Monica Evans:
This is The Marketing Hero Podcast by ClearPivot, turning marketers into heroes.
Monica Evans:
Welcome to The Marketing Hero Podcast. I'm your host, Monica Evans, marketer extraordinaire. Today we have our guests, Tim Gasper, who is the Director of Product from data.world. Hello Tim.
Tim Gasper:
Hey Monica, how's it going? Really excited to be on your show. This is great.
Monica Evans:
I know. And just for the listeners to know, me and Tim actually go way back. We used to work at a company together called BitFusion. So he's currently out in Austin, I'm in the UK, but it's good to catch up.
Tim Gasper:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was a lot of fun working together over at BitFusion and obviously we've got all sorts of fun projects now, but this is really awesome. I'm excited to talk a little bit about product marketing today.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah, sure. So, I've been in product management and product marketing for over 12 years now. I grew up in Cleveland, went to school in Cleveland, but got some investment in a startup that I was doing, and that brought me over to Austin, Texas. I've been here ever since, probably about nine or so years now. And yeah, I've just always been especially attracted to smaller companies. I love entrepreneurship. Me and Monica spent some time together over at BitFusion, which was a really awesome AI and deep learning oriented startup. I've been mostly in the enterprise SaaS space. So I worked at big data companies, I worked at a customer identity company called Janrain. I worked at Rackspace. And most recently I'm the Director of Product over data.world and I've been doing that for a little over a year now. So yeah, having lots of fun doing product management, but also a ton of product marketing as well, which I find those two things go really hand in hand which is awesome.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, no, it sounds like it. Can you tell our audience a little bit about data.world?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah, sure. So data.world is an enterprise data cataloging company. And what that means is that we're helping people in their companies to find, understand, and use data. And one of the coolest things about data.world is, in addition to being a cloud based catalog system, we're also the largest open data catalog in the world. And so you can find hundreds of thousands of data sets from across the world, including things like the census and data.gov and there's a bunch of COVID data and policing in America data, and things like that. So a ton of really awesome stuff on there. So definitely invite people to check it out and I lead our strategic product management and help out a ton on the product marketing side as well over there.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. So what exactly do you typically do on a daily basis over at data.world?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah, sure. So at data.world, so my role is Director of Product. So obviously I'm heavily involved in the product management side, especially as well. And so, in terms of the product side, I work very closely with our engineering teams, I work with our engineering leaders. I work closely with our customers and partnering with them, understanding their needs and really translating market perspective expertise around the market with what our customers are saying, what our engineers are saying, and turn that into our roadmap.
Tim Gasper:
Now at data.world, I have kind of a unique position because we actually have engineering leaders that are product owners. And if you're familiar with Scrum and Agile, the product owner role is someone who leads the backlog for their given team. So actually, they take on a lot of the tactical product management responsibilities, and that gives me the opportunity to, in this role not only do strategic project management and product management, but also help a lot on the product marketing side. So, my daily routine involves a lot of working with the marketing team or working with the sales team, doing a lot of sales enablement, a lot of training, developing content and working with our leadership team to aim us in the right direction too. So I cover a lot of things, but centered around product management and product marketing, especially.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. Awesome. And how does product marketing differ from traditional brand marketing? Because I feel like there's a lot of companies that do marketing, but as you develop your product and especially differentiate yourself, you need to be able to really speak to your product and its features. And so I just wanted to let the audience know about, what is the true difference between the two and how you set it up within an organization?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. I think that's a really great question. And I think in general, there's a whole lot of interesting debate around the best ways to structure your marketing team. How many product marketers you need and how many campaign marketers you need. Should you hire marketing managers or should you have more specific roles and things like that? So I think that's a very interesting conversation area. And obviously product marketing and brand marketing are our two big topics in terms of, what the difference is and what sort of specializes in what. And the way that I look at it is that product marketing for me really centers more around the product specifically, obviously, right? And what are the benefits of the product? How can it work and benefit different personas, whether those are more of your buyer personas or more your user personas? And really providing that expertise around the product and the content and the campaigns around the product.
Tim Gasper:
I do, like product marketers, especially work a lot more closely with product managers and the engineering side of the house to really have strong partnership there. Whereas, broader marketing folks maybe don't have to do that as much, they get to focus on slightly different things. So that's the product marketing side, but then when you zoom out, brand marketing, I feel like really looks to build up the broader awareness, interest in, and the differentiation of the company beyond just the products. And so I think brand marketing is bigger than products, it even sort of includes product marketing, product marketing goes a little bit more. It goes a little deeper, whereas brand marketing is a little broader and a little bigger.
