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Today we talk with Norman about two unconventional underdogs, Google and Uberall, and how they changed the perception.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hi, everyone. This is Tony Holbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the revenue formula. In today's episode, we're talking with Norman Rohr about his time at Google and Uberall and how they change the perception of being underdogs.
[00:00:16] Enjoy.
[00:00:21] How are we going to be funny now?
[00:00:23] Mikkel: On command, you cannot be funny. It doesn't work like that.
[00:00:26] Toni: I thought that's how it works with the entertainment. I thought you would be an entertainer.
[00:00:28] Mikkel: I mean, if you're a stand up comedian, maybe you can crack some kind of a joke, but it's just not what I am being paid for, at least.
[00:00:33] It's not what I, you know, what keeps me up at night. It's not, how to make a good comedy intro for this show.
[00:00:39] Toni: Well, we're sitting here today again. Yes, we have another wonderful guest joining us.
[00:00:44] Mikkel: Yeah, we have Norm on the show with us. Norm, Norman on the show. There's the intro. Yeah, there's the intro.
[00:00:51] Norman. Got it. So are you going to be, are some folks referring to you as Norm? I'm thinking this is a very American
[00:00:58] Norman: Yeah, it actually happened at business school. There was this, uh, Canadian, she always called me Norman, actually stuck. It was better than being called Norman because, uh, you know, there's social norms in German, Norman. So that's when I always woke up at school.
[00:01:14] Mikkel: there you go. And actually, so you told me, uh, last week, you were listening to the show and you heard about the Blizzard. In Germany, right? And did I get this right? You were biking while, while you were talking with me and there was snow as well? Or did I get that right?
[00:01:33] Norman: Yeah, yeah. So I actually had listened to your show where I think Toni complained about driving in Northern Germany or how bad it was. Yeah, it was actually Wewebirth in Munich. So we had about I think the biggest snow since 2006, and was literally frozen, but, uh, okay. I swapped from the two wheeler to the three wheeler, but I have to haul my kids around, so bike is my preference.
[00:01:55] Toni: I mean, basically trains stopped running. That's a, that's a first. And airport was shut down for what, a week or something like this?
[00:02:03] Norman: A few days, yeah.
[00:02:05] Mikkel: But the internet was running, right? Don't tell me the internet was down. The
[00:02:09] Toni: internet was down.
[00:02:10] Mikkel: Yes. So that's funny. You can make that kind of joke. I can't. So
[00:02:13] Toni: who is, who is Norman actually?
[00:02:15] We need to still introduce them.
[00:02:16] Mikkel: Well, uh, currently VP, uh, marketing at Capmo. Uh, you also run advisory and B2B coaching. Um, I saw you've been at both Google and Uber all, so we're going to get into that, but actually. I know you had an untraditional upbringing in marketing, or at least entry point to marketing.
[00:02:35] So I would love to maybe just, maybe you can tell the listeners a little bit about your background and who you are.
[00:02:40] Norman: Oh, I hope I'm not getting stoned or by any of the marketers on the show, but to be quite frank, I never wanted to end up in marketing. And the reason is I'm not sure how it was for you guys at university. I'm a numbers guy and all the people who ended up, who elected to go into marketing, they had nothing to do with numbers.
[00:02:59] They just wanted to be there to basically tell nice stories. So what I did is basically I focused on operations, finance, international business, but I was literally, numbers is what counts. Didn't mean that I had no interest in marketing, but it was just, it's for the people without the numbers. So, After business school, I initially joined, uh, actually quite a good startup in Switzerland.
[00:03:22] S Works was one of the most successful, uh, exits later on. Um, still in finance, and then at some point I decided, okay, I need to join a big company. I joined Google, again in finance, but there I transitioned into marketing finance. And rather than sitting with the finance folks, I was sitting in finance, uh, in the middle of the marketers.
[00:03:43] And I was, oh, I'm actually more like them. So, it was also code marketing that helps a very, very number driven. At some point, one of the VP finance guys came to me and said, Norman, I think for a finance person, you're way too interested in changing the business. At the same time, um, Arjen Dijk, who is now CEO of Booking.
[00:04:04] com, he was my business partner back then. And he said, Norman, you finance guys, you can always make those smart suggestions, but you don't have to deliver on it. So at some point, uh, I told him over lunch, Arjen, send me to Japan. I show you, I make APEC work. And that's how I ended up on the marketing side and never ever left it again.
[00:04:23] Toni: Jesus. Okay. So basically kind of give, tell me the story one more time. So we are like in the munich, Switzerland area. It's like southern, southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, right? Kind of ish there, I guess. And then basically making the jump over to the APAC office for, for Google. Was, was that, was that how the journey went?
[00:04:41] Norman: It's a bit longer, so I've basically worked on four different continents by now. I joined Google in Switzerland, yeah, Svox was a Swiss company. You probably can still hear from my accent, I'm German, so I
[00:04:52] can't hide this.
