in the data space. And so I was working, a lot of my clients were on the vendor side with marketing folks. So they would come to us and they would say, Hey, could you do some research on topic X, Y, Z, this would help our go to market, or could we do some interviews on the cube that would help us promote our product, that kind of thing.

• Transition to Marketing and Early Experiences

  Jeff: So I got to know marketers that way, kind of saw, saw the role of marketing kind of from the outside looking in a little bit, and then I got the bug to. To try it from the inside, you know, I had been as a journalist, as an analyst, kind of on the outside of the, of the industry looking in, and I wanted to get on the inside and see what it was like to really build something and actually bring something to market.

  So that's where I decided to get into, to marketing. So, and that was,

  let's see, I want to say that was about 2015. So, you know, despite my, uh, some of my gray hairs, I really only in the marketing industry for about eight or nine years now, but I was able to join a company called Pivotal Software, who was one of my clients.

  At, at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE covering, doing marketing for their data [00:04:00] products. And so that's how I ended up getting into the marketing field. And from there, spent time doing product marketing there for their data products, eventually moved on to a flagship product there, which is called Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

  Which is a developer platform, worked for a little bit at a small startup. And I think a lot of us, we have that experience, go to some small startups. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

  Larry: I know that all too well, man. Yeah.

  Jeff: It's a whole nother conversation we could talk about. Then went from a very small startup to a very large company you might be familiar with called AWS.

  Yep. Where you and I worked together for a few years in the database space. And now I'm over at a company called Nutanix. Again, covering databases, as you say. So. A little bit of a, you know, a different kind of different path, although it's not super uncommon. I definitely, some of my journalism colleagues from back in the day are similarly in different marketing roles today in the tech industry.

  So it's not totally uncommon. And there are a lot of skills that overlap, whether it's research or writing. We're storytellers in both professions. There is a nice kind of overlap there in terms of skills.

  Larry: Yeah, look, I am a, such a big fan [00:05:00] of making sure that folks that know how to tell stories, write narratives, like just anything from reporting and journalism, writing.

  It's so important to marketing. Like many organizations I've been in full disclosure, like IBM loved IBM to death, but it's super technical. And I would say is You had less folks that could actually write and talk back in the day about the content. Like I was in the data warehousing space and it was such a challenge.

  And I found that bringing people in both from agencies or research or I'm talking like analyst research. And bringing them in folks that can write and tell stories and then mixing them with folks who have the technical ability that want to be able to tell stories that want to get into this and it fits a good mix.

  So I love your background. I think it's fantastic. And you're able to have those great conversations.

• Nutanix and Its Innovations

  I want to ask a little bit just for folks that aren't aware of what Nutanix does. Can you give a little background on Nutanix, what Nutanix is, what it does and what you do there specifically? Sure.

  Jeff: Absolutely.

  So Nutanix has been around for about [00:06:00] 12, 15 years, founded by some former, some former Google engineers and essentially Nutanix pioneered the hyperconverged infrastructure space, basically created that category and to oversimplify it a little bit, essentially it takes storage, networking, and compute.

  Which traditionally in a traditional data center, kind of three tier, they're separate, separate, um, technologies that you have to stitch together. And they created this thing called hyperconverged infrastructure, where you take those three components and merge them into a single platform. It's much easier to manage from the end user standpoint.

  So storage, networking, compute in a single hyperconverged, if you will, box. And so that's how kind of Nutanix made its name. Been around for a number of years now, still the leader in that. product category, but a few years ago, seeing where the market was going, Nutanix, this was before my time here, but decided to invest in some, what we might call emerging products, moving up the infrastructure stack a little bit more to the kind of platform layer where you've got things like applications and data.

  And so one of the products that they established or created [00:07:00] here was the Nutanix database service, essentially, uh, and certainly can talk more about it, but essentially a, a managed database service that can run both on prem or in the cloud. to help you with your day to day database administration tasks.

  As those get more complicated, we know that companies today are all companies are software companies, a bit of a cliche, but, uh, somewhat true. And so you've got more apps than ever before or databases than ever before, but you don't necessarily have a lot more DBAs to manage those databases. And so the idea is how can we help them do their jobs a little more efficiently?

  Uh, especially when they're now being asked also to manage, not just back in the day, you might have a, well, you might be an Oracle shop or a SQL server shop. Today, most enterprises have multiple different types of databases running, and that can get very complicated, very quick. And so what our product tries to do is simplify that environment, make it a lot easier to, to manage disparate data databases across on prem hybrid cloud environments, simplify that, de risk it, help DBAs and IT kind of keep their heads above water.

  Uh, and there's also a developer angle where [00:08:00] we try to help developers make it easy for them to access databases, because databases can be challenging for developers to work with, and that can slow down their development process. And so that's the other angle around, around our product Nutanix database service.

  So I run product marketing for that product, as well as our database workflows overall, you can run databases natively on Nutanix as well. Basically all things databases is my remit.

  Larry: Got it. No, that's awesome. And you got me sent me back. I've been doing cybersecurity for a while now, but my course in data warehousing and databases.

