Schneider Electric: Shonodeep Modak

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Shonodeep Modak of Schneider Electric discusses the challenges faced by many industrial B2B CMOs who have to market less tangible products or services.

 

 

Danny:

All right, so let’s jump into today’s episode. Shonodeep, thank you so much for joining us today on IndustrialSage.

Shonodeep:

Danny, great to be here, good to be here.

Danny:

Now we’re super excited. So we’ve got Shonodeep Modak, Chief Marketing Officer in North America for Schneider Electric. And so we just, again, really thank you so much for spending some time, I know you’re super busy to share some information and some insights with the IndustrialSage nation or our audience here. So before we jump into all the really cool fun techie stuff, for those who aren’t familiar with Schneider Electric, tell us, who is Schneider electric?

Shonodeep:

Yeah, Schneider Electric is a leader in industrial automation and energy management products. So much like, you think about your house, how there’s a load center, where you turn the circuit breakers on and off, that’s just the very basics of what Schneider Electric does, it goes all the way around smart manufacturing to building management and energy management systems, to newly announced joint ventures, with infrastructure companies. And so we span the space of buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industry and helping out those customers control, protect, and monetize a better experience for their customers.

Danny:

Excellent. So that’s kind of a big deal. A lot of things going on in that digital transformation piece, talk about industrial automation, a lot of big buzz words, rightly so, a lot of transformation happening now in manufacturing. Maybe give me a little bit of your background, as Chief Marketing Officer, so second day on the job and market, you know.

Shonodeep:

Yeah, no, I’m officially a year in Schneider now, so loving it, it’s a great organization, lots of great leadership. My responsibility is essentially across North America, so Mexico, Canada, United States, and I’m essentially responsible for how we market to our customers and build a seamless experience to help customers understand awareness of our products, help challenge them and solve solutions for their biggest problems, and then work on the how do we keep them engaged through both the aftermarket and through this great service experience.

Danny:

Big challenges that we can all focus on. I didn’t ask you this before, so let me throw a little curveball, but it should be an easy question, tell me a little about your marketing background, like how did you get into marketing, like, did you go to school for it, or well, do you have a different background, just curious.

Shonodeep:

Yeah, no, good curveball. Interesting story there. So I mean, I’m an engineer, I’m a chemical engineer. You may not tell by my deep southern drawl, but while I’m a resident of Atlanta, I actually grew up in Mississippi, so I went to Mississippi State University, and while I was there in my internship in my last year, I did a fantastic internship with a power generation manufacturer, and got to go crawl around boilers and nuclear power plants and cell service solutions. And I said, “You know what, this is much more exciting “than being in a plant “and potentially blowing it up with my engineering skills.” So I said, I’m probably better off, and I actually enjoy the value sale, and how you define what makes your product make either intrinsic or economic sense for the customer and benefits. And so that got me into marketing and sales.

My first job, when I left, was I joined a big oil and gas company, and I did sales for about three years, crawling around more boilers, making recommendations in the industrial customers, and based on all this great data that we were finding. And from there, I moved into a finance role, and then finally into a marketing role for the Consumer Products Division in the oil and gas company. And I had some of the best times of my career figuring out how to position products on the shelf of big retailers and make sure that we optimize the product mix, and we introduced a lot of cool new products too. And that got my passion for marketing. And I ended up going to school at George Washington University, and did marketing there and got my MBA, and then left and joined another industrial manufacturing company, and then Schneider Electric about 10 years later. So lots of different marketing experiences, but all B2B, and be some B2C, but all B2B, and all in the industrial side.

Danny:

That’s awesome, that’s a great story. Sometimes I like asking that question just to see like, hey, ’cause I always find it fascinating that people actually went to school for marketing, or they started totally different, and you kind of started totally different. It’s interesting, you see a lot of crossover from engineering Product Manager, whatever, into sales and marketing, that kind of role, but sounds like that you got plucked early.

Shonodeep:

Yeah, I found my way, I think, just being able to be involved in the customer experience, I think is kind of the common thread. The other thing I’ll just point out to you is that I’ve kind of, it’s a little bit of some introspective analysis on my career is that every product I’ve been involved in, be it in terms of marketing motor oil, or marketing hydraulic industrial fluids, or if it’s been power generation plants, and now even at Schneider Electric, with energy management and industrial solution, IoT, it’s all what I call ghost brands, meaning that you can’t touch, feel, taste the products like a power plant, you can’t feel the electricity, you can see the see the light, but can’t tell the difference of one versus another, motor oil when you put that in your car, you can’t tell, and now even with a lot of energy management systems, the fact that they’re working, you never know.

