Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen, EMEA marketing manager at Jabra, on growing your business through effective ABM strategies:

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 0:13
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix, I’m Carlota Pico, your host for today’s show and I’m excited to introduce Andreas Villumsen, who is EMEA account based marketing manager at Jabra and also has over a decade of experience in marketing and communications. Welcome, Andreas and thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix.

Thanks very much for inviting me.

Carlota Pico 0:40
The pleasure is ours. Okay Andreas. So tell me about yourself. How did you get to where you are today?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 0:46
Oh, I better cut the story short, right. So we in Denmark, we had to do a trip in the military. I only just finished my high school degree and I had to go into the military service. The next day, I met a guy working actually at the Royal Danish Life Guards, a really cool sergeant, and he told me: “Listen, you need to take the skills and go to Copenhagen Business School and get a degree there. You’ve got a fantastic talent for communications.” I was like, alright, I might have to look into that and I didn’t really have any future plans. So obviously I applied to go to Copenhagen Business School, actually to read German and English, in a language study there. I didn’t make the cut because the exam you needed to have to get in was quite high there, so actually I ended up incidentally in my second priority with marketing, but I haven’t regretted it ever since finalizing those studies. I really find myself very much at home within marketing.

Carlota Pico 1:56
Okay, so your military experience yielded a marketing career?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 2:00
That’s right, so you can say this whole two year period in the Royal Life Guards obviously was a big thing for me back then. But I’ve never had any plans on staying within the army. I knew I had to get out. But that was like those transforming years, just when I turned 20. So it’s really helped shape me as a person as well.

Carlota Pico 2:21
That’s so interesting. And so then talk to me about the next steps. What did you do after military?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 2:26
Yes. So that was five years in Copenhagen Business School, doing both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in marketing, international marketing and English. So I spent a wonderful five years back then, and obviously, then came out and got my first job in a recruitment agency. It was a rather small company and they were looking for their first ever marketing coordinator back then, and I landed that job. It was a fantastic team of colleagues, a big sales team, of course, it was hitting the ramp quite rapidly. Having to suddenly take all that knowledge from school and transform it into what things look like in real business life, but with some really great leaders that helped me a lot on the way.

Carlota Pico 3:20
Hmm, interesting. So what major lessons did you learn from going to school to actually putting that theory into practice in your first role as a marketing professional?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 3:29
I was lucky enough to, besides the schools, have a student marketing job at a private hospital in their communications departments so obviously I got a few years there to try and translate these theoretical pieces into something actionable and concrete but obviously, getting into your first full time role is always a big thing. It was a good experience, I actually just became a dad a month before joining. So I had my first child, Caroline ,in that time as well, but it was a really good time. I think Copenhagen Business School did a really fantastic job of not just putting a lot of theory in your backpack, but also making it very concrete with a lot of external advisors coming through to the training sessions and educations and everything throughout those five years. So they did a really fantastic job there.

Carlota Pico 4:29
Okay, so fast forward 10 years, and now you’re an account based marketing manager at Jabra. Why choose account based marketing as your area of expertise or specialty?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 4:38
Oh, yeah, that’s a really good question. I think throughout my career, I’ve been in these traditional field Marketing and Communications roles. Then working at a company called EMC, we had a PR agency and a really clever guy called Klaus Kølbæk, he had actually joined Jabra as the new PR director and this guy tapped me on the shoulder and told me about this opening in Jabra’s global accounts team where they were looking for an experienced guy or girl perhaps, with the opening of this account based marketing role, and I was like, what is account based marketing and what does it do? He sent me the the job description and it just looked really, really interesting. The job I had when he approached me on this opportunity was actually managing a marketing and business partner team at another company. And really, you can say, I wasn’t sure if that was the way to go forward. Should I still stay becoming a manager or could I now go into this, you could say, more independent role within a specialist sales team at another company? Having admired Jabra for quite some years, even before getting this opportunity to join Jabra, I figured might as well just take that interview. It was just such a great opportunity. I couldn’t turn that opportunity down. So I’ve been with Jabra now for two years, and I really, really love the job and the company, it’s a fantastic place to be.

Carlota Pico 6:14
Okay, Andreas could you walk me through the job description? And does the job description actually match the job’s daily activities?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 6:24
Of course, a job description is always a sales letter right? But they had a really thorough recruitment process so it wasn’t just like one of those, one or two meetings and then sign the contract and then we get started. A very thorough process interview session with Andrew Pratt, who manages our global accounts team, our French based international accounts director as well, Nicolas, so I really got that opportunity to ask all questions possible before accepting anything so they did a fantastic job and in all honesty, no overselling or anything from from the job. It has completely lived up to what they promised, I’m realizing now, looking two years back, I think the job is even more flexible and more open for creative new ideas and what we could do. So I really, really, really loved this job.