  And I think back and that you just, you started bringing up like how many databases we've grown from over the past, like 30 years, right? Where was you had a handful of DB2, Oracle SQL server, and then some open source projects like MySQL and Postgres. In the early days, and then all of a sudden between cloud communication, collaboration, development, empowerment of the developer, I got 400 something databases now.

  Like, how do you, I see the need. I see the need with microservices. How do you keep up with this? How do you [00:09:00] manage all of this stuff? Because I got to tell you, like, I, you start, you don't even know how, where to start. Now you've got a database and basically everything from different types of in memory to time series through graph.

  Man, it's a lot. So being able to keep up with that and help manage it for developers, manage it for folks, taking some of the pain out of that, I think is a major benefit.

• Challenges and Strategies With Emerging Products

  So here's where I want to focus our discussion because we can go nerd out on databases, pretty hardcore, but I want to target specifically around some of the launching here and, and really dig into your experience at launching emerging products in an enterprise and for enterprises.

  And what does that mean? What is like, let's start out there and dig into what is an emerging product to you and how would you define the difference of emerging products versus the core legacy you started touching on it, but what are some of the nuances and factors that we need to take into consideration?

  Jeff: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, this kind of relates to if you've ever read the [00:10:00] Innovator's Dilemma, uh, Clay Dickerson kind of coined that term and wrote a book about that, where you've got a successful company. They've built their business around a single kind of core product, maybe a flagship product, you might call it.

  And that's obviously fantastic. That's what they're known for driving a lot of revenue. But you know, we're in the tech industry and the only constant in tech is change. And so we know things are going to evolve. And if you want to stay relevant, you've got to continue to evolve. In the tech space, enterprise tech space, anyway, it tends to kind of the direction tends to be moving up the stack, starting with infrastructure and gradually we're moving up the stack to things like application and data.

  So when I think about, you know, what's the distinction, you know, think about can use Nutanix as a good example. As I mentioned, uh, Nutanix started this hyperconverged infrastructure market really created a category. There was where the leader in that category continued to be, and there's still a lot of room for that market category to grow, but they recognized that the, the value that.

  That their customers were looking for, not just in the infrastructure space, but to make it easier for them to manage apps and data on that infrastructure. And so that's where [00:11:00] they decided, okay, well, what are some ways we can help there? And that's where, uh, in, in my case, Nutanix database service comes in.

  So when I think of a kind of an emerging technology, if you will, different terms, some people call them kind of portfolio products, whatever you call them, they tend to be, hopefully they're complimentary to the core product, but they tend to be maybe a little bit higher up the stack. Abstracting away some complexity on top of the core product.

  And usually it's in a, it's in a nascent market, rapidly evolving as opposed to the core product, which tends to be in a more mature market. So, you know, and that is an exciting place to be as a marketer, but it also, there's a lot of challenges as well, especially when you're dealing with one of those, it's kind of a blessing and a curse.

  So you're in a company that's very successful. They've got a great core product, which is great, but then as a marketer, you've got to figure out, well, how do I take this emerging product that we're not really known for yet? What could potentially be a really successful product? How do I, how do I bring that to market?

  How do I get that attention? It deserves both inside and outside the company. So it's a, it's a really interesting challenge, but that's kind of how I see the difference.

  Larry: [00:12:00] Got it. Yeah. No, no, that makes sense. And can you take me through a little bit, are you dealing with the same persona and like, what are the similarities?

  What are the differences? Like, cause from a product marketing perspective. You know, really who's the customer, right? First thing first, right? Like who's the customer, what's their pain point. Well, can you talk me through maybe some of the similarities or some of the, and some of the differences between.

  This service and the existing platform services. And how do you approach it?

  Jeff: Yeah. I mean, it's great. It's a great question. And that is where I think you need to start.

• Understanding and Reaching Different Personas

  …because in a lot of cases, the personas that you're going after are going to be somewhat different. And that is really one of the biggest challenges I think, as you start to think about how you're going to bring these products to market.

  So again, in the case of Nutanix, our core hyperconverged infrastructure product really goes after IT admins and sys admins, even the core. Pros. Whereas the database product is more focused at database administrators and developers. And so you've got to recognize that these are not the same. The same [00:13:00] personas.

  And if you, I mean, I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes you could make as a, as a marketer of an emerging product is to simply assume you're going to have the same persona as your core product. Generally, that's not the case. It could be, it's not out of the question, but you definitely have to do that.

  Do that research to determine who does this really benefit? Who is my buyer? Who's my, who are my influencers? And often you're going to find they are different from the buyers, the influencers of your core product. Now, hopefully there's some relationship between the two where you can leverage one to get to the other.

  So, you know, again, if you've got a, your company is very well known in one particular market is, is hopefully the customers love your core product. You're dealing with personas in our case, it pros, hopefully they can serve as a bridge to the other personas, DBAs or developers, but it's, but it is important to recognize that they aren't the same.

  They are different and that you have to make sure you're speaking the right language.

  Larry: Yeah, no. It like, I think you're hitting, hitting the nail on the head a little [00:14:00] bit with that, and I use the term single thread, right? You want a narrative that can actually span through. If you're going to talk through the database services that, that are Hey, Mr.

