Integrating Service Experience in the Sales Cycle with Kevin Ford of Myriad360

EPISODE SUMMARY

This episode features Kevin Ford, the Head of Marketing for Myriad360. Myriad360 is a leading provider of IT services, specializing in cloud transformation, AI implementation, and security systems. The discussion touches on how Myriad360 targets customers using a hospitality and event-based strategy, integrating the experience of their services early in the sales cycle to help clients extract value.

EPISODE NOTES

Peter: The Next CMO Podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies. And we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The Next CMO is sponsored by Planful for Marketing. A leading marketing performance management solution that automates marketing planning, financial management, and ROI optimization.

And hosted by me, Peter Mahoney, an experienced CMO, CEO, board member, and executive advisor.

In this episode of the Next CMO Podcast, I speak to Kevin Ford. Kevin is the Head of Marketing for Myriad 360. Myriad [00:01:00] 360 is a leading provider of IT services. They help their customers with cloud transformation, with AI implementation, and with security systems. Kevin talks to us about how he targets these customers using a hospitality and event based strategy, how they integrate the idea of experiencing Myriad 360 services as early as possible in the sales cycle so they can help their customers understand how they get value from Myriad as early in the sales cycle as possible, his theories on content and His approach to targeted marketing along with much more.

So I hope you enjoy the show.

Hey, Kevin, thanks so much for being on the Next CMO podcast. And to get us started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Kevin and a little bit about Myriad360.

Kevin: Sure, and thank you Peter for having me on here. So I’m Kevin Ford, I’m the head of marketing at Myriad [00:02:00] 360. Myriad 360 is a global systems integrator. We specialize in data center modernization, cybersecurity, cloud, and artificial intelligence.

Peter: Awesome. Those sound like, frothy businesses these days. So Kevin, tell me a little bit about the kind of target enterprise you go after and the typical decision maker, it will give us a little bit of a sense as we start to dive into some of your thoughts about marketing Myriad360.

Kevin: Yep. So we we really categorize our our target client into two big buckets. So we have the enterprise, which we’re really focused on the mid market. So, organizations that revenues are in the 1 billion to 20 billion range annually and are usually about a thousand plus headcount or mailboxes that support.

And are involved in the organization. And the other bucket is the service provider [00:03:00] segment that the clients that we’re working with are providing a service for their client. So the profile and the, the size, shape, the requirements of the client are very different than the enterprise.

Peter: And what is it about the service provider? Is it they have a similar set of requirements, a similar scale, similar complexity that, that sort of is aligned with the Myriad360 capabilities? Is that a good way to think about it, Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. So, the types of technologies that we provide to each. Client segments vary and are different in how they impact the organization. So service providers are looking for technology that are ultimately going to provide a service to their client and the profile of the client themselves is usually different.

In terms of the level of support they’re looking for and what they’re in need [00:04:00] of so you can just see that the technology we’re actually helping to, helping these folks to select, implement, and optimize are providing an end service to their client. So the the titles, the CTOs, heads of infrastructure they have data centers all over the world.

That we’re helping to fulfill and shift gear to, and, integrate and help to ultimately improve the operation of, and the enterprise, we’re dealing with really all the other industries that map outside of the service provider market and the technologies, what we’re doing is providing a service to their internal, you Technology team and ultimately their staff, like their organization.

So you can think campus, branch, offices there there’s a real big requirement right now for, up leveling cybersecurity. And, technologies similar. So, so at the macro [00:05:00] level, that’s the breakdown. It does go further, it goes a layer deeper than that.

As we go further into the data center and the networking folks, cybersecurity people that are involved in cloud and artificial intelligence tools. But. As you can see from the start here on the marketing side, this definitely does open up doors. This is a whole layer of complexity in that, we’re not selling here at Myriad one, one service, one solution, we’re selling consultancy and our expertise and, we, we need to be able to map that to all of these different types of individuals.

