Maia Wells:
It's time for another episode of the Marketing Hero Podcast. I'm your host Maia Morgan Wells. Today, we have Sejal Korenromp, VP of global field marketing for Snyk. If you haven't heard of Snyk, it's a SaaS product that offers developers a secure working environment and we'll talk a little bit more about it in the interview.
Our discussion today focuses on a topic we haven't covered yet here on the Marketing Hero, international field marketing. Getting out there and talking with people about our products and services has been resurfacing in a big way this year and we'll talk with Sejal today about what it's been like getting back out there after COVID. Plus, we'll cover some of the nuances of what it's like to work with an international field team. Let's get into it. Sejal Korenromp, welcome to the show.
Sejal Korenromp:
Hi there Maia. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Maia Wells:
It's great having you. And I want to start with a question we like to ask all of our guests, which is what is your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Sejal Korenromp:
Oh, that's a great question. So for me, the most favorite part of my career, it's a tough one, but I guess it really stems back from the many years I've worked on the B2B agency side. And Maia, I think you've been on the agency side itself so you maybe it able to relate to that as well. For me, it was really a great opportunity to be exposed to so many different diverse areas of marketing.
It was actually even a time that I did think to myself, it felt like the theory of everything that I'd learned through my studies and university years was kind of coming to life and all those models and frameworks and the theory of things, they were coming into play. And in my role as account lead, what happened is when I was taking the briefings and developing programs and campaigns for all these different global brands, it was a period that really just resonated with me.
And mostly it was really interesting because it was also my first exposure to startup wealth, because most of the agencies I was working with, they were actually just starting their first operation in mainland Europe. So a lot of context switching between the types of projects I worked on. And the one day I was taking a briefing on a product launch, another day, it was going to be around a global brand strategy.
Sometimes it was covering product marketing. In any case, it was every single brand that had their own nuances, they had different goals, different KPIs, and all of those were things that we were just working towards. So this was really early on in my career and it actually gave me a really unique environment of gaining a lot of really breadth in all the different experiences and working with lots of different cross-functional teams as well on the agency side as well as on the customer side.
Maia Wells:
How do you go from a B2B tech agency or the different types of agencies you worked for then, how do you go from that to kind of ending up in the startup world where you are now?
Sejal Korenromp:
So actually that's another good question. And it probably takes me to the second favorite part of my career, which is when I switched from agency side to client side. This is when I first met some of the founders of the very early stage startup. It was an open source company, very much in the tech space. And I was actually fortunate enough to be one of the first wave of hires and actually the only one in marketing.
So when I actually said to the founders kind of why me apart from it being the right place at the right time, which actually in most cases, it usually is, it was actually being that generalist from having come on the agency side that allowed me to be one of the first hires in a tech startup. Because what you've got is very much in those early days, least in his perspective, he shared that you're bringing on a lot more of the generalists because you want to get exposure to many different projects, you don't have many people you can hire in those early days.
And the fact that the agency world that almost set me up to do all of those different projects and programs was actually almost my USP, one of the reasons that I got into that world I guess you could say. And it actually now makes sense because when we were talking about the whole, I guess, concept of generalists versus specialists in the early stages of the start term you've got a lot of ambiguity.
You've got to work towards creative problem solving, you're always behind deadlines, right? You're always behind. And those are all things that you've kind of just learned on the agency side. The other aspect was something that you mentioned very earlier in the startup days is expect your role to change every six months, which is again, on the contrast, on the flip side.
You saw that on the agency side, there weren't many times that you were going to be working on concepts or programs or projects that were more than six months, so that's how I got myself onto the tech startup scene. Later what I also realized is having been on the tech startup, what was really interesting is when the company did start to grow, we started to bring in those specialists, which then fueled that real excitement for me to continue my learning so continuing to develop and learn from specialists that were coming in.
Sejal Korenromp:
And it was actually this early stage startup ended up being a journey of almost seven and a half years, a company that went from zero revenue to over half a billion, a handful of employees to like three and a half thousand and it was actually the smallest and the largest company I'd actually ever worked for. It's now trading on the New York Stock Exchange which was a great opportunity to have been exposed to such a journey. And that's then where I've built my very first global film marketing team, which was over 30 people. It was in a scale up environment. And actually that's when I came back here at Snyk to go and do something very similar and that's when I joined Snyk about a year and a half ago.
