Sophie Glaser: Hi.
Jan Mundorf: Hey, Sophie. It’s an absolute pleasure to be connected. I think first time was when I called – prospected you. We were called outbound.
Sophie Glaser: Very true.
Jan Mundorf: It was very along a line of different steps. Then we finally got an answer, and since then I’ve been following you, so it’s an absolute pleasure to have you. How are you today? You’re weekend ready I heard.
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, weekend ready, Friday ready, so in a very good mood. I’m looking forward to a very nice meeting. How are you?
Jan Mundorf: I’m also very good. We had a quick chat before. We both had a wild week. What made your week wild?
Sophie Glaser: I think too many meetings. It’s very frustrating. In Google you now have the statistic how many hours you spend per day and per week in meetings, and –
Jan Mundorf: Really?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, it’s horrible. It’s very disappointing when you realize that you spend more than half of your day talking to people without getting something done, right, so that was my moment that I realized maybe I need to rearrange stuff a bit.
Jan Mundorf: Then I hope we are speaking about something productive, and you’re not getting Zoom fatigue.
Sophie Glaser: No, no.
Jan Mundorf: Listen, Sophie, you are active on LinkedIn. I’ve been following you for a while. I think I know a bit about what you’re passionate about, but, Sophie, what are you actually passionate about?
Sophie Glaser: I could give a very plain answer that’s marketing, but I think that’s a bit too generic, and I was thinking about that for a while, for the last month especially, what I’m really passionate about, and I think what I realized in the end is that it’s all about storytelling and how stories work because I’m currently investing a lot of my time in product marketing, how to position products for SMEs, how to enhance inbound marketing and digital distribution. It all comes down to one core. It’s really understanding how stories work and how stories must be told that your audience really understand that and gets excited.
Also, in private life I’m doing a creative writing course to literally understand how stories are working and how you can excite with excellent storytelling your audience and the people you want to reach, so I think that’s my real passion, understanding stories and creating stories in the end hopefully myself.
Jan Mundorf: Awesome, yeah. It’s so true. How do you come up with those stories? How far have you come with that?
Sophie Glaser: Personal stories or –
Jan Mundorf: No, in general. You said you are writing the stories now or just tell us you’re passionate about storytelling. How did you land on this because it sounds like it has been a process behind it. How did you land on this as your passion?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, it goes way back. I studied – many years ago I studied literature science, so it’s an always kind of existing passion to understand not only fictional stories but how you’re actually – how you’re actually telling exciting content, basically, and how you create that because it’s not talent and it’s not a brilliant idea, but basically it’s a certain technique you can learn and you can enhance, so it goes way back I would say, but especially in the last year I would say at Vimcar, for example, we reached the point where – typically with a SaaS and tech startup you start telling people what you can do, like what kind of features you offer, what kind of products and how they work and all that kind of stuff, and then you reach a certain scale and limitation of scale, and then you really need to shift more towards hey, actually what does my audience need and then you shift towards that more benefit orientated communication.
That was when also for Vimcar get much more important to understand hey, what kind of story do I need to tell to answer that need and these pains of my audience to tell them hey, these are really our benefits, which serves your need. This is when only in private life and not only talking about literature and reading a lot of stuff and creating fictional stories for my daughter, right, when it comes also in terms of the next growth level for Vimcar, it get much more important to dig deeper and really point these working stories for our audience.
Jan Mundorf: Great stuff. How do you – I find it really interesting. You said you hit a certain growth stage or growth pattern. How do you find those stories, or how do you connect with the customers in a way?
Sophie Glaser: I think that also reflects the question how does marketing work and what do you need to do that marketing works, and it all comes down to segmentation. I think you first have to understand your audience in depth, what kind of coffee they’re drinking in the morning or maybe tea or what is the newspaper next to the coffee machine in the office kitchen, for example. First it’s about segmentation and having a very clear understanding of the audience not only based on economics demographics and so on and so forth, but really based on their needs and their behavior.
Then if you know that then it’s actually pretty straightforward to create that messaging or key messaging around these needs. It’s pretty clear if you have – even if you have a very diverse audience, they will share common pains, and they will share common needs on a social, emotional, or functional level, and then you can address that. If you know that, then it’s a technique of storytelling, which comes in very handy in creating the whole – opening up the world to them to your offering and invite them basically to get to know that.
Jan Mundorf: Awesome. Thanks for sharing. What story are you currently trying to tell?
Sophie Glaser: Good question. I think – Vimcar is – maybe I should introduce Vimcar better.
Jan Mundorf: I assume that people listening to that were people who already know, but yeah, please.