Peter: Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring that up, Kevin, and it’s the idea of packaging and product marketing kind of for the idea of services. And so who does that within the organization? Is that a marketing function? Is that sort of a business line thing? This idea of packaging up the services, trying to articulate the business value of [00:06:00] services, etc.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a great question here. It’s highly collaborative. I think we, we had, there are periods of time here at myriad where. We were the ownership of productization content creation, was either owned by marketing or engineering. And, it really boils down to all of our teams need to be operating at a really high level together to create effective content engagements that are going to provide value to our clients.

And. It needs to be in line with I, I believe what makes Muri 360 different and it’s that, we are part of our job is we are protecting our clients from, we’re boiling the ocean of thousands of technology solutions, that map to all of these different areas.

Right. And, we need to be at the forefront. everyone. And really guiding our clients [00:07:00] in making sure that they’re reading the right things. They’re investigating the right solutions, right? They’re getting into a meeting with us where we’re going to have resources that are going to be, ultimately guiding them down the right path, right?

So what that does is, if you look at a organization that, again, is selling one, software, right, or one product or suite of products, right, you can lock in the strategy. Early in the year, right? And build out content as you go, right? On the back end and you have a good, or, there can be quarterly check ins or whatever, but, from a strategy perspective, it’s on lock and marketing can run with it, right?

An organization like Myriad Technology and, this is what our clients are experiencing. It’s changing daily, right? So, That needs to be something that is coming from both marketing and engineering, because the engineers are the ones that are setting the strategy, right?

And ultimately understanding, hey, the trends in the marketplace, and ultimately providing that service, that value to our clients, that they’re in return for providing the marketing, right? So I [00:08:00] benefit from that as well. And then it’s up to marketing to take that and, produce content that is valuable to our clients.

But The last point I’ll make is like what we refuse to do is take our clients eyes off of their day to day and put out any marketing fluff, right? Like we’re not gonna, we’re not just going to look at something and say, Oh, this is, this is hot. This is new in the market, right?

Like, and go issue a piece of an ebook, right? Or whatever, like we’re actually negating. our value, right? Like, we want to make sure that if we’re going to issue something, if we’re going to do something, it’s going to provide value to the, to, to our client. And there’s a lot of content out there right now that could be argued doesn’t need to be out there.

So, roundabout way of answering your question. Hopefully I covered covered all the

Peter: You you covered a lot there, which is great. And and I wanted to dig into the content thing because that’s I always have a bee in my bonnet about the kind of content that you see in the world. [00:09:00] And you put your finger on the issue, and the issue is this fluff factor that you get with a lot of content.

And it may be fine in some domains where people are trying to get, simple, content to drive SEO for a simple commoditized product that’s very consumer y as an example. Sure, you can have pretty brief things if you’re a travel site and you need someone to write 50 little articles about every little village that someone needs to visit in their travel site or something like that.

But if you’re writing meaningful, technical, if your product and service is meaningfully technical, then you actually have to write something that is meaningfully technical and it has to be accurate. And and that can be a challenge and it sounds like you’re. You’re leveraging your team, carefully, as you mentioned, because they’re also the product.

[00:10:00] And and that’s a really good strategy to to leverage to leverage that team. And it, That sort of that packaging of their expertise is a good way to think about packaging up the value of Myriad360 is by saying that, hey, our, I assume the biggest part of how you differentiate is your expertise.

So the idea of demonstrating that is probably an important part of your strategy. Did I get that right?

Kevin: You nailed it, Peter. Yeah, that is, that’s truly so, and it’s funny and I’ll shift our transition from here into, what makes us different and our differentiators in the market, but one point I’ll make that I thought of there, like, When you’re thinking about, I just, I feel like in the marketing, in the world of marketing, you could get very sucked into tactics and like be thinking, all right, here’s the best practice, right?

Internally, these are the things that are going to work [00:11:00] best on the marketing side. You lose sight of the actual client, right? Like, And it’s funny because when you really start to think, you put the client first, right, you think about what the client needs, like, don’t get me wrong, like, I understand there needs to be a funnel, right, awareness, consideration, right, but it actually becomes, it starts to become less relevant or like doesn’t apply as much, right, when you really start to think about, okay, whatever I’m sitting here looking at right now that I’m going to demand the eyes of, Or a potential client or prospect, right, that’s going to read, needs to be high in value.