Tim Gasper:
And just to give a tactical example of that, at the end of that world, you heard me mention that our product is an enterprise data catalog. Our product is all about collaboration, it's about knowledge, [inaudible 00:06:59] intelligence. We really focus on access to data. And so a lot of the product marketing focuses around, how do we communicate those benefits, those features to our different personas, to the market, build up our reputation in our product? But then if you look at our company and our brand, then you see things like we're doing a lot of good in the world around the data that we're putting out there, the COVID data, the policing in America data, or a B Corp, a public benefit corporation. And so, we're really a big part of the B Corp movement. We support a lot of academics and nonprofits. And so, excuse me, our brand is this bigger thing that's focused especially on making a difference, making an impact in the world, versus our product, which is something much more specific.
Monica Evans:
Sure. And within an organization, how does product marketing and brand marketing play together? I know a lot of structures and organizations, you have your product marketing team, you have your brand marketing team, but how do they overlap in terms of the content that they're creating? Who do you work with as a product marketer versus who the brand marketing works with?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. Good question. I feel like product marketers and brand marketers are having to work very closely together and I think that, oftentimes it's hard to keep those swim lanes mutually exclusive. I feel like a lot of times, you may be working on a webinar or a particular campaign or a particular sort of ad message or something like that, and there are aspects of that which are brand oriented and aspects that are product oriented. So I really do think that marketing teams that are most effective look at marketing holistically, and that means that product marketers, brand marketers, campaign marketers, lead gen, and growth marketers, everyone is working together, PR people, everyone's working together towards whatever those goals are. And so is it driving leads? Is it increasing thought leadership? Is it increasing share of voice in the marketplace and social channels? And things like that.
Tim Gasper:
And then prioritizing the content and the campaigns and things that are going to move the needle on those and then naturally you're going to start to see that like, "Okay, well, we've got a launch coming up. Product marketers are going to focus on that." For that, they're going to have to work more with the engineering team and more with the product teams and things like that. Whereas the brand marketer might be coordinating the PR campaign around that, so they're going to be working more with PR folks and more with the communication folks in the organization. The product person might say, "Hey, I'm going to be in charge of the sales enablement activities." And so maybe they're going to work a lot more with the sales team and packaging together that sales packaging. But then maybe the brand marketer is working on some slides that are going to help communicate up to the leadership how the brand is going to shift a little bit based on this big new product launch. And so, I think it all works itself out and it has to be something that's dynamic.
Monica Evans:
Definitely. And I feel like product marketers tend to have extensive knowledge about the product's capabilities, whereas, the brand marketing might have a general idea, but they don't really get deep into it. So how does that translate easily for prospects that are coming to the website, that are doing the research about the product and how does that translate to the business use case of those prospects?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. Interesting question. I think that, especially in today's day and age, there's a ton of self-service around learning about products. I think I read a stat somewhere, I wouldn't know where to quote it from, that 60% or 70% of the sales process these days happened before a person ever talks to a sales person. So there's a ton of self-service around information. And I think that's especially [inaudible 00:11:07] where the product marketer and their expertise really comes to play, because you want to put a lot of stuff out there that helps enable that self-service journey around getting knowledge and around getting the information that they need. And that becomes such a huge part of the sales process of what prospects are looking for and want to consume.
Tim Gasper:
And so, I think especially there are a major categories of content where, whereas a brand marketer might have a broader view or a higher level view, you do want to have that deep expertise and that deep content that... Especially I've always worked in a lot of companies that had relatively technical products, where there's some features that are aimed at developers. At BitFusion, for example, we were targeting data scientists and AI developers, and these people are pretty sophisticated and you want to put content out there that really matches that sophistication with the information they're looking for and where possible insights, and actually expanding their thinking and tilting their perspective in favor of your own differentiators as your company. And so I definitely see how, in terms of like the T-shape, the brand person probably is more that top of the T, that much broader, product marketer definitely being more of the vertical part of the T, the more vertical and deeper expertise.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And we've talked a lot about getting customers to you, your company, and the brand awareness and people doing their self-service stuff and learning themselves, but what happens post-sale? So say you get the users, say you get the new business, how does product marketing go beyond that? If people are using the product, do you find information about what's working, what's not, and relay that back to the engineer team to make updates to the software itself? How does that work post-sale?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. Great question. I think that this goes a little bit into what makes a good product marketer versus a great product marketer. And I think good product marketers are excellent at developing content, deep content. They're really great at being able to do product launches and things like that and supporting the product cycle. But I think where you jump from a good product marketer to a great product marketer is their ability to, as you're kind of framing here, the ability to support the post-sale and especially become a really deep expert and partner to customers. And there's a whole lot of reasons for that. One is that one of the biggest impact factors for a company that could really be a game changer from more consumer-oriented companies, all the way to the big enterprise SaaS companies or big enterprise software companies, is the power of customer testimonials, the power of customer references, the power of customer partnership.