Sophie Glaser: Because it’s kind of a niche market in the end – well, not a niche market, but at the moment quite a market there’s room for scaling at least. We’re doing fleet management software and mobility solutions for SMEs. Not the large enterprise customers with hundreds of cars, but more the plumber, the mobile care company, all of these smaller companies between 5 to 50 cars, something like that, who have to handle their fleet basically, and they not even call that fleet. They call it vehicles and company cars and need to digitize that.
What is very special about our audience is you do not have a typical stakeholder you can address. They do not call themselves fleet manager, for example, but they’re the secretary and HR person, some bookkeeping person who was approached by the MD saying hey, by the way, please take care additionally of the cars. I know you have a lot to do, but it’s just the cars, right? We have an audience which is not perfectly trained for their job, right? They’re really immature. They have not a clear understanding of what they need to do.
Coming back to the storytelling part, what I’m trying to communicate is A that we are really here to help with partner on eye to eye level, that we’re here to educate the audience, that we can literally help to make sure that they can do their job properly on the one hand with content marketing and content assets and on the other hand, it’s all about the easiness and simplicity because especially in the DACH market, we’re not talking about very tech savvy people and not like a –
Jan Mundorf: Sometimes
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, I would say an SME market in a typical German SME company, are they really tech savvy? No, maybe not. Are they really aware of digitalization? Yes, they are, but at the same time are they really open towards that? Maybe. What we are really pushing forward is how easy the software is and how easy to use, how easy to install, that you do not have to worry about anything in using it and all of these kind of question, that it’s not that hard to just use what we have, and then it makes your life even better, so that’s the two angles we are currently pushing forward.
Jan Mundorf: It’s going very well. Thanks for sharing, Sophie, but I think we have to start a bit from the beginning here. Why did you choose to work in marketing? How did you land where you’re currently right now?
Sophie Glaser: I could tell a very inspirational story, but let’s stick to the facts. I always enjoyed creating content, and I always enjoyed creating content for an audience, right, not for myself, but I was always very eager to put something out there. What I really like and that’s come to the point where digital marketing that it’s not only the creative part but that you base that on analytics and really understand the performance of things you’re doing and having that balance between picking your creative part of the brain and making something shiny and good looking like that typical hey, what is marketing doing. Yeah, that shiny banner, right? That part but base it on a very [10:20] analytics and understanding what is the impact of what I’m doing, and that fascinated me from the very beginning on. It was quite logical, I would say, to choose a career in marketing, right?
Jan Mundorf: Great. Yeah, and why did you end up in B2B because most – you don’t get taught anything about B2B in university or in high school, yet it’s such an incredibly interesting market right now, so why B2B?
Sophie Glaser: I always had a mix in my job between B2C and B2B marketing so I always had these two perspectives in different positions in my career, and then me personally – what’s very personal opinion and nothing against any B2C campaigns, right, but me personally, having the combination of inbound marketing, a tech product, and the SME audience is the most challenging thing you could do in marketing at least from my perspective –
Jan Mundorf: Woohoo.
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, see? I think that, yeah, it’s an area where so much green field in the market where you can really just try to invent new ways of acquiring customers, of attracting them, of speaking to them in the right way that I personally really like that because my personal feeling is in B2C, especially e-commerce, a lot of the groundwork has been done, right? We are at a scale level where it’s pretty, pretty clear how to get there and then it’s really baby steps where B2B, especially SME inbound marketing, it’s – the field is way open, right? You have to investigate and explore a lot, especially in Europe. I really like that.
Jan Mundorf: Cool, yeah. I can definitely see that. You’re thriving in it, so awesome. We already spoke about your passion that’s around storytelling. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received for your role?
Sophie Glaser: It’s maybe a bit dumb, but it’s still the piece of advice I give to every junior because I think the most basic mistake you can do as a marketer is market stuff for yourself and what you like personally, so what I always keep telling is first segmentation because without a good segmentation and without a good understanding of the audience, nothing good comes out of that. First, do your groundwork. First understand your audience.
We just hired a brilliant senior product marketer where I said hey, for me, it’s perfectly fine if you just go for the first five weeks to a fleet manager and do an internship there to really understand your target audience. That’s the best piece of advice I would say because especially junior colleagues tend to do marketing stuff they personally like and forgetting that there’s someone out there not sitting in a city center of Berlin, not being 21, like having a completely different mindset.
Jan Mundorf: I love that. I love also that you repeat that and highlight that because it’s overview. People forget about that. They think oh, that’s the way to grow, and then you speak to the audience and they’re like no. Why is that? Why should I look at that?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, and especially –
Jan Mundorf: Go ahead.
