Jack Foster

Franco Caporale:

Hello, and welcome to new episode of the DemandGen Club podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Jack Foster, Senior Director of Demand Generation and Marketing Operations at SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is the leading survey platform that enables companies around the globe to turn feedback into action.

Jack has been at SurveyMonkey for two and a half years, and she's responsible for building out the demand generation and marketing operations functions for the enterprise part of the business. Prior to SurveyMonkey, Jack led the demand generation teams at high-growth tech companies like Lever and Arcserve.

So I'm really happy to welcome today, Jack Foster, Senior Director of Demand Generation and Marketing Operations at SurveyMonkey. Jack, I'm really happy to have you as a guest on the episode today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jack Foster:

Thank you for having me. I have to tell you a secret, this is actually my first podcast I've ever been on before, so thank you for that as well.

Franco Caporale:

Wow. I'm honored. So, thanks so much again, to accept the invitation. I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun. So first of all, please tell us a little bit about your history, your background, especially obviously from your career perspective, how did you end up working in demand generation and marketing operation and what you're doing today?

Jack Foster:

Sure. So I am currently the head of global demand generation and marketing operations for the enterprise portfolio of solutions at SurveyMonkey. So we can definitely talk more about that, but I have spent 13 years in marketing and 12 out of those 13 years in marketing at tech companies.

Jack Foster:

I started my career in marketing actually in a completely different space, more in the manufacturing space. I knew I wanted to get into tech early on, and so found a role at a really large company at the time called CA Technologies. They no longer exist. They were acquired a year or two ago, but at the time it was a 14000 person enterprise software company, started their business and mainframe and grew to all types of different solutions.

Jack Foster:

I joined the marketing and communications team as a marketing coordinator to build out their events program for one of the business units at CA Technologies, as well as just, help on marketing projects kind of across the team.

Jack Foster:

It was super interesting because the business unit that I was part of was actually a 100% channel focused. So I was working with channel partners as well as thinking about demand gen throughout the various roles that I held at CA. A couple of years I was in marketing, I ended up working actually more closely with our partners. And this was really when I started to get deeply into what I would call demand generation.

Jack Foster:

At the time, it may not sound like I was doing demand gen, but it was a flavor of it. And then, I kind of progressed from there. So I was working with channel partners to actually build out marketing plans and how they would be attracting customers to resell the products that I was representing for CA. So, regional partners, what could we do to try to create business for our products, but so that they could resell it, so it was a form of demand gen.

Jack Foster:

I had the opportunity to take on a leadership role within the business unit. And then I really did own demand gen. I not only owned this partner marketing piece, but actually had someone on my team who was focused on demand gen at the time. So we were doing both this partner marketing piece, as well as again, trying to create a customer demand that we could then put through our partners.

Jack Foster:

That's when I started to get deep into what demand gen is known as today. This was kind of in the era when marketing automation had just started to come onto the scene and was becoming popular. The demand gen funnel from ... The name is escaping me. They're so famous for it. Franco, you've got to help me out here. The famous demand gen funnel.

Franco Caporale:

With all that inbound marketing and then content marketing and the nurturing and all of that?

Jack Foster:

All of that. But the one that was created by one of the top analyst groups out there, the name is-

Franco Caporale:

SiriusDecisions?

Jack Foster:

Yes. SiriusDecisions. Thank you. Man, that was a little bit of a forget moment there, but yes, the SiriusDecisions funnel had just really started to make its way onto the scene. And that's when I really started to see how important kind of the analytics and creative and process with sales, how important those aspects were. And I really loved it and really was interested in just continuing to learn more and to get more experience in this area.

Jack Foster:

And so in 2012, I decided I wanted to make my way into venture capital. I started to look for roles at startups within the Bay area. And I landed the first director of demand gen role for a company called Lever that had just as I was joining, announced, we announced our series B and we were about 60 people large, really looking to have that high growth trajectory.

