Your brand isn’t just a logo or a tagline. It’s the very identity of your business. But what happens when the market changes and your current position no longer fits? How do you declare your independence from an outdated image and forge a new path forward?
That’s exactly what today’s guest Michaela Underdahl, marketing lead at Nimble CRM, is here to talk about in this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, with our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton. Michaela is about to share some revolutionary insights that’ll help your brand not just survive but thrive in this brand-new world of business.
Key Indicators of Market Repositioning
Mike Allton: My pleasure. I’m so glad to connect with you. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a chance to chat. So I’m looking forward to it simply from that perspective, but I’d love it if you could just walk us through the moment you realized that Nimble needed to reposition itself in the market.
What were some of the key indicators?
Michaela Underdahl: It actually has been a gradual process, so maybe we can go down memory lane a little bit. So when Nimble was first launched in 2009—I believe it was launched and positioned as the social CRM before I joined—but Nimble was the only CRM on the market that integrated social media.
So imagine having a CRM that has direct integrations with all the social media platforms. That was Nimble. We had access to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, then Google Plus, and other APIs. So when you log into Nimble, you can use it as an aggregator of everything. You were able to see all the notifications and all your messages in one unified inbox, you could see all the birthday notifications. So it allowed you to immediately jump on an opportunity to connect with somebody or reconnect with somebody, start a conversation. And also it automatically added or unified all this information to a specific contact record. But then shortly after I joined, we lost access to a LinkedIn API. So we were not able to directly integrate with them and then gradually the other platforms followed.
But right after we lost access to LinkedIn, we were already thinking about what we do to still allow our customers to benefit from using a Nimble on social media. So we came up with a browser extension that we have until now. It works on all browsers and all social, not only social platforms but anywhere on the web that allows you to use Nimble outside of Nimble.
You can hover over any name anywhere and create a contact record within seconds. So we already started thinking about how we could still deliver on the promise, but we started to see that things were changing. So then later we saw that while we had a pretty easy way for our customers to get their contacts into Nimble, there was one very important thing missing, which was web forms.
We added web forms and allowed our customers to easily create and deploy web forms and capture leads, put them in the system. And from there we were like, “But once the leads are in, what do you do? How can we make it easier for our customers to spend less time managing the system and have the system do a lot of the heavy lifting for our customers?”
Because our customers are small to medium-sized business owners, and entrepreneurs, they’re busy. They’re wearing so many different hats and they need help. So then we started thinking once the contact got in. How can we make it easier for people to do the next action?
We started playing with integrating the features that we already had. So right now you can easily get the contact into Nimble and then immediately enroll them into an email sequence or also put them on a customizable Kanban board. So from the moment they get in, we make it easy for people to make sure that they don’t have to do a lot of the manual steps that they would otherwise have to do by allowing them the option to create a personalized email sequence and start the drip. We also connected email sequences with the Kanban boards. The feature is called Workflows, but it’s essentially what it is: a customizable Kanban board. Or you can use it in a list view, which gives you the ability to visually see or visualize where you are in the process of the customer.
We have been working towards offering all the tools that our customers might need to cover the entire journey of the customer from capturing the lead to an actual conversion and then also nurturing the contact to drive further business and referrals and so on.
Using Past Experiences for Market Repositioning
I’m curious how that diversity of experience has helped you prepare for this new effort to reposition the entire brand.
Michaela Underdahl: So when I applied for the position at Nimble, I actually applied to be in customer service. And a fun thing is I didn’t get the job. So they told me that it came down to two candidates. And then they felt that the other one was a stronger candidate that had more experience. So I think I may have sent an email that I really liked them, and maybe if there were other opportunities in the future, I would love to be involved.
They ended up going back and offering me a slightly different role. And the girl that was hired instead of me—she’s still at Nimble too. She’s leading our customer support. So we started on the same day, exactly. So our anniversary is the same day. And so when I started, I did customer support for three months and that allowed me to really learn the platform in and out. And then I was transitioning into a social media role or more like a community management role.
Having a good knowledge of what you’re selling is very beneficial because when you’re having interactions with people on social media, you can intelligently talk about the value it brings.
I also ended up doing hundreds of webinars, training people, working with industry influencers, and actually onboarding them. So I was able to learn a lot of different use cases, and that prepared me for working on the rebranding and positioning role because I’ve been so close to the product that I think we might get to it later, but it was good, and bad because I ended up being too close after 10 years working somewhere, you can become a little too close.
Mike Allton: Yeah, I can relate to that. So I think it was when you were transitioning into the social media role that you and I met. I think that’s probably when you were at Social Media Marketing World that’s when we first got to meet, which is fantastic.
