The Discipline of Category Creation

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You are about to hear a recording from CMO Huddle Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. The marketing leaders in this episode are Bernd Leger, Charles Groom, and Jackie Geiger. They break down what it takes to build a category, starting with a problem your buyers already feel and a direction the whole business has to rally around.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand and just plain cut through proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Most companies like to think of themselves as being in a class or category by themselves. Sometimes it's actually true. These organizations have deliberately chosen to deliver a new kind of product or service or combo that doesn't have a direct competitor initially. It's a bit of a tricky dance as it's not really a category until there are direct competitors and influencers like analysts or the press acknowledge the new category. So it's a tricky world to get into because you want to own it alone, but you can't because it's not a category until there are others in it.

Alright, with that, let's bring on Bernd Leger, CMO of Cornerstone OnDemand, and a returning guest who has previously appeared on the show to discuss board management in the first 90 days. Hello, Bernd, how are you? And where are you this fine day?

Bernd: Hey, Drew. Great to talk to you again. I'm in Boston today.

Drew: Alright, well, let's clear up this thing. You know, to you, what does category creation mean, and what does it mean at Cornerstone?

Bernd: Yeah, for sure. I think for me what it means is an opportunity to really reposition the organization, to your point in setting the stage and creating the benchmark that everybody else should be measured against. And it creates opportunity for differentiation and it creates opportunity for driving the business forward. What it means at Cornerstone—so the context around Cornerstone: we've been a market leader in the HR tech space, B2B learning and talent space for the last 25 years. We're about 3,500 employees, we have 140 million users on our platform, and our legacy has been learning management systems. That's what we're known for. And when we look at what has happened and transpired in the industry over the last three to four years, with emergence of remote learning, expectations of people coming into the industry has changed dramatically. AI has transformed learning. So we felt like there was a massive opportunity to reshape the market requirements and how we show up in the market as well.

Drew: So let's talk about that. So learning management systems was the category that you were a major—that you were part of, right?

Bernd: It was learning and talent management is what we called it before.

Drew: Okay. Learning and talent management. And then, what are we calling it now?

Bernd: Yeah, we're calling it workforce agility. So, kind of how we thought about it is, given the trends that I just talked about, we looked at—bring it back to the problem. What is it that we're actually trying to solve for with these changes in the market? With changes in understanding of the expectations that your employees have, with changes around skills transformations that are happening, with changes around the massive amount of tools that organizations have in the HR tech space. So we identified these as gaps that organizations have, and we call this the workforce readiness gap. So we started with the problem—solving for the workforce readiness gap—and the solution and the category that we're solving for is what we call workforce agility.

Drew: It's interesting as I'm hearing you talk, I definitely understand the benefit that you're delivering with workforce agility. We need an agile workforce. There's a lot of things happening in the workforce that are going to require substantial changing, or at least adjustments. But I'm wondering, as I think about it, are analysts ready to declare that workforce agility is a category?

Bernd: Well, we're on that path. It takes a while. I absolutely agree with you. This is a starting point. This can take two to three years. So we're on that path. Part of the exercise that we went through is we started with stakeholders. Obviously we started with our employees. We started with our customers. We had an executive advisor council to lock in on this category. And we also spent time with the analyst community. So we brought them into this journey. So in many ways, we want them to be part of the solution and we want them to feel like they were part of this category creation process. We had an analyst day. We brought together, I would say about 40 analysts in a face-to-face environment where we unveiled all the things we had heard, and then we brought them into—kind of as we were unveiling this to the marketplace as well. So that was kind of a good process for bringing them in. It takes time to create that category. I think it's part of changing the perception of how we show up and who we are. And then ultimately we do envision that we want a Magic Quadrant or a Wave to be created that is called workforce agility down the road.

Drew: And in your experience, how long does it take for that to actually stick? Because in some sense, suddenly an analyst has to now be dedicated to this new category at these companies, right? So it's not a small thing for them and it complicates their lives a little bit. On the other hand, they want sometimes to be the guys who lead and say, "Hey, there is a new category and we're the first to write about it."

Bernd: You're a hundred percent right. So having done this a couple times before—we did in a previous company—we did find one of those hungry analysts who was trying to make a name for himself and he wasn't one of the established analysts. So we spent a lot of time with him. We had him speak at our conferences. We did a lot of strategies with him. We invested in that relationship and it took literally three years, but after three years, the category that we were after was created with that name. And ultimately the company I was at at the time was the clear top-right leader in that market. And so that took a while, but it is an investment. But ultimately that was the destination that we were after, and we were able to accomplish that. Now, here at Cornerstone, we started that journey in May when we unveiled our category. We're on a good path, but it's going to take a little bit of time for us to get there.

Drew: Right. And so I want to go back—before I ask this question, which is about analyst day, because I think it's so interesting. I mean, these analysts are competitive.

Bernd: They are.

Drew: And so can you actually put them in the same room and share the same information and still make them feel special?