It’s like, it does everything, like it’s so, so I always try to push myself what, and there’s a lot of great, not saying these marketing frameworks don’t work, right? But I do think there’s a level of, like, it needs to be also unique to your own business and you need to be leading that, right?

And be able to actually harness it and do that, right? So to kind of transition, like, Part of Myriad’s [00:12:00] differentiator is that we don’t want to like gate and cage up like our resources or our content or our services. Like we want to provide value instantly to clients and prospects, right? So, and we want to do that in a way that is you know, that, that is unbiased and we want to be opinionated, right?

We want to actually bring an opinion to the table. So Myriad. Is I’d mark us, midsize, right? We’re on our way to being a billion dollar organization. We’re growing consecutively year over year. It’s all great. Right? We’ve hired a ton of people and the business is doing great.

Awesome culture. Right? We, there’s stiff competition, right? We have competitors out there that are incredible, right? And what they do day to day and, they have like great teams and maybe the word incredible is a little strong. I might get a, I might get some flack for that, but or good, right?

They’re good at their. They’re adequate, right? And they’re good in their jobs. I’m not going to say they’re not, right? So like, that is not what we’re trying to do, right? And if our client is [00:13:00] getting a good, having a good experience with another team, like, we are going to tip our hats to that and move on, right?

Or we’re going to figure out a way that we can work around or insert ourselves there or whatever, right? We’re not. Now, where Myriad starts to get its edge and kind of talk through some of our differentiators and our competitor, nine times out of ten in deals when we’re competing, the competitors we’re going up against are multi billion dollar competitors, they’re a large, or I’m not going to name the organizations, right, but they’re big competitors, and that’s already our edge.

Right, because clients right now, folks in technology, and this is broad shrug, like, I’m talking very broad right now, but it does these things, these pains, these challenges map across the board, right, they’re under significant pressure. Pressure to keep up with technology. And Peter, we’re keeping up with marketing technology, right?

Imagine, imagine keeping up with [00:14:00] technology for your infrastructure or your cybersecurity, right? Artificial intelligence, like AI, right? And like cloud, the pressure is significant, right? And these technologies are changing every day, right? So also there’s this requirement to do more with less, right?

There’s resource constraints, folks are, they’re being tasked to do more and they need to, in a sense, make things happen in ways that are sometimes unrealistic and it’s part of our jobs to help them to. Articulate and say this is unrealistic, right? And they need to, the last part of it is like, they need to justify the return on investment.

They need to speak. They’re sitting at board. They’re at the board table, right? They’re in the meetings, right? It’s a different conversation. They’re not just speaking technology, they need to speak business, right? So this combination of things, right, what it does is actually creates an environment where these clients are, they’re [00:15:00] longing for a need, a guide, right?

They need a strategic ally that they can rely on, they can trust, it’s going to go above and beyond, put their team first, right? And help them to ultimately select the right solutions For their team, the right technology, boil the ocean, like I said, of, and bring forth the best technology available, implement them at scale and really ensure that they’re getting the maximum return on their technology investment.

Now we do this, right? Where we get, again, our edge becomes, we’re midsize, right? So when you break these things down, I broke them down a little bit. When you actually break them down further, what that means is you need a team that is going to be available and it’s going to pick up the phone, right?

You need a team that, you need an account rep. engineer that’s going to really get to know your business and they’re not going to have to go out and tell their story three different [00:16:00] times to reps that get turned over within their organization. They need to know there’s good retention in the business, right?

And the person they’re working with is going to like be there. In six months, these things sound silly, but they’re they bump up as a priority, right? Especially right now where I went through all of those challenges. So, they need agile flexibility. They need to get in front of technical talent fast in situations where things are critical, right.

Or it could be, or they need to, they don’t need barriers. They don’t want to be on a they don’t want to call a call center. To get a hold of people that are, have their technology in their hands, right? So Myriad, that’s us, right? We client first, we put a concierge service, white glove, right?

We’re extremely responsive and agile in our business. We, we’re pragmatic in how we innovate and we’re very practical in the technologies that we consult our clients on [00:17:00] and they can trust us, so, these things become very important.