Challenges in the Marketing Repositioning Process
Mike Allton: But I’m curious what some of the personal challenges may be that you ran into during this repositioning process and whatever those challenges were.
How have you overcome challenges?
Michaela Underdahl: I think I realized I was too close to the product. And I had to step back and go back to the drawing board because all of us involved in the rebranding discovered April Dunford’s book called Obviously Awesome. She talks a lot about how in the B2B space or B2B tech—it’s all about features. Feature here, feature there, but how that doesn’t mean anything to people who are shopping.
There’s so much software, and there’s so many CRS on the market. I realized I was just using our internal lingo and calling things names or using words normal people don’t use because I’ve been in it for 10+ years.
That was definitely one of the biggest things I had to step back on and be like, “No!”
Mike Allton: Makes a lot of sense. It’s something that I’m spearheading at Agorapulse where we’re trying to talk less about features and benefits and even go beyond benefits and talk about the things that we do and why we do them.
Why is our approach to social media management different from other tools? Because there are so many tools out there. They all schedule posts to LinkedIn and X and so on. You can differentiate them on price to an extent, but when you’re thinking about a solution, whether it’s a social media management tool or a small business growth engine, why are they different and why are they that way? Why is their house so different?
Strategies/Tactics for Marketing Repositioning
Is there a specific strategy or a tactic that you found that was particularly effective in communicating your new positioning?
Michaela Underdahl: We spoke to customers, but not immediately.
That was part of the learning process. So one of the things that April talks about in her book is focusing on—I forget the exact term she uses—but basically focusing on the people that love you the most.
We have segmented the database, looking at the people who have been with us the longest. And we’re using a lot of different features and taking advantage of the whole system. Also, we interviewed some, and then we were also focusing on talking to our partners, interviewing those who have been with us for a long time, and learning their lingo (meaning a normal language). Because we were talking in a feature language that nobody wants to hear.
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Mike Allton: I think that’s such an important reminder to everybody. Whether you’re going through a brand repositioning or not, you should still be talking to your customers on a regular basis. Don’t just assign it to somebody in the product marketing department and let them handle it.
I mean, there are a lot of people in the organization that need to have that one-on-one FaceTime periodically. It doesn’t have to be 10 interviews a week, but periodically talking to folks. I’ve got the benefit of doing these podcasts for Agorapulse, where often I am talking to Agorapulse users. I’m hearing them. I’m doing that, but, gosh, so many in the company lack that exposure, including other companies.
That’s going to surface to your point, how they talk about themselves. How they see their business, their world, their industry, how they see your product, what they’re interested in, what they aren’t. You’ll find out that you’ve got features that you thought were super cool that they had no idea even existed. They’d never found them. They never heard of them. You’re going to identify those kinds of problems in your marketing. “You can do that?” I’m like, “God, we’ve had that for years. How do you not know you can do that?”
But that happens, right? They might help you realize that something you thought was going to be really, really helpful isn’t at all because of the way that they want to use the tool or the process they have. And it just doesn’t fit with how you designed your product. Those conversations are important.
Michaela Underdahl: I remember during some of these conversations. I’ve been taking notes, like literally writing down the way people talk about. The features or the capabilities or what we’re doing, like how are they talking about it? How are they describing it? Because it’s very likely there’s a lot more of them that are using these terms. We need to apply that in our marketing and our advertising. It needs to speak to them.
Mike Allton: The real blessing today, I think, for organizations is that you can bring Read.ai or Firefly or Otter.ai into the call, and have the entire call recorded and a transcript created. You can feed all these transcripts back into an AI that is going to help you analyze it. That way, you will be able to get to those learnings and process those learnings so much faster. It’ll identify common phrases, word clouds, problems, wishlists, and all that sort of thing at a much faster rate than a human can. Which leaves you then to have more conversation. So I love that advice.
When it comes to balancing what Nimble was known for in terms of a core identity and then evolving into an image that’s going to appeal to a broader SMB market, how did you balance that?
Michaela Underdahl: Because the change has been gradual. I think that’s what made it easier. We’re trying to just take it slow; take it easy. We haven’t made a major announcement that this happened.
Now we’re at this, we’ve been gradually adding more and more capabilities and trying to keep a close eye on how customers are using it, the feedback and adjusting, and basically doing a lot of different mini launches. Well, listening to our customers about how they’re using it. So because it’s been happening for a long time, I think that was easier to balance it out.
Were there any unexpected benefits or opportunities that came out of this entire repositioning process?
Michaela Underdahl: As we were digging through our database and doing different segmenting, we did discover interesting niches.