Maia Wells:
I have to ask you something based on what you just shared because not a week goes by in the marketing groups I'm in that somebody doesn't share a job listing that just looks ridiculous, just every different function from design to writing, to advice, to social media.
And it's a generalist position I guess, but a lot of the marketers I know complain about that, like how can you possibly think that you're going to get one person that's an expert in all these things? In that example you were sharing with us, when did you know you were ready to move on from that one man marketing team to hiring a few specialists? Can you talk a little bit more about that and when we start to differentiate, what kind of difference does that make?
Sejal Korenromp:
Sure. So I think the generalist approach is really needed when you've got to have the breadth of the entire marketing spectrum that you've got to cover. And that's when you have to be okay with covering all aspects. Sometimes you're going to be working on some conceptual messaging and sometimes you're going to be working on briefing a design team. And in other cases, you're going to be running a lead generation campaign.
And the breadth of all those different things is your experimental ground. That's when you're actually really trying to see, "Hey, what's resonating with my audience? What's working in my particular market? How am I going to maybe differentiate that for different countries?" And that's when you start to think about the root to specialism.
Now in my world in global film marketing, those will be specialists that are marketers that know their regions, but for somebody who's maybe in the demand field, it would be maybe somebody who specializes in digital marketing, or if it's a product marketer, it would be somebody who then is a specific product content writer. That's when I think you see the transition from a generalist to a specialist role.
Maia Wells:
Thank you. Because I know that that's a big topic among marketers who are seeking positions or whatnot. It's like, oh, and I wonder what the salary is with all these different duties. So it's kind of funny. I think it's like a little insider thing of these generalist roles even at big companies. So I think it's really interesting to think about that. Talk about Snyk and a little bit more about what you do there.
Sejal Korenromp:
Sure. Snyk was founded in 2015 and we are the market leader in developer security. We offer a security solution that really thinks about the developer's needs first and foremost. So we start by thinking if I was a developer and I want to tackle a security threat, what's the ideal solution for me? And with that, we offer a developer first approach that allows developers to secure all the critical components of the code and of their applications.
And actually that also goes hand in hand with helping them with developer productivity, impacting your revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and of course, ultimately cost savings. Because our developer security platform integrates into their workflow, it means that security teams and developer teams work hand in hand to find, prioritize and fix their security probabilities.
Maia Wells:
So I would love to know a little bit more about what the global marketing team does and what your role is with that and how you lead such a diverse team of people across the world. I would love for you to just tell us all about that.
Sejal Korenromp:
So I was tired to build and lead the global field marketing organization. As the name suggests, it really is closely aligned to the field. And in this case, as with many other companies, this means it's the regional sales teams. So at Snyk, for example, we have four geographies that we split into what we call three theaters, the Americas, EMEA, and APJ. And within each one of those, we have our core markets and countries that we support from a marketing perspective.
Before I delve into my own team, let me share a little bit of contrast with the broader global marketing functions that support my regional tips. So these include community, growth, demand generation, events and partner marketing and some of the more traditional functions you'd often see across all marketing companies, which is product marketing, customer advocacy, communications, creative services, and web.
You could say that each of these are like a center of excellence that offers a service to the three theaters in which my team operates. So in the early days, what we found is the Americas market was very well served from a global organization because they are only really operating in one language and because a lot of things were happening in that Americas time zone.
So when I first joined Snyk, I spent a lot of time first building out the EMEA and the APJ team, which actually required a lot more of a tailored approach. And in light of that tailored approach, you may even hear me talk about field marketing and regional marketing interchangeably. Because to me, the person that's in the field marketing role in the region is like a little mini CMO of their region. They're accountable to delivering against marketing pipeline goals for that territory or region, also a word I use interchangeably, but it's actually where they're the one that has the holistic view and almost the glue between sales and marketing.
Maia Wells:
And so how do you actually map out those geographic territories? How do you know who you need in those areas? Is it truly a one person team in each region? How does that actually work?