Jack Foster:

So I had the opportunity to take on the demand gen function as my primary role and build out the team and included marketing operations as well. So, that was fun. And, we can definitely talk about that more. I mean, I knew that demand gen was going to be such a critical part to scaling a company like that. And so it was absolutely just a blast being able to work on that for the two and a half years that I was at Lever.

Jack Foster:

And then I decided that I wanted to kind of do something like that again, and the opportunity to build out the demand gen function and marketing operations function occurred at SurveyMonkey. And, for the listeners, I know that SurveyMonkey is a very well-known organization. We've been around for over 20 years, but the bread and butter of the company had really been on the self-serve side of the business.

Jack Foster:

And over the last two and a half years that I've been at SurveyMonkey and before that, but we've really been putting the acceleration on building out our enterprise part of the business, which is of course where the demand gen piece comes in. So it's been really fun and a fun ride, again, just building out the team, building out the function here. So that's kind of the history, but it's obviously been part of my career really throughout, as I said, the last decade or so, but with a major focus on demand gen over the last five years as I've been leading teams.

Franco Caporale:

And so at SurveyMonkey, how big is your team on the enterprise side? Because like you said, most of the people that are familiar with the self-serve consumer side, from enterprise perspective, how many people, how big is that side of the organization?

Jack Foster:

So when I started, my team was four people large, including me, and today we're 21 people large. So we have a global demand generation and marketing operations team. We are organized around our three pillar strategy that our business is focused on. So we're focused on bringing feedback solutions to market. You want to collect feedback at scale and we want it to enable companies to be able to do that and take action on that feedback.

Jack Foster:

We have solutions that enable organizations to do that kind of across any use case that you can think about but we also have a focus on customer experience solutions, as well as our market research solutions. And so that's how my team is organized. And then I have a marketing operations function that is actually horizontal across those three pillars. And we're building a business over here and it's been really fun to build that out.

Franco Caporale:

And tell us a little bit about the marketing operation side of the business. What's your tech stack? What kind of platform are you using and how are you making them work together?

Jack Foster:

So our business has a lot of tech across the organization. So I will focus more on the tech that my team uses and/or owns, but this is by no means just the only tech that we have, it's just more what I would call our enterprise tech stack. At the core of everything we do we have HubSpot for marketing automation and Salesforce, of course, as our source of truth.

Jack Foster:

So, that's the center of it all. We, from a webinar perspective, leverage ON24. You can imagine 2020 virtual events has been a big part of our mix. And actually even before 2020, we had created a flagship enterprise program called Curiosity Conference Virtual that we launched in 2018 to, again, bring our portfolio enterprise portfolio of solutions to market. So ON24 has been a big part of our mix.

Jack Foster:

From an ABM perspective, we've been leveraging Sendoso and we have just recently purchased and are implementing Terminus. So, continuing to build out our muscle there. And then from a kind of data perspective, we leverage ZoomInfo and DataFox for data pending, list-building, enrichment all of that good stuff. So, that's kind of the core of what we're using from a marketing perspective.

Jack Foster:

Of course, we partner super closely with our sales and sales operations team. And so, we're also on that side of the house using tools like RingCentral and Outreach, and that's kind of the central of our enterprise tech stack hub.

Franco Caporale:

And if you look today, so you mentioned some ABM and some other kind of aspects of your tech stack, but if you look on all your pipeline today, your opportunities, your leads, what are your top lead sources? Where are they coming from? What do you see as some of the strategies or tactics that are really working?

Jack Foster:

I mean, I think that this question is always really interesting. Everyone's like, what channel is the best channel? Where do you get the best leads from? And, I think you have to actually take a step back and it really does come down to your strategy and the content that's fueling your programs and just what you're actually giving that's of value to the market.

Jack Foster:

So I think when it's a channel question, you can kind of take it from a tactical point view and I will answer you, but I always like to take a step back when I get asked that question, because I think it's important to realize, if you don't have the right offers and the right mechanisms just to measure what's working and if your messaging is working in place, then it doesn't really matter what you're doing from a channel perspective. That's kind of the foundation to get it right.