Danny:

You can’t tell until they’re not working.

Shonodeep:

Until not working.

Danny:

It is a big problem.

Shonodeep:

And so I coined the term ghost brands, and that’s something that I feel like requires a different way of looking at things, and different way of marketing, and that’s where I feel like I’ve been able to add a lot of value in these companies and make what’s intangible, tangible, and the IoT transformation, it makes it dynamic in a whole new way, digitization in marketing changes that for us, where in the past, you were selling on a lot of great PowerPoints and great collateral, now we have something we can really bring to the customer.

Danny:

Now that’s awesome, I love that. So, ghost products?

Shonodeep:

Ghost brands.

Danny:

Ghost brands, ghost brands.

Shonodeep:

Ghost brands, yeah.

Danny:

Yeah, it totally makes sense because it’s very hard to sell a blank canvas or something that you can’t touch and feel, so that might be another episode, might have to jump into, because that’s a huge challenge, but I think, speaking of challenges, I think it’s a really good segue into talking about kind of what I wanted to address in this episode a bit more is today’s challenge for the CMO, and just really just marketing in general, there’s a lot of great tools, there’s a lot of transformation happening right now, but that’s creating a lot of other challenges. So maybe you could speak to it, what is the number one challenge, in your mind, for today’s CMO?

Shonodeep:

Yeah, and I’ll partition that in today’s CMO, industrial B2B CMO, just because I know that’s a lot of the folks here listening in. And I would say that, especially in industries, where you do sell through a channel, the biggest challenge is to be able to continue that engagement when you’re two degrees away, and you’re separated from that customer experience. And so at the transactional level, the transaction is between your channel partner and the customer, the end user or the intermediary, and that disconnect is probably the biggest challenge that we have. I think in Schneider Electric, we have a huge percentage of our business that we call goes through the channels and also goes through diffuse customers who are too small to even really have that one-to-one relationship. And it’s obviously a big challenge that B2C has been having for a while, but it’s easier, I feel, not not to offend my B2C comrades, I think it’s easier to be able to have that relationship, especially, when you’re going through retail or normal channels.

Danny:

Sure, I mean, looking at attribution models and things can be a little bit easier if you can have the whole life cycle of the sale.

Shonodeep:

The whole view.

Danny:

From beginning to end.

Shonodeep:

You got it.

Danny:

Certainly a big challenge. Yeah, you answered one of my other questions is, unlike most manufacturers, it looks like most of your sale is driven through distribution channel partners. So do you do any direct type of work, or something?

Shonodeep:

We do, on some big projects, we’ll go to direct on but our preferred channel is go through partners, and they have the best path to market. In many cases, they’re influencing a lot of the projects, too, so we prefer to choose the partner route.

Danny:

Right. Yeah, no, and this is such a big challenge for everybody, is that you have, essentially, like those two kind of audiences, you’ve got where A, selling to the channel partners to make sure, “Hey, like we’re going to help make you guys “look great, and we can help roll out “your totally different message,” versus then selling to the end user, but kind of having the, you know, like, “Hey,” we don’t have as much connection to them. So that makes a little bit more difficult. How are you addressing this?

Shonodeep:

Yeah. There’s a few things that we’re trying to do. One is, I guess, I would say, maybe I can summarize it in three things, number one is, while we lose the visibility in the transaction side today, we do have visibility on the, call it, the initial search and the initial kind of, call it, solution-seeking that you hear all these stats about most B2B companies make their decisions, well ahead of on the digital space, right? So we have that responsibility, I feel, to be able to help navigate customers into understanding where we can help with the right solutions, giving them education and thought leadership. Example is, as people come into our website, we’re looking at their IP addresses and their cookies and really understanding where they’re coming in and looking at the paths that they’re coming into.