[00:04:53] Toni: no, you can't hear that.
[00:04:55] Norman: I, um, There at Google, I first moved to London for a summer, which was really nice.
[00:05:03] London summers are underrated.
[00:05:06] Toni: Yeah,
[00:05:06] Norman: Moved over to Mountain View. That's where I basically worked in marketing finance. Then from there in 2012, made the jump across the Pacific into Japan. Was in charge of Asia Pacific for S& B marketing. Then I had one more stop for Google, which was Canada as the S& B country marketing manager.
[00:05:25] And then eventually it was time to go back into the startup mode. So I first joined a Boston startup and then at some point came back to Europe.
[00:05:33] Mikkel: Wow. So it's so nice to have a person who moved to marketing rather, usually it's the opposite. We have some, Oh, I'm no, I'm no longer really a marketing person or, you know, stuff like that. So it's good to have someone who actually moved into marketing. That's, that's going to be great. It's a plus one on
[00:05:47] Toni: your side.
[00:05:51] Mikkel: Okay, nice. So, I mean, what
[00:05:53] Toni: we actually, my, my quick thing on this one is, uh, so by the way, I think in Germany, Uh, both marketing and sales, both of them are like a really bad reputation, right? And, uh, you can't study sales in university. So it's the only thing it's like marketing can study in university.
[00:06:09] And it's always like this fonts and colors, uh, kind of thing. And I don't know the, the four Ps and, and whatever you learn from the marketing professor. So I had the exact same, approach like you and this one was like, no marketing, this is for like, you know. Fluffy stuff, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to kind of dabble in this.
[00:06:27] And I don't know. I'm not sure if I, am I, am I marketeer now? Am I like more as a salesperson? What is it Mikkel? None? You're a puppet. Okay.
[00:06:34] Norman: Yeah,
[00:06:34] Toni: I'll, I'll, I'll go with that. I'll
[00:06:36] Mikkel: go with that. You know how, uh, so it was the same for me. I also looked at the marketing courses in university and were like, ah, not doing that.
[00:06:42] I read the HubSpot blog instead and stuff like that. That was how I learned it.
[00:06:46] Toni: Wow. HubSpot did a
[00:06:47] Norman: Mikkel, you're giving away how young
[00:06:49] you are. I, I recently had a conversation with the VC and both of us could talk about the com bubble and the parallels to here. So S box, we. Literally built in the 2000s. There was no funding, nothing. So when we tried to exit the company in 2007, 2008, uh, some of the US investors who were interested in buying, they said, what?
[00:07:12] You only built this amazing business with 6 million. They couldn't understand that you had to literally bootstrap from one angel onto the next.
[00:07:20] Mikkel: Nice. So, uh, what we wanted to get into is obviously some of the stories, uh, that you've experienced throughout your career. And I think we've, we've pinpointed like two areas because you mentioned, your time at Google and actually that, uh, you were an underdog, which is very counterintuitive. I mean. By now it's a trillion dollar company.
[00:07:41] I'm not, I don't know how big it was back then, but at least when I got into whole, all this, uh, tech startup realm, it was pretty big also back then. Right. So love to hear about, uh, about that story and maybe give us a clue as to when, when, when was it happening and, you know, why was Google even considered an underdog?
[00:07:59] Norman: That's actually a good question. And even back then, Google was a giant. So when I joined, we were I think 20, 000 people. When I left, we were probably closer to 100, 000 in the course of those eight years. But there were Certain markets where there are local people who rule the market, obviously you know about China where they are completely blocked, but if you think about Czech Republic had Cessna at some point, there's Russia, uh, with Yandex, uh, but I'm talking more about, uh, Asian Pacific arena and there's obviously Japan where Google took a long time to overtake Yahoo.
[00:08:34] Um, if you look at Korea, Even today, Google has, uh, I think it's more of a challenge, we would call it, back when I was there, it was the loser in the search arena, probably just some low double digit percentage in the search space. So, how do you go about this market? I always approach topics as a product marketer, not the one who writes the product sheets for the company, but really thinking about what's the audience, what are they looking for, how you can solve their problem.
[00:09:04] And that's exactly how I look to the market. I, if you're the underdog, you have two options. Either you reshape. How the industry is perceived in the product, or you shape how your company is perceived. And the starting point is looking for strengths. Well, if you don't have strengths, you have to get into completely different discussions.
[00:09:22] But Google had a couple of strengths. They just were overlooked so much so, that when I first said, Oh, I want to figure out Korea, I was told by both my manager VP on Hub, No, don't do it. But in fact, Google had a strength. Think about PSI. That's about the time frame when it was. 2012, PSI was just coming and PSI was a phenomenon on YouTube.