  And Mrs. It, you know, uh, pro the story will resonate to them in their own language and different ways. And you're, you're not, I mean, you're tying it together because there will be a time where, or even the CXO of the organization that you're selling to, they're going to go ask their developers, they'll ask their DBAs, they'll ask their it architects.

  Hey, go figure this thing out. What is this guy? Jeff Kelly's telling me some stuff. Like, tell me, is this legit? If you don't, if you don't cover that one base in that one area, you can host. It's not a good thing there'd be like, what? I have no idea what this is. So yeah, that's super important. I'm happy you brought that up.

  Jeff: Yeah, it's, I mean, it's critical. It's critical. And you know, I mean, we can talk about personas all day. That in and of itself is a, is a big topic and just trying to understand, you know, there's kind of your, your buyer. Concerned maybe with more of the business value story versus your technical influencer is more concerned with the nuts and bolts.

  How does this work? And [00:15:00] so, yeah, weaving those together is, is a challenge, but that's really what you gotta do. You gotta start with the right personas.

  Larry: How has it been, if you're taking on a different approach with different personas, different users of the product, like even different folks that are using the product to different influencers, different purchasers, like how do you think about launching or announcing?

  To the market, because I would take it. It's a little bit different than it architects. Is there anything specifically you've done differently or a different approach on how you've gone to market or launch, like just any insider information from your perspective on what would be some tribal knowledge?

  You could share with the audience on that.

  Jeff: Yeah. Let's think about that. I mean, Because they, if you've got different personas, they don't, uh, necessarily quote unquote, hang around in the same places, correct? You're not going to, they, they read different publications, they go to different events. They probably, they talk to different analyst firms or different analysts within the.

  The big analyst firms. And so you, you, when you think about the personas, you don't need to just think about what's what's their [00:16:00] language, but you also have to think about what are the, what is their, how do they consume media? How do they consume information and go to where they go? And you can't really expect them just to come to, to the traditional places, maybe where you launch products with your core product.

  So in our case, we're thinking about where developers get their information, where the DBAs get their information. That's different from our core personas. And so. Again, there's no, I don't think there's a magic bullet. It's just a matter of uncovering those places and, and going where they are. Meeting those, meeting those personas where they are.

  If you try to force it in a place where those types of Personas don't generally congregate or get their information. You're going to be yelling into the void. So again, no magic formula. I think it's a matter of just kind of doing your due diligence, building that persona profile. I mean, a lot of it is trial and error.

  You've got to go out there and talk to a lot of prospective customers, get a sense of what's important to them, where they get their information, and then test different, test different, test different approaches, test different places to launch your product. It's very much [00:17:00] like, if you think about software development, agile software development, you're always kind of.

  Uh, you want to start small and with an MVP, get it into market, get some user data, and then iterate. I think of marketing and emerging product and in very much a similar way, you, you could spend a year and a half kind of building out the perfect marketing plan that you think is going to work for this persona, uh, from, from A to Z, and then get it out in the market and realize totally wrong versus starting with more of an MVP and just starting small and getting, you know, getting something into market, getting some feedback.

  Did it work? Did it not work? If it did great, continue to follow that path. If it didn't. Iterate, uh, and, and try to find a different path.

  Larry: Move fast. Yeah. So, so one of the questions I have is how about like, if you have a different audience, is there anything different with specifically developers, pricing or usage or trial or anything you've done differently than like, cause it admins going to be a little bit of a different sale and how they actually use and touch the product.

  First developers, very used to having on demand, as we know from AWS, [00:18:00] where it's like, Hey, I need my services now. Don't talk to me, show me, give me the content tutorial. Awesome. But step away. So anything around that, that maybe either challenges or things around pricing or trial or any stories you have there from your time?

  Jeff: Yeah, I think, I think back to my time at Pivotal working on our data products there, absolutely. It's critical to, Make them as very to entry as low as possible. And when you're dealing with enterprise software products, it's not like a consumer product where it's necessarily you just swipe a credit card.

  I mean, there are some such services when you're talking about a database, that's a little bit more complex. It's, it's not something you're going to just swipe a credit card and start using necessarily. But if you can lower those barriers with kind of either a starter package, maybe a free tier, some way just to kind of get, let people experiment with the product.

  So Nutanix, for example, we have something called test drive, which is essentially a sandbox environment. That our users can prospective customers, users can come and try out the product. He would just like to. [00:19:00] Manage a fleet of databases with our product in this kind of sandbox environment. So, you know, it's just a way to, to let them kind of test the waters.

  As you said, they don't necessarily want you holding their hand the whole way. They want to get in there and kind of play with it themselves. And I think giving them that opportunity is really important to start to break through because you're talking about an emerging product. One of the other challenges, I'm sure we could get into a little bit more detail later, if your company is known for one thing, but not the market that you're merging products in, well, you don't necessarily have any credibility in that market.

  So how do you start to build that? You've got to show them, Hey, this, this product is real. It's really going to deliver value. And how do you do that? You need to get it in their hands as easy as possible. But you can create either that free tier or some kind of environment where it makes it easy for, in my case, developers or DBAs to use the product.