Sejal Korenromp:
So, yeah, that's a great question. So actually it goes back a step further in that. So what we first do is, and this is actually on the sales operations side, so the team that we work really closely with is there's an extensive metric led planning exercise. So we first have to define what's the business need, the market and the demand in that particular geography before I even think about who I put into the region and how many people.
We also think about what the makeup is of the sales segments there in that particular geography. Are there more SMBs? Have we got mid-market accounts? Are there named accounts there? Because that will also then talk to the type of experience you look for in the marketer that you put into that territory. All of these factors ultimately determine what our go to market plan is from a strategic standpoint, that's also wide use to build my team.
So the core activity of these marketers that I hire are to define, to build, to drive, plan and to execute the regional marketing programs. What are they doing and what are the KPIs that we measure them against? Pipeline generation acceleration and expansion, and in many cases evolving the brand awareness in that particular territory. To me, a successful global field marketing works best with the balance between the global functions and the right amount of local autonomy as well.
Maia Wells:
So can you tell us a story of one of the territories that you built out and how that worked, maybe something that didn't go right at first and you had to fix it or something that was unique within that territory or region that you needed to accomplish?
Sejal Korenromp:
Yes, of course. I think there's two markets that come to mind, France and Japan. They're so very unique in the way in which you approach them. They have a very strong language dependency because you can't actually communicate anything in English in those markets. And one of the lessons learned, I guess, is when you're building out a global field marketing function, you don't necessarily always dig into the nuances in those early stages, but actually it can impact negatively if you don't consider that early on.
So actually communicating out to a Japanese market in English emails, if you've already built your database, your opt-in rate might actually decrease. And same happens in France. People want to be communicated into their own languages and also throughout their user journey, it may look very different to what we may see in other markets. So those are some of maybe the experiences I've got in terms of how you differentiate that approach.
Maia Wells:
So beyond language, I'd like to talk a little bit about user journey and how that's different in France and Japan, other places, what's so different about it?
Sejal Korenromp:
So actually there's some obvious ones, right? There's language, there's time zone, there's also a way in which people interact with content, for example, on your website. What we often see in website behavior is that people that are coming in from different cultures and backgrounds interact with content in very different ways.
Take for example somebody that may be coming in onto our website from Germany. They tend to show different user traits on how they click through our website. They may stay on the content pages a lot longer to digest the content that they're going through. They'll go in and look for maybe references and some strong statements to show where are we in our subject matter experience?
Whereas often what you see with maybe audiences in the US is they may have looked and scanned some of the product pages and they request a demo straight away. So that user journey mapping and for my field marketers is going to be really important and crucial in the way in which we define what the content pieces are and also what the different programs are that are going to be successful in that region.
Maia Wells:
What tools do you use to see that behavior and then pivot within the different regions?
Sejal Korenromp:
So I mean, we've got some of the obvious tech stack, we've got Google Analytics, which actually helps show us the amount of time people are spending on the pages. And then we map that out with where we are seeing them navigate their weight. So it helps us to define what that user journey and user path looks like.
Maia Wells:
Do you use any tools like Hotjar or like heat mapping, things like that where you're actually seeing what they're looking at on the page? And also do you integrate that with other sources of data like marketing automation data, or your CRM? I'd love to know a little bit more about that tech stack and how you actually do that at Snyk.
Sejal Korenromp:
So actually we're very lucky to have a very sophisticated marketing operations team that actually take care of a lot of the text stack. We do have indeed Marketo on the backend that we look at that feeds into the pages that people are looking at. We have Google Analytics that also work through that. We have 6sense from an ABM perspective and then we have data enrichment tools as well. Because based upon where you're coming from from a geographic perspective, we also look at technographic experience and background as well.
Maia Wells:
Thank you for sharing that. I'd like to know a little bit more about your audience and how you're approaching them. It's a very developer first approach. I know the product of course, is for developers. How do you develop that persona? How do you talk to them? What are some of the nuances that you have to think about when you are not only approaching people in different parts of the world, but also this very unique buyer persona, the developer? Tell us more about that.
Sejal Korenromp:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question. So developers don't necessarily want to engage with marketing and definitely not with sales. So we take that into account, into our plan of action and how we communicate with them. Developers generally take a lot of pride in building policy software. And they in Snyk's perspective, they want to make sure it's secure and working the way they like it.
