How to Turn Your Customers Into Your Greatest Advocates with Dave King, CMO of Asana

This episode features an interview with Dave King, CMO of Asana. Specializing in B2B enterprise marketing and growth, Dave joined Asana in 2017 to oversee global marketing efforts after having previously led marketing teams at Percolate, Highfive and Salesforce.

On this episode, Dave breaks down Asana’s unique, hybrid demand gen strategy that starts with a core belief in an exceptional product experience. Dave discusses how to add value, engender trust, and deliver such a remarkable experience that your customers become your greatest advocates.

Key Takeaways

• Word of mouth marketing is the future and is still largely untapped. More people hear about Asana from word of mouth than from any other advertising or marketing tactics. Think about how to create an experience that’s so remarkable that people want to share about it.
• Ultimately a brand is about building trust. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, what matters is that you’re engendering trust within the specific audience that you’re targeting.
• Demand gen has to be tailored to your audience and the needs of the business. You can’t take a demand gen model that works for company X and apply it to company Y. The first and most important thing you need to do is figure out what you need demand gen to do for your organization
• Both the demand gen team and sales teams at Asana are really focused on how to help customers get even more value out of the product.
• Asana customers can use the product for free and see the value from day one, which aligns everybody’s incentives in a powerful way, and is a huge driver of word of mouth.
• Everyone at Asana uses the product, which is a huge advantage to knowing how to explain to customers how it can add value.
• Big ad platforms still work fine but have likely reached their peak influence. There are exciting new types of smaller channels and communities that are more targeted and intimate (like podcasts).
• Gated assets are still sometimes a necessary evil, but there’s likely a technology breakthrough coming where you won’t have to make the false choice between customer experience and data capture. 

Quotes

• “More people hear about us from word of mouth than they do from any of our advertising or marketing tactics. Our community team does several hundred events per year, on five continents, all about driving word of mouth.”
• “We like to say great marketing is about education and delivering an experience. So how do we help people be better at their jobs, and how do you make it an experience that people want to talk about?”
• “Helping people be better at their jobs rather than selling features is a shift that’s happening across our craft...We view ourselves as community organizers more than as professors.”
• “Some of the best marketing is not creating things from scratch, but seeing the bright spots–what is working organically, what’s happening naturally, and how do we create programs to amplify or facilitate that. Our most creative ideas come from what we’re seeing in the community, versus us thinking them up in the lab”
• “I think that the scarce commodity in society right now is trust. We make emotional decisions, and we make them based on trust. That’s ultimately what a brand is: How do I deliver trust?”
• “Our philosophy is that we believe so much in the product experience that we want to get people into that experience as quickly as possible.”
• “Speed to market is the new currency of success. You have to be agile and adaptive...Who has time for a one- or two-year software deployment cycle these days? Especially as demand gen marketers, we’ve got to get up and running quickly, and where you can put tools together to be really adaptive and move fast gives you a big advantage.”

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