Carlota Pico 7:27
Okay, so now after two years in your current role as an account based marketing manager, talk to me about your daily activities, what’s your job look like now?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 7:36
A lot of calls, a lot of alignment, a lot of creative development. Really, I can’t say that any work week looks like the same. We’ve got a ton of projects, so I can potentially give you just a quick insight into the team that I sit in, Jabra has, I think, it’s close to 120 Global customers that fit within this program that we call global accounts. Each of them have a global account manager and then some regional account managers where we help manage their businesses all across the world, and really what me and my manager, Michael, what we do and our team is bring support to all of the sales guys managing these 120 accounts. So from an ABM perspective, we have chosen, I can’t remember the exact figure, but probably around 20 or 25, that we will give a full one to one account based treatment, and then there would be a lot of sporadic, ad hoc requests coming in on all the remaining accounts. So any work week doesn’t look like the next one. It’s a ton of different new projects, it’s a ton of new requests coming in, joining customer conversations, all that stuff. So a very, very broad and very wide ranging role.

Carlota Pico 8:56
Yeah, it sounds like a very sales driven role as well. So how does marketing play a role in that?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 9:03
Yeah, so APM, at least according to my definition of account based marketing, you can say this is very much a sales pattern role right as opposed to field marketing. There’s nothing wrong with field marketing and we have a lot of field marketing people as well. This is very much a marketing role that support sales and partner with sales much more in depth than the traditional field marketing teams would do. So we are working on account plans, we help build a one to one communication on different customer projects, to all sorts of creative pieces to make Jabra look as good a partner as possible to those accounts.

Carlota Pico 9:53
Okay. So it’s not about attracting new customers but more about retaining your existing customers?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 9:58
It’s a combination of both actually. So you can say if we look at these 120 accounts, we would have some very mature Jabra accounts among these and obviously the main purpose with these accounts is to make them stay as loyal and get to trust Jabra as much as they have in the past, so very much about retaining that business we have with them. Then we’ve got a subset of accounts that are hidden in, should we call it development phase, it means that we would have good business with them in one or two regions, but still with the potential to do even better with them in a remaining region. Then we’ve got completely new logos, acquisition accounts as well, with a big on-paper-at-least potential, but where we would have very little business with them. So it’s actually a mix of all three.

Carlota Pico 10:51
Okay, very interesting. Well, let’s take a step back. Could you talk to me about Jabra? What is it?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 10:56
Yes so, as you can see, we are wearing our headsets here, right? Jabra is part of an organization called GN (Great North), it’s actually a 150-year-old company founded by one of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs I would call him. This guy was closely related to not only the royal family in Denmark, but even a lot of the rulers of the world back then. He was so clever, he actually put in place a telegraph cable connecting Europe to Asia, you can imagine, back then 120 or 30 years ago when this was piloted, this guy had to make strong arrangements with the Tsar in Russia, with people all the way through these 9000 kilometers of inland road, where these cables were to be built. So everything from ever since GM was founded has been about connecting people, and I know that was the old trademark of Nokia, but we were there a long time before Nokia. So this is about audio communication collaboration, and this is still very much upfront of what Jabra and the company do today. So our sister company is doing hearing aids, so we’ve got that under the same roof as the hits of production that Jabra does.

Carlota Pico 12:27
Okay, and how has COVID-19 shaken up your world or your business world?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 12:32
Oh, yeah, so just imagine the majority of the world’s countries having to send employees to work from home, in these confined areas. Everybody had to use a virtual collaboration all of a sudden, right? The need and request for audio devices, like we produce at Jabra has been unprecedented, we’ve never seen any demand coming from customers to the extent that we have seen over the past six months. It’s a positive thing you can say for our company, manufacturing these supporting devices to support our customers. The back side of that coin is that the demand was so great that we couldn’t satisfy all customer’s demands, simply because we didn’t have enough products. So we completely emptied the shelves of all our inventory, when Covid-19 really hit the market and even today, we are still behind on orders and being able to fully fulfill all of the customer requirements. So you can say we’ve learned a lot over the past couple of months, you can imagine just the production pieces, the shipping, the getting products in the hands of our customers to support their businesses. And obviously, we had to also give priority to some of these first line emergency responders like banks, finance companies, of course, the hospitals, etc, to make sure that they were fully equipped with audio devices to to support their customers.

Carlota Pico 14:08
I mean, it sounds like a fantastic problem to have.