Franco Caporale:

Of course, but if I ask you in a different way, if I give you a half a million dollar today, where would you spend it?

Jack Foster:

Well, I think that any demand gen or growth marketer knows that paid search is usually a great channel to get high intent leads from, right? I think it's one of those channels that you can turn on and continue to test and optimize into. So that's always going to be a big part of our mix, but for us, we have a pretty healthy mix of activities that are going on from an enterprise perspective.

Jack Foster:

We definitely market on LinkedIn and see that as part of both our kind of traditional demand gen strategy, as well as a way to engage target accounts. So it's kind of two in how we're leveraging LinkedIn and other social channels. Facebook, we definitely have doubled down, as I said, we've been leveraging Sendoso.

Jack Foster:

So we've been thinking about how direct mail or, I don't know if you call kind of the digital direct mail and offers that you're able to do through Sendoso direct mail, but we've definitely been thinking about that as part of our ABM strategy and channel, a channel that we leverage. As I said, virtual events, it's kind of been interesting in 2020. I'm sure Franco you've talked to other demand gen marketers that have an opinion on this.

Jack Foster:

We've been having kind of mixed results with virtual events throughout this year where we've seen ... It's been really hard, right? We did have an events program that was successful for our business, and it was definitely going to be part of our mix in 2020 and just like everyone else, we had to pivot from that and figure out how we were going to either bring those to be virtual or redeploy that investment into other channels that were working.

Jack Foster:

But virtual events we have seen success with. We've hosted some of our own, which, I'm happy to go into details around because I think we've had some really great learnings from our own virtual summits that we've been hosting. Where we've not seen so much success is honestly on some sponsorships where we've seen companies kind of just try to take their event and make it virtual.

Jack Foster:

So there might be a trade show booth that you're sponsoring, quote unquote. We haven't really seen those types of sponsorships been successful, honestly. Where we have been seeing success though is where we've done some of these more intimate virtual events. And, when you're able to have more of a real conversation, engage the right type of title, even if it's only 10 or 15 people, those have actually been more successful for us then some of these larger sponsorships.

Jack Foster:

So definitely continuing to think about events as part of our mix, but just being really thoughtful, I guess, in terms of the types of opportunities that we're looking at. And then, I have to give it up for email as well. I think that email sometimes gets forgotten as a channel that can really work for you.

Jack Foster:

And, we as marketers know that having a solid nurture program in place and continuing to try to engage leads that you've already created, there's sweat equity that goes into that, but it's by kind of all other ... It's free otherwise, you're not spending a ton of money to do that. And we've been really thoughtful about how to leverage email this year as well, and are seeing some great results from the nurture programs that we've been setting up there.

Jack Foster:

So I would say we definitely have a healthy mix. I mean, I'll go back to answer your question, paid search you're always going to see, higher intent leads potentially coming from that. But I think you need to have a mix so that you are filling top of funnel and, continuing to engage and build those relationships as you're trying to grow a business.

Franco Caporale:

Is there a particular campaign example that you can share with us that has worked out really well for you, or maybe it was a particular theme or a combination of channels or a strategy behind that was really successful and it can be at SurveyMonkey or even in previous roles?

Jack Foster:

Yeah. I mean, I have so many different campaigns that I've worked on in my career and I love it. I have to say it's probably one of my favorite things to do is think about an integrated campaign strategy. It just really fires me up to be thinking through that. So two that come to mind this year for SurveyMonkey, we were just talking about virtual events and this past October, we held our first ever customer experience impact summit, where we actually announced our new customer experience platform, the GetFeedback platform.

Jack Foster:

And so we created big virtual events that had everything from product keynotes to thought leadership to even practitioner type of sessions included. And I can't take a ton of credit for this event. This was definitely all done by my team. And they did an incredible job bringing this over the line, in this crazy environment that we're all in right now. And especially for a first time pancake for us, if you will.