Peter: So all of that makes a ton of sense, Kevin. One of the things that must be a challenge though, for you as a marketer, is that anyone can say that, right? So this is, and it’s the perpetual challenge you have when you’re marketing services. is that you can say my services are better. My people are smarter.

My my customer service is better. My, my model is better, but it becomes a little bit challenging to prove and break out if other people are saying the same stuff, because they may be. So how do you deal with that as a marketer to try to prove some of the Sometimes difficult, especially early in the cycle, right?

It may be later on where they’ve experienced you, that’s a little bit different. But early on in the cycle, how do you get people to believe [00:18:00] the message?

Kevin: So, we, so Myriad, as I mentioned, we’ve expanded our business. We’re now we’ve nationally we service clients all over the globe and we’ve had a national presence for, 20 years now. But, most of our intentional efforts from a marketing perspective in our brand existed.

It still exists in the Northeast, so, that’s recently changed. We’ve expanded nationally. We have a a regional team now that sits down covering the Southeast, regional sales director, business business development people marketing folks, right, supporting that region. We’re in the Midwest. We have folks sitting in Chicago, that entire area.

We’re growing that. So we are, so part of what’s helped carry us, right, to to, And I’m going to get into answering your question. In the Northeast, we’ve established a brand for ourselves, right? So it’s become very much about just getting in front of people, right? Getting out there, hosting [00:19:00] events, being involved in industry gatherings, right?

And people know who we are, right? The Southeast, the Midwest, the West Coast, right? We don’t have as an established brand right now. We’re actively working on getting out there. So, where we are focusing, and to your point, it’s not easy, right? This is the challenge and especially to your point around everything I just said sounds good, right?

In, like, It sounds good, right? But when you put it on paper, words they lose half meaning, right? Because it’s not being delivered by a person, right? You don’t have that passion behind it. You’re not sitting in front of someone saying it, right? So, our number 1 goal. Is to make sure that we provide value up front as fast as possible, right?

Like I said, so that’s become the strategy in that, we have solution briefings. We have workshops, we have assessments we’ll get on an initial call and [00:20:00] we’ll quote something out for a client, right? We’ll put together professional services scope of work. We really want to be fast, we’re going to provide the language, right, and the content to say, Hey, this is how we’re different.

But I think it’s more about proving it and to prove it, you got to get in front of people. So to get in front of people, we’ve been very focused on getting out there in the field and hosting events. We do run campaigns digitally. We do a lot with our strategic partners. But it’s, I think it just comes down to being in the right.

Setting to prove it, and people need to experience those things that,

Peter: Yeah it’s interesting, Kevin, because you can definitely, at certain points in a sales engagement or sales cycle you could certainly Architect the sales process in a way that might get them to experience a little bit of myriad along the way. And like you said, whether it’s every step along the way is [00:21:00] is an expression of your brand.

So it’s, how do you respond to an initial proposal request? And you can blow people away with. with the detail, with the speed, with the quality of that kind of material is probably really important. If you’re trying to tell people that, no, we, we actually are smart and we’re fast and responsive. And because you’re, you’ve got the Goldilocks positioning, I suspect, right?

Where you’re not some. a guy or gal in a garage and you’re not, some giant 50 billion dollar, organization that’s probably slow and expensive, right? You’re, you have enough resources to, to get the significant projects done, but you’re nimble enough to be fast is probably the thing.

And you got to prove that along the way. So that’s a little tricky. And you talked a little bit about your, some of your marketing strategies. to to try to get in front of people, especially earlier in this, in the sales cycle. You have [00:22:00] a very, an eventy kind of thing, which may make sense for you, right?

I tend to be wildly against events for almost for almost everybody. But this kind of business is a little bit different because they need to experience your people. It needs to be a a rich one on one kind of thing. And I suspect the contract value is high enough that an average deal size is probably fairly large.

So as a result, it probably makes sense. And, as a point of comparison, my current company where I’m the CMO, we sell products that typically cost a couple of thousand dollars. And and it doesn’t make sense for us to, have one on one hand to hand combat with prospects that much.

We’re, it’s we’re much more digital first as an example. So you have a, you have probably a customer engagement, prospect engagement kind of strategy. [00:23:00]

Kevin: Yeah, and

Peter: referrals are always, are also really important too in your business, right?