  That's definitely an important part of the process.

  Larry: Got it. Yeah, no total sense. And so like we, I'm happy to jump into that right now, even a little bit. So what are some of those areas where you've run into so far? Because Hey, like, and [00:20:00] this gets into what I was gonna ask you about enablement too, is okay, sure.

  The world might not know you exist. And you're also in a situation where correct me if I'm wrong, your enterprise software. So you have a lot less random developers come in, putting their credit card in, trying the product. You were going to rely a little bit more on your Salesforce and on your sales organization to help get that in the market.

  So. Maybe I have two questions.

• Building Credibility and Sales Enablement

  Number one is the challenge of getting the word out there externally. And what, maybe what you've run into and how you've overcome that or are overcoming it. And then number two is how do you get the Salesforce enablement? How do you get those folks jazzed to go take this in the market when.

  Or you tell me a little bit more about that because they might have, they've been carrying a bag of some other content or other products that might be 90 percent of their, you know, quota and you got this little thing out there. How do you incent them to carry that?

  Jeff: Uh, two big questions. Let's start, let's start with the first one.

  Yeah. So. It's definitely a challenge. If you are known in one space, but not in [00:21:00] another, people will say, I'll give you an example with Nutanix. You know, we are in the HCI space, not really known in the database space. And we spend some time, we sponsor some database, small database conferences. We get there and people are like, I have no idea who you are.

  It's like a different world to them. And so I think it's important to, before you kind of launch a, maybe a full fledged, you know, campaign where you're out there at events and things like that. You have to start seeding the market with some proof points. I think that was probably one of the biggest things I learned is that in order, people are going to look at you a little skeptically if you're in a new market that your company is not known for.

  Yeah. And so it's really important to have some early customers. I mean, you know, it's what came first, the chicken or the egg kind of thing, but if you can get some early customers. Uh, some early wins that can show success. Now, maybe you have to do it anonymously. We all know as marketers, how hard it is to get customers sometimes to put their names on case studies and things like that, but it's really important to have [00:22:00] one or two, I guess, might say lighthouse accounts that you can use to show success because that credibility is really, really important.

  You've got to build that up and you've got to do that with actual customers. You can't just do that by, you know, I can, I can yell from the rooftops, how great our product is. But. If I don't have real customers and I can demonstrate I've had success with our product, it's not going to really land. So I think that's important to really focus on that early in the process of marketing an emerging product.

  Again, always, this is not easy because your early customers, you know, they're often learning with you because it's a new product. It's a new emerging space. But if you can find one or two of those lighthouse customers, and again, working closely with your sales team, and that's. Second part of the question, which, uh, I have some thoughts on as well.

  I think that's really important. The other thing in terms of bidding, building credibility, if I think it's important, if you can tie your emerging product and the value proposition to, to that of your core product and what your customer, what your company's already known for, so for example, With Nutanix, [00:23:00] HCI is all about simplifying your data center, taking that three tier architecture of separate compute, networking, and storage, simplify and add into a hyper converged.

  Hyper converged solution and making it much easier for you to manage your data center. And so the way I think about our database product is we're trying to do what we did for your data center. We're trying to do that for databases. So there is some linkage there. It's not like it's completely out of left field.

  Similarly, we're trying to take all the challenging things. And that typically you kind of have to do manually and then maybe in isolation with database management, and we're trying to bring that into a single solution through automation to help simplify that so you can, you can do that at scale, reduce the risk, and then hopefully free up time for your DBAs and IT to do higher value activities.

  But the key there is aligning the, The simplicity in our case, the simplicity message applies to both products. So it's, they're different spaces, they're different technologies, but we're trying to do for our emerging products, what we've done for our core products. And I think that is a way, because you're, cause hopefully if your, if your company is well known for that or product [00:24:00] has a good reputation, you want to build on that.

• Leveraging Early Customer Wins

  You want to leverage that as best you can, but still recognizing it is a new market. So there's things you've got to do differently, but if you can draft off some of that goodwill, you have in your other Core space. I think that's, that's really helpful.

  Larry: Yeah. I think going back to what you said, I took a couple of notes here in this, but like talking about early customers, early wins during your MVP, as you, as you're developing too, and you're coming out with new things,

• Aligning Sales and Product Management

  I think part of it too, is this having the sales team find them is one piece, but also, Being close to product management as the products being developed as you're like for me, at least having product marketing as close to the product management team is invaluable, right?

  Because you're going to see real quick, what you started off with might've drifted into something else. And, and, but you're also going to have in those situations where product marketing or marketing in general can be close to that. Even, even like someone in PR, if you're a smaller organization, be close to those early stage customers, because you're going to hear their challenges and also their wins.

  And also [00:25:00] what are those pain points are being taken away. And that's gold. When you go to market, that is man, company, whatever it is, even if it's unnamed, you know, what that pain point is, you know, how it's solving it. And then that becomes fuel for your awareness or marketing push. So like, okay, awesome.

  On that side, like on the sales front. Understood. And it makes so much sense, right? If you have an existing product that, you know, and you're attaching to that and attaching to the value proposition, it's an extension going into a different area, maybe a little different products, a little different customer makes sense.