[00:09:46] So were all the K pop activities. In fact, Google had completely overlooked, back then YouTube was not a medium for SMB yet. Google had completely overlooked that they were one of the market leaders and had a huge search volume on, um, on YouTube. So you just reshaped the story. You basically started telling based on it and forget about search.
[00:10:06] Yeah, we have search, it's an add on, but what we are actually is we are YouTube. Then you need to start telling the story. And I think, um, Toni, you asked me about how do you may get more relevant for salespeople? How do you get salespeople into the door? So you basically equip salespeople and then you sell your assets.
[00:10:23] So we hosted a lot of events where people, advertisers could actually come in and talk to PSI, talk to the K pop people that they would normally just see from afar. So.
[00:10:32] Toni: What is PSI by the way? So maybe, maybe it's not just me not knowing.
[00:10:36] Norman: Style?
[00:10:36] Toni: Ah, okay.
[00:10:39] Norman: The, the, Chubby Korean, who was this complete, I
[00:10:44] Toni: Everyone, everyone knows now. Everyone knows now. Okay. I
[00:10:48] Mikkel: think for the video proponent of this, we can edit him in like with that crazy dance.
[00:10:52] Toni: You mean in the, in the period of time we forgot to hit record on the camera? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:10:57] Mikkel: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I thought we were done with the intro, by the way.
[00:11:01] Sorry, slipping. So back to the, back to the story. So you said really looking at the strength, like maybe take us through the, the journey because you said. people discouraged you internally to go and actually build up that market. What were the steps, uh, you over at Google took back then in order to say, no, no, no, we need to go and push through.
[00:11:20] Did you just do it irregardless, uh, or, or like, what was the approach like from, from day one there?
[00:11:25] Norman: yeah, to tell you the truth, I'm a renegade. So don't hire me, uh, I'm the worst person that you could hire for a big company that is in very stale processes, and Google always encouraged us 20%, so yes, I did my day to day job looking at the agency and I basically said, okay, I personally own Korea, which is obviously tough.
[00:11:46] I don't speak Korean. It's one of the more difficult languages, but I thought, uh, Korea is still one of the biggest, uh, economies in the world. So there must be something. So I looked into the market. I talked to the people on the crown, got, uh, got, uh, Uh, got that trust and we basically figured out, okay, what's in the game.
[00:12:04] There's some additional challenges. Korea is actually a market that is heavily controlled by the agencies, and the agencies want money. And Google, because it's against corruption, doesn't want to pay the money. So, what do you do? You need to find something. That triggers the agency and things that you are, uh, that it's worthwhile dealing with it.
[00:12:23] So we really analyze the market, but in the end, it's serendipity. Because I emerge from the market, we, and talk to the right people. Often, I think that's my experience. If you join somewhere as a head of marketing or a VP or so on, you talk just to your layer. And the ideas are actually on the ground. So talk to the people on the ground, sit down, listen to them.
[00:12:42] And at some point it turned out as a theme that you, uh, with YouTube, because all of them were super engaged. They believed in it. So let's double down on this. Sometimes you just need to try a thing that you are convinced of. And that's what we did.
[00:12:57] Toni: And then, so, I mean, All of this sounds and feels so super abstract because, wow, it's Google and it's like YouTube and it's, you know, it's Korea, but actually what you're just saying, it's like, Hey, um, when you say strengths, like no one cared much about Google search, but people cared about K pop and cared about, you know, Gangnam style, this is, and that was basically happening on YouTube and then you basically were kind of forging a, let's just say a sales argument or a pitch almost based on that.
[00:13:26] That then led to leveraging maybe the core business of Google. Is, is that, is that basically kind of how you then went about it and then went to those big agencies that, Hey, listen, we're like the YouTube shop and we have a little bit of search on the side as well, but it's, is that how you then approach it?
[00:13:38] Norman: I have to say, you framed it a lot nicer than I did, but in the end what I did was repositioning. You need to, often it's a mental repositioning, be it, um, I just heard last week this example when Unbounce reshaped itself from landing pages to conversion optimization or conversion analytics. So you had to reshape the positioning of Google as a search company.
[00:14:00] To the YouTube company. And suddenly people understood why they should actually advertise on you. I think similar story we have afterwards with Central or so on. You basically need to figure out what is the, where is the mindset of the people. Take your product and find a way to connect the two of them.
[00:14:23] Toni: sure where, where Google's clocking in terms of revenue right now and back then, but let's just say to like a 50, a hundred million business, basically, sure you have some pro market fit kind of issues, kind of lurking around, but ultimately also have a, clear understanding.
[00:14:36] That's our. You know, I think some people call it, that's our 10X feature. And in your case, it's really, that's our 10X feature in this market. And then how can we leverage that in order to kind of sell the rest of, uh, of, of the business. Right. And I think, uh, if you, if you take this away and kind of think about it like this, and then really lean into the strength, um, and this might be an, you know, a satellite market, like, you know, in your case, busy kind of, uh, Korea, um, but it might also be a call marketing just early on in the journey, right.