Kevin: yeah, exactly. And, that makes sense on the event side, because I was hung up on that for a second. And, I wanted to ask, tell me more about your opinion on events. So, in technology, and I think you hit it. There’s so much networking to be done, right? Like, so much is actually happening in the field.

It’s never ending, right? Like I said, we’re not selling You know, one service or suite of solutions where it’s like the conversation stops, right? Or you hit a point where it’s like, all right, like either I’m going to buy this or I’m not, or, like I already have, I’m already signed up with this, your offering, right?

Maybe I’ll renew, right? See you later. Like we can, like conversations are never ending. So it’s, it becomes a different type of. Engagement at an event, I believe, just to go deeper into that. So, and our clients, [00:24:00] one of the things that we’ve done at Myriad I believe to be a really valuable community category as a service, right.

It is on the marketing side is, we, just like our content, we’ve boiled down the, in our technologies we’re positioning, we’ve boiled down the best, right. We, our clients, I keep saying clients, because these are folks that are actively trading with Myriad, work at Myriad, will rely on us to actually guide them to industry events that are of value, right?

Or they should be at and also they’ll follow our brand. They’ll see if we’re there. Could be a good place for us to be, right? And additional to that, we try to to think outside the box and host our own events. So, whether it’s a suite, it’s a ballgame, right? We will we’ll host things and we’ve done some of the virtual.

We did too many virtual events through the COVID period there is, but we still do some virtual because some folks are, it’s tough to, it’s tough to get out there into different business case when you need to [00:25:00] travel and you’re fixing it hours, right? It becomes different. But events are, I believe to be a top way for us to engage with our clients, develop relationships we’re doing that at scale, right? We’re at all the big in DRCs, AWS events, Cisco that like all the big technology events we were present as well as doing things on a national basis to meet with clients.

But look, it’s, it needs to be well thought out. There needs to be extra rigor, especially when you’re booking a suite that’s 20, 30 grand, right? There needs to be extra rigor around, okay, who are we sending? Who from our team is going to be there? Like, what is the outcome we’re looking for?

So it’s definitely a top focus for us, at least on, on the marketing side to, to get out there and do more. In person, we’re trying to do more virtually as well but I hear you for sure. I think it really needs to apply to the type of business and the conversations and, ultimately the sales cycle and the funnel.

And it’s just technology. It’s just bundled up in networking and the opportunities to a degree are endless. [00:26:00] Right,

Peter: your audience, you have an audience that is marketed to all over the place, right? They’re influencing huge technology budgets in and they’re some of the biggest spenders on the planet. So they’re marketed to a lot. So how do you find a way to do that?

And I’m sure there’s a huge element of trust and referral. I know in my world, I’m sure you see this in sort of the CMO networks, you ask your peers, what are you doing? What, how are you approaching this? God, how are you thinking about this GNI thing? Because my brain is exploding with all these new tools that keep coming out every day.

And you get people to tell you what they’re working on and what their experience is. And that’s, what’s really valuable. And and I think if you can create the opportunity for those conversations to be had and seed the conversations with people who are really happy mirrored 360 customers. That’s a great thing to do.

So in a perfect world you [00:27:00] include your happy customers

Kevin: Right.

Peter: in the discussion and have them help you tell the story in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

Kevin: Exactly. Yeah. 100 percent and we we do a lot of our new business, new clients are by way of referral. We want to make it really easy for clients to introduce us to folks within their network. We also have our client referrals and then we have partner referrals. So, we have hundreds of partners that we work with.

There’s, 30, 40 that are highly strategic to the business. But those partnerships are also a referral source for Myriad because they’re, they’re walking us into the clients, right? They’re making introductions. They’re saying, hey, you got to meet Myriad, right?

They’re a partner of ours. They work with organizations like yours. So it becomes enabling our our clients and our partners. And to your point, it’s definitely a number one way that we acquire new clients here.

Peter: Yeah, I [00:28:00] assume there’s probably A lot of influence that comes from that partner network and networks in general. Networks are super valuable because it’s a way for you to communicate with some affinity group. So if it’s, if it’s a technology provider, as an example, the people who use that technology, and yes, you happen to be someone who is who has proven to successfully implement that technology.