Sophie Glaser: Sorry, just to interrupt you there. The interesting thing is also experienced marketing managers tend to forget that because of course it’s very appealing to hunt the latest trend and to – yeah, of course, it would be great to have the next TikTok ad and to try that new channel, but you always shave to balance that a bit with the audience, and yeah, not every audience is the most suitable one to be at the front row for the next digital marketing trend, right? Yeah, that’s good to always keep in back of your head. Who are you addressing and where?
Jan Mundorf: Great stuff. Where do you find that balance between traditional and understanding but also try new things and innovate maybe a bit? Have you thought about that before because I was exactly – I’m just thinking about it right now because at the conference [14:43] spoke yeah, TikTok is the next big thing in B2B. It might be true for some, but you still sometimes want to innovate and try new stuff.
Sophie Glaser: Was that TikTok themselves, we are the big B2B next thing?
Jan Mundorf: No, no, they said not themselves but there were people in the audience that said that. I just want to ask you and get your opinion on that. How do you innovate or dare something new that you maybe haven’t done before?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, very good question I would say. What we do typically is to reserve some experimentation budget for brand but also for channel testings, and then I think – maybe to example of TikTok, maybe it is not the most perfect idea to target or to try to target a mid-50 MD of an SME there, but maybe if you could try a campaign for younger MDs or the junior ones in the family business now taking over step by step the business of their parents, for example, and you could target them there.
It’s always about having some room for experimentation and having some budget in there to test and try but to be very clear of what you could achieve there, and then based on that you could scale the most obvious stuff and then step by step adding new channels or a certain mix or a certain campaign whatsoever, which maybe is not scalable as of now but maybe is worthwhile because you, for example, identify a very special target group which will get in X, Y years very important for the majority of business, so yeah.
Jan Mundorf: Thank you. I just had to pick your brain on that.
Sophie Glaser: Sure.
Jan Mundorf: Interesting one is content, right? You’re working with a lot of content. You tell a lot of stories. Gated or not and why?
Sophie Glaser: Gated or not. Two opinions on that. Gated content really helps to get more qualitative leads because even if they only have to enter an email address, that’s a starting point, right? Me personally I would differ between content which is qualitative and kind of meets the expectation of the audience or your user. Then you should get it, right because then the user gets value out of that, so he doesn’t – the user doesn’t necessarily feel that it was a wasted time or a wasted data drop so to say and really values that because they get something out of that.
If you do not have that quality in content or if you are unsure about that the content itself is very helpful for the user, then you should definitely investigate whether it’s good for the brand and the company to gate it or whether it might be useful to have something like Albacross, for example, to identify users in a different way, right? I would differ it along that kind of benchmark, yeah.
Jan Mundorf: Sophie, thanks for elaborating. What’s your favorite way to consume content? I’m really interested. When was the last time you downloaded a whitepaper, you read it afterwards? I have some where I’m like some Gartner reports, for example. I download them and you read them through just in uni maybe, but how is that for you?
Sophie Glaser: I do not download stuff necessarily because I know that I will get a call afterwards. No, actually, I think when I try to educate myself about a new product or – I don’t know – a new functionality or stuff like that, I tend to – if I’m really interested, then I tend to address the salespeople more directly on LinkedIn, for example, or over the website because then I’m more interested in getting to know the product and then a demo would be much more helpful than investing my time into the whitepaper, but when it’s more about education, then I prefer not the content provided by a company but rather any blog article, any network, any whatsoever to educate myself, yeah, but the typical – I download some whitepaper where I’m unsure whether that’s high quality content. I’m doing that myself or we are doing that a lot in our company. I know what happens afterwards, so I try to avoid that actually.
Jan Mundorf: Yeah, cool. Thanks for sharing. You work very closely with your sales team, and you try your best to help them just as they like to help you the best way. When do you decide and pass an account over to sales? How does that work for you?
Sophie Glaser: It differs quite significantly if your high intended leads to having someone just racing ahead, hey I want to talk to you. I want to get a demo. I want to test the product. Then we hand over the lead immediately to our inbound SDRs or to our account executives. Then we have crazy conversion rates and there’s no need of any nurturing sequence for example, but just turning it over and letting them do their job basically. If we are talking more about low intentional leads like education leads, for example, downloading a new whitepaper or checklist or whatsoever, then we, yeah, experimented a lot with that at the beginning.