[00:15:05] Kind of really doubling down on that. And I guess, at the same time, you not only have the, really good argument, uh, for one product, but that also might be how you can shape the journey for product number two and three, right? Because when you are around the 50, 100 million stage, that might be the place where suddenly, um, you guys are, you know, introducing a new product line, for example, and you will, you run through the same motions just a little bit faster with more capital.
[00:15:32] To figure out product market fit. And, you know, I'm just trying to kind of frame it in a way where, uh, some of our audience would be like, Hey, you know what, actually the problem that you solved there for Google, um, very, very similar to what we are running into every day. Right. Because I think that's exactly what it is.
[00:15:46] Norman: Exactly, I actually, I think the more relatable case is even at Central where we sold an ERP platform. And the challenge is no one actually looks for an ERP. No one looks for a platform. People at an SMB level. They are looking for the solution to their day to day challenge. So you have to first find this initial beachhead, where you can break in, where you can open up their mind, you solve an immediate problem, and you open, uh, you, uh, pave the ground for the next problem that you can solve.
[00:16:16] And at some point at the end of the journey, they're on this platform, or how you call it, this entire bundle of product. The problem, though, is that most people make it too complicated, particularly in the SMB space. Uh, they just tell their platform story and don't understand The people will switch off.
[00:16:30] It's a mental overload. Think about your business. The thing that you think about is, Hey, I currently have this challenge. I currently have this challenge. If you're not in the top two, you just wipe it off the table until you have the mental capacity to put it up into the top two.
[00:16:48] Toni: But, but basically kind of when you compare it to the ERP space, right. So you would basically say like, well, invoicing. That's the problem on top of someone's head or mind. Um, and that would be the message. And then yes, in order to solve that, you kind of sell an ERP and then can do accounting and all the other things as well, I guess, I don't know, but I'm just kind of, basically kind of breaking it down into like small, super relevant pieces and bits for someone to pick it up there and then go from there.
[00:17:13] Norman: Exactly. So you think about the journey, how do they explore, and I explained this in the example of the ERP in a second, and then you basically try to uplevel, but don't try to immediately say, Hey, you need a platform. Then immediately say, oh, it's too complicated. So if I think about ERP for e-commerce, yes, you're right.
[00:17:31] They need an accounting, they need an invoicing, they need a payment solution. All this they can get from individual things, but then you run for the first time in the issue. Oh. I had switched on Google Ads and I didn't have the inventory. I need inventory management. That's where I can pick them up for the first time you have a competitive advantage.
[00:17:48] At some point, they might have so many orders, they need an order management tool because they can't handle it in Excel anymore. Then they realize, I, uh, copying from one side to the other doesn't do me any good. I need a central data management. And so you get them slowly onto the system and the message then is, Hey.
[00:18:05] We help you solve your day to day problem and you can call with us when you're ready to the next step. So never ever mention the platform until they are completely ready, because otherwise, oh, I don't want a platform. I just want to solve this problem. Unless they are obviously experienced and then we are talking about a completely different customer segment.
[00:18:23] Toni: But, but, but I do believe, I think. You know, and I think, you know, for the, for the platform play, I think you need to have a lot of brand trust already, uh, that's basically exists in the market, right? For you and for, for your product. Um, I think it's super relevant for every new challenger coming out, trying to attack an existing platform or trying to come up with a platform.
[00:18:44] I think, um, the path that you just laid out there is the path of much. Less resistant to actually kind of get there. And on the flip side, you even get a nice equity story out of this because you basically can build this in a, you know, land and expand kind of fashion, right? You kind of land the first deal, it's low friction, no problem.
[00:19:01] It's exactly for the buyer persona that sits there, not for. You know, the full CEO to buy in kind of just for kind of someone there in the corner to make that decision, which helps your sales cycles, which helps your conversion rates. And then from there, you can basically kind of grow into the organization or grow with the organization, right?
[00:19:17] Both of these are fantastic use cases to show, you know, great net retention, for example.
[00:19:22] Norman: Yeah, I almost say we come from one issue to another. We can talk for a couple of hours now. Because now we have exactly what I call the dichotomy between SMB, or let's call it small business, and enterprise. In enterprise, you actually want to get as high as possible onto the tree. To quote John McMahon from Qualified Sales Leader, the reason is because in order to get the entire organization, you need to CEO buy in, even if you afterwards have a pilot in the lower branch.
[00:19:48] However, in the SMB space, you can't pitch that high because they want to first solve the problem. They are a lot more budget conscious. So you start with the low end and then buy in gradually. So it's almost like a product led growth or as the company grow, you take them with you. Um, so that would be the difference where I say.