  Maybe, can we talk a little bit more? How do you also stand out with the sales organization to get coverage? I would assume that might be a challenge. Uh, I don't even know, you'd assume correctly. All right. Right.

• Challenges in Sales Incentives

  Because I don't, I don't know what your team's like, how they're different people, you know, sellers are incentivized, but I've been in a situation at one company where we had a portfolio of products and they were not incented to sell any incentivized [00:26:00] to sell any specific product.

  So they all went. To their core, which was the old legacy product and you never got any new ones. You could have a little spiff here and there, but it never penetrated until kind of what you talked about, bringing it back to the core message and show the seller how they can extend and build out their, their, their quota, so to speak, or how their sales can get bigger if you leverage the other areas.

  So I'll shut up, but tell me a little bit more about your experience there and how you're trying to overcome it or are overcoming that.

• Marketing Emerging Products Internally

  Jeff: Yeah, I think this is a really tough one, but I think marketing your product, your emerging product internally to your sales force is just as important as, as marketing it to your customer.

  A hundred percent. Um, because, because you're right. I mean, like, you know, and this is not a knock on salespeople. But they go where the money is. That's why they're in sales. They're looking to, they got to hit their number. And they, you know, they don't hit their number. They don't eat. So like, you know, full respect for South people.

  Like, I don't think I can do it, but, um, you're right. So they're going to go there again. If you've got a very successful core product, in our case, [00:27:00] we're the leader in that market. The majority of the revenue comes from that product. The easiest thing for them to do as a sales person is go continue to sell what they know.

  And so you can't blame them for that. You have to give them a reason to take, take a look at your product. You can't just expect them to do it by Fiat. CRO says you must sell this product. You know, that generally is going to, going to work that you have to give them a reason to do it.

• Building Credibility with Sales Teams

  And you have to build credibility with them.

  Just like you have to build credibility with your customers. They might be like, Hey, why are we, why would I sell this database product? We're not known for databases. This is just going to make my job a lot harder. If you think about what are the challenges with emerging products, I think from a sales perspective is if your seller kind of has, they know their sales motion for the core product, they've got a down cold.

  Introducing a new product. Into the mix is just going to add complexity, potentially slow their deals down, but deals at risk. So you have to give them a reason to want to do that. And the reason, uh, surprisingly is it's going to make them more money. It's going [00:28:00] to, it's going to grow their deal. That's ultimately what gets, Their attention in my experience now again, that's hard to do in the early days because you don't have a lot of data to draw But as you build one or two of those lighthouse customers just like you use them with customers You have to use them internally.

  So I think about how I market to my core sellers internally almost as much as to customers now In our case, we are lucky. Not every organization has that, but we also have an overlay team that focus specifically on our portfolio products or emerging products. So we've got some specialists who focus on the database products.

  And I've seen that at other companies as well. And that can, that can serve as a bridge because if you think about the core sellers in any given organization, if you're introducing a new product, a new personas, That's now that you're asking them to look into different parts of the organization of their accounts.

  I mean, that, that adds complexity and related to that. I mean, having said that you still want to take advantage of your install base [00:29:00] as much as you can, but the hardest thing you can, the hardest thing to do is to sell a new product to a new customer. Slightly easier selling a new product to an existing customer, because even if it's not the same persona, you have to go find the different buyer in that organization, but there's some institutional knowledge about your company and your product.

  Presumably they're believers in your core product

  Larry: level of brand trust. And

  Jeff: yeah, yeah, exactly. But nevertheless, you've got to, again, you've got to show those sellers why it's worth their time. And you also have to show again, Going back to the messaging, as I talked about, if you can tie the, not necessarily the details, but the overall approach that your product takes as it relates to the core product, in our case, simplifying operations, and you can tell that story to the core sellers where they get it like, okay, this, I can see where the connection is here between these products, even if they're not hemotheric tangential in nature.

  So I think that's really important. And then ultimately nothing beats customer success.

• Importance of Customer Success Stories

  If you can, you can land a big early customer. And you can actually show the sales team that, [00:30:00] Hey, look, you know, we did a deal XYZ size. And this is the opportunity here. I mean, obviously you need market data as well.

  Like here's the TAM for this particular product for this particular, uh, market segment, but if you can really say, Hey, we just sold our product to this retailer for however many millions, and this is going to help, this is a ripe opportunity for those who want to jump on it. That's, you know, that's cool.

  I'd love to see that. And then once you get, I think one or two sellers, maybe not literally, but you know, you get a handful of sellers who are, who buy in. Can kind of be evangelists to the rest of the rest of the team and use that as almost they're almost like customers. So I would use them in internal webinars, for example, if I can get in front of, I might ask one of our sales leader, can I get in front of your team for an hour and bring in one of the sellers that sold one of our early deals and kind of walk through how they did it.

  And how it aligns to the larger, to the core product, for example, and how we sell that. Just like developers like to hear from other developers, salespeople like to hear from other salespeople about how they did their [00:31:00] jobs. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a huge topic and it's obviously very challenging, but ultimately you've got to give them a reason to want to sell your product.