Bernd: Well, we make them feel special by having a lot of one-on-one conversations first. We spend a lot of time engaging on a one-on-one basis. For us, the analyst day in the HR tech industry—there are so many industry analysts and boutique firms—this was kind of like right before we actually launched the category. It was our way at our conference where we unveiled it. The day before, we said, "If you would like to come, we want to give you that special additional attention to bring you in."

And you're right, they are high-profile people with a lot of egos, and so managing that dynamic can be a little bit tricky. We did pull it off and bring them all together in that one room. We had some people call in, and then you have to kind of manage how those conversations go during the analyst day because they all want to speak and they all want to weigh in. And they all want to sound very, very intelligent at the same time.

Drew: Exactly. They're the masters of this. They'll be the decider, so to speak. Stepping back just for a second, so if I were an analyst right now, am I thinking about this universe of HR tech, or am I thinking about this universe of sort of learning management systems?

Bernd: The context is like, you know, there are traditional solutions in many subcategories within learning and talent. So you have recruiting solutions, you have learning management systems, you have learning experience platforms, you have HR core solutions. You have ERP vendors stepping into this space, like an Oracle or a Workday and an SAP.

So what was important for us is to reframe that conversation around how do we solve for this readiness gap and what are all the solutions that are critical to solve for that? And so we launched kind of our new product platform where we organized our solutions into three core buckets. We call them Learn, Elevate, and Transform. They relate back to core learning, to skills transformation, and people development. And that's kind of how we framed the solution. We call this Cornerstone Galaxy, which then allowed us also to lean in to reframe that we're more than what we were known for.

We made three acquisitions in the last three years. So when we add all those things up, it allowed us to reshape the conversation around a broader solution that we think brings together a lot of those point solutions that are available in the industry.

Drew: And what's so interesting in all of this is a lot of companies—again, we talk about this—they love the idea of creating a new category, but they often don't change the product. You actually went to the trouble of introducing a new, almost platform: Learn, Elevate, Transform. That took some of the merged products, created a new thing, and said, "Now that we have this new product, maybe you want to think about us differently." And so there was a whole story there, not just a repositioning, right?

Bernd: A hundred percent. It's actually interesting when we think about our roles as marketers. In many ways, I think we were the impetus for that product roadmap to change as well. So part of it was acquisitions we made, but we also looked at, based on the feedback we were getting from analysts and from customers, what is it they were looking for? And that allowed us to reshape these offerings and recategorize and also change the roadmap for how we think about where we want to go forward.

So it was quite the company process. And I always say that this is not a marketing exercise. This has to be a change management company exercise with true support from the CEO and the leadership team. So it is a much bigger transformation than just a repositioning exercise.

Drew: Yeah, and I think that's a key thing, and I want to come back to that after we talk to our other guest, because it's such an interesting challenge to be at the center of this. Because in some ways, marketing is leading this change management transformation. It is a mindset to be thinking about for CMOs. All right, we'll come back to you, Bernd. But now let's bring on Charles Groome, the Vice President of Growth Strategy and Operations at Biz2Credit and an industry expert who's been with us before to discuss account-based marketing and B2B marketing strategies for 2025. Hello, Charles. Wonderful to see you again.

Charles: Hey, Drew, great to be with you.

Drew: Where are you this fine day?

Charles: So I am in our sunny New York City headquarters here, right in Midtown Manhattan. And although it is a nice, great day outside, I am a little bit under the weather. So I apologize to all your viewers for a little frog in my throat today.

Drew: It's all good with the lighting and everything. You are coming at us with a very serious mindset, and we expect pearls of wisdom despite you being under the weather. So let's talk about your category creation journey and what that means for Biz2Credit.

Charles: Yeah, so it's an interesting topic because in B2B marketing, especially in SaaS, I feel like I've been part of category establishment and category creation throughout my career. You know, personally, I've always been a big fan of the Blue Ocean Strategy framework, and you think about getting yourself out of the chum of competition that often crops up when categories become really well entrenched.

I think that's part of the impetus and what Bernd is pointing to in his remarks as well: how do you move yourself and your product into a space that is seen as more transformative, seen as more strategic to your target buyer? At Biz2Credit, we've got a really interesting dynamic at play because in our business, we have both a technology business, which has SaaS products, and we've got a financing business.

And so part of what we've done by having both of those two sides to the company is we've been able to forge a new definition, a sort of subcategory in small business FinTech. It's not at the place where it has an official name yet or anything, but we do pair the financing capabilities that we have with our technology in a way that pretty much nobody else in the market today is doing.

And then the other side of this for us is our SaaS products, and that's where we're in the process right now of two—I would call them category creation exercises—they're sort of organically unfolding. One is around embedded SMB finance and creating a vertical strategy for financing within a particular solution suite.

So inside of the payroll space, you would have financing. Inside of insurance, you would have financing. This is inventing something that is really blending a use case with a technology solution.

And then the other side of what we're doing is we're working with accounting firms on what we're calling financial advisory services, something that today is really not something that most accounting firms offer as a strict practice, but that many are actually doing. This is a case of the customer leading us as opposed to the other way around into a new category. What we're doing is we're just trying to coin that idea so that it becomes more current and something that customers are actually starting to use and develop software needs around.