[00:20:05] Platform is probably the most suitable thing on the enterprise side, particularly if you have shortcomings on some of the features and you want to plug some of the people who are better in the island solutions.
[00:20:16] Toni: hmm.
[00:20:16] Norman: Whereas for SMB, often your product is just fine, so don't tell them platform, sell them what you can deliver and how it solves their problem that they are ready for the next step.
[00:20:26] Mikkel: I'm, uh, thinking actually whether we should switch over to Uberall. That's exactly the thing. That's exactly what you wanted to do. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess from Korea to what the German market, no, isn't that where Uball is German? Yeah. Yeah. It's a German. So it's one of the bigger companies today.
[00:20:44] You also mentioned there was a bit of a challenge and perception around Uball being an underdog as well. So we'd love to hear actually that story.
[00:20:52] Norman: Yeah, it was actually funny, but back when I joined, some people had heard, but probably a lot more people had heard about Jaxx, which is the global beer moth in the space. Um, The funny bit is, uh, even though Uber in the end was probably, revenue wise, the second largest company in the space, and maybe location wise, even the largest, no one knew about it.
[00:21:14] So, just to give you a couple of funny instances, early on I started talking to the foresters, the gardeners, and so on, and I asked them, why we are not covered in your reports? They said, well, we never heard of you. And I said, well, six out of the ten companies that you list there are actually using our technology.
[00:21:30] So, what Uberall had very successfully done is they had actually grown very efficiently in this S& P space via resellers and had only focused on the mid market. But as a consequence, they were basically perceived as, um, not one of the big players in the market and, um, because they sold location marketing, location marketing doesn't sound sexy.
[00:21:52] So they basically sold primarily to digital marketers, maybe to the head of digital. So, what do you do? Uh, you need to give this, uh, You need to, you need to raise the importance. One of the things when I talk to the salespeople, like I told you, like I mentioned before, I always talk to the people on the ground and said, Norman, we aren't getting nowhere.
[00:22:13] We are making cold calls, cold calls. The people here are location marketing, they switch off. Or we never, we never getting through to the people where we can actually pitch the bigger budgets. The irony is, if you look today at the market, location marketing, so Google local search is actually, um, over 50 percent of all of Google searches.
[00:22:32] But people don't know it. So tackling those two, I poke it down. And first of all, you need to show. Overall, we are not, uh, we are the underdog, but the really, really big underdog. That was the first step. The second, uh, uh, step is how can you reposition overall so that people perceive the category as important.
[00:22:51] So, how do we tackle it? Uh, when I did my own investigation, my homework, when I started, I realized most people Uh, the reports they published as well, maybe Moment Feed published 20, uh, in a study of 20 companies. There was something with a couple of hundred locations, and then Cinda, the big industry association in EMEA, published something with two and a half thousand companies across 30 states and Europe.
[00:23:16] So basically 80 companies per state, uh, per country. And then I And I think that's where I saw the opportunity. Add to this, voice search was actually back then. Everyone wanted to know about voice search. People were experimenting with Google Assistant and so on. So basically what we did is we scanned 105, 000 locations or businesses across three markets and looked into how they are already with voice search. Super, super cool. Now, just imagine Cinda announces a two and a half, a desk study with two and a half thousand locations and 20 minutes later on stage, Ubal talks about 105, 000 locations. It was such a blow up. Uh, we had, and I never expected it as a couple of hundred super amazing leads within the first week.
[00:24:06] People suddenly started calling us, says, can you come in and talk about how we are ready for voice search and so on. So it completely shifted the game from. We're trying to get into the door to people calling us. We want to get into the door. We want to understand how we are performing against the industry, how we are performing against the location.
[00:24:22] What can we do better? And tell me more about it. Um, it also had another side effect that was quite funny. Um, before us, Yext was riding the voice search, uh, wave. After our report, they never ever mentioned voice search anymore because they didn't want to link, uh, basically, uh, lead traffic to us because we had a more important study.
[00:24:42] Toni: And I'm, and I'm just assuming, right. That kind of insight, was that basically, so to a degree, there's this underdog piece, but to another degree, there's also this, growing up in the organization piece to it, right. Because it, you know, people that we're listening to might have not only been the digital marketers that are used to talking, uh, to before, but maybe also a bit higher up.
[00:25:02] Is that, is it a correct assumption or what, what really happened there? Because it's. It's both a underdog and it's an SMB to enterprise jump that you kind of executed in that, in that approach.
[00:25:13] Norman: Exactly. So I wouldn't call it SMB, but I would call it, um, the importance of the people we are talking, uh, talking to in the mid market or in the enterprise sector. So suddenly it was not a head of digital topic anymore because voice search was often with some special director who did all the experimental stuff, but we didn't leave it at this.