So that’s a natural targeting for you. It’s a network approach. There are other kinds of networks that are super valuable like, PE networks as an example. So private equity firms who have a portfolio of companies, if you make one successful. That’s a natural referral to in that thing.

But the idea of finding these micro segments is a really valuable thing. And it’s almost like a it’s like a variant of [00:29:00] account based marketing. But it’s really. Network based marketing to think about. And do you use that kind of account based marketing strategy, Kevin, in your marketing approach overall?

Kevin: We do, yeah, and just to get 1 last thought out on, referrals and for us, it’s It’s, we want to enable clients and partners, but, harnessing where we’re focused right now is like, how can we actually, clients that have been working with us for years are huge Myriad fans, right?

If we could get a client to an event, right, or to engage in a networking roundtable or join, yeah, I, I’ve been looking into these testimonial video companies. There’s one called I’m actually I think we’re going to be moving forward with. There’s a team that, they make it super easy for clients to talk about their experience with Myriad.

They do this digitally, so instead of having to go somewhere and actually be, [00:30:00] And then we have like, a full production actually being filmed at the physical location. They will, they, you, they have clients do it from their phone. And they make it very easy to set up the production, looks, the actual quality of the videos look really good.

And it turns into being like a 30 minute ask of clients. And we want to try to do more digitally and have clients like, essentially share like. Like a case study or share a real example of a project that we help them with that we could share snips of those videos on social media and, really, again, harness our clients especially, the last point is like, Oh, part of the barrier for us is a lot of the projects we work on and engagements we have with clients are pretty sensitive in terms of like, they don’t want.

It being public knowledge. So we need to find, strike that balance of telling the story at a business level to get [00:31:00] people excited about things that we did, but not share enough detail. So we got to, is it worth sharing or is it not worth sharing is where we’ll get to sometimes with these stories.

But we’re definitely one, one of the areas we’re focused right now is like, how can we really get big. Myriad champions and clients of ours out in front of other folks to help us. And I know they’d be happy to write and make that really easy to do and make them look good.

Right. As we do that. So, really focused on that right now and just leaning into the referral. Motion there and just getting in front of more of our clients and enabling them to help us to introduce us to people they know. But I guess to the next question we, so we do, we have an account based marketing.

Approach here. So yes, I guess the short answer is yes. And we’re not, I know there’s a spectrum of how [00:32:00] how much you use account based marketing, but we do we, we do have that work into our strategy. Yes.

Peter: Makes sense. Well, believe it or not, we’re actually zoomed through our time here, Kevin, and going to need to wrap up. But. Of course, I always ask the same question at the end of each of each podcast. I would love your view on this. So what advice would you give to current or future CMOs?

Kevin: I think now is the like we talked about earlier, Peter, really be in control of what you’re consuming and your opinion things. I think it’s a saturated marketplace right now in terms of marketing technologies and theories and frameworks, right? So, like, Applying that first principle way of thinking, right?

And like being critical, always asking questions. When you’re in demos and looking at different technologies, like what, what is the actual output? Like, what is the outcome going to [00:33:00] be from introducing this new technology theory or tool to my organization? And, really being critical with a different.

Vendors, teams you talk to and ask for use cases, right? Because I just think, Peter, I’m sure you’re aware. There’s just so much out there right now. It’s very easy to get lost in that. Just like myriad clients and technology, right? It’s the same exact. So, and you may need a guide to help you to do that.

And that’s okay. Right? But, make sure you’re really putting a lot of rigor around whatever strategy, theory, or tool you’re going to move forward with.

Peter: Yep, makes total sense. Appreciate the advice, Kevin, and appreciate your time on the Next CMO podcast. So, for those of you out in the listening audience, if you have thoughts or ideas for what you’d like to hear on future versions of the show, if you have guests in mind or topics, just drop us a note at thenextcmoatplanfold.

com. [00:34:00] I wanted to thank our sponsor, Planful, and Planful for Marketing for making the show possible. And thanks so much and Kevin, have an awesome day. Thanks for being on the show.

Kevin: Great. Thanks again, Peter.