Megan Eisenberg is the VP of Marketing and Customer Acquisition at DocuSign. In less than 4 years she’s helped DocuSign grow from a 150 to 1,200 people. She’s seen by many as a master of B2B marketing and in this interview she shares the B2B marketing secrets behind her success. Click play and listen to the latest episode of Triblio’s B2B Content Marketing Leader’s Podcast:

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/docusign-meagen-eisenberg/

Meagen Eisenberg, VP Marketing @ DocuSign

BEGINNING OF TRANSCRIPT

Jeff Zelaya: We’re honored to have you on the show today Meagen. Could you start off by sharing a little bit about yourself and your role at Docusign?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sure. My name is Meagen Eisenberg. I’m Vice President of Customer Acquisition and Marketing at DocuSign. I’ve been here a little over three years. I’ve really see the company grow from a 150-person company to 1200 people in the last three years.

DocuSign, we’re just doing some exciting things to get rid of the paper and the paper chase that we are moving you all to online signing, the electronic signatures and we’re just having a good time doing that.

Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. I’m a user of DocuSign. Triblio is a client and we love it. It makes our life a lot easier.

Meagen Eisenberg: Thank you.

Jeff Zelaya: So thank you for that.

Meagen Eisenberg: Thank you very much.

Jeff Zelaya: So I heard one of the first things that you did when you joined DocuSign four years ago was to come in and conduct a content audit and really take us a measure of where you guys were at, what needed to be done. How important is doing that for businesses in this day and age? What is a content audit and what’s involved in doing one of those?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sure. So definitely really important – anytime I start a company, I really want to understand what assets I have available from a demand generation standpoint, from a sales standpoint, to leverage just to see what we’re going to be syndicating out to entice people to come in. But also to see where we have gaps and where we need to build out content and so three years ago, we didn’t have these cool products like Triblio out there where we could do that audit and maintain.

So I had the spreadsheet and really mapped out kind of the buyer’s journey and different stages they need to go through and then what kind of content do we have for those stages.

A lot of times when we first join a company in their early stages, it’s a lot of generic content around probably analyst white papers. Maybe you have product briefs. You’ve got hopefully some customer case studies but maybe not that content that aligns with the business. Like DocuSign, we were really strong in sales use case and HR procurement but also in industries.

So that year, we had picked six different industries to target. Financial services, insurance, high tech, healthcare, higher ed, and banking, and you can imagine we did not have a lot of specific content in those areas at the time. So just understanding what we had, what we needed and putting them in the spreadsheet and then I also just socialized that with product marketing. There was a woman in product marketing here at the time, to talk to her if I was missing anything.

I talked to the sales team and really just what do they use on a day to day basis. So I can also get a sense what they found valuable and then what they were missing and filled that out. It ended up being this six-page massive spreadsheet, really looking at all of that.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow.

Meagen Eisenberg: So that’s important.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah. No, it sounds like it’s an essential first step for anyone to take when they’re launching and revamping their content strategy. I know you mentioned some of that in that answer. It looks like you were creating some buyer personas because initially, I thought DocuSign was just for sales. But there are so many ways that this technology could be used. It looks like part of your process was creating those personas for who to target with your content. Can you share a little bit more insight on what that process is like for you, in building those buyer personas and the questions that you ask yourself in doing so?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes, good question. We do have way over 20 personas here at DocuSign. As you imagine anyone and everyone at some point in their personal or business life needs to sign a document, whether it’s a permission slip or sales or your procurement to vendor contracts.

So yes, it just started out by looking at what are sort of the durations of a customer as they’re coming on and how long they’re with us, and hopefully as SaaS business forever and ever.

Then we do look at the different stages that a buyer will go through and they are a little different between B to B and B to C. So we do have a consumer component and individuals and folks like real estate agents that buy our product. So if we looked at a business persona, we look at the concept that people are – first they have a problem they’re dealing with and they’re trying to discover different solutions and learn about them.

As they progress, they start to evaluate or go through a trial stage. At DocuSign, we have a trial and then eventually they will evaluate the different players as selected by and so we’re looking at across the stages. What are the goals that the person has if they’re going through that? What are the questions they might have that we need to answer?

For us, a lot of times we will get visits – legal to sign electronically and we do a lot of documentation around how it was legal starting with the ESIGN Act that President Clinton put out there in 2000. So it has been legal for a long time. They will ask things such as, “Is it secure?†So we have content around that as well.

As they’re progressing through, they want to know different things like, “How are people using the product?†and so it’s so important that we understand the buyer as what they’re thinking, what their goals are, what their questions will be and what their objections will be.

So we’re creating our personas. We’re asking those kinds of questions to get those kinds of answers and then we’re also looking at what they’re doing, kind of what actions they’re taking. So we can get a sense of where to find them. So where do they go to digest the information? So we could get maybe banner ads or good content out there in front of people where they’re digesting them, kind of some of their gateway actions that they do to kind of raise their hand. That there’s something we need to target. Even feeling sort of what they’re thinking, if they’re aware or not, where they are. Are they intrigued, et cetera?

Then how are they going against the experience, against our messaging? So we will also test a little bit of messaging against it. So all those very important things are part of building out a person’s persona and working with the sales team because they talk with them on a day to day basis and learn from them that way and of course directly to our customers and our prospects asking and learning about them.

Jeff Zelaya: You’ve also done a lot of research and know very well what the buyer journey looks like. How were you guys able to learn that? Was there any technology that helped? Was it certain questions that you asked? How were you able to really zone in on the buyer’s journey and how are you still looking at that information and revamping it as it changes?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sure. Well, I think there’s – every buyer in some ways goes through a journey and there are many different – I’ve seen [0:06:55] [Indiscernible] decisions models. I’ve seen different agency models that are doing persona work. It really comes down to there’s an awareness stage or there – where they have a problem and they’re trying to learn more about the solution, so that can take you to the next stage, learning. They’re evaluating at some point when we buy something.