[00:25:31] The second thing that we did is we came up with, uh, with the report, uh, reputation management revolution. What we did there is for the first time we could, uh, prove the impact of conversion rates once you had a certain, uh, weighting for your location. So we knew that the critical points were 3. 8, 4. 3, 4. 7, and we could people give a guidance how to get there and how some of the locations were underperforming.
[00:25:55] And suddenly, you talked to the level head of brand, CMO. Because that's, uh, that's the people who are really relevant and you actually help the head of digital, head of customer experience to get the resources to respond to reviewers, to deal with people who are unsatisfied. So I remember I was in a room presenting to, uh, to a big German bank.
[00:26:15] I don't want to mention the name. And I could literally Call out. Yeah. And there in this city you have this, uh, branch that has only a rating of 2.8 and in this location you have and then, um, um, the people who for formally blocked us from getting high up to treat and say, oh yeah, it's true, but we can't do anything and it's because for this and this reason.
[00:26:35] Then they look to the head of brand for the sea. Oh, can you please give us permission that we can, uh, work with Uber to fixing this problem? So suddenly. Uberall became almost a challenge, I would call it, basically help us improve our business. So you moved from someone who always knocked on door. Can we do a, let's do some small digital project to, Hey, we are here.
[00:26:57] They are to, uh, to improve our business. And that's actually where we, in the end, um, changed our position and we moved away from location marketing. There are lots of companies. We move to hybrid customer experience. We help via digital solutions to fix your physical retail locations in the world.
[00:27:14] Toni: After the fact, all of these stories are always so great, right? Especially if they work out, it's like check, check, check, check, check, you know, Norman, the super brain and team and other people probably figured this out. How much of that would you kind of assign to also serendipity, right? Kind of, you mentioned that previously, right?
[00:27:30] And it's like, you, you do those things. You come up with this, uh, piece of research. You Yek starts to not talk about voice search anymore. You know, either Deutsche or Commerzbank something like that and sit there and kind of, you know, do these, uh, do these pitches. How much of that, um, you know, really was, um, a straight line versus, Oh wow, this worked and this worked again and this worked again and serendipity suddenly kind of exploding in the best possible way.
[00:28:01] Norman: Let me do a bit of a segway. I'm a marketer. I'm allowed to do the storytelling. So, wind back to my last month at, um, at Google. Sitting on a car with a good friend of mine. He's now with Coinbase and so on. We're sitting and there's a Sajak. What do you think? How much of our, uh, how much of Google's growth is because of us?
[00:28:27] Or despite of us, because I've seen all those golden boys from the cash who moved to other companies and then it didn't really break through. And so I say, it's always serendipity. It's never a straight line, but you can, with the right process and really open mindsets, you can change it. So I would, for example, even Uber on the voice search, I credit to me talking to some of the, uh, people on the ground and one of them had this amazing idea, and then you take this idea.
[00:28:57] And you put it, you put it to your next level. So I would actually say as a VP or CMO level, you're basically the person who edits the story. How can you take something that does Super smart brains that are junior marketing managers, the, uh, the sellers or so, that they carry to you. How can you, how can you shape it, make it perfect and take it to the next level?
[00:29:20] But yes, you need to do your homework. If I hadn't talked to the people, if I hadn't understood the opportunity, the competitive environment, I would not have been able. So Toni, I credit totally the people who gave me the ideas. But I believe that the right process, you can get faster results, but then again, I'm the first one to admit, I tried to replicate something like this at a different company, it took much longer.
[00:29:43] So I think overall, I have to credit was by far the fastest success in reshaping this. Google Korea was the 12 months also quite, uh, quite a faster. Sometimes when you reshape things with product marketing, it takes a long time, particularly when you want to create a new category. That's a marathon, I would say.
[00:30:04] You need 12 months or more.
[00:30:06] Toni: Yeah. I was about to ask you about the timeframe behind this, but basically kind of 12 months and more. Yeah. There you go. Yeah.
[00:30:11] Norman: For Uber, it was actually an immediate win, but I didn't count on it. It was just, let's call it a lucky punch.
[00:30:17] Mikkel: Yeah. But I mean, so I'm also curious here because you mentioned you did this massive study. I'm sure there were a bunch of other things you did beyond just that, right? It's, it's rarely just the trick of one specific tactic that leads to the success, uh, right? And, and I mean, repositioning in itself is a massive kind of exercise.
[00:30:37] So what, what are some of the things, other things you kind of did surrounding that piece to, to basically assist UBAL becoming, You know, more known.
[00:30:47] Norman: Yeah, that's a good question. And, um, I think we can talk about it. So obviously as a marketer, when you only work on the strategic things, you're getting fired before there are any results. So Toni probably would do this. Um, so the trick is actually to really balance short term and long term. So you can't always get this right.