They want to be able to ship things fast and still feel empowered. So a lot of what we do is to help them shed light on what's happening in the security side of the business, but also explain it in developer terms to say, "Hey, and this is how you remediate the problem and this is what we say when we mean developer first, is we are thinking in the perspective of the person that we want to make successful."
So a lot of marketing programs and the strategy that we are using is actually helping them learn and educate themselves, so on our tech stack, on how to be successful with it. And there's a lot of technical blogs that we share, we've got documentation, and it's always thinking about this is how I'm going to be helpful to you. So it's really making sure it's in the context of our developer.
So it's also why like many SaaS companies, that bottom up approach of what we call a product led growth market is actually where we rely upon. That's how we do a lot of our customer acquisition and conversion and retention. And throughout the entire process, we're making sure that we're making them successful by giving them education and understanding of how our product works.
Here at Snyk, we don't actually just have the developer persona, we actually have the security persona as well. So we're also having to target the CISOs. So we actually use that bottom up and top down strategy and call it the sandwich strategy where we couple up the two together. So we make sure that the programs that we're doing that are for the security persona are really well differentiated to the developer persona there as well.
Maia Wells:
So it really comes back to a theme that we get to a lot on the Marketing Hero which is providing value, understanding your audience, providing them with some education, if that's what they need, some proof points if that's what they need. So just calling that out people because if you listen to the Marketing Hero Podcast, you've heard this before. It's all about understanding who you're talking with and providing value to that person even if it's not leading to a direct sales opportunity. So then how does that translate that sandwich strategy? I love that term. How does that apply to what you end up doing in field marketing?
Sejal Korenromp:
So, I mean, first and foremost, it's not just about events and conferences, which is actually often the perception that field marketing has. It actually starts with data. So we talked about tracking on our website, but we also track what's coming in. What's coming in from the website traffic, what meeting requests are coming in, what are the chats and the contact us, but also valuable PQL, the product qualified leads that are coming in.
Sejal Korenromp:
We're seeing people coming in, using our product and then we're going to make them successful with that product. And we also then look at how our programs are basically delivering against some of the campaign, MQLs that we have, the marketing qualified leads, and they're coming from regional events, some are coming from webinars.
In some markets, we actually see this coming from assets like white papers, for example, because people first really want to understand and grasp what's the platform or what's the product and then actually think about delving into it. So as I mentioned earlier, we've got pipeline goals in our region, we go through a strategy to develop that. So as field marketers, we actually then go and map against whether what we're working on in the region is actually delivering against these pipeline goals as well.
Maia Wells:
So it's a lot to manage because there's a big international component to that. And as you mentioned before, it may be slightly different in each region and with each marketer that you're working with. So in a practical sense, how do you deal with that at Snyk? How do you actually structure those teams and make sure that those KPIs are being hit, even if they're slightly different in each region?
Sejal Korenromp:
Yeah, excellent question. So, I mean, this is the perfect time to probably lay out what my team looks like. So I mentioned earlier that we've got three core theaters, the Americas, EMEA and APJ. If I start with APJ, I've got three marketers there that in what we call our three core markets. So I've got a marketer in Sydney, a marketer in Tokyo and a marketer in Singapore. They cover basically the core markets that we have and the countries that are there.
In EMEA, I have a team lead that's based in Tel Aviv and she manages a team in the UK, in France, in Germany and the Netherlands, which again are our core markets in these EMEA regions. In the Americas, it's different of course, because there, we don't necessarily have the new nuances of countries, but what we do see is a lot of variants between our east, west and central territories. So that's how we've mapped out the team there.
And just for context, if you think about that makeup of the team I just shared, less than one third of my team actually speaks English as their first language because when I hire the marketers in the regions, they are usually native speaking experienced marketers. So my field marketer in France is actually a native French speaker who knows the French market.
So when we do our team calls and when we're syncing with one another asynchronously as well, we have to also be really mindful of how do we communicate with one another and with my team being on at least eight different time zones, we also have to be mindful when do we communicate what messages to each one of us as well. So with both time zones and cultural differences, one aspect of education is being really aware of what the cultural differences are.