Jack Foster:

I mean, it was awesome. We beat our registration numbers. We had high engagement from an attendance perspective. We set pipeline goals specifically for this program. And, we are on track to more than beat those in the timeframe that we set to beat them. So, I think it just goes back to the team was really thoughtful about the type of content that was going to be highlighted. We worked really closely with all of our cross-functional partners in marketing to think about how we promoted this event, to how we could engage influencers and our speakers to promote it. How we can engage sales.

Jack Foster:

And everyone just really rallied around it to kind of make it the big thing that we did in October. And so really excited about what we've been able to do there and the results that we're seeing. And again, most of the credit goes to the team, but that was a really fun campaign to see come to fruition. And then from a market research perspective, we've been running some custom account-based marketing campaigns.

Jack Foster:

And so again, earlier this year, it kind of started with a product announcement. We launched our experts solutions within our market research portfolio of solutions. And this allows basically companies to go out and concept test in an agile way. So let's say you have a product that you're going to be, like a CPG product, for example, that you're going to be bringing to market.

Jack Foster:

And you want to get really fast agile research on if this packaging is going to do better than that packaging, right? This is the type of solution that you could use to run those types of tests. And so, there's obviously a lot of different types of companies that could find value in this. And if you actually take a step back and think about that type of market research could take you a really long time and a lot of money to do, in just kind of the previous way that market research has been done.

Jack Foster:

So this is definitely a huge value to get to insights very quickly. So we created a custom ABM campaign for different verticals and even sub verticals within those verticals. So, if you think about CPG, there's food and beverage or beauty, and we created custom content. And even down to showing what specific concept tests could look like for that vertical, we created high value offers that our sales team was able to go out with like, being able to offer something in exchange for some time.

Jack Foster:

Obviously talking about the value of the solutions as well, and this has just been a stand out campaign for the team. Again, it's all because it's really something that has been working in concert across the marketing organization. It's demand gen working with brand and content and creative and sales to get it all right. But that has been just another really fun one to see come to fruition. And of course, we're thinking about how we can continue to develop both of those programs for the future. So those are two that come to mind right off the bat.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. And now that we are to closing the 2020, we're closing the year, and a lot of marketing departments are in planning mode for next year, wow's your 2021 plan coming along? What is on your bucket list for next year?

Jack Foster:

I mean, I think that we definitely want to continue to double down on things that we saw work in 2020. So some of the programs that I just mentioned, we're thinking about doing those again next year. I think that it all starts with understanding kind of what the core value that you're bringing to market is. And that has changed to some degree. I mean, not fundamentally in all areas of our business, but if you think about kind of how the world has changed in 2020, our customer's needs have changed and we've had to be agile and change how we're meeting our customer's needs because they're needing to change how they're meeting their customer's needs.

Jack Foster:

So for us, I think it's continuing to figure out how we can bring value to organizations as we continue to navigate kind of this unpredictable environment that we're in. So we can do that through creating valuable content, creating valuable solutions. One thing that comes to mind for our surveys business is, we see an opportunity to help organizations with return to work and maybe return to work is even too narrow, but just, how do you reimagine and think about kind of the future of the workplace and what has COVID meant for how companies think about a remote workforce, or how you keep employees engaged.

Jack Foster:

And so we've created solutions to meet the needs of our customers who are trying to navigate this, that need help and direction. You can imagine feedback plays a really big role in how companies can keep a pulse on what their employees need, right? That's kind of core to, I think how you can be agile is collecting feedback from your right stakeholders. So for us in 2020, getting back or 2021, getting back to your question, I think that's really what's key for us.

Jack Foster:

It's like, how can we make sure that we're bringing just the right set of offers that our customers need to market? How can we make sure that we have awareness around those? What's the right content that we need to create? And then, you can obviously think about the channel mix and how you get that out. But that's probably top of mind is just continuing to make sure we're meeting customer's needs in this kind of, again, crazy times that we're in.