  You can't just expect them to do it because. It's, Hey, we have this new product, it's on the truck. I expect you to sell it. Yeah. It's not how it works in enterprise sales. They're almost like CEOs of their own careers. You know, it's like, you know, they, they are very focused on hitting their numbers as they should be.

  Yeah. You've got to give them a reason to want to do it.

  Larry: No, that makes total sense. I'm on board a hundred percent with that. And it's, I think the larger the organization, the more challenging it is. I think I learned a lot of that in my time at IBM. Where was your, you're fighting for share of a mind within the sales force.

  What, what, one of the things when you were taught, and I agree having to really market and educate your sellers and really share with them, you're not just helping them sell, but you're also sharing them to get an understanding of why. And another area I was thinking of on that note, I'll just out of just ROI or making money and competitive.

  Sometimes I've had situations where I think where it's worked best is where I've illustrated, Hey, the [00:32:00] whole portfolio or the new emerging product. Can help you in competitive situations because, Hey, they don't have that feature or they don't have that product. So make sure you have that in your back pocket.

  And when the customer starts asking, well, I, I heard this company out here, like, you know, it's a new bam. You bring that into the situation. It becomes fuel, it becomes ammunition for the sellers in which I felt was always, was always a good one to get. You know, share a mind with them. Yeah, I

  Jeff: know. I agree. I agree.

  And if you think about, you know, this is not necessarily the case where I am now, cause there's still a long runway in terms of the market, but as your core product becomes more commoditized. There's, you've got less differentiation with your competitors. So if you've got an emerging product or a portfolio of emerging products that you can position as, Hey, you know, we are innovating, we're thinking about not just helping you today, but in two, three, five years, and that's something your competitors don't have, then yeah, that absolutely can serve as a way to differentiate.[00:33:00]

• Collaborating with Product Management

  Larry: Yeah. How about, we're talking a lot of sales and the outbound side of it. It's quick pivot to, to internal, to the product management side. And how, how do you like maybe some of these many times product marketing, you're going to see the nuggets. You're going to be able to say, Oh, here are the use cases there.

  different that are new. If you're close to the customer or close to the sellers, you're gaining this information, any insider, any, any knowledge around transferring that knowledge back into product management and, or working with product management to, I don't know, build some like new learnings into the product or be aware of that.

  Any, any situations like that you want to share?

  Jeff: Yeah. Well, I, well, I mean, I would say big picture. I mean, obviously. It's important to have a good relationship between product marketing and product management. And I would even add sales to that. Um, but I think it's even more important in emerging products with a, with a established product, oftentimes, hopefully things are running in a machine like way.

  And we know who are, we know who our, uh, personas are. There isn't a lot of [00:34:00] change there with nailed down product market fit. And so everyone knows their lane and they can just go full steam ahead. When it comes to an emerging product. You're just trying to figure, you're still trying to figure out product market fit.

  You know, you're trying to figure out, do we have something here? And so for me, it's really, really important to build those relationships and really create, even though, for example, I report into the marketing organization here at Nutanix, I think of myself as really a member of that cross functional database service team.

  I run marketing. We've got a head of PM. We've got a head of sales, a head of services. Ahead of partnerships for, for our product. And we think of ourselves as a, as a team within a team. And I think it's really important to build relationships there, good communication, because I think you kind of mentioned it earlier.

  You're dealing with your PMs are out there building the product. They're getting feedback from customers. Your salespeople are similarly getting feedback from customers. You need that information as a marketer. To make decisions about how you're going to position your product. And similarly, you might have to get some feedback from the market that you need to communicate to those folks.

  So the [00:35:00] communication has to go both ways, but it's, yeah, I mean, it's really important for those emerging products. I mean, it's important for all products, but for emerging products specifically, because often you don't even know what you have, like you might, you might go to market with a product and think, yeah, we're going to, we're going to, the real value prop is use case a, and you get it out in the market and you realize actually.

  Use case B is just as important, maybe more important or, and I'm trying to think of a good example like Anonymize, an experience I had where we were selling an emerging product to a particular customer and it was a decent sized opportunity focused on what we thought was the main use case. But then when the customer asked, is there, there was a security angle here that we hadn't thought of.

  And all of a sudden now the security team gets involved and that opens up a whole new budget. And so now the sale goes from this big to this big, because you're talking to a different group. Now that kind of information, if I'm not communicating with the sales team and the PM team, you know, a marketer, I might not know [00:36:00] about that.

  So it's important that I know that because now I have to think about, well, is that a repeatable thing? Could that be the case at other customers? And so then you've got to go out and test that. And so you don't get that kind of information unless you have really good communication and good relationship.

  And it's also, you know, I think to get an emerging product off the ground, you have to think like you're a kind of a startup within a larger company. And so I think it's good to kind of have that kind of, you need that camaraderie, you need that kind of team, you know, us against the world kind of thing. I mean, not confrontational with the rest of the org, you feel like you guys are playing You're starting, you're starting small, the odds are stacked against you.