So one great book that I must give a shout out to is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It's been so crucial for me in my career when I've been working with global teams to just be aware of the nuances of how people in different countries communicate and how best to make sure that you can converse with them in order to have a successful working environment.
Maia Wells:
I have a couple questions on that because I'd love to know how you actually handle that in a practical sense. The first one is how many languages do you speak? And when you're communicating with people, do you try to switch into French and use Google translate as best as you can, how does that actually work? And then I would love to know if there is a story you can share with us where you learned about a cultural difference and approached that person or that team differently after having that knowledge.
Sejal Korenromp:
Yeah, great question. So unfortunately I probably don't speak as many languages as the folks on my team, I speak four different languages. And I generally do allow teams when sales and marketing teams are operating in calls themselves to speak in their own language. So for example, I speak French, Dutch and English. I understand German, a little bit of Spanish.
So the team's room, for example, we're doing a call in French, I have absolutely no qualms of them speaking in French because I can understand it. And in the chat I would usually ask questions in English. That's something I feel comfortable with. Because what you find is when teams can speak their own languages, they tend to go into a little bit more of detail, they cover the depth and the breadth of what it is that you want the discussion topic to be. So that's how I generally address that.
How I've seen that work well or less well is when people are not aware of the cultural differences. And a good example here is if you look at countries in the APJ. Often they work on a very different time zone to what we do in the EMEA and the Americas, which means that they can come across as very direct communication. The nuance of almost being, is it a little rude? Are people being very direct with their communication?
It's actually just something they've picked up along the way. If they don't ask the question very directly and very crisp, they don't necessarily get the answer in the time zone they need it in. It also could be because English is a second language that people have to write down it more literally than actually having that flowered up with extra words and extra I guess synonyms needed there.
Maia Wells:
And even in the Americas, I know you mentioned there are three regions here where we're recording the Marketing Hero Podcast and I've noticed there's major differences between west coast people and east coast people for example. East coast, people are a little bit more direct like that. So it just brings up that reminder to us that even in different regions in the same country, we've got differences.
And I think it sounds like having an open mind and trying to understand each other is really that first step. I'm wondering with the language that you don't speak, let's say for Japanese, for example, when you have meetings with those teams, do you just not attend? Do you try and learn a little Japanese? Do you have somebody that's translating for you? Because I think it's great that you are encouraging that native language to be spoken in those regions. It makes sense to do that. What do you do when you don't speak the language?
Sejal Korenromp:
So that is twofold. I'm fortunate enough to have a team that speaks English fluently, as well as the language or the region in which they're supporting. So in that respect, I trust them and I give them the autonomy to bring in myself or others into the conversation where needed. So in most cases, I think people often feel uncomfortable if you are a non-native speaker being in the meeting.
So I don't attend all the meetings. What I generally do say is if there's any path or if there's any areas that I can delve into, I would usually have that conversation in my one on ones with my regional marketers. So that's where, for example, making sure that you've got experienced individuals in each one of these roles and folks who can really hold their own when I don't speak the language or when I'm not in their time zone are the types of people that I also hire as well.
Maia Wells:
That sounds really important. You mentioned in there that there is a misconception about field marketing and that it's not just conferences. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? What types of events are you doing? Are there other parts and pieces of that? Are they different in each region? I know we're seeing a lot of hybrid events where there's a digital component, as well as an in person component right now. And which types of events are most successful for you at Snyk?
Sejal Korenromp:
So it's a really good question. I mean, we've just come out a really strange period. So in the COVID time, like everyone else, we were hosting many different virtual events. And they varied from very content demo heavy sessions to more experiential networking round table events and we had to a lot of experiments there. We had to test which ones worked in which countries and which regions.
We found that those that were content demo focused, worked really well in EMEA and APJ. However, in the Americas we found that a lot of these more experiential networking round tables with tastings done with chocolate and coffee and beers and we tried them all, they worked really well. In parts of Europe, you don't generally have those experiential moments with people you don't know.
You generally want to do those with people you've met in different settings. Whereas in the Americas, this was actually a great opportunity, especially in the COVID time when you weren't out networking in the way in which we were accustomed to doing, they worked really well for us. So most in-person activities are back in play.