Drew: So let's go through them both one at a time. Let's go back to the small business FinTech, because you're right, when we think about FinTech, we tend to think about it as something that big financial firms are using, or other companies. So let's fast-forward—what does success look like?

Charles: Exactly. So success is going to look like basically wires in the wall. Biz2Credit financing is available throughout the ecosystem that a small business owner would interface with—the financial services that a small business owner uses. So this is what's really unique and why it's a distinct category today.

You've got lending, so businesses will go out there and they'll seek lending directly, and then you also have these other kinds of intermediary solutions, right? Marketplaces or accounting aggregators or other kinds of platforms that just simply allow you to compare options. What we're doing is we're combining those two things and providing it in one package.

Then we add the layer of industry-specific marketing so that it's appropriate to each financial use case. Do you need money for payroll? That can become its own mini-category. Do you need money for insurance? That can become its own mini-category, and so on.

How long do you think it's going to take for you to get to this point where you are, in fact, a recognized category—that someone is actually searching for this kind of solution? And I mean, obviously, whenever you have a new category and it's you, you have to give people the vocabulary, right? They have to be able to search for it.

A hundred percent. One of the things we've been doing is we're working with these industry-specific players, so payroll companies. We have seen a lot of payroll companies starting to reach out to us, interested in doing a partnership—a go-to-market partnership. What we're going to want to see over time is that more and more of those folks are coming to us organically.

You know, they're searching online or they're reaching out to our sales representatives organically to have a conversation about how we do a partnership. So I think I agree with what you're saying, Drew. It's got to gain traction in the market before you can say truly you've created the category.

We're starting to see it in one of these areas and hoping to see that replicate in these others—what I'm calling the subcategories of insurance, payments, and so on.

Drew: You know, sort of as you're thinking about this challenge, it's funny. We gotta thank you, Liza Adams, for the comment because she says in the process of trying to create a category, one of the biggest considerations is how do we ensure that we're not in a category of one. In some sense, it's sort of one of these kind of contradictions because you want to be the lead player, right? Yes, you want to be the dominant player, but it's not a category unless you have a competitor. So how is this going to work?

Charles: So let me talk about the other side now where I think this issue is right at the forefront for us. There's, in the accounting space, there's this whole practice area called client advisory services. And what we're in the midst of doing is we're trying to sort of co-opt that a little bit for adding financial advisory into the ecosystem of services that an accounting firm would provide. Our platform, our technology helps the accounting firm to do that from end to end. They can, you know, consult with the client about what's the right type of financing for their business, all the way through to helping that client get financing all through one piece of software.

So how do you make sure that you're not in a category of one? It's something we've grappled with directly, and we're doing this really in partnership. And I think that's kind of our answer to the question: look for those trusted knowledge sources. They could be analysts, as you mentioned before, Drew. They could be the media that people are consuming. They could be certain thought leaders in the industry, right? In our industry, there are certain accountants—Gene Marks comes to mind—certain accountants that lead the narrative inherently, that start to sort of point to this kind of solution.

So I think that's the way that you really have to start thinking about how do you not isolate yourself while at the same time you push the industry forward, you push the conversation in your direction so that you're starting to get more business as a result.

Drew: Well, it's funny, as you were talking about media and thinking about how the press loves the notion of a new category because it's something new to write about. It's a new way to think about it, and they can help lead folks along. So you have a friend there, right? I mean, that's in a group. Whereas analysts are a little bit trickier because there's, while they want to lead, they don't want to get too far ahead of their customers or the reality, right?

Charles: Sometimes it's also, and I'll share my experience at our partnership in the CPA space, in the accounting space, it's also about not leading too far, too fast. You know, when we first rolled out our notion of this category of financing advisory, we kind of went all in on the notion, just sort of pushing the message that this is a valuable service area. And I think one of the things we found was the market wasn't necessarily ready for that message. They weren't ready to just cut over to a whole new concept. What they needed was they needed more tie-in to the, you know, moving from the known to the new.

They needed more tie-in to the known, which for them was client advisory services. And so really the packaging of your new category is important. I think what Burnt was saying before about moving from sort of the old school learning management into this agility space, you have to find a tie-in that makes it obvious to the right kind of buyer. Oh, this is like that, only better. This is like that, only it's for the use case that will really serve my business best.

Drew: Interesting. All right, keep that, hold that thought. We'll come back to you now. Let's welcome Jakki Geiger, three-time CMO, who has previously joined us on the show to shed light on the intricacies of moving up market and customer-centric marketing. Hello Jakki, welcome back.

Jakki: Hello Drew.

Drew: How are you? And where are you this amazing day?

Jakki: I'm doing well. A little tired. It is holiday season, so we've been going a lot—holiday parties this week. I'm sure you're probably in the same boat. And we're in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Drew: Got it. Okay, so let's talk about, you know, fill us in on your career category creation expertise or experience.

