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Franco Caporale:
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Demand Gen Club podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Fanette Jobard, Senior Demand Generation Manager at JFrog. JFrog's mission is to transform the way enterprises manage and release software updates. With more than 6,000 customers, JFrog is the leading DevOps platform that empowers developers to code high-quality application that securely flow to end-users without interruptions. At JFrog, Fanette is responsible for driving sales opportunities and revenue in North America, through integrated campaigns. Prior to JFrog, she had a chance to build lead generation engines for company like Docker, Algolia and more recently Sqreen as their Head of Demand Generation. So I'm really happy to welcome today Fanette Jobard, Senior Demand Generation Manager at JFrog.
Fanette, I'm very excited to have you on the episode today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Fanette Jobard:
Well, thanks for having me.
Franco Caporale:
So I want to start right away. Tell us a little bit about your story, your background. Where did you work? What was your role and tell us about what's your role today and what's your company?
Fanette Jobard:
So I started my career in analytics and media research. So, I would say heavy stylistic centric roles in France, and at one point I moved to us several years ago. When I moved to the U.S., I was looking for a job where I can put in practice that data driven mindset and naturally demand generation and growth marketing, they were kind of the next logical steps. So I started doing growth marketing for Docker, at the time it was a small startup. Then I own Demand Generation at Algolia from 10 million ARR to over 15 million ARR, and so really moving up-market with the company. More recently, I worked at series A, a startup where I led Demand Generation, Sqreen. Even more recently, one month ago, I joined JFrog in the demand generation team to own the integrated campaigns and the marketing in North America.
Franco Caporale:
Can you tell us a little more about JFrog, your current company, how big it is? Who's in your team and what are your exact responsibilities there?
Fanette Jobard:
JFrog is a newly public company. I would say, it's a pretty big startup. I think there's more than 700 employees all over the world. The team that you mentioned is about 15 people with amazing leadership, and we are covering any kind of channel in terms of demand gen.
Franco Caporale:
And so now you're working in this more established, larger company or startup. I mean, still, I don't know if you can define as a startup and JFrog, but a definitely a more established company. So how was the impact of joining a company like this after having worked for series A, series B, more early stage companies before, and how did your approach change?
Fanette Jobard:
So, I was really... I have done demand gen for all the over different stages and I wasn't missing the pre IPO to public stage. And what I was geeky about was to understand how the demand gen changed, based on what kind of company you're promoting, what kind of product you're promoting. So you don't do the same demand gen in a series A startup as a public company. And that was really what motivated me to join a bigger team. As you, work in a bigger team, you think more strategically and also collectively, so it's no longer in your own ownership, but it's more like how do you work with a team to shape the campaigns and, and track the results as well.
Franco Caporale:
In terms of your daily operation or how do you implement this program? How do you see? How do you see the differences?
Fanette Jobard:
In terms of the daily operation, I would say so really... so when I think of the day, a big leap from the series A to be a public company. In the series A as its demand gen marketer. You're usually one of the first marketers, so you tends to own a lot of stuff. You're, you're owning the marketing operations, you're owning the digital aspects of marketing. You're owning also some other channels working closely with products. In a public company, you're a little bit less operational and more strategic and really, it's more like about how do you project, manage a campaign and have all the different elements of that campaign coming together.
Franco Caporale:
So there's a lot of project managing in the larger company versus actual execution directly and kind of moving things forward. Is that correct?
Fanette Jobard:
yeah, exactly.
Franco Caporale:
And in terms of how... I want to know a little bit about your favorite tech stack, and I assume, in previous company you might have provided input about what tech stack you use, how does it work as you join a larger company?
Fanette Jobard:
So, I was pretty close to marketing operation for all my previous roles. It's pretty, of a new role is actually pretty new for me because I'm not owning the marketing operation, but I need to work with people that are expert in that domain. The, tech stack, the main difference is that, I would say, when you join a smaller startup, you have to build this tech stack. So it's really a matter of building for efficiency. You don't always have an extensive budget in order to build your tech stack, but the startup will grow.
Fanette Jobard:
So how do you build for efficiency and for the long term. In a bigger company, your tech stack is often a legacy. So you have some piece of this stack that are from all the teams, but also something you have also an internal teams that are building in-house. The equivalent of some tools that are your approach that you're purchasing. So for example, I'm thinking a pretty simple use case when you're in a small startup, you always purchase some kind of landing page. Builder when you're lacking a bigger startup. You usually have a design and integration team that is building some kind of spinning page template for you. And you can upscale your demand gen page on these templates
Franco Caporale:
And there's a lot of outsourcing in series A and series B companies.