Our portfolio includes regional conferences, which is hosted by third party vendors, but we also do our own Snyk proprietary events like our own user conference, but also breakfast briefings, lunch and learns, field events that are focused to either a vertical or a particular area of our product platform. And we always tailor these based upon the prospects and the customers. And as we talked about earlier, that user journey and how people like to consume content and how they like to engage with us as well.
Maia Wells:
Okay, so that sounds like an absolute nightmare logistically, right? I used to do events in another lifetime and it's like boxes of swag and send it to the hotel. And how am I going to get from the hotel to the conference center? How are you managing that? Do you have your regional people managing all those details on their own? You mentioned an outside vendor in certain cases operating the events for you.
Sejal Korenromp:
So I'd just say right now where possible, we aim for economies to scale, we're trying to centralize our processes and procurement for things like swag where we're in the midst of trying to figure that out. But my team grew in the last year from zero to 12 people. So all of a sudden, we have these marketers in a country where they do need swag.
And some of these logistical nightmares are real. Just to give you an example, post Brexit, we had our core supplier in the UK and every time we were doing an event in mainland Europe, which has just started of course earlier this year, we started to have endless declarations that we have to fill in and customs forms, which was one of the key things that led to now thinking about having two different suppliers, one maybe in the UK, but one in mainland Europe as well.
It is my team that usually works through that with local vendors as well where possible. We're looking to centralize this as we continue to grow. But this also goes down to what resonates in one region may not work in another. I mean, a swag choice in Australia could be KOOZIES for a beer to keep them chilled.
You would not use that in France because culturally people don't generally cover their beer KOOZIE with something on the outside. And the same goes with food choices when you're doing a field event or a lunch and learn program. Whilst here in the Netherlands where I live, an all Dutch audience would have no qualms about having a sandwich and a glass of milk.
Completely customary and acceptable here when you have a multicultural audience from different countries. This is something we'd have to strongly take into consideration. So it's where I really rely upon my regional team and the regional expertise they have both with the culture, but also with the country customs that they take that into consideration with whichever program that they're running.
Maia Wells:
And who typically supports these events? I know that you mentioned that you have regional people that are leading things in their regions. Do you hire additional contractors to help on the event days? How do you actually support these events?
Sejal Korenromp:
So actually we've got a really great support network, as I mentioned from our centers of excellence in our global team. So for example, we have marketing operations team that help us on the backend for tooling, for our landing pages, for pulling invite lists, we have a demand team that help us maybe for digital marketing to promote various topical campaigns and programs.
We've got in-house design and content team for bigger events that are events team run like RSA and black hat. And then the people on the ground are really our go to market team. And we refer to them as pods and the pods are our sales people, our AEs, we've got our SDRs or our user success managers and we've got our SEs or SAs. So we've got somebody who's like used to really talking to the prospects early on.
We've got the people that often own relationships with customers and we have the technical experts. And it's with each one of them that we work on our programs. So when we're actually executing a field event program in Germany, it's each one of those different functions that will support us as well as the global team. And if it's actually, like you said, a vendor hosted event, we'd have somebody on the vendor side or potentially an agency that we might get involved to help us execute on some programs on the ground.
Maia Wells:
So you mentioned a couple things in there that relate back to digital. I'm just curious about how you think about language localization for the website landing pages, other marketing content, whether that's physically printed or digital. How do you actually approach that language idea and how does it actually become executed let's say on the website? Do you have people that are selecting their region and then it translates the entire site for them? How does that work?
Sejal Korenromp:
So we will do, we don't as yet. So our Snyk website currently is hosted only in English. By the end of this year, we will be having French, Japanese and German versions of our website. My team will actually be driving a lot of that activity together with our localization team and an external localization agency that will help us manage that.
So right now, how we're working through that is for some of our core campaigns and programs, we have individual landing pages that are in native language. So for example, if we were hosting a French webinar, we would make sure that the person that comes to the French webinar gets a French email invitation, they land on a French webinar page, they go through the form and they go through the, I guess the process of completing their details all in French.
The on-demand content or the live content will also be hosted in local language and the follow-up will also be done there. So when we think about localization, for me, the experience should be end-to-end where possible. However, there's a lot of market research that actually shows that people do want to be having that experience in their local language and they want to buy in their local language. When that's not the case, we make it very clear that the content is available in English, but there's always a contact person that would be available to them to speak in their local language.