Jakki: Absolutely. So I think there's like two discussions, right? There's category creation and then there's category disruption. I'm going to talk about like the five key learnings I've had over the course of my career when it comes to deciding should we create or disrupt. So my very first leadership role in marketing was at a company that was truly doing something unique. There were no competitors. It was called pricing profit optimization in retail. Everyone knew it in airlines, right? Optimize the price of a seat. If there's a lot of demand for that flight, put the prices up. If there's not a lot of demand, put them down. Same thing. So we were completely changing how retailers would make pricing decisions, moving away from gut instinct to actually using consumer data to make pricing decisions. So huge evangelism effort.

Another company, Reltio, for example, we launched the first SaaS offering in the master data management space. So all that data that's so critical to your operations, like is it Jackie or Jacqueline? That's our customer. We need to know that it's Jackie, right? This is one person. That was really critical technology, but there were two industry heavyweights in the market, Informatica and IBM at the time, and we had the first SaaS offering. So we really needed to educate about what is the value of moving this infrastructure technology to the cloud, and what are the additional benefits that you get.

The third example is Pyramid Analytics. This is in the BI and analytics space. So if you think BI and analytics, who do you think of? Tableau, Qlik, Power BI. I mean, these are huge brands, huge customer bases. So how do you break through in a category like that? In that case, we decided to disrupt. So, you know, what is the ultimate pain that we're trying to solve for? And I really liked Burnt's example, like everyone would like to have more agility in their workplace. That is more of a buyer-centric, pain-centric view. And that's what we did as well. Ultimately, they're buying BI and analytics technology so they can make more intelligent decisions. So we launched a disruption called decision intelligence.

It was close enough to the category that people could kind of understand what it was, but it created interest, like what is decision intelligence? How is it different than what I'm doing today? And so for those visionary people, those movers and shakers in the organization who are always looking to get a competitive edge, we were able to pull them in.

So first of all, you know, in category creation, there's no point in doing it if you can't be number one. I think that's pretty clear. There's a ton of heavy lift investment, time and effort, and I agree that it is a company-wide effort. It is not a marketing-only effort. That'll fail for sure. I think it's important to find a niche that's small enough to own, big enough that's worth pursuing. So those would be—that's kind of number one, owning a niche.

The second is differentiated value. You have to speak to a pain that someone has, and there needs to be some true benefit. Ideally, financial, measurable benefit and impact you will gain by doing something completely different because, you know, these people are taking a risk. The third thing is the types of customers, right? You can't go after the whole market. It's really important to understand who are those movers and shakers? Who are those innovators that are willing to take a risk because they want to get ahead in their career, they want to do something game-changing for their company. If you're talking to laggards, you're not going to be successful.

And then an ecosystem—you can't do it alone. For us it's always been really important to engage with the analyst community, influencers. You know, at Profit Logic, which was sold to Oracle, we found a professor who wrote the book on retail management and we got included in that book and we had made sure he could incorporate that into his lessons. At Pyramid there's a professor at Berkeley who teaches the next generation of data and analytics leaders. We got in front of them, so that they could try out our technology and start using it in the classroom. So you have to be creative—partners, customers need to be advocates.

And then the last component I would say is, this would be an interesting discussion topic for the open conversation, is evolving buyer preferences, right? Like our goal was always Magic Quadrant, top of the quadrant or Forrester Wave. But the question is this next generation of buyers, these millennials and Gen Zs that are coming up like, how important is that? Do they view Gartner and Forrester the same way that they've been viewed in the past, or are reviews, peer reviews and try it before you buy it experiences and influencer input, is that more important? So I'd love to debate that and get other people's opinions on that topic.

Drew: Well, it's interesting because we had Dave Franklin from Forrester join us for a bonus huddle. What the number that really stuck with me that he just talked about is yes, buyers are getting at, even at enterprise, are getting younger, the Gen Z and millennials. But interestingly their buying group was probably about 13, but they have nine outside influencers, nine collectively including review sites like G2 or TrustRadius, including the analysts, including peers.

And so you're right, I want to go back. There's several things that you mentioned that I think are so important in all of this, and it's really tricky, you know, you want a niche that in theory, that you can sort of own and dominate, but you also have to have this vision that it can become something bigger. Yeah. And that's tricky. And the same challenge is you got to go after the early adopters and innovators, but then you have to hope that these other folks will come along.

I always wonder about the mission, the desire to create a category versus, and this will be a good one to say for the group, but versus just build a community and I'll give you an example. Tableau, when, and I interviewed Alyssa Fink probably five years ago. They built a community of what essentially were data visualizers, right? They were the first in the category of data visualization, and they started with a hundred at a conference, and then it was 500 and, you know, 10 years later, 10,000 folks who identified as data visualizers. And I don't know if they set out to build a category, but they definitely set out to build a community. And I think that that's such an interesting distinction, that it may be a path. And I think there's a lot of ego involved, particularly at the CEO level. Say, we're in a class by ourselves, we're going to create a category. And I just wonder if the pursuit of creating a category is a good pursuit even.