Tim Gasper:
When you're doing things like having a partner conference or you're putting together an ad or a commercial or something like that and you want to have that customer testimonial on there, and that person singing your praises, if somebody has actually used the product, nothing is more powerful than that. And I think that the product marketer is the key person that can be the catalyst to really partner with those customers and get those types of testimonials and case studies. And honestly, as they're doing that, as they're working with those different people, as they're gaining a really strong understanding of the voice of the customer, in a lot of organizations, the product managers and the product management organization, they're pretty busy. I speak from my own expertise or own experience.
Tim Gasper:
Frankly, product management, you end up getting involved in a lot of internal details. You're trying to develop an engineering plan. You're arguing with other people about scope and architecture and things like that. And every product manager will admit that, even if they're doing a lot of talking to customers, they wish they were doing more talking to customers. And I think that's where our product marketing especially can come and become a really big and help the partner to product management, to engineering, and to help with that voice of the customer and to help support that organization.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, no, I think that is a pretty powerful thing to have within an organization post-sale. What type of campaigns are you currently doing data.world?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So, at data.world, we are doing all sorts of different marketing focuses and they tend to focus around some themes that we've been pushing lately. And one of the biggest themes that we're centering some of our campaigns around is what we're calling agile data governance. And so this is something that I've just found that helps with product marketing, with marketing more generally, is that usually the product is evolving in a certain direction. You see the market needs and the people in the market and what they care about and it helps to come up with some sort of a strategic theme. And so at data.world, we've been looking at the governance space and where people are trying to balance the needs of democratizing data and self-service access to data, but then balance that against safety. Because you've got GDPR, you have CCPA, you've got all this compliance and regulatory things going on. How do you move faster, enable greater access to data while at the same time minimizing a central fallout?
Tim Gasper:
And so agile data governance has become that theme and now we have a bunch of campaigns and materials and things like that that are falling under that umbrella. So we've got a new product launch coming up pretty soon where we're going to be talking about agile data governance to the market a little bit more. We've got a bunch of persona marketing campaigns going out where we're targeting specific personas, like analysts, like data scientists, like governance personnel, and really having messages targeted at them and materials targeted at them, like, "Are you a governance person? Download this governance white paper. Are you a security person? Download this security white paper. We have a webinar coming up with AWS, are you a cloud person? Let's get you into our governance [inaudible 00:17:35] AWS webinar." So a lot of persona oriented campaigns.
Tim Gasper:
Also, there's a kind of campaign marketing that I feel like is a little bit overlooked that I think especially product marketers can help with. And this is something that we're trying to do a little bit with our agile data governance, as well as you heard me mention about collaboration and knowledge [inaudible 00:17:55] and some of these things. And I refer to this as product differentiator marketing, because I think in product marketing and maybe marketing more generally, you tend to gravitate more towards things like personas and then things like announcements, right? The good old press release. Like, "We got five new features." And I think you can attest, you always go in thinking that those press releases are going to have a big impact, but then a lot of times they just don't nearly have the impact that they maybe used to 10 or 15 years ago.
Tim Gasper:
And so product differentiator marketing is like, what are the things that we know we're really good at? At data.world we know we're really good at collaboration on social. We're really good at knowledge graph and the underlying intelligence and the way we store the data, the flexibility, the open ecosystem. What are the things that we can do that tie into our themes, but also our ongoing campaigns that really press on those differentiators so that not only do those in the marketplace know that that's what makes us unique, but also starts to, I like to use the phrase, tilt the market? It actually starts to influence the market. It's just to steer the Titanic more in our direction that those are the things that are important, and therefore those are the things that they should be using as their core buying criteria. So these are some of the things that we're trying to incorporate, in terms of campaigns and things over at data.world.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. It's interesting that you say that about the product differentiator, because I've listened to a couple of podcasts too myself, and hearing, there's some people that are just like, "Don't attack your competitors, differentiate yourself." Don't just, "We do this better, we do this better." It's more of just like, well, take a step back and don't just be like, "Well, we do it better." It's like, how do you do a better? Show your differentiators that way, rather than trying to directly compete with others. And how do you feel about that?