Fanette Jobard:
Exactly, yeah and then you'll have to switch all your ads in order to do a little bit of everything. So remember doing some email design, it's still funny when I received the email of like really companies and it's still my design from five years ago. So that's always like a-
Franco Caporale:
Yeah. They don't get updated very often. Tell us some names in terms of what you guys are using as platform that helps you on your daily work or to build campaigns.
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah. So, I will probably speak of my previous experience because JFrog is pretty new. So a classic stack, we'd say Marketo and Salesforce, like the central piece of the stack. They are obviously communicating with, be sure to track and assign to own what we call the sales marketing end of process. And then around those two tools, you have a bunch of satellites tools. So depending on how you want to build your stack, you obviously will need, Webinar tool, so I know a JFrog, we have 24, and then you can also like add over a gravitational tools. One tool that I really enjoy working with was MadKudu predictive scoring tool and engine. And I know that now they have more advanced features that are like even predicting the revenue channel by channel. That's pretty cool in terms of reporting. You have the attribution piece. So if you have market over there, always, they will bundle Marketo and Bizible , but you have also LeanData, which is doing an amazing work in making your attribution more visible.
Franco Caporale:
Which leads me very well into my next question. Because I know you are very strong about attribution and you focus a lot of the time and you believe in very clean attribution. So I want to know, what do you recommend, what's your advice to track this level of attribution, particularly at the top of the funnel where sometimes it's very hard to track. Even more if there're offline channels, like I don't know if you guys ran billboard campaigns or if you do anything that is not digital, how do you track that?
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah, now that's an excellent question. I would say with attribution, always keeping in mind that the simpler is always the better, because even if you're thirsty for more advanced attribution model, you will still have to explain attributions to the execs, to the sales team, and really in these cases always done the simpler, the better. Don't over complicate your attribution. You don't do attribution the same way for a series A startup as a series C or a more advanced startup. But I would say, really tracking the first touch is always key, at least for you on the demand gen team, because the first touch is always where you spend the money in the first place. So it could be an event, could be, as you mentioned, the billboard, it could be your Facebook ads. So really you need to be as close as, the money as possible.
Fanette Jobard:
And, and being able, to track that. For digital ads, it's really down to the UTM parameters. It's still one of the best way to track the interactions, of course it has its limits. I'm working with a DevOps audience and devOps for ads. And those people love ad blocker. And so sometimes you're just removing like the UTM tags from a URL. So sometimes you're losing maybe 15% to 20% of your attribution, but really UTM parameters are key to track the offline channels. So I would say in the events scenario, it's always good to have a demand gen person at the booth and making sure the sales are tracking people or we're all recording the business cards properly.
Fanette Jobard:
So how we can ease that process or even create some kind of incentives for sales to enter the leads in the system. So that way you can track your ROI of the event and if it's worth to renew the event. For the billboards it's pretty tricky, so I think it's down to the promotion code. If you have a promotion code, it's something you can't really... I remember, trying to track geo-located visits to the region of the billboard in San Francisco. You have to accept that it's really working for your awareness. And then you're curious a bunch of things. Do you want to, you'd like to track.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, I guess at that point it becomes more of a correlation that you dry. Right. And see that when you started running the billboard, maybe your traffic went up and other metrics that you can see they're correlated, but it's not going to be a direct attribution at that point.
Fanette Jobard:
I remember when you were doing some partnership with conferences, I think you can, with the tracking of the IP address, you can narrow down to a specific neighborhood. And I remember one of our partners mentioned the company name on stage on the Moscone center and immediately seeing all those Moscone IP address connecting to the websites in Google Analytics was like a good indicator of the awareness that the events drove.
Franco Caporale:
That's awesome way to correlate the traffic and the source. So from the attribution, I want to understand a little more your approach to ABM because that also obviously involves attribution. You talked about MadKudu, lead scoring and everything. Do you guys track attribution and scoring also at the account level? And what is your approach to ABM versus inbound marketing and content marketing?