Jakki: So I would say creating a community or a club is really incredibly valuable if you're trying to do something different in a market. The example that at Profit Logic was, you know, because we were able to help improve margins, who cared a lot about that in the retailers? The CFOs, right? So we took some CFO customers who were on the cutting edge and using this technology and actually being able to materially show a boost in their margins, come to an event. We attracted other CFOs to that event, and it became an annual event that just grew and grew, because other CFOs who maybe aren't the early adopters would say, "Wait a minute, what are they doing over at Old Navy and Gap? What are they doing at Nordstrom? I want to know." And so they would start coming to these events and it actually created a community. So I agree, I think that is a really good strategy. But I think you need to know, like, who are the types of people you want to attract for the early days of that community? That profile may look different over time as you get more of the mainstream and laggards joining at later points.

Drew: Got it. All right, well, so many good points, lots of things to come back to, but for now we're going to, it's time for me to talk about CMO Huddles. One of my favorite topics. Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is the only community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Wait. Well, a group of these curious, adaptable, and problem-solving birds is called a huddle, and the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to conquer the toughest job in the C-suite. There's a little play on words there just in case you missed it. Burn, Charles, Jakki, since you are all incredibly busy marketing leaders slash penguins, I am wondering if you could share a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Charles: I will just say it's a great community, picking up on what Jakki and Drew were just talking about. So Drew, you've created that community. I don't know if it's a category yet, but there you go. For me, and it's one that just happened recently, MarTech shortlists—I mean, as a CMO in today's day and age, just getting the who's who might just come from the Slack channel. You know, it might not come from a Gartner or Forrester analyst, it might be Jakki and Bernd telling me what, who to go after. This last week I had a quick project that our team was trying to do, setting up a community event, and we got a list of five great apps to schedule the event and do networking around the event. And we vetted one of those and activated within a week. So MarTech lists.

Drew: I love it. All right, MarTech lists. Can I ask you which one you went with?

Charles: So we ended up with an organization called Digi App that does like an event organization app. It basically, you know, it's an app store solution.

Drew: Got it. Okay. Bernd, Jakki, anything to add?

Bernd: Yeah, happy to jump in. I think it, I completely agree with Charles. It's an incredible community. It's a safe place to exchange ideas and when I think about how I make decisions, what I assess, what I evaluate, what I buy, it's this community that I go to first before I would trust any other vendor or any other source of information, even more than the analysts. Like, this is the community that I go to when I'm evaluating where to go and what to do. Like, I'll give you an example, like, the connections you're making and like having people who are experts in their domains, like ABX conversations, the vendor selections, like there's so many examples where this community is so helpful in helping me and our organization define the right strategy.

Drew: I love it. Oh my God, thank you for that. Jakki, any last notes here?

Jakki: Yes. I thought I would make it a little fun. So I have a three-letter acronym, CMO. So first of all, connection, right? The community that we've built is so viable. It can be isolating to be a CMO. There's so much going on in the market and having the ability to just call somebody and ask their opinion on how things are going or if they've tried something is incredibly helpful. In fact, I have a one-on-one call with one of the CMO Huddle members later today. He's doing a job interview and wants to balance his story off of me, so we help each other out like that. Second, M is for market. There are so many changes happening in the market. The Super Huddle I went to with over a hundred CMOs was phenomenal. Mindy from One Mind, I can't stop thinking about it. I went to the site and I started engaging with this superhuman who can deliver a sales presentation, a demo, and answer technical questions, and I just got to know her a little better and what she's capable of doing. So that's the type of information I would find hard—it would be hard to find, I think, on my own. And then O is opportunities, right? And so I think it's a fertile ground for discovering opportunities. As you mentioned, MarTech, right, Charles? Like, yes, absolutely. What's the latest and greatest out there? What should my team be exploring? How can we improve ABM? What's a better 90-day onboarding plan? Like these opportunities for improving ourselves and our teams come from CMO Huddles.

Drew: I love it. Thank you for that. Yeah, Amanda's thing blew me away. If you're a B2B marketer, marketing leader who wants to build a strong peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader and outswim your competition, take a second to sign up for a free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, we have so many things that we've got to go here. We got to balance educating the audience while simultaneously driving demand. And there's, those are in, in many ways, often separate tasks, unfortunately. So how do we balance this? Because it feels like if you're going for category creation, you need to spend more on education and a little bit less on some of the other areas of marketing. So how do you balance that?

Charles: For me, that goes back to my comment before about don't abandon the existing category right away. Sometimes those have become comfortable. Sometimes they might even be relatively new in their own right. And so you might be creating a category in a category that's in the process of being kind of created itself. So I've definitely found that with our client advisory services area, it's the fastest growing area of accounting. But don't abandon that just right away, because there's still that second half of the growth curve for every market. They still haven't come around to seeing how that existing core category is benefiting their business.