Maia Wells:
One of the questions I have there is since your website is not currently available in other languages outside of English, once they go through that webinar experience, for example, everything's in French, thank you so much messy, right? And then what if they're ready to buy and does that take them back into an English experience in a pricing page or an experience with your website and how do you handle that piece of it when it kind of comes back out of the French experience?
Sejal Korenromp:
So excellent question. So actually that's something that we've been doing some testing on recently as well. So it does currently because as I mentioned, we've got single landing pages right now and indeed, if they wanted to get more information, what we're trying to do is drive them to actually request a demo, which would then be in local language because that pod that I mentioned, the SDR, the AE and the technical team would be the local people on the ground that would engage with our prospects.
So in that respect, they'll get that language and cultural experience. If they do go to our website and they go to the pricing page or they go to our premium offer, for example, it will be in English. However, research has actually proved that people don't actually mind having the combination of going from local language to English language, as long as certain aspects of the experience are in their own language.
Maia Wells:
It sounds like you really take it seriously. And I think I want to step out of the technical questions or the process questions for a second because I want to know from your perspective, why is it so important to care about this stuff? Now, most of our audiences in the US, and as you probably know, Americans especially are very stuck on English. Many of us don't speak any other language. It's like tunnel vision.
And I think a lot of US marketers approach everything from the US perspective, even if, for example, they have a team in EMEA and it's just like, well, we'll just use an S instead of a Z on the word organization, and that's fine and now it's localized. So that seems like it's kind of the wrong way to think about it.
And I know a lot of our audience is looking to learn more about themselves, about our own cultural approaches and being more inclusive. And so I'm just kind of wondering whether from a business standpoint, whether from a personal standpoint, why is localization and paying attention to local approaches customs languages so important?
Sejal Korenromp:
So you touched upon two things. I always talk about localization and regionalization. Localization is often talking about the language aspect of it. So localizing it from English into French or English into Japanese. There's also a level of regionalization that needs to be done. So that's the context in which what's the information you give in that first touch email, in that second touch email.
So we actually spend a lot of time end to end looking at when we are looking at campaigns and programs, what do the cadences look like? And in some cases where in the US, we may have a single touch addressing a particular follow up activity, in EMEA we may go for a multi-touch follow up as well. So why is it so important? It goes back to the user journey. People consume content in different ways. People experience engagement with the product in different ways as well.
So the that's why to me personally it's really important. And then the other aspect of it, culturally there's just some things that you do. You first build a relationship with someone. You and I probably both know that you work with people. And selling is also about people as well to a certain extent. Even in a SaaS business and you build relationships, that's what actually makes it valuable.
And we've started to experience that now that we're back in person. Those networking moments, these events where you give people an opportunity to connect with one another and share their stories and experiences is more and more crucial. And doing that, having some empathy for the culture and for the country and for the language is going to be really, really crucial for marketers.
Maia Wells:
And that human connection really has no barriers. We all are seeking that type of connection. So very important to note. Well, I want to know, just kind of one more question practically, and then I want to know what is next for you. I noticed that you mentioned you started with EMEA and then have been building out the program from there to focus on other regions. How did you transition from EMEA into more of a global focus and how has that balance really achieved?
Sejal Korenromp:
So, I mean, the transition has been pretty seamless in most roles I've had because I've had global responsibilities. The obvious ones are the ones that come to mind are time zones and team time and travel. You asked earlier what about when there are meetings happening in a different time zone? How do you attend? I don't always attend.
So that transition is I make myself available in different time zones at different times of the day. So there's times of my day that I'm available for my APJ team. So I work from 6:00 AM until 9:00 and then take a break. It's being accessible to the teams that need you on those different time zones. So that was a big transition from when you're just working in a is it a 9:00 to 5:00? I mean, it's never a 9:00 to 5:00 for us, but those were the time zones that most teams were awake.
I now make myself available in the mornings for the APJ team and later in the evenings for the Americas team. And I think that's how you have to think about it, is that transition is not just on the way in which you work. It's the times that you work in, it's making sure that you give a balance also between regions autonomy allow the regions to give themselves some freedom of making their own decisions and the choices that they'd like to do.