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah, so on the ABM side, it's the same as attributions that was really kept simple. So it was more like building a target at list of targeted accounts and tracking those targeted accounts all along the websites, on all the different interaction with all brands.
Franco Caporale:
So for the attribution in particular, at least in my opinion, it gets very tricky when you're trying to decide... you have multiple people from that account that are engaging across different campaigns. How do you, weigh that? Because if it's a junior marketing person in the same company is different than the VP and maybe they come from different channels, how do you weigh that engagement at the campaign level when you look at the account instead of leads?
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah, no, totally. So in terms of ABM, so you're obviously targeting different personas. The idea is to really penetrate the accounts and then having different piece of content, having different assets towards the different persona of the account. So for example, for products like Patagonia or JFrog is really, you can target the developer as you can target at the same time, the VP engineering. So of course they won't reply to the same kind of asset and offers. How do you track that? ABM is also a partnership with the sales, so you have really also to partnering with them and track their interactions. So you have to think about two timelines.
Fanette Jobard:
The timeline of marketing and demand gen interaction from the accounts and the sales interaction to the accounts. And it's a mix of those two interactions. So maybe the accounts really created an opportunity just after one of your webinars, but just that there is opportunity. There is that an over opportunity it maybe an upsell opportunity that has been created by the sales. So it's really a matter of, I would say accepting the sales as part of the demand gen team and exec team. The demand gen team as being part of a sales team and having that integrated timeline of all the different touches on the accounts.
Franco Caporale:
And so tell us more about how you work with the sales team to coordinate this and orchestrate these campaigns. And I'm sure there is a difference again, between this early stage startup and, and established company, but like what is, what is a good best practice to make this thing work?
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah. When you're in a series A company, your demand gen is really part of... I would say almost part of a sales team. So we are working closely with your team and the sales leadership. You're also creating your goals, targets revenues, depending on their own groups. So if they plan to hire, four min market execs, you need to adjust to a dimensioned planning in order to be able to feed those forming markets accounts exec. And you really need that close connection. So attending all the meetings, trying to connect with them, obviously with the COVID situation It's pretty hard to be in the same room, the same open space in the head , that energy cell synergy with you, but like really trying to connect with them as much as possible. On a bigger company it's really down to the sales team is also more complex.
Fanette Jobard:
So it's divided into different teams, sometimes into different parts where you're mixing different sales role and you also have sales specialized by product. So really identifying who's doing what, how do you communicate with them proactively? So it's like being proactive on the communication side and essentially on the accounts. So in bigger company, there is chance that we already have some contacts on the accounts we're targeting. So really keeping them in the loop of all the different initiatives. The sales time is precious because it's really a factor of money, so time is money. So you don't want to have them lose the very time of reading your emails. So you have to find the best way of communicating with them, showing in their meeting, organizing some kind of curatorial IPO, where would them to connect.
Franco Caporale:
Do you think it works better when the SDR reporting to marketing or it makes it easier or it doesn't change much.
Fanette Jobard:
This is, a good question. I once asked myself that question because I found myself in smaller startup, where I was doing the marketing operation or owning the marketing sales end off. You have a feeling of working 50% of your time with SDRs directly mentoring them, answering their questions, being proactive on the campaign when you shipped. But I think SDR should really stay under sales. So why is that? It's because they are a sales role and they are like a temporary role. And so I think if they want to progress in the company, learn new things, become an AE, they need to be mentored by sales leadership and not marketing leadership. So they should for very personal and career growth, they should stay under sales management. And then I think it's also good for them to be in under sales managements, because they are also a sales marketing link, pushes marketing to connect with the sales, build that relation with the SDR beyond that marketing operation hygiene, and really connect with the sales team.
Franco Caporale:
Awesome. Yes, I see that working pretty well, especially if there is enough alignment between demand generation and sales, then it works really smoothly. I want to also ask you about events because obviously 2020 has been a very particular year for events. And now we see all these virtual events popping up everywhere. A lot of companies have relocated budget to virtual events. I want to know, what's your opinion on these virtual events and how you do planning next year? Is it going to be all virtual events again, or are you hoping at some point to the location budget to some live events?