[00:31:05] Sometimes foundational work that you need to do. It just takes you the six months before you can have the right messaging. You can't create, push out ads with the incorrect messaging. But, uh, what did we, uh, uh, uh, uh, what are the things that you came to do, uh, do? And overall, I was actually glad that I had already a team of 12 people.
[00:31:22] So that's quite a number of resources. So you could basically, um, carve out people who worked on a strategic thing that basically studies the storytelling to basically up level the organization. At the same time, you, um, Can focus on improving your digital marketing to think about sales marketing alignment.
[00:31:40] How do you help sales be better at targeting? Um, the first stuff, the first things that I typically do is literally. Who is the ICP, what are the personas, what's the value prop? If those things are in place, then you can literally work with it. And quite often, um, particularly I think up to 10 million ARR, people think they know their ICP, I think people think they know their personas, but when you actually inquire, it's still a hunch that they maybe may have done first with the investors.
[00:32:11] It changes from 10 million because then you actually want to build the engine. That's then mostly, I think, Toni, what you said, when there's a second, the third, or the fourth product when you really need to think about how you reposition your product portfolio. Is it a platform or is it, um, is it just a range of products that target different ICPs or different personas?
[00:32:32] So, in short, to answer your question, I think, Mikkel, um, I recommend looking for the quick wins, what's currently working. Try to optimize one or two channels, not more, and then work on the one thing that you actually believe strategically. It can be a failure, but try to identify the failure early so that you don't work six months on something big that doesn't, that will never come.
[00:32:58] Mikkel: And how, I'm also just curious here because you mentioned you talked with, um, with analysts who were, you know, oblivious to the fact almost that Uberhaul existed. I guess there were also a process internally of aligning expectations with the, the folks at the table. So to speak. So how did you go about basically positioning this?
[00:33:17] Because it's a usually a big initiative also for a company to take on a reposition, a repositioning exercise. So what kind of steps did you take there actually? Yeah.
[00:33:29] Norman: That's actually a good question. Um, First of all, you need executive alignment. So, plus points if you have someone who, uh, who supports you. So in my case, one of the founders, David, was already convinced that we needed to break out so you could work with him and shape the story. I think it gets difficult if you have skeptics or, uh, or, um, people who have an opposing opinion.
[00:33:57] I think then you need to start with a small wins. Like voice search was for me, it sounds big with 105, 000, but it was the small win that gave the marketing team the credibility to do the next things. Once you have sales on your side, it's typically a lot easier. So I think that's also just segwaying to, um, to something I obviously talked about.
[00:34:16] ABM, if you want to do account based marketing, you just need sales on your side. Otherwise it will be a failure. The same thing we basically did. Try to build, try to establish the credibility, get some momentum, and then just push it through. A friend of mine always talked about the train mode. Once the train is running, you can't stop it anymore.
[00:34:35] But know when you have to stop it yourself.
[00:34:38] Toni: Yeah. So I, I like that approach. Right. Because it's also when someone says executive buy in, you know, always my, my eyes roll over. It's like, ah, okay, sure. But it's, I mean, it's, um, at the end of the day, it's, it's really like, are the top dogs, are they like, are they in favor or are they against it?
[00:34:53] Right. and I can totally see if, if there's someone, sitting there with their arms crossed, it's very difficult to get these new pieces through. You kind of almost need to go through a Either you hyper engineer this and have someone in the room that can help you shape this, which in your case maybe was the case, right?
[00:35:11] Or, and I really like this other approach, it's like, well, if you're not basically sitting at the table yet, right, because of whatever reasons, You know, find those wins that enable you to sit there. and this is, this is a little bit, you know, you almost kind of executed this in a dual fashion, both with one of the founders being on your side, and then you with, uh, you know, checking some, some boxes and actually delivering some wins and, and getting also some tailwind, I guess, then also from the sales team in order to, to push something like that to fruition.
[00:35:41] Norman: Exactly. I think, um, it's a lot, it's a lot more difficult when you jump right away into things like we need to do rebranding. We need to do complete repositioning. Uh, I think that's likely, as a marketer, setting you up for failure, because people will lose the patience. Sometimes you have to go through this, but it requires a lot more communication.
[00:36:02] That you first explain to people, let's talk, let's go back to the central example. It was, when I joined, it was literally mantra, we have to market a platform, we have to talk, we have to sell an ERP. It took me quite some time to explain why we need to sell the individual pain points, that this is a much, much, much bigger market, but it burns a lot of your credibility until it finally works.
[00:36:27] So I think that's why I would always say try to get as much out of, uh, get a small wins with the existing performance while you work on the strategic
[00:36:36] stuff.
[00:36:38] Toni: And so one of the things that kind of frustrates me as a CEO is always you get a new VP marketing in and the first thing they look into is like, Oh, the personas and the ICP and, you know, it's the message, correct. And then they built like the message house and all of that stuff. But the, um, the, the key point here being, um, well, how do you want to push out ads?