  It's an all for one kind of thing. And so I think if you can build that kind of relationship, that all the better, cause that's where the communication comes in and you can make smarter decisions faster.

  Larry: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I love that idea. It reminds me of like, it's kind of. You against the world with this team and it builds that bond with others that are associated.

  And also it creates an energy. I've been in situations that creates energy that actually goes beyond just your unit. It was, I [00:37:00] think even one back in the IBM days was we did acquisition of a company called Cloudant and Cloudant was did open source. It basically took open source CouchDB and, you know, forked it to Cloudant.

  But it was, it was Cloudant against the world in many ways. And it was, it was a different way of operating that IBM wasn't used to at the time. And that energy, that leadership from that team, the creativity just, you know, like it led that transformation into things like Bluemix and IBM cloud and other areas.

  I loved it. I thought that team was absolutely fantastic. And that's where a situation like, wow, like that's the kind of greatness, even in Amazon, AWS, I think. It's a little databases against the world because you're fighting. You're like, what those back in the day, the cloud databases, I'm not going to move my workloads to the cloud.

  Like what, why not? And it became that, that kind of energy is the best way I can say it. And that moves across different teams.

  Jeff: Yeah. You know, as we talked about earlier, you've got to get the sales team bought in. They need to be excited. And if the team that's doing it. Putting [00:38:00] together the product and bringing it to market isn't excited.

  How are you going to get the sales team excited? You can build that camaraderie, build that excitement. And as you said, kind of make its way through the organization, kind of create a buzz internally. That's great. And sometimes the other thing is, depending on your situation at Nutanix, for example, we've got a handful of emerging products.

  So I'm competing with our core product. For, for, you know, marketing attention, sales attention, but I'm also competing competing with our other emerging products as well. So, you know, it can get very complex. So if you can build that excitement, that's great. That's a way to get other people on board.

  Larry: How about, and then I'll get out of the politics area here or the organizational one, but how do you stand out now?

  We talked, okay. Sales great. Now you've got the product side of it. How about other areas of marketing like demand gen? I don't know if content marketing is run under your team or not, but sometimes the situations, you got a big organization, you got different folks. I only have budget to write these five eBooks or these campaigns are going to go to the [00:39:00] legacy product.

  They're not going to cover you. You're like, gosh, darn it. How do I, so how, how is that working with you? And is there any insight you have?

  Jeff: Yes. I do have some thoughts

  Larry: Can of worms opened up, man.

  Jeff: Yes, absolutely. That's a great point.

• Coordinating Marketing Functions

  So, the challenge that I've, that I had in a couple of roles, marketing emerging products is as a product marketer, you know, I'm, you know, I'm in my product marketing lane.

  And as you mentioned, there's digital marketing, there's campaigns. Demand gen, different kind of marketing functions that in a, with a core product, that's more established, they can run in their own lanes. They don't have to be quite as tightly coordinated. I think it's really different for a merging product where the GM of the business wants to know what is our, what is our strategic marketing plan for this product, not just, I don't, you know, they don't want to just hear from the product marketing team and then from the field marketing team and the digital.

  Like how are these all working together? And if I think it's important for an emerging product to have a point person, [00:40:00] single threaded marketing leader that runs marketing for that product. Now, oftentimes in my case here at Nutanix, you know, field marketing doesn't report to me. Digital doesn't report to me, but my job is to kind of be like a quarterback and try to coordinate those different functions.

  So I've, what we've tried here is to kind of create a virtual marketing team for Our database product. And so, you know, we created a tiger team, if you will, we're product marketing. I've got my field marketing person. I've got a digital marketing person. We get together every two weeks. Work. We think of ourselves as a, as a, as a cross functional marketing team for the database service.

  And we all work together to make sure that we're not missing anything. And we're thinking strategically. It's because if you do things in isolation as a product marketer, you create content. And if you don't. Have a plan to get that content out into the market, whether it's through digital spend or organic means, whatever it might be.

  It's not going to be effective. We've [00:41:00] come up with this concept here, which we call the virtual CMO where I'm a virtual CMO for my product. Sure. So my job is to bring all these different marketing functions together into a cohesive whole. So each year I'm going through this process now where we put together an integrated marketing plan.

  For my product that covers all the different functions across marketing, not just product marketing, which is where I focus most of my attention, but also includes the different digital campaigns and other types of other marketing functions. So I think it's important to have that kind of single thread leader.

  And we got, you know, we learned this the hard way. It was challenging when I got here because we didn't have that. And, you know, we learned on the job and we kind of figured out, uh, through trial and error, this kind of approach is showing some dividends because this way, you've got somebody who's really thinking about the product and the Kind of a marketing perspective holistically.

  Okay. And if you don't have that, you can have blind spots, there can be miscommunication and it's just more challenging to put together a more strategic approach. So I think that's really important. Now, as I said, [00:42:00] these folks don't report to me. So it's more, it's a challenge because your, your job is to influence these different groups.

  You know, it's not like, you know, these are your direct reports and you can say, Hey, go do this, go do that. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a different skill. But really important, I think, to have that kind of, that kind of approach, at least in my experience, that's, that has worked.

  Larry: Yeah, no, then it makes a hundred percent sense.