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah, so I'm proud of my year. When I did some planning for 2020 last year, I was thinking of allocating to all my even budget for Q1 2020, and essentially in January and February. And I felt it was kind of dis balanced, but I kept that budget that way. So I'm proud because I did and invested in sponsorship leader this year. So I'm probably one of the only a demand gen person that made revenue from physical events in 2020. But then the strategy moved toward more like digital events. It's really amazing to see how the marketing teams adapted. And I still have a lot of friends that are working in field events, field marketing, and that switched everything to webinars. So we were doing more demand generation than even marketing nowadays. And so I've seen a movement where we had a wave of creating more webinars, workshops to being creative with the different online formats.
Fanette Jobard:
And it was pretty successful until I would say recently until September. And since September, and I've seen that in a lot of... And so all the other friends working in demand gen. I think we noticed some kind of online even fatigue. And so that will be challenging for next year. I think that, fatigue can be explained by the competition. There is so many new webinars and we are not only competing now against B2B webinars, but we are also competing against online therapy session, or homeschooling, online classes, a bunch of other stuff I don't know of. Not only demand gen podcasts, I don't know the only like B2B marketing related. And so competition is really tough and we need to be more creative for next year. So strategy, I think next year will be to still keep a high pace in terms of webinar, but also be sure we created a lot of content.
Fanette Jobard:
And so what about like optimizing what we already created and repackage, redigest it in a different format. So next year we'll be, ... Part of that will be to keep that pace of virtual events, repackage, what have been existing secure. And also why not create some kind of hybrid formats, where you can have maybe the speakers in a room, rent a hotel, some room where you can social distance, have the speakers there, record the session and then create some kind of online event where people can attend. So yeah, I'm really curious to see what it will be the strategy for overs next year in terms of online event. I think these,
Fanette Jobard:
we've been our effects a little bit concerning. I'm so curious to see if it's just this season or if it's a long term.
Franco Caporale:
You don't think that live events are a thing of the past. Like people seem to be pretty eager to go back to meet in person in conferences and trade shows.
Fanette Jobard:
Yeah. Hopefully they're another thing in the past. But I think, with COVID, we will have to be careful at least until mid next year. So once committing to it like any live event before I would say will be tough, but the first part of 2021 will be a tough one for live event for sure.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, I think so, too. So if there is one last takeaway that you can share with us, one advice or recommendation or something that you wish you would have known when you started your career, when you started in your last role at JFrog, what would that be?
Fanette Jobard:
I will say one advice when embracing the dimensioned narration courier is accepting chance. So I'm using the word chance and not luck because a bunch of campaigns, you have tacky results, and sometimes you have accidental fear and chance is always part of your campaign. Taking some examples, we have the webinars, and virtual events we're working super well. I would say in Q3 and they're not working as well in Q4. So you're trying to reproduce something that is successful and that for some reason won't work and sometimes you'll have also happy accidents. Having a campaign, planning your campaign and things are not going as you expect and it's part of the game. Taking one example of my most famous, happy accidents. It was a highly targeted reactivation campaign on emails. And we were using, sending marketing emails, pretending to send on behalf of SDRS. Using the person first name, the company name for highly personalized emails.
Fanette Jobard:
During that time, we had a consultant working for us and that person during maybe 10 hours, that person created some kind of upsets in the Salesforce database. So basically, the name of the people was no longer in front of the right company. And so it was too late, our campaign was scuttle and everything was sent. And so for 10 hours, people will receive email with the wrong company name. So when we realized that, you can guess it was horrible. I was like, "Oh my God."
Fanette Jobard:
And then what happened is that let's say, you're working at SaaSMQL and we send an email pretending you're working at Slack. And so hello, Franco, I think at Slack we'd benefit from our products. What about a demo or a call? And so people send us replies to those emails and they said, okay, I'm not working at Slack. Your database is wrong. And they say, but if Slack is using your product or wants to use your product, I don't see why we shouldn't have a call. And so we had actually generated some calls about those mistakes, like those or re bill emails with miss match between the name of the company and the person. And we created some meetings out of that because people were interested knowing that the competitor was potentially a customer service.
Franco Caporale:
That's a funny one. I know, for example, companies that on purpose, put diapers on the ads to make them more genuine. I don't know if that works all the time, but there is this now trend that if a video ad is over produced or the audio, the ad is over produced, it comes across less in a more artifact. I don't know if that works all the time, but a very cool story. So thank you so much for that. It was really a pleasure talking to you today. And again, thanks for spending time with us.
Fanette Jobard:
Well, thanks for having me as well.