We just handed that over to our outbound SDRs and then they gave us the feedback hey, leads from that content asset were pretty, pretty good. We want to have them right away or leads from that kind of content class don’t perform that well there. It might be more worthwhile sending them to a nurturing – lead nurturing sequence, for example, so it’s more about [20:54]. In general, I would say. As long as we have a unique address and unique contact so to say, we are tending more towards handing it directly except if we see any pattern, for example, to specific content areas which don’t perform, then there are follow-up nurture sequences trying to, yeah, let’s say focus on the right leads so to say.
Jan Mundorf: Sounds like a marketing machine you’re building there.
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, and that’s pretty cool, actually. Having a up and running marketing machine – inbound marketing machine for SMEs, that’s pretty, pretty cool.
Jan Mundorf: Cool. What do you think sales can learn from marketing?
Sophie Glaser: I can only talk about – or maybe both. I think both inbound and outbound marketing – sales, sorry, outbound sales can –
Jan Mundorf: It is marketing at the end.
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, maybe. I think two things. One is I’m really looking at the sale process as a funnel and be very precise on the funnel conversion rates and maybe some second-level KPIs to nail it down because especially for inbound marketing, my ideal future would be that you can hire anyone and then the person gets a playbook with the hierarchy of questions you need to ask and you need to answer on the other side and then you get the most – highest potential of closing that deal because it’s pretty, pretty straightforward because you get a very unified user or prospect set which are very in line within each other, right?
For outbound sales it’s very similar, especially if we work on educational, low-intentional leads, and I think looking at it more from a funnel perspective and optimizing it more as a funnel and trying to standardize it as much as possible, I think that’s something which could be very helpful. On the other hand, very similar to what I’ve said before for marketing, also, for sales very valid to first understand the segmentation and the story behind your customer and then according to this knowledge optimize your playbook in the end, so these two perspective on a qualitative [23:16].
Jan Mundorf: I took a lot of mental notes. I’m so happy that’s recorded so I can go back and listen to that. Thanks for the advice, though.
Sophie Glaser: Right.
Jan Mundorf: That’s an interesting one, though. You said more and more new people are coming in into marketing. You’re growing your team. You’ve done this before. What would be your first hire and why?
Sophie Glaser: Depends really on the company and if you’re VC funded and which kind of funding stage. Did you start with outbound sales and now adding marketing to the mix or the other way around, so it really depends, but in general, I would say if you’re a tech-driven SaaS company, which you – you are tech driven if you’re a SaaS company, but if you’re a startup, then the first hire should be a very thrilled, motivated junior maybe already mid-level, so at least being very close to the mid-level stage and highly analytical and a person which is not afraid of getting hands dirty, right, and very broadly interested in digital marketing because then you have a first set of scaling your channels at first, so very generic, very general managers I would say.
Jan Mundorf: Great stuff. Obviously, we spoke about it a bit. When you don’t know the whitepaper, you don’t really do that because you know that you get a call. When you’re currently buying software or getting into new software or interested, what would you improve in the way you buy software and what would you change or what do you like right now?
Sophie Glaser: I think very typically for other startups, we have a broad set of software solutions in-house, not built in-house but having so many different suppliers in place and what we experienced lately that all of these different software solutions are perfect in itself but not working very good in a combined way, so I would put more effort in first understanding okay, does the software, of course, offers what I need, but does it work with my current landscape, right? Does it interact in the right way? Is the API suitable? Are there any direct integration [25:41] in use or could be used and so on and so forth.
It’s more about how is the fit in our current software landscape because it’s just simply too diverse maybe also but I guess a lot of – and it will become more diverse for many companies because you have that software solution for bookkeeping, that for HR, people development, that for recruiting, that for – I don’t know – intern log keeping, and so on and so forth. So many software solutions are in there, and I would look to how streamlined they are in between or with each other.
Jan Mundorf: Yeah, that’s a great tip. You do a lot of research before. You’ve got to find out can we even integrate it. Does it work?
Sophie Glaser: Unfortunately, especially that integration part you can research that, but you only experience it real life. In my experience, you only will notice the hiccups and problems in between when you already bought that, and that would be perfect to first understand that part and then buy it, right?
Jan Mundorf: Yeah. Maybe you would like to have more trials or what is it do you want to –
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, or some kind of proof points that the use cases – when software has to interact with each other that the use cases are trustfully built and working.
Jan Mundorf: Yeah, cool. Thanks for sharing, Sophie. This is my favorite part of the entire section already because you are VP, you get prospected and probably hunted down a lot. What’s the craftiest way you have been prospected so far?