Bernd: I was going to say, I, so kind of what Charles is saying, for me it's, yes, we shouldn't abandon what the demand motions are that we're driving. For us, it was the thought process around how do we drive incremental pipeline, and the goal isn't necessarily to say like, "Hey, we created a category." The goal is to create ultimately more demand for what we're trying to sell. And so for us, an example of what we did is we created like additional assets that promoted the category that ultimately are there to create more interest. We created a Dummies Guide for Workforce Agility that has become our number one asset for the organization in regards to how we're bringing interest into the organization. That's top of the funnel, but it is driving interest, and it ties back to what Jakki said. I loved what you said around pain and gain, right? We have to be able to articulate pain and then we have to be able to articulate what are they gaining. So if we can articulate that for us, it's like driving incremental demand, not, and somewhat new demand, rather than replacing the demand we already had.

Drew: And Jakki?

Jakki: Yes. I don't think you can underestimate the lift it's going to take on the education front. One example I can give you from Pyramid Analytics is there were a lot of myths in the market about what wasn't possible because they were using legacy technology. So we created this Myth Busters guide. Here are the top nine myths about what's not possible that actually is possible if you're using technology from Pyramid, for example. But we had to make sure that that was infused across the entire organization. It wasn't just something marketing was doing and promoting on the website and through digital ads and events and things like that. We had to make sure that the sales team could talk about those myths, that the demos were aligned with. Like, let's show you how you can have those aha moments with those nine things you didn't think you could do. So we had to make sure that it sort of pervaded through the entire organization and everyone could be on the same page in educating the market in a more provocative way. That was the hook for us, right? Like if we educate people on their pains and how they can overcome them differently, they'll want to engage with us, that should drive demand.

Drew: Interesting. I'm coming to the conclusion. One conclusion is that if it is really a category, there is a book to be written about that with like a how-to guide, and Vern, you talked about the Dummies book guide. And Charles, I, and we talked about, I know that folks at Workato wrote a book that actually sort of started them towards a new category. Because if you can't write a book about it, like a how-to guide, there's probably not enough there, right? Because there's not enough that enough people wouldn't want to sort of invest their energy to sort of learn in theory kind of a new skill or a new approach or a new something.

And I just want to share, so Lisa Adams, thank you again for your comment. She says, "I think many people misjudge how much it takes to create a category: time, money, resources, and there's no guarantee that it'll be successful." So is the risk-reward formula, in your opinion, how do you sort of weigh that and know when it's actually worth that kind of investment? I'm going to go with you first.

Bernd: Yeah. For us, it came back to are we able to articulate a clear value proposition that ties back to what executives are worried about today. And then, so if we're able to tap into that, then absolutely it's worth it because that's what we're trying to do is like tap into buying motions, tying into the key priorities that organizations are having. And that's what this was all about for us, is like creating relevance with an executive level audience. In our world, the decision making processes have moved away maybe from a chief learning officer and a head of talent to CHROs, to CIOs and CFOs. So we have to be able to be relevant with that audience, with the right messages. That's what we're trying to accomplish with that.

Drew: Interesting. So in the case that I'm thinking about it, you are saying there's a problem that they have that they know they have.

Bernd: Well, in some cases it's like tapping into what is it they're worried about and can we tie what we do to what they're worried about? And kind of reshaping the question and reshaping the problem statement. It comes back from me to the problem statement. And you should be getting nods and like, "That's exactly the problem that I have." That's what this is about. And moving away also from maybe more product messaging really to tapping into the challenge that they're facing.

Drew: You're sort of taking, you thought it was this kind of thing and you were trying to solve it this kind of way, but it's really this kind of thing and you need to solve it in a completely different way.

Bernd: Correct.

Drew: I guess it's sort of the way we're talking about this. Okay. Charles, can you help straighten out some of the language that I just sort of waffled in there?

Charles: I feel like what Bernd is saying is really spot on for me because I'll use a concrete example from our accounting area, which is so many accountants just don't have any label to put on the activity that they're doing, and as a result, they're missing a huge revenue opportunity. Right. So Bernd, you get that moment when we talk to accounting firms, when we've had executives and we have our sales team in front of these accounting firms, they're nodding along of like, "Yes, we do have clients that come to us when they're taking a loan at a very high rate of expense. Yes, we do have clients asking us for documentation, for some undisclosed purpose. For some reason, yes, we do have all of these indicators that I could be involved in this business process and generating value from it," but they don't have the words or the terminology to say, "This is exactly what I need. Here's the solution that will help me unlock that value."

That's what we're now in the process of providing. We're saying to them, "Hey, when you see these indicators of pain, when you see these indicators of opportunity, this is the thing that you now need to provide: financing advisory services," and it has, you know, components and all the educational material that goes into the table of contents, Drew, of your proverbial category-defining book.

Drew: Okay. I'm waiting to see Charles Groome, author of this new book. We'll stay tuned and cover that in books. Alright. So interesting. We've talked a lot about various aspects of this. When, let's give some folks, because sometimes there's an ego involved in creating a category that is not well-placed. What are the things when you've faced folks that are trying to create a category that really isn't warranted? How, what are your signs to make sure that you know for sure it's worth it? Or push back, it's time to push back.