And the transition is something that I experienced from going from an EMEA role. I could take that perspective from EMEA and APJ and give it back now to the global team. And I think that generally our global team have been really, really open to receiving that feedback and packaging things up for us in what we call a campaign in a box and tools in a box to give each regional marketer the autonomy that they need. And it also gives them a bit of a menu choice to pick and choose what it is. So that's been, as I said, a pretty smooth transition, certainly here at Snyk, because I think a lot of people just open to hearing that global context as well.
Maia Wells:
Do you feel like that burns you out? Are you just on 24 hours a day and you just take a few breaks in between? I'm concerned. Is that hard for you?
Sejal Korenromp:
No. It is something that's been a learning curve and this has been something that I've indeed had to protect myself along the way. It is possible to completely burn yourself out if you think that you are going to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's simply not possible. So what I try to do is I try to balance out, for example, how I communicate with my team.
There's a function in Slack that you can have it send later. So for when I'm communicating with my a APJ team, I sometimes have a reminder to make sure that I send them the message a little bit later. So they actually receive it when they're waking up in the morning and they don't go to ping at 3:00 AM for example. Other aspects is I block out times on my calendar.
I block out times to go do some sports in the morning. And sometimes that sports is after I've done three calls with APJ which is totally okay. I do to 6:00 to 9:00 AM, 9:00 AM, I do some sport, I'll be back. And when my EMEA team are working, I'm available, but then I carve out some time at the end of the day. I have some family time, I have dinner.
And just like today, I then log back on of an evening and then liaise with my Americas team. So it's really important when you're running a global team to strike that balance for yourself, making sure that you're accessible for the team in the regions, but also making sure you protect yourself from working all days of the week and all hours of the day.
Maia Wells:
Very important. I hope everyone's ears perked up when you were talking about that, because that work life balance is so important and I feel like people who are working with global teams have less of it oftentimes. They are trying to be available to all people at all times. So I really applaud you for that. I think that is just such an important message to share. So you don't attend all the calls and that's fair because you have to live your life and everyone's in a different time zone. How do you understand what's happening on those calls? Are they always recorded?
Sejal Korenromp:
Excellent question. So actually they are all recorded. We try and I always put in the request, if I can't join a calendar invite said, sorry, unavailable, because it's 11:00 PM or it's 2:00 AM for me and said, please, can you record the call? So there is a culture and it's also something that's been growing more and more to share calls and share recordings as well.
And that's also for my team. Not all my team can join all of the calls in the time zone in which they're being constructed live. So I always ask respectfully, can you please record the call? And can we even sometimes have a ask me anything session set up for any questions that come up from calls that have happened? So it's something that we take really seriously and to make sure that we respect people's times and people's personal time and people's working times.
Maia Wells:
And it seems like it goes beyond just the time zone thing, right? Because people also have maybe children or lives or things where they're not going to be in the office for 10 hours of the entire day. Do you provide that flexibility like within the region for your teams?
Sejal Korenromp:
Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, my team are on different time zones. So if, for example, during my team course, somebody has to go and pick up their child from the childcare, that's completely okay. I said, "Hey, add some agenda topics if you want me to cover it or record the call." What I actually do, recordings are often long. I even summarize some of the key points for my team from calls that I've listened in on, or we crowdsource listening into calls and take some notes and share it back with the team as well.
Maia Wells:
Sounds like an awesome approach. So Sejal what is next for you? What are you excited about?
Sejal Korenromp:
There's so much in store. I mean, continuing to grow my team, being, or having the ability to mentor and coach them and others and learning so much from all the experienced professionals I have around me. I mean, it still feels early days for me here at Snyk. And this rocket ship is just getting going. And having been fortunate enough to have been on a similar journey before, I just know it's going to be fulfilling. So I'm going to get my teeth stuck in and I'm going to give Snyk and this team everything I've got because there's an exciting journey ahead of us.
Maia Wells:
That's such a great thing to hear from a leader. Well, Sejal Korenromp, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you having come on the Marketing Hero Podcast.
Sejal Korenromp:
Thank you very much Maia. Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you.