Sophie Glaser: Actually, it was you. I wrote you that email that you’re the only SDR I feel very guilty of not answering emails. Still my benchmark. Also, when I’m talking to my outbound sales team, I always refer to you and say these are the emails I found just crazy good. Without being [27:49], right, I think if you feel a strong interest in your use case and really having at least the perception that the other person, the other end took some time to understand your use case, what your current challenges are, is following you in a positive way, so what are you currently doing and then trying to find hooks like your offering could help us there, that’s a good way I would say.
I’m not preferring any channel. It’s not about having five calls and one notification in LinkedIn and then three emails, right, but if the balance between I want to sell you something but I really want to help you, so having that mix between content driven emails and sales driven emails is in a good shape with a personalization approach, right, then I would say that’s the most craftiest way.
Jan Mundorf: Cool, yeah. Thank you so much. I didn’t knew that, so that’s great. Thank you, Sophie. It was fun. I really enjoyed it and cool that I deserved an answer in that case. Of course, you can’t take meetings with everyone that’s personalized to you that’s putting in an effort, but when are you – you think okay, you actually got my interest. I’m actually willing to spend 15 minutes of my time to speak to that person?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah, I think it’s exactly that balance. If I understood or if I have the feeling hey, okay, that person nailed down my use case and then yeah, can – told me how that use case can be solved or be easened or whatsoever, then that’s the moment when I decide hey, okay, that’s something interesting because I wouldn’t go on a call for a product which is somewhat in the future maybe interesting or something, but if I have a top need and that person addressed that in a good way – and that’s the science part of that, how to know the need and how to be on point in terms of timing to address it. That’s crazy complex, but – and then understood hey, okay, this is your need, and this is my solution, then that’s the moment when I would jump on a call and say okay, please explain that to me.
Jan Mundorf: That’s great. Thanks for sharing. You have a lot of things happening over at Vimcar. You’re crazy growing. I think two years’ growth, 120%, so it’s like you’re really going for it right now. What recent developments in [30:31] space are you excited about?
Sophie Glaser: I think it’s more driven out of challenges because the former playbook for inbound marketing doesn’t necessarily work anymore, so PPC prices go through the roof. A lot of people identified inbound as a good revenue channel, so our audience get overwhelmed by all of these acquisition tactics, so I think next level B2B marketing is much more about storytelling, about brand, about content marketing really providing that thought leadership angle to extend out of the [31:13] and not only in between all of these different fleet management solutions, but you have to send out in between all of these variety of software solutions now trying to tackle that same audience and that same market.
I personally think that brand as a growth level will become much more important, and this is something very exciting, especially in Europe because I think in Europe still having startup B2B brands are – is a fairly limited landscape like the very good ones, so I think there’s a lot of room to learn and to expand and to get better. On the other hand, getting so – such a good understanding of the needs of the audience and to address them with the personalization approach in the end and nail that and scale that, that’s two things I think are pretty interesting because I think also inbound marketers have to rethink their way of working because I don’t see any quite significant change in PPC pricing, for example, or any change that less people will target the same audience with similar tactics, for example.
Jan Mundorf: Yeah, thank you so much. I think this draws quite a nice line of where we began our conversation today. How do you find time to focus on the right things?
Sophie Glaser: Yeah. Maybe not the [32:43] answer, but having a glass of white wine in the evening and just go through the inbox and the task list and then be very strict of what is important and what not. That’s one part of the story, but I think it’s even more important if you have that kind of clarity in between a glass of wine or two than to continue and stick to that over the next days because it’s very easy to get distracted because everybody in a startup seems to feel that that a lot of input is coming on your desk every day, a lot of numbers, a lot of insights.
It’s very tickling to make quick moves into one or the other direction, right, but I think it’s much more important to think that through and to stick to your focus. Of course, not over a time cycle of years, right? That would be too romantic and too naïve, right, but not getting too distracted then in daily life. If you have clarity about what is important for you, then you did that for a good reason, right, and to keeping that focus and to not do too much at the same time. I think that’s the only way to go because otherwise you’ve lost – you will lose yourself. Glass of wine in the evening helps I would say.
Jan Mundorf: I love that. I think it’s a great tip, and it’s underappreciated.
Sophie Glaser: Yes, definitely.
Jan Mundorf: Sophie, I would like to give the last words to you. Is there anything you would like to add? Where can people find you? Is there anything you wanted to add, some last words?
Sophie Glaser: First of all, many thanks to you. I’m very happy to be invited and to share some of my personal thoughts on that and many thanks for asking these questions. People can find me on LinkedIn. That’s pretty straightforward. I’m very much looking forward of course working with you furthermore, and let’s see how that goes, right?
Jan Mundorf: Thank you.