Jakki: I like to start with outcomes. What outcomes will we achieve by creating our own category and how long will it take to achieve those outcomes, do we think? Right? What would it take to get from point A to point B and do we have the time, resources, and I guess perseverance to go through that? And making sure that executive team that you're working with is absolutely 100% committed. I think CEO, it's got to be driven from the CEO and it can't be something you give up on in six months.

Drew: Well, and I think one of the things that Bernd mentioned too is that ideally product is in there because we're going to, it's going to have to impact the roadmap, and I think that is one of those checkpoints. If your new category doesn't impact your roadmap, you're probably not creating a new category.

Bernd: Absolutely. I would also say kind of to Jakki's point, like the outcomes, but what's the impetus for creating this change? Like has something changed the market? Are there different impetus areas? Like, why would we embark on this to begin with? Is there something that has fundamentally changed? And in our case, we were like exploring, do we have clarity on the problem we're solving?

And then so a lot of that stakeholder involvement on interviewing the leadership team, interviewing the sellers, interviewing the customer-facing teams, interviewing the customers themselves too. Ensure that we're onto something. And if we're not, you're 100% right Drew, then it's like, well, why are we doing this? But if they are coming back saying, "Our world is different than it was three years ago and this is what we're faced with," and then if you're able to put the pin on it to say like, "Okay, great, I've heard from like 40 different customers. They're all facing this one thing. What do we call that?" And if you're able to pin that down, then you've got something that you can work with and then you have to like make sure you articulate that clearly.

Charles: I think the other piece of this ties what Jakki's saying and outcomes and what Bernd is saying in sort of impetus together is traction. For us, I've, and for me personally, I've been through the category creation motion when it had no traction. When you didn't have those 40 or so customers raising their hands and saying, "This is the identified problem, this is what I need your help solving." I think you have to weed that out early and, and Jakki, I know that it's all about balancing so that you have the long-term staying power once you commit. But I do think you need sort of six-month check-ins to say, are we seeing that traction? Is it actually happening? And are customers starting to show the signals that we want to see?

Jakki: Yeah, I would agree with you. And if I could jump in with one additional point to build on that. Liza had a comment and it just prompted a thought. In every single situation where I've tried to build or disrupt competitors, copy it word for word. So coming back to like, there must be a product differentiation. There must be something, maybe a methodology, a framework, a blueprint, a unique point of view that you can continue adding because it's so easy for people to just copy and paste what you've got, put it on their website, and suddenly you're undifferentiated again.

Drew: Yeah. And it's so funny because you, particularly if they're using the same language, like the category language, you want them to eventually, you just don't want them to do it day two. So you really, this is such an interesting part of that. And does that affect how you roll it out? I mean, do you have to sort of do it in stealth mode so you get some established users and product and so that you do have a competitive advantage for at least a certain period of time? Right. I mean, because otherwise someone just copies the language and then they copy the offering and then, well, that's not very good, is it?

Bernd: Well, ideally, you've defined your category in a way to Jakki's point where you've, and also I think it was Lisa who had a comment online. You define it in a way that it's already stacked in your favor. Right. So you've looked at, if we created an RFP and you sent this out, it's... You want others to follow. You want others to jump into this category. You want others to follow you and copy you, but can they pull off the same definition of how you've defined the category, the way you've added? You're setting the stage, you're setting the requirements in a way that although there's others there, you're the one who's going to be able to satisfy those requirements in the best way.

Drew: So right, so we're going to say, here are the 10 things that you need to do to sort of get to here in order to get to there in this new happy place, the Shangri-La, if you will. And right now we're the only ones who can deliver 10 on 10. So yeah, that makes sense. So you are defining the things so that, and assuming that the customer agrees with those definitions and those requirements...

Charles: We've had some success actually building in the open, and I think there's a reason why. As we're building the category sort of for all to see, the secret sauce we're finding, at least in this accounting space, is you have to have a good strategic partner who's helping you set that narrative. If our relationship with the AICPA were not the foundation on which we were building this category, we would probably think about it very, very differently. So you can approach building the category if you've got, you know, that knowledge leader, that you know, that very important executive, you can build it in the open, right? If you've done, if you've put the investment in to create trust and buy into your company before you start the process. If you haven't yet really established that, if you're not already a leader in the legacy category, then you might want to think about kind of that stealth mode option instead.

Drew: Interesting. Yeah, because if you're not a leader, you've got to jumpstart it. I'm also sort of, I'm thinking about all the times that I worked with companies to help them establish a strong niche, if not a category. And one of the things was creating the maturity model, right? That for the industry or say, well, this is where most people are and this is where you want to be. And guess what? We're the only ones who can help you get there. And usually you need a third party who actually defines that maturity model. Is that still a viable approach?