The number two thing is that also along that kind of informational journey that these customers are going on, we also are establishing we’re changing the way we interact with them. So we’re no longer going from big Schneider corporate Schneider Electric corporate to, call it, a vast space of all these customers, we’re going from one-to-one, basically, our inside sales, or our individual, call it, customer service agents, directly into those customers so they feel like they have this one-to-one relationship. We’re leveraging marketing automation technology, but there’s still very much a personal touch. And so that’s another way that we’re trying to bridge that gap I talked about. The third way is actually eliminating that gap. And so we are working with our partners on establishing point of sale satellite data analytics platforms that will allow us to collaborate with these channel partners to look at exactly, here’s the people that we made awareness of and then let’s actually look at the transaction and then look at just the traditional what should they have bought, what could they have bought, and then where are they now few years into the sale and the install base, and how are they using it and how can we be able to help them further?

Danny:

So you’re measuring things like touch points, just all the way from the journey from, “Hey, we generated this lead through X, “and then we processed and followed them through here “and then we handed over the lead to you guys. “Okay, here you guys go, like make this happen, “and hopefully we see a sale on the back end.”

That’s right. And before, we didn’t have that visibility and now we’re slowly kind of going through the fog here and parting ways so we can see through that?

Danny:

How did you get that visibility, what was that main catalyst?

Shonodeep:

A lot of the main catalyst is technology and having those access to all these new, call it, account based marketing platforms, having access to marketing automation platforms, and having access to sell-out data, data lakes that we are able to use in the what was the future is here now.

Danny:

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, account-based marketing, big thing. Actually, we have an episode we’re going to be recording. Hey, after yours, we’re going to talk to Terminus actually about–

Shonodeep:

Oh, yeah. I’ve got good friends there.

Danny:

Yep, we have Sangram Vajre.

Shonodeep:

Sangram Vajre, yeah.

Danny:

He’s going to come on.

Shonodeep:

Cool.

Danny:

Talk all about that, which is super exciting. I love, not to gush all about their platform and everything, but I just love all the great cool toys and stuff, which you can do with it.

Shonodeep:

Well, he’s got tremendous energy, so the audience is going to love him, yeah.

Danny:

Get ready, we’re ready. Well, on that note, you mentioned you’re using some of these different platforms, is there a particular like critical martech stack that you use, I mean, as far as like the backbone? I know there’s no lack of marketing technology out there, but have you found the kind of the backbone? What have you found that’s helpful?

Shonodeep:

Yeah, I think part of it is. A lot of the technologies work in the core fundamentals in a similar way, the experience may be very different in terms of the usability, but making sure that you have a CRM system that talks to your marketing automation system, you have an account-based marketing platform that also talks into the CRM, and then finally, that you have the ability to enter your CRM, plug in your, in this case your satellite data, or all your data analytics sort of tools that can help you synthesize and analyze things. And I think for us, in Schneider Electric, we have a customer analytics team that’s been fantastic, that’s helped us kind of think through and look at these pieces and how they work together. Change management, the biggest challenge that I think lot of us face when it comes to onboarding these platforms, ’cause not a lot of the platform providers, I would say, no offense to a lot of you, have a great change management process. And I think that’s something that we’ve got to work towards.

Danny:

Yeah, it’s super difficult, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, you’ve got I think a lot of people that are just generally resistance to change, there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of resistance to change for many reasons, I’m either afraid of it, or I don’t want to mess with it, or I’m worried that I’m going to lose my job. So what have you seen that has been successful in terms of deploying? So, as you said, you didn’t have this visibility before, and now you guys are kind of like going through, cutting through fog a little bit, what were you guys able to do or how are you guys managing that?

Shonodeep:

I wish I could take credit for a lot of it, well, since I’ve been here only for a year, but I think the methodical approach that we’ve taken has made it successful, meaning that we never turn on everything all at once, we start either in a geography or in a sub geography, and we trial and test it out, and then we start to scale. Especially when you go from country to country, and you have different languages, et cetera, right, that is a big problem. But that kind of testing and phasing in, is what’s been working. And we’ve partnered very closely with our Schneider Digital, which is our information technology side, and as they’ve been really helpful at coordinating the platform developments and establishment with us. In my team, I have a Digital Customer Experience team that’s responsible for the implementation of those platforms. And so that makes it also successful too, is by having a focus dedicated team versus somebody that kind of has to live with it, but then doesn’t necessarily have the chance of, call it, onboarding.

