SuiteWorld - the wrap with CMO Fred Studer
- Summary:
- SuiteWorld's over for another year. CMO Fred Studer considers progress to date and plans for next year.
One week on from SuiteWorld and my jet lag has abated enough to think about the overall impact of the event, the first held under the auspices of NetSuite’s new CMO Fred Studer.
Having spoken to him about his ambitions for this year’s conference prior to the show, I thought it was an idea to get his views on how it had gone.
With that in mind, I caught up with him as the conference was winding down and asked if his ‘telling stories around the campfire’ concept had worked out as he’d hoped.
Certainly there was a considerably higher level of customer testimonial on view, something which I’ve observed elsewhere, other companies struggle to achieve. Studer says:
It all comes back to us delivering on the brand promises. You don’t always get the luxury of working for a company where the technology or product or service does what you said it was going to do. Every one of our customers not only wants to talk about the story, they want to talk about how they’re changing their business. We’ve created a bit of a movement, even just over the last six months.
This ties back into a wider philosophy on the role of marketing:
If marketing is done well, you’re never really marketing. Marketing kind of assumes that you’re trying to make something that isn’t as good, sound better than it is. True marketing is the curation of authentic customer stories and sharing them. Not being the creator of those stories, but being the advocate and the creator of places to share that story. My job as a marketer is to help in the creation of our customer stories and providing communities around which they can go tell those stories.
There’s one unusual angle to Studer’s theory that differs from many tech vendors who struggle to move from their natural conversational constituency of IT to reach up to the line of business executives and C-suite. NetSuite, according to Studer, is heading in the opposite direction:
The common story is around transformation, but the story does take a different pivot between IT and business. We’ve always really nailed the business story. The IT story was a little bit different. Because we became very comfortable in the line of business, we loved to talk to the CFO. We then got comfortable talking to the VP of Operations, Manufacturing and Supply Chain. Then recently we got more comfortable talking to HR and marketing and sales. Our strength has been coming from line of business.
Now we’re bridging the gap and saying, ‘Gosh, we have to involve IT’. They have to be bought in. Just one simple questions - what does 99.98 mean? A lot of them don’t know what that uptime rate would be if they maintained it. All they see is a risk because it’s not 100. But when they have the dialog with us, they say, ‘Oh my goodness, we can’t do that uptime if we tried’. That story about how do we support IT to support the line of business is something we’re starting to get across.
That’s an interesting situation to be in, particularly when weighed against the notorious Gartner claim that it’s the CMO who’s the IT decision powerhouse these days. (That’s a claim that brings a refreshingly stark Anglo Saxon response from the NetSuite CMO!). Studer says:
In the reality check, the CIO and the IT team still hold the budget, but they are very much influenced by the line of business. It’s totally a partnership. I doubt that there would ever be a situation where a CIO is going to over-rule a terrible solution that the line of business just loves. They’re going to be judged and measured on how successful that team is as they support them through the strategy that they have to go drive.
But in many cases we really don’t want the line of business getting into the bits and bytes evaluation. They shouldn’t have to worry about security and uptime, that is an IT thing. Line of business will be more pushing on the usage. How easy is it going to be? How are you going to train me on all this change? IT is promising all this change and customization and configuration, so how does that effect me as line of business? They are more worried about how hard is this going to be to use.
For people who have been in a company for a long time, change is always going to be a slightly scary situation. So we have to come and secure a buy-in with line of business, while IT gets comfortable with things like security, delivery, uptime, all those kinds of things.
The race to C
Part of this will be influenced by the growing consumerization of business applications, adds Studer:
We want to get to thinking more about NetSuite releasing more like Facebook, where new things just show up and people don’t really talk about it. If I was closing my books with Facebook I would probably be a little more irritated that a field was going to be moved and I would revert back. But we’ll get closer to that.
There is a race now from B to C in applications right now. Business applications will not exist in their current instantiation. We will have consumer applications that do commercial type things, but they will have to behave in a consumer type format.
So when we talk about ‘Is it an ERP system or is it a website?’, those lines are completely blurred. Internal or external, we’re all consumers. Why should someone internally have an ugly screen that they can’t frickin’ learn how to use, then they go home and buy something on Amazon? There should be no difference. Why not make it the same? The companies that win will be the ones move the quickest from B to C.
Macro-conversations
With all this talk of conversations and stories, I put it to Studer that there are two types of conversations that NetSuite needs to engage with: the NetSuite-centric ones and the wider macro-trend ones, such as, for example, taking a stand on issues such as the European Commission’s newly-announced inquiry into e-commerce company practices.
This isn’t something that I’d have associated with NetSuite in the past, but it seems more macro-trend engagement is on the cards, as Studer says:
We have to. I don’t think that there’s any way that we can’t. We are a commerce company. We will run tens of thousands of commerce firms. Clearly we will have to get more involved with the macro-conversations and have our perspective and point of view around how we will help.
What NetSuite - and any software company - needs to do is to get ahead of that and work with those regulatory bodies and say, ‘How can we be involved in helping you and what is it that you are trying to attain and what might this morph into over time so that we can prepare customers?’.
With SuiteWorld by now in its final hour and Studer and his team winding down, it would incredibly unfair to ask what to expect from next year’s show. So I asked what we could expect from next year’s show. This year’s theme was disruption, coming on the back of last year’s transformation meme. Next year? Studer pauses for thought, then says:
If we follow it through, it’s been transformation and disruption, I think it’s going to be around this notion of experience. We kind of ended this year with the tag that experience is everything, I think that really is going to be our tone, our theme. We know that things are disruptive and we wanted to shock the market a bit and say ‘are you ready for it?’.
Now the goal, thinking about cross-industry types of engagement, the only thing that should matter is that you deliver a delightful experience, regardless of product or service. So we’ll talk about personalization and about delivering an amazing experience.
My take
As noted in earlier articles, there was a different vibe to SuiteWorld this year. The emphasis on customer-centric storytelling was evident. I'm of the view that macro-trend conversations are something to build on, particularly in Europe where NetSuite can usefully use such engagement to build profile.
Disclosure - at time of writing NetSuite is a premier partner of diginimica.