Franco Caporale:

And in fact, from a goal perspective, I don't know how many departments or companies hit their goal in 2020, but I'm assuming a lot of them are now looking to really grow next year or at least going back. Do you see that trend as, do you have pretty aggressive goals for next year? Or how is that trending on your side?

Jack Foster:

Yeah. I mean, we're always looking to see how we can contribute from a marketing perspective to the business. So definitely, working across the organization to figure out what marketing's contribution is going to be. I mean, we have been able to be a big contributor throughout 2020. And I think, we've been able to be at kind of the center of some of this agility that's needed to happen.

Jack Foster:

It's kind of the go to market teams, right, that have to pivot quickly to meet the needs of these customers. So, yes, I mean, marketing will continue to be a big contributor to our business. And, it's something that I'm very passionate about in demand gen, is making sure that we are aligned to the pipeline and booking goals for the organization.

Franco Caporale:

Which is a perfect introduction for my last question, which is how do you relate to your sales counterpart in the sales department, how you guys are remaining aligned throughout all the different programs and all the different strategies, channels that are being run, how do you maintain that alignment? What kind of process do you adopt to make sure of that?

Jack Foster:

I mean, that's a great question. And I think I view my partnership with sales and my ability to collaborate with sales as one of the most important aspects of my role. I will start by saying we have incredible leaders in the sales organization at SurveyMonkey. We've been so lucky or, it's been intentional that we have these leaders. I shouldn't say the word lucky.

Jack Foster:

It's been intentional that we have incredible leaders who really view marketing as a partnership. So, that definitely sets kind of the tone just from the start in how our teams should work together. Our goals are aligned and that's really, I think, where it starts. You need to understand, I mean, we've been very successful in being able to say, this is what the inbound goal is going to be, here's what our outbound goal is going to be. This is what we're expecting from the AEs, get everybody rallied around these goals.

Jack Foster:

And then, you're measuring against that and you're communicating on a regular basis how you're doing against that goal. I have several forecast meetings every single week in partnership with sales leadership to communicate out, how we're doing against our goals and make sure that we're, again, pulling the levers that we need to, to be successful. And so it starts with the goals.

Jack Foster:

And then I think, from there, it's obviously ongoing communication and collaboration, and I think holding each other accountable is what it comes down to. So, like I said, I've been so lucky to work with some incredible leaders on the sales side. And I think, we all have that kind of common mission that we're going after together and we all recognize that. So let's set the goals, let's get after it and let's have some fun and keep communicating as we're doing it.

Franco Caporale:

Fantastic. I want to ask you one more question before leaving, which is, can you share with us one recommendation or advice coming into the new year to other people leading demand generation team, what do they need to do to ensure that they can hit their goal and be successful next year?

Jack Foster:

Just being agile is probably one of the biggest learnings of 2020. It's just, you can't plan for a lot of the things that have happened throughout this year. I'm not saying you don't have a plan, right? Of course, you need to plan and have an understanding of where you want to go and some of the ways that you're going to get there, but I think you also need to build into your plan that things may change.

Jack Foster:

And I mean, we even have data that shows that companies that have been able to be more agile throughout this pandemic, are set up for success or they're understanding their customer's needs more quickly. And that's what customers demand right now. And that's what they're expecting. And so I think that's probably it, is just be agile. I'd also maybe follow up with have a bias toward action.

Jack Foster:

I think, especially in demand gen you can spend a lot of time doing a lot of analyzing and of course you want to understand your metrics and what you need to be measuring and stuff. But I would also recommend just be agile, have a bias toward action, make a decision, see if something works, if it doesn't, move on and figure out why it didn't. But I think companies that are able to do that and teams that are able to do that are just set up for success.

Franco Caporale:

Fantastic. Jack, this has been such a pleasure. Thanks again for spending time with us today.

Jack Foster:

Thank you so much for having me. This was lots of fun.

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