Danny:

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. Yeah, we see that a lot. Yeah, what we also see a lot is flip side. So not taking like little chunks, like, hey, we’re just going to focus on this group with this geography or this department, or what have you, it’s we’re doing everything, we’re going now hoo ah, again, then it’s like, oh, my gosh, and then you come to realize, man, big thing, we really liked process, we didn’t know that. We though that buying Salesforce was going to, not to throw shade on Salesforce, actually, this week’s episode is on top CRMs, so anyways, that’s neither here nor there. These are all great platforms, but if you don’t have the framework behind them, man.

Shonodeep:

You got it, you got it. You mentioned Salesforce, we’re one of the biggest Salesforce users, and so for us, it’s really important that we look at those processes. And now some of the things I’m doing with my team is we’re going through a massive transformation where we’re reorganizing, re-architecting from product focus to customer segment focus, customer segment orientation, and along with that, that incorporates and entails the integration of the portfolio products into a customer segment, but along with that, it’s about now how do we develop processes because now we’re changing things around that allow us to make that we’re using CRM consistently, using marketing automation consistently, and that’s going to be a big phase for us in the next few months.

Danny:

No, it’s great. I mean, here’s the thing, you were talking about rolling out with Salesforce, and you guys being a big users, I think it’s super needed, and it’s really important, once you get to a certain phase, but going from like over here to, like from zero to 60, like that is like, okay. ‘Cause I think what you guys do is great, just get those wins, build that in there. ‘Cause I would imagine, from a change management perspective is that when you have a more focused group, that maybe just communicating and internalizing those wins, like, “Oh, my gosh, look at this, “this helped us do this. “We have visibility now, this is amazing,” and the internal cheerleader is like, “Oh, yeah, this is awesome, “this has made my life a million times easier,” or what have you, then that’s how you’re going to win fans and scale, right?

Shonodeep:

Absolutely, and just to add to your comment, I mean, we found the success points, like remember, the change we’ve made around using our inside sales team and our customer service team, to multiply, force multiply, their one-on-one interactions by using marketing automation technology, has turned these teams into true fans of marketing. Before they may have been like, “Yeah, that’s great content, how do I use it?” Now we’re involved in the use of it. And so we’ve developed nurture paths, say, call it, steps of five emails, where we’ll go through with the inside sales team, and then we’ll actually do boosting, we’ll do paid boosting after that, to then re-engage those customers who maybe didn’t open it. But we’re seeing open rates, call it, five times higher than what we would have if we were just doing big Schneider corporate emails. So it’s changed things.

Danny:

It’s going to be more tailored, I imagine.

Shonodeep:

Yes.

Danny:

All right. So for those in our audience that are, “Okay, nurturing and whatnot, all this stuff,” like, sometimes, we can throw up big terms and whatever, but really, at the end of the day, I mean, I think one of the really exciting things, this is a conversation that I had with one of our clients before, we were talking about trade shows, “Hey, listen, how many follow-ups do you have?” Let’s just take this real simple, right? “Okay, well, you we met all these people at a trade show,” or, “we have this list of people that we’re working.” Said, “Okay, well, “we can create an automated email sequence. “So instead of you sending an email to 50 people, “like one by one, let me send to this person, “now let’s send it to this, “I mean, how long is that going to take? “So imagine doing that like that?”

And I think the awesome thing is that where you guys have it right, is that a lot of times we have this major disconnect between sales and marketing. So sales is on this part of the building, marketing is way over here, and both are like, “Oh these guys, I can’t believe,” like, “why did marketing make this? “What the heck do they know?” And sales like, “They don’t even use anything that we made.” And I think by walking in and getting an understanding of like, what they need, and saying, “Hey, this is how it’s going to help you guys,” and then, “let me show you these couple of things.” Like, “Oh, wow, “you mean I can like increase my productivity like big time, “you mean I can have more interactions with customers “in a shorter amount of time? “Wow, that’s amazing, that’s super exciting,” so.

Shonodeep:

And I’ll just say maybe another helpful hint for the audience would be as you assess that with your different sales organizations, there are some that are much more transactional, that don’t have the time to be a hunter, per se, so what we found is that that type of, so I’ll call it lead-gen trends, coordination, opportunity management, doesn’t necessarily work as effectively. But when the primary goal, like inside sales, or our customer service team, is meant to look for those opportunities, and seek out that value add that they can provide and go after that diffuse market that the guys that are going after the big projects would never have a chance of shooting at, this is a way for these teams to be successful. And I think starting, and maybe it’s smaller dollars, but you can make a big name in marketing, or make a big mark in marketing when you focus in those areas.