In technology, we’re looking at all our options. So if we could do a trial, we’re doing a trial. If we could do a pilot, we’re doing a pilot. Then once we feel confident in our decision, we buy. Then if we’re – as technology companies, if we’re lucky, our customers will be advocates for us.

So there are definitely these stages and you could bring that into your business. But I think it’s just understanding those stages, talking to your customers. What are they looking for? Then mapping your content to those stages and then for us, we do so many personas and we don’t have that large marketing team. What are we doing to automate that and how do we use technology to automate the content against this journey?

Jeff Zelaya: Now Meagen, you’re producing blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars. You’re creating all this content. How do you know what content is working and how do you measure it? What are the metrics that you like to zone in on?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sure. That’s a good question. So we’re certainly looking at the number of folks that will read and digest that content. So if it’s a blog, how many visitors are we having? If it’s a white paper, how many downloads? If it’s email marketing, how many emails are – what are they doing with the email? Are they clicking through it? Are they filling out the form or not?

But I think more importantly is we are capturing that in our marketing automation platform which is Eloqua at DocuSign or Oracle Marketing Cloud and then mapping that all the way through to our CRM, which is Salesforce, and tying it to a campaign. Then we monitor those members of that campaign and if they influence or initiate a new opportunity. Then we monitor that opportunity all the way to close one and we look at the influence against the revenue that’s tied to that. So we run against all our content metrics to see if it actually influenced revenue or not.

Then even how many – if we look at just influencing revenue. But how much revenue, how many different opportunities? Then we can rank our content that way.

Jeff Zelaya: Meagen, I’ve heard that you are the queen of moving prospects that are in the middle of the funnel and getting them closed, getting them to a decision and it seems like you’ve been creating great content around that. What are your favorite strategies or techniques or tricks that you would recommend to companies that have a lot of prospects in that middle part of the funnel, but they are not getting them to the next stage?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sure. So I think number one is your nurture programs and your content, with your content. So it’s really understanding where they are in the funnel, in the middle, who they are. So you make sure you’re collecting the right information. It’s really important for us to collect title and industry so that we could tailor the right message to them. But also at the right time.

If you’re early stage, we’re helping you do more of the learning. If you’re middle and you’re evaluating, we want to make sure we’re giving you case studies and referrals or references to talk to others, to get a sense of the products, and eleven product content. But delivering that content at the right time, we’re also doing pipeline acceleration activities, webinars that would be specific to where they are. Maybe it’s a one-on-five webinar with the customer. So they can ask questions that they may have.

It’s some dinners or wine tasting, really developing a relationship. So they have a chance to meet with DocuSign, meet with the execs, meet with the developers and get any of the questions answered that they would need answered.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow. That’s great. A lot of great techniques from Meagen there. How close – I know you’re big on this. So you mentioned this even earlier in our conversation today. How closely does marketing work with sales at DocuSign?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. So it’s really important. I think the success of all marketing departments is the relationship that they have with sales. So really important upfront was building that relationship, agreeing to really understanding the flow of leads, mapping that out with sales, definitions of the different stages, understanding what content they had that was working, what wasn’t working, what they needed, lead scoring, agreeing to those definitions. We use various decisions for the waterfall, agreeing to the different stages and metrics and having aligned goals against those stages, so extremely important that we have a strong relationship with sales.

It’s not just that upfront. It’s habitual. We continually meet and communicate on a weekly basis on what’s working, what content is marketing and not, and what they need, and what programs we’re releasing, how people are responding, measuring the results, making sure we’re transparent with those results with them whether it’s working or not. All of that is really important.

Jeff Zelaya: That’s so refreshing to see because there are many companies out there that have them siloed and it’s almost a competitive environment where you guys are very collaborative and I think that’s a reason, a big reason why you’ve been growing it and so successful. So congrats on creating that type of culture at DocuSign.

You mentioned some of these throughout our chat today, Eloqua and I think Influitive is something that you’re using for advocacy, Salesforce. Besides those tools, what other technology do you have in your toolbox to help execute with your content marketing and your strategies?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. So definitely Oracle Marketing Cloud. You’re right on that. Demandbase is really important for us from understanding the person as – the group as they’re coming and to be able to pivot the content that we need to show. So personalization, getting the right information without having to ask for too much.

For instance on our forums, we can get all the location and industry [0:12:49] [Indiscernible] company, kind of the company information behind the scenes. We also use a technology called LookBookHQ to help our market development reps and SDRs deliver aggregated content by persona and by industry. In the social space, we use Insightful [Phonetic]. They’re very similar to your email marketing platform but for social and they help us deliver content to our different personas as well, but on the social channels. So I love working with them. You’re right with Influitive on the advocacy side.

Jeff Zelaya: As we wrap up, the last question I have for you. What do you see on the horizon for content marketing?

Meagen Eisenberg: It’s definitely this area of predictive analytics and capabilities. So being able to have technology, monitor people’s activities and interests and how they responded in the past and then map the right content to that. So companies are already working with Oracle Marketing Cloud and they’ve hooked into Eloqua and so when you come and you’re – people going through their feeders and determining what – how they’re going to be nurtured, it will actually analyze and predict which is the best next piece. Which white paper is the next white paper you should deliver? Which case study is the right case study? What webinar would be best digested at this time?

So these companies that are really looking at predictive capabilities like Mintgo and 6Sense and I’ve seen a few other really nascent companies coming out. We will be – I think some people will be leveraging and retesting in the year to come.

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