For example, in the voiceover community, we have a big adoption rate among voiceover artists. That helped us to identify new groups of our customers. Also, as we were in the process, we were learning about new ways to basically market it, and we learned different use cases. So it was really interesting.
Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense.
We’ve discovered some of those same things here at Agorapulse. We’ve always just been either from marketing agencies or social media managers. Broadly speaking, we’re now going through these exercises to recognize what kinds of social media managers are being targeted. Truly helping and discovering some niche industries like construction and manufacturing or FinTech services that as you asked me upfront, do you work with these companies?
I would say, I don’t know, but here they’ve established themselves as a really interesting segment of our customer base that’s doing some fun stuff. And when you know that, that’s an opportunity for you to do a deeper dive into that industry and create some content to help them have conversations directly with them and expand further in that industry, which is a lot of fun.
Looking back, is there anything you do differently when you’re thinking about some of the decisions you’ve made?
Michaela Underdahl: Looking back, I would have started the conversations with the close customers sooner because when we first started thinking about this, we were looking at different approaches or different books that we could read and extract some processes from.
I already mentioned it. We ended up finding out we were way too close and not talking in words that resonated with people. So I would have involved our customers who have been with us for a long time and are active in the application sooner in the process.
Metrics to Watch
How do you know that these kinds of rebranding or repositioning efforts are having a positive impact? Is it just the bottom line or are there other metrics that you’ve been looking at?
Michaela Underdahl: We’re looking at the adoption rate of the individual feature.
As we’re adding them one by one, we keep a close eye on how it’s adapted and how many customers are using it. And how much are they using it? If we launch something and then people look at it but then abandon it, we need to take a closer look at why is that? Is it too difficult to set up? Are we not explaining its value correctly? And then, of course, looking at the turn rate or the conversion trial to pay. We’d like to have our mixed panel set up so we can see the individual adoption rates of the individual features.
Mike Allton: That’s fantastic. I love it when companies start to pay that close attention to not just how many users are we bringing on and how much money are we making? But how are they actually using our tools and services? I love it when they go so far as to identify when a customer has achieved success with their product or service, and they can celebrate that. They can celebrate the customers and celebrate with them. That’s going to make for a super long-term customer.
Michaela Underdahl: I was just going to say that when I work with people from product, I’m always laughing at myself being horrible—not horrible, but just being a marketer—because I’m like, “Show me the exact customers again.” And I’m writing it down for case studies or testimonials and just fishing from there. So that’s been beneficial for us to work closely with the product, too, and looking at this because then customers are busy.
You do need the testimonials. You do need the case studies.
And we’ve actually when we’ve done a broad outreach, it’s resulted in a lot of raised hands. But when we approach it from the perspective of “We noticed that you started using this, it’s new, do you need any help? Can we set you up with somebody who can review it, and maybe listen to your specific use case?”
Build a relationship in a way that they are more likely to agree to work with you on something like a case study, which takes a lot of time from their busy day.
Measuring Success: Market Repositioning
Mike Allton: I know you were involved with social. I know you now have a whole team that you’re leading, so you’re not quite so hands-on with your social media.
But I have to ask: How has that changed? How are you measuring the success? As you go through this repositioning/rebranding effort, how are you measuring the success from a social media perspective?
Michaela Underdahl: We’re also working on revamping the social strategy as well.
See, I’ve been looking at it. What other companies in a similar space—like, not necessarily our competitors or other similar brands are doing—I was just trying to find content creators or brands that are doing social media in a very educational way where they’re able to quickly summarize what is it you’re doing and how you can help people. That’s something we’ve been trying to implement lately.
As far as tracking, I think the biggest thing that we look at is the referral traffic from social media. But like I said, that’s something we’re working on too right now.
Mike Allton: Now, earlier, I love that you mentioned April’s book. She’s fantastic.
Michaela Underdahl: All of us involved in this read the book and then followed the process. We learned a lot from it, but we were also looking at other industry experts. April specifically focuses on the B2B space, so a lot of the things that she was talking about really resonated with us, especially the things I mentioned about features here and there. But nobody cares kind of thing so leaning on industry experts’ podcasts, and if I see somebody recommending a good book I listen, I used to read a lot, but since my kids, I need to listen to the books.
Mike Allton: Folks, if you’re interested: We did an episode recording with Tamsin Webster not too long ago. That was a fantastic resource. If you’re going through anything that we’ve been talking about today, that’ll be another episode to listen to [or read]. She’s the author of Find Your Red Thread. It’s a process of thinking about “Why are you in business? Who are you trying to help?”
Thank you all of you for listening. We’ll have all the links and all the resources that we talked about today in the show notes below. And don’t forget to find Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Until next time.