Danny:

Absolutely. And you have the whole land and expand opportunities there.

Shonodeep:

That’s right.

Danny:

So, that’s awesome.

Shonodeep:

We’re trying to still figure out how to do this with our channel partners, and force multiply with their sales force, who, in many cases, is more opportunistic, but I look forward to your next episode to learn more.

Danny:

Learn all about the secrets, yeah, absolutely. So one other thing I wanted to talk about a little bit was, from as far as another challenge, I would imagine from a marketing standpoint, is that now we have all this great marketing technology, and it’s awesome. There’s a key thing you said earlier, you had a great partner as far as your data and analytics, is now that we’re generating all this activity, we’re generating all this data, we’re generating all this analytics, and we’ve got ABM platforms, we’ve got CRM, we have marketing automation, and who knows how many other technologies we’ve got, pouring into marketing automation, is having that visibility and taking all of this structured or unstructured data, and making what’s what of it, is that a challenge for you guys?

Shonodeep:

It is, because I say, firstly, it’s so easy to get distracted by the next shiny thing. So the next sales person that emails me and says, “Hey, we’ve got this great new platform for your content, “or this great new thing,” and it’s so easy to get distracted, but we are trying to stay ultra-focused, I mentioned the transformation that we’re going through right now, what I’ve done is I’ve said, “All right, “we need to make sure that in every key area, “be it lead-gen or be it social media, “we need to make sure we have listing analytics, “we need to make sure we have lead-gen “and performance analytics. “For our campaigns, we need to make sure “that we have analytics on the ROI for campaigns.” So part of the redeployment has been to make sure that we have analysts that we’re positioning across the different touch points, or the different areas of marketing, because the worst thing that we can do is move on to the next thing without learning it, or go after the next shiny thing without learning. So that’s a big investment that we’re making in our team.

Danny:

Yeah, no, that’s great, totally makes all the sense in the world to me. So well, Shonodeep, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. I feel like we go like hours more.

Shonodeep:

Thank you for the opportunity, Danny, I really, really appreciate it.

Danny:

Any parting words you would have for our audience who are maybe facing or struggling with this challenge?

Shonodeep:

Yeah, no, I think that I’d love to have the dialogue with a lot of the folks here in the audience on their challenges and how they’re solving for it. In Schneider Electric, we have a large marketing organization that’s doing some amazing things in different spaces, and I hope we get a chance to maybe, in the future episodes, have a chance to bring in more of the team.

Danny:

Absolutely, yeah.

Shonodeep:

And showcase more of the great learnings that we have.

Danny:

That’d be awesome. Well, Shonodeep, again, thanks so much. We really, really appreciate all your insights, super valuable to our audience. And I’ve learned a lot too, so thank you.

Shonodeep:

Thanks again for the time, Danny.

Danny:

Anytime. All right, well, there you go, there you have it. Listen, some great stuff, we have some recurring themes here. The big challenge, right, is, and I know everyone can, almost everybody can relate to this, if not 100% of you, is that we’ve got essentially these two audiences, how do we get that visibility in from working with channel partners, or distributors, or what have you, or even independent sales reps, all the way down to the end user? And digital has a really great way, a great opportunity, to be able to get that visibility. If you’re thinking about that whole marketing automation, CRM integration, that kind of PC, you can start doing that but don’t do it super fast, we talk about this all the time, take that segment, take that small test group and just kind of, as one of our previous guests said, nail it and then scale it. So, Malika said that, Malika, I’m stealing it, but I’m crediting it to you, nail it and scale it.

So anyways, listen, this is it for today’s episode. If you have any other questions, we’d love to answer them for you. You can reach out to industrialsage.com/questions. If you’re listening on any of the podcasting apps, we would love a review, if you’re on social media, please share stuff, we’d love it, and last but not least, if you’re not on our email list, you need to go to industrialsage.com, get on there ’cause there’s a lot of great content that you’re not hearing or seeing, if you’re watching this on social media, or listening on iTunes, that a lot of stuff is coming down the pipe through your email that you don’t want to miss. So go to there, sign up, and you can take a look at all the really cool things there, and I will check you later, check you out next time, next week. I’m Danny, thanks for watching.

 

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