Tim Gasper:
Exactly. No, I think that's exactly right. And I think that there's a tendency or a desire, and I know I've been involved in this sometimes. There's a tendency to fixate on gaps. There's like, "Oh my God, our competitor does this one feature and we can't do that. And it came up in this one sales call last week." Now, we're talking recency bias steer, right? And you're like, "Oh my gosh, we need to do a campaign around this thing, so that way people see that we're not so bad."
Tim Gasper:
But a lot of times it's sort of, I call that gap marketing. When you fixate on the gap, you're actually raising and highlighting the thing that you're not that good at, almost bringing more attention to the thing that you're not good at. Versus if you focus on the differentiator, it's hard to imagine what your competitor is thinking, but if you're doing a really good job of product differentiator marketing, then your competitors are looking at your marketing and they're saying, "Oh my gosh, we have a gap. We better do a campaign on the gap." And so you're tricking them into doing the thing that you want to avoid. So I think that's pretty powerful if you can stay focused and really be strategic that way.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No, I totally agree. And at data.world, what kind of benchmarks or KPIs do you look for when you're managing your team?
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. So in terms of things that we're measuring, what's an area where I think that there's some bad practices that are easy to do? And so one of the things that I really like at data.world is that we do an OKR approach. So we set objectives for the company and we set some key results and then the different groups and teams really set their OKRs to support that. And so I think that's a really important foundation. And I think that if you're working at a company that, whether you're doing OKRs, or you're doing MBOs, management by objective and things like that, those frameworks are important and valuable and if you don't have that in your company and you have any ability to influence that, I know a lot of times you're not in a position to be that, that's huge, because that creates alignment.
Tim Gasper:
But then specifically on product marketing, what I like about what we're doing at data.world and what I would recommend every company do is really look at marketing goals holistically. So, if you're trying to increase your market footprint and you're trying to increase sales and stuff like that, you're probably looking at leads, better leads, are they turning into closed one opportunities? So you're looking at your funnel. If you're more of a consumer oriented company, then you're probably looking at more your funnel and your e-commerce channels, than your brick and mortar channels and things like that. Are those things turning into conversion? What is your cost for acquisition? How much are you spending on ads and things like that?
Tim Gasper:
You're probably looking at things like sharer voice or awareness in the market. Do people know about us? What is their feeling about us? Trusted customer relationships, you already mentioned about case studies and good references and the ability to have constructive, collaborative relationships with your customers for product feedback. I think these are the things that are important and they're not important just to product marketing, they're really important to marketing as a whole and really the business as a whole. That's where I would focus and that's where I think we've done a good job at data.world about the same. I think it's easy to fall a little bit into a trap here where maybe you want to, especially if you have a content calendar and you're trying to push content velocity and things like that, you can fall into the trap of measuring PMMs, product marketing managers on how many white papers did they put out? Or how many webinars did they do? Or did we do three launches this quarter instead of just one launch?
Tim Gasper:
And I feel like those are kind of vanity metrics. It's just looking at activity, instead of outcomes. And so that would be the big thing that I would say is, where you can focus on outcomes, that's really important. It keeps everyone aligned. It doesn't have everyone just trying to steal time and attention from each other.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And I feel like with any company, budget is always an issue with growing teams and developing content and that kind of stuff. I know that, even at BitFusion, we had limitations with that. But if you had unlimited budget, what would be the first thing you'd invest more money in?
Tim Gasper:
That's a great question. If I had a million dollars... Yeah, the thing I always come to is more people, and I know that's a little bit of a challenging answer because a lot of times you can't add more people, but having another product manager or having another product marketer, I think growing the team and having more ability to have expert people working on these campaigns, working on this content and things like that would be the biggest accelerator. And at some point we'll get to that point. A lot of startups, you care about the ratios of things. As your sales increase, you're not just going to say, "Okay, let's hire 20 marketers." That doesn't make sense, but to try to keep things in ratio with each other.