  And I got to remember too, having worked for large enterprises like AWS, IBM, you know, Oracle, like. It's a different way you go to market. And for those situations, you're fighting for share of mind, share of wallet and different teams. And what you brought up, I think is very important. And that is the idea of being quarterback, the CMO of your organization or CEO of your product in many ways, like working with those folks and ensuring then the energy gets brought between those people as well.

  And y'all go in there and fight for, go to battle. And that's awesome. Especially when you have good synergies with other leaders in the organization. Yeah. Versus, and you brought up another thing, the marketing plan, and I'm going to, I'm going to shift now, right now to the small, medium [00:43:00] business, the startups.

  Many times there's not a separate marketing plan. When I've worked with certain smaller companies, marketing plan, what's that? No, you have to get that down. It's not just, we have one or two marketers like roaming and building stuff. Cause. That doesn't work either. And so really aligning around the plan is key on that.

  And the plan is fueling the larger enterprises, but that, that concept that you bring up, that being that the virtual CMO or whatever, or the tiger team lead, that's imperative. That's super important because that's the only way you're going to get folks to do the things they got to do is specifically in a, if you've never worked in a matrix environment.

  Wow. Those are some different skillsets that you need to leverage, but I think that's really important. And I'm happy you guys are doing that there. Look, we're hitting that time here.

• Trends and Learnings in Tech Marketing

  I have one more question I want to ask you specifically a little bit off of this is where you're sitting and what you're doing right now, like any trends or anything that you're seeing, or even a biggest learning from this past year or so, [00:44:00] whether it be, it could be in the database of space, could be in marketing in general, but just anything that you're seeing or like, Hey, man.

  That seems kind of important or that that's, that's a little different than what I've noticed.

  Jeff: Um, yeah, I mean, I would say, let me think about, that's a great question. You know, things obviously are always changing quickly. And I think one thing that maybe this isn't like a brand new lesson, but that's been hammered home to a bit more over the last year or so is tech marketing, we sometimes, we get, especially in enterprise tech, we sometimes get very obviously technical.

  We get very, you know, focused on the. Business and the rational decision making about, you know, how are they going to evaluate our product, et cetera, but it's still marketing. And it's still, you have to evoke a feeling and an emotion in your customers. But that that's more intuitive when you're talking about a consumer product, like your iPhone and obviously Apple's great at that and creating this kind of feeling that you get when you see your iPhone, but I think it's, it plays a role [00:45:00] in all marketing, even if it is a database or a server, something that you don't think of as particularly emotional, you have to, it is important to evoke a feeling.

  Some emotion among your customers that And the way you do that, I think is through empathy and them understanding that you really get their problem and that you're here to solve their problem. You're not here to sell them this widget. You're here to solve this problem for them, that you get this, you understand why this is so hard and that you're, you're, you're a partner in this journey, we're not just, you know, this isn't just a transactional type relationship.

  We did here at Nutanix, kind of a rebrand. We've got a new CMO, not new anymore. She's been here a couple of years. Mandy Dollywall. And she undertook a real rebranding for us. And it's like night and day from, from where we were. And she's really done a great job of creating this kind of emotional connection with our customers around our focuses on helping you run your apps and data anywhere.

  And that, that kind of building that kind of connection, I think is important because ultimately, [00:46:00] again, it's tech products are still products and people buy, not just based on what's the best product, but also on what is the best They buy based on relationships, they buy based on feelings and trust. And so you still have to think about that, even in enterprise tech, it's not, it's not just for consumer products.

  So again, maybe not necessarily a new learning, but something that's been, I've come to appreciate even more of the last couple of years, seeing what we've done here at Nutanix.

  Larry: Yeah, no, it's, it, you bring it back to a customer obsession and really making sure you have that connection, even if it's just some super technical product or feature, uh, like, why do you exist?

  Why does that product exist? Why does that customer need it? And then what is the story? Like, how do you then build that trust, build that awareness and build that desire, uh, for that offering, for that service, for that feature within the customer base, I think that's. That's always important. And, uh, I think what you're bringing up though, is specifically within the tech sector, sometimes software or services, cloud services gets away [00:47:00] from that.

  Specifically, if the more infrastructure like you get, I would say. And, um, rather than, Oh, new gen AI stuff. Oh, what's that it's helping. I'm touching it. I'm feeling it. And for some of those offerings or services that might not be as tangible to the end user sometimes. So I think that's an important thing, but Hey, Jeff, I loved having you on the show today.

  Uh, I'll, I'll, you know, basically best way to get in touch with you would be via LinkedIn.

  Jeff: Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. Um, we'd love to, you know, chat with anybody who's interested in marketing. Um, we could, we could have talked for hours more. Well, so much to cover.

  Larry: Yeah, I know. Well, we'll start doing panel discussions too, as well.

  Well, let's grab a topic and we'll start digging into it here, but no. Awesome. Thank you. I learned a bunch of great talking about emerging products and enterprise emerging products. And yeah, thanks for being on the launch gravy podcast and look forward to talking with you again, Jeff. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Larry.

  Take care. Have a great [00:48:00] one.