Jakki: I think so, yeah, showing that maturity model and being able to say, we have a vision for where you could go for some game-changing outcomes you could get that you're not getting today, and we are the perfect partner to take you on that journey and then get the whole ecosystem to kind of coalesce around that maturity model. It could be a very valuable way to engage the market. I think even in sales conversations, right? How do you get from point A to point B discovery? Where are they? Let's make sure we're clear on where they actually are. Where do they want to go? They might not want to go to level five right out of the gate. Maybe they just need to get to level two. So the plan for getting them to level two would be different. So again, full company effort, but I think maturity models can be very powerful.

Charles: It's about having the customer internalize the transformation that your category is going to bring to them. So, to go back to something, Drew, you were asking about: do we have to change our selling mode with a millennial or Gen Z buyer? You know, charts that move up into the right are still going to have value for somebody in Gen Z. You might have to put a Snapchat filter on it to make it appealing. But the basic concept of where am I trying to go so that I succeed, so that my company succeeds, that will never lose, you know, luster.

Bernd: A hundred percent agree on the maturity model. Like we took it in a similar vein. One, we had an analyst group write about the maturity of the market and where workforce agility fitted in. We also created what we call the workforce agility grader, which was a tool that you could either, as a prospect, go online and fill out a form that would tell you how agile you are, and/or it would allow you, as in a sales conversation with a prospect, to engage directly to say like, look, here's kind of how we would define it based on what we heard from you. Would you like to know where you are versus your peers? And it allows them to kind of benchmark. And it arms them to go to their bosses to say, look, here's where we're at. Here's where we're doing great, but here's where we have opportunity. Let's take a look at that.

Jakki: That's such a good point. We haven't talked about the internal selling, right? We need those champions to go into their organization and say, why is this such an important investment? I know we haven't budgeted for this. Great, but we need to make this happen and here's why. So I think that was a really good point you brought up.

Drew: Well, and then by the way, that is one of the bigger challenges of creating a category: there's no line item in the budget necessarily for it. If there is a line item in the budget, it's not a new category. All right, I want to ask you, you all get one answer to this question, which is, you know you've created a category when... So, all right, and we'll start with, let's see, Charles, you know you've created a category when, and you get one.

Charles: For me, the KPI that we're always going to look at is, it starts in search. So are people actually searching on the concept? You know, over time you start to see that show up in your Google search account. You start to see it pop up on your website. You see traffic coming in on those blog articles. If you're in that incremental mode, like Bernd is, that's where I would go.

Drew: Okay, so we have a term that people are searching, so that's one. Jakki, you know you've succeeded in creating category when...

Jakki: Revenue. For me, it's all about the revenue, right? If you can get to a hundred million or and beyond, I think you've created a category, or maybe you even get acquired before you get there.

Drew: Okay? So show me the money at a hundred million dollars that someone is buying to adopt that category. Okay? Bernd, number three.

Bernd: When your competition is imitating your category and they're using the same competitive language, they're using that terminology.

Drew: Right? And they're just going to say, hey, we're a better X, Y, Z than that. And that's really what it comes down to. All right, let's see. I guess I want to have one other final words of wisdom from each of you. We've covered so many good things here, and let's just end it with, when creating a category, always do this, Bernd?

Bernd: Don't go at it alone. Particularly your executive leadership team will have a lot of strong opinions. Think about using a third-party consultancy, and then think about bringing the power of the community to bear, like partners, advisors, analysts, to make sure that your launch is successful.

Drew: Okay, good. Jakki?

Jakki: Yeah, I think it's a company-wide effort. It actually even comes down to affecting HR. Right? Who are the types of people you're hiring in your organization who have that education advisory consultative approach to the way they interface with customers and their ability to educate and inspire people to take action? Very different than if you're in sort of a laggard category or sort of a mainstream category. So from every aspect of the organization, you need to be committed to this even hiring.

Drew: Interesting. And it's because we're talking about innovation. We're not saying this is a better X, this is a new thing. And that takes folks some imagination, some storytelling, some interesting things. Okay, Charles, last thought.

Charles: When you're creating a new category, I think you have to check your marketing ego at the door, and you have to really listen in to your customer all the time. It cannot be a one-time listening tour. It has to be continuous and you need to incorporate that to the points that the others have made. You have to incorporate that across the business. A category doesn't get built alone, as Bernd said, and you're not going to do it just because you've got this great, awesome idea that is going out to the market. You've got to have your customers bought into it as well.

Drew: And I think that's such an important point and a great place to end it. This is not a marketing effort. This is not a marketing challenge. Sure, there's language and a story that the marketing folks can help shape, because it has implications for product and as we talked about roadmap, it has implications for service and the kind of expertise that you need to deliver on that's going to be different than what you had before. You know, so we've got, we've got people, we've got process, and there's probably even technology and we've got pro, there's a lot to get this right. So, with that before creating a category, think about just being a better what you're in. And then if you really have something visionary, invest the time. And what Bernd talked about, which I thought was so helpful, was you've got to do your homework and sort of talk to your customer and see if they're talking about a particular pain in the same way. So you have a sense that this isn't just wishful thinking, but there's a real opportunity there. All right, thank you Bernd, Charles, Jakki, you're amazing sports. Thank you audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one, and submit your questions while we’re live. Join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio, we stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!