Tim Gasper:
So, knowing that people, despite being possible, isn't necessarily where that money would go. I feel like, given COVID and everyone's working at home and the current situation, particularly in the US, I feel like digital content is king right now. So where you can have, especially things that help you stand out, because now everyone is investing a lot in digital channels is like, what can we do that's kind of unique? Can we get some unique content partnerships? Can we lean in on the analyst community? So if you're an enterprise tech, maybe [inaudible 00:25:49] or something like that, lean in with them, do some collaboration that really helps us cut through the digital noise.
Tim Gasper:
Creative content development, for example at data.world, we've got this thing that we've been doing, it's sort of like a live podcast called Catalog and Cocktails. So every Wednesday at 4:00 PM central, we do this live Zoom where we turn it into a podcast afterwards and then everyone hangs out for a happy hour afterwards. And the idea is everyone's supposed to bring their cocktail. So like, "Hey, what are you drinking? Oh, you're drinking a Manhattan? Okay, cool." [crosstalk 00:26:23] rum and Coke. It's like a little alcohol-centric, so maybe that's a little bit alien, but bring your team bring your water, you can bring your non-alcoholic drinks with. I mean, stuff like that where if you can invest in that kind of stuff that stands out, I feel like that's pretty valuable right now. So I think, if we had some extra budget, I would love to figure out more creative outlets for content.
Monica Evans:
No, that's exciting. I'm going to have to come check that out myself.
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. Please bring your favorite cocktails and bring your good data ideas.
Monica Evans:
Will do. And just to give some advice to the audience, I feel like a lot of startups, they tend to be very product software heavy. They think their software is that good that it just sells itself. What kind of advice would you give a company that's like, they're at this plateau now, they've got as many users as they can get just by having their software out there? What kind of advice would you give them to speed that up by incorporating product marketing into their business?
Tim Gasper:
That's a great question. I'll answer that first with the product marketing hat, and then I'll add in one little thing just because I'm a product manager, I'll add a little bit of a product management sprinkle at the end. But from a product marketing standpoint, it's what are our unique differentiators? What makes our product unique? What is our angle? And that's okay if you're wrong at first. I mean, you don't want to be wrong forever, but if you can have an opinion about your unique angle, by gleaning on that, have one message that you're pushing hard and your brand marketing supports that, your product marketing supports that. And if you're a really small startup, you probably don't have product marketers and brand marketers, you're lucky if you have a marketer. We were lucky at BitFusion to have you as our marketer. And so you kind of had to wear a lot of hats there. But the key is focus. So can you focus on something? Can you really push that one message? That would be my key around product marketing.
Tim Gasper:
And then to add just a little sprinkle of product management, I've been in a lot of different startups of different sizes and I think one of the key challenges, especially after you get seed funding, now you've hired some people, maybe you're 10 people, 15 people, is you're trying to find that product market bit. You're trying to find your swim lane that you can grow into a sustainable business. And then get eventually to that scaling phase where now you're pouring money into it and you get predictable results.
Tim Gasper:
And I think that one thing that I heard that I think is really valuable is, talk to your customers, really understand their needs, and identify the features that are must have, where people love it. If you were doing NPS, the NPS is off the chart, right? Find the features that people love and then find the people, the users that are ecstatic about your product. So you're basically finding the people that really love your product and then figure out how you can double down on those users and on those use cases. Because I think one of the hardest things is you start to grow your team and you're like 10 people, 15 people, you're like, "Oh man, I want to do more use cases. I want to be able to say yes more." But I think that focusing, again, it's kind of the theme of focus on a specific thing really helps a lot. So yeah, so I think that's how product management and product marketing can really help with that because it's hard, it's a hard problem.
Monica Evans:
Great. Thank you for that. Towards the end of our podcast, we typically ask our guest just a fun question to end on. If you were a superhero, who would you be and why?
Tim Gasper:
Oh gosh, if I had to be a superhero. Well, my thought first was coming over to Captain America, but then I was thinking, "You know what? He's a little vanilla. I want something a little more exciting." So let's go with Iron Man, because he's got the cool tech, he's got a lot of money, he was kind of a screw up at first, but he became a do-gooder at the end of it. So yeah, I like Iron Man. Let's do that.
Monica Evans:
That's great. Well, thanks Tim. I really appreciate you coming on and it was great catching up.
Tim Gasper:
Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks Monica. Appreciate you having me on.
Monica Evans:
You've been listening to The Marketing Hero Podcast by ClearPivot. Be sure to join us next time. For more information, visit www.clearpivotcom.