[00:36:59] You know, very expensively, if you don't know what to write on them, and if you don't know what filters to select in the ad build on LinkedIn, right? How do you want to do that? And, um, and that basic kind of being, and so the reason why I'm pointing this out, there are a bunch of CROs and RevOps folks listening that Probably have the same thing like, ah, another VP marketing that talks about, you know, defining personas and putting up posters and, and, and that kind of stuff.
[00:37:24] it has some really for marketing folks that has some real practical implications if you're not sure, or if you are, um, uh, if, if you see gaps there, right. And kind of, we had the same thing. I think, uh, we talked to someone and we're like, Hey, we could also use LinkedIn to. Figure out who our persona is and figure out what the messaging is.
[00:37:42] And that guy was just looking at us like, guys, you're stupid. It's, it's probably the most expensive way you could do that. And, and that's, that's the reason why, you know, especially when someone experienced comes in into this, into the VP marketing spot, you know, really solidifying that, figuring this out, maybe checking it, maybe working with a third party, with like a consulting analyst kind of play.
[00:38:04] to make sure that this is actually true, right? And then once you have that, once you have that, um, you know, solid base in place, you can nicely build on top and build up the audience and warm them up and, you know, do all of those things. But that's still going to take you six to nine to 12 months, probably before that really comes back.
[00:38:23] I guess, I don't know what your opinion is.
[00:38:26] Norman: First of all, I love that you mentioned you potentially to work with some research, a research company. So I actually say a lot of the people that get stuck at what I call ICP and Persona 101. That's when they do the internal analysis, closed won, closed lost, look at where they had the traction, where they, maybe they've done a workshop, they talk to some of their own customers, but in order to really understand what's working or what's out there, you have to get to what I call one or two.
[00:38:53] You really have to interview a number of people in the industry, have a panel, and then do quantitative, uh, research in order to understand, is this what I'm seeing internally actually in place externally? Good example is, um, at, uh, Uberall, we, in the end, we basically found out there is, yes, there is the single purpose person that's the head of digital.
[00:39:14] They only care about the same thing. There will never be an experience, but in order to get to the experience level, customer experience, you basically talk to the CXO and they have completely different way of how you talk to them. If you want to acquire them. You need a completely different narrative, you need a completely different pitch, messaging, ads, and so on.
[00:39:32] And I think that's what's mostly overlooked. So my response to a CEO would then be typically, Okay, How do you align outbound and marketing? Because typically outbound will tell a completely different story than marketing unless you have done the research.
[00:39:47] Mikkel: But I think it's also so funny, usually folks, they will hire a VP marketing. And then if they start that exercise, we're talking about now defining ICPs, they're going to sit and go, That's not what I hired the person for. Can't they just crank up the ads and get me some more leads now? Where am I in balance?
[00:40:00] Yeah.
[00:40:00] Norman: Or,
[00:40:01] Mikkel: So it's so funny. Yeah.
[00:40:05] Norman: already, um, 100, 000 or whatever. Why would I then pay another agency just because you're here?
[00:40:11] Mikkel: Yeah. But it's so true. And I think the other, the other interesting kind of, uh, takeaway we, we glanced a little bit over is this, if you can actually have sales in your corner from a marketing perspective, that is going to be super powerful because if the business needs to prioritize some of these things.
[00:40:27] I think they're not going to start questioning the judgment of that marketing team if, if they consistently have delivered and make sure. And I think this also goes back to, uh, another guest we had on the show, Udi Ledergaard, where Gong, they're infamously known for the Superbowl ad and for sponsoring NBA, you know, basketball teams and all kinds of crazy things.
[00:40:46] But what they do is they hit the numbers over and over again. All those boring pieces, they actually have them, uh, you know, on a complete control. And I think that's also kind of what you hinted at here, you know, it just gets a whole lot easier to execute in that case.
[00:41:00] Toni: Okay. Pretty, pretty cool. I'm just kind of wrapping this here a little bit, if, if, if I may.
[00:41:05] So we talked to Norman about, uh, Google as an underdog in APEX, so specifically Korea and how, you know, YouTube was big. And you basically use this as a spearhead to build out the search market for Google in Korea, which was pretty awesome story. And then the other piece we spent quite some time on was actually Uberall, both as a, Hey, we have kind of a very use case y positioning here that we need to broaden out and make a little bit bigger, um, how to achieve that and also then how to grow up in the organization, whether that's.
[00:41:36] Uh, just vertically up or to someone else with a bigger budget. I think kind of, that was kind of both, both cases here, the case. so really cool chatting with you, Norman, and really, really, you know, thanks, thanks to you, uh, dropping some of those insights here.
[00:41:47] Norman: Thanks so much. It was a great conversation.
[00:41:50] Toni: Thanks, Norman. Have a good one. Bye bye. Bye.