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 14:11
Yeah, it’s a bittersweet one right. Our sister company, on the other hand, is selling hearing aids, you can imagine with the older population being too afraid to get outside, the hearing aids shops are closing, etc, so that part of the business has come to a complete stop over the past couple of months as well. So, of course feeling fortunate that we had a role to play but feeling sorry for the sister company employees that they ran more or less out of businesses overnight. So I guess it shows the two dimensions of the COVID impact just in our company.

Carlota Pico 14:50
Yeah, definitely. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing and communications. You’re in a really delicate field because you’re selling earpieces, so you have to evoke the desire to buy something online that you put in your ear and you can’t really test it. So how do you do that, through language or communication?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 15:07
Oh, it’s big work and the back end team of Jabra’s marketing department has a lot of clever people. There’s a branding creation team, there’s a digital team, etc and even an insights team, not to forget that piece. So everything that we do is of course, based on a strategy and the strategy comprises of a lot of insights. You guys would know the Apple air pods, the small little design pieces and a company with such power, like Apple, is creating markets, even for us where we probably differentiate ourselves against the market as that we do a consumer versions of our headsets and we do business versions of our headsets. There’s quite a drastic difference between the headsets because in a business context, you would have a big focus on high audio quality and microphone performance, where as a consumer I would just want that really cool music experiences. We even developed sports, ear pods that had pulse meters in them, etc. So they are two paths, but these two paths also impact one another. Back in the days when companies used the first day headsets for professional usage, you would have a call center, right? People don’t want to look like a call center agent these days if you are a knowledge worker or office worker, right? You would want something that looks a little more cool, a little more sexy, we are all a bit vain with what devices we are wearing so we also need to make those compromises in our communication and explain and help guide users to choose the right headset that fits their needs. So there’s a lot of effort going into making those stories resonate with our audience for sure.

Carlota Pico 17:06
Okay, and what shape do those stories take? So content-wise, are they videos, is it through a blog, is it through social media?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 17:13
Yes, definitely, all of those. A video is becoming an increasingly powerful way of bringing across our messages. You can say creating videos is not only a lengthy process in many cases, but also expensive, right? I think we would love to have 10 times as much video content as we do today, but we have a limited budget and we have limited resources. But it’s definitely something we have improved on just over those two years that I’ve worked with Jabra. Then the website is a chapter on its own. We have a really, really powerful digital team. I can’t even recall now, I think we manage up to eight or nine different languages on the Jabra website these days. And that’s a big website. So that part is a big thing as well. Online sales is becoming even more important, these days and Jabra has made some tremendous efforts in that area as well, having grown our online sales quite drastically over the years.

Carlota Pico 18:20
Okay, excellent. Now zooming a little bit more into account-based marketing. How do you know what accounts to target in the first place?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 18:29
Yes, so you can say in the specialist team that I sit in, the global accounts team, they are all defined. So we know exactly all those 120 accounts by name. The difference of course there is what does our engagement look like in different parts of the world? Where do we need to do penetration or create demand, make sure I use our new products and i’m hitting the right people, etc. That’s the underlying big puzzle, getting to that stage. So obviously managing this in teams, actually we are quite a heavy Microsoft Teams user. So we have a dedicated team site for each of these 120 accounts where the full sales team, marketing team, program management team, etc have access to specific information about each of those customers.

Carlota Pico 19:23
Okay, so then my next question would be how do you know who to prioritize first?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 19:28
Yeah, so we prioritize really, in essence, all 120. They are given full attention, but you can say from an ABM support perspective, we might have some customers that don’t have any imminent needs for the marketing and communications support services that we bring to our customers, so it’s very much also about where are the customer? What are they doing? Are they introducing new headsets to their catalogs from their employees, etc. So that would be where we would normally do our job as well, right? And then you can say, acquiring a lot of new contacts, generating the right value propositions to the customers in search phase is a lot of work as well.

Carlota Pico 20:11
Yeah, definitely. Do you use any tools to measure your performance or to measure how well your accounts are performing in their activities?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 20:20
Yeah, and you can see, the overall measurement that really applies is revenue, right? So each of these 120 accounts would have a revenue target and we’ve exceeded those targets by more than 20%, year after year, the past three or four years. So we are doing really well with these accounts. But at one point, they will also reach like a maximum level of revenue generation. We can’t oversell headsets, because they would only have so many employees that would be in need headset devices. So it’s very much about understanding, where does potential lie? How do we keep the current business that we already have with them? And how can we expand into new territory. So a concrete example could be last year, we acquired a company called Altia Systems. They have specialized in cameras, for small rooms, huddle rooms and meeting rooms, so that suddenly became a new product that we could introduce to the existing customers and see if we could make our foot in there as well. This is something that Jabra is continuously looking at, adding to the portfolio of products and services.

Carlota Pico 21:34
Okay, in terms of creating new marketing strategies or plans, what’s your relationship look like with your sales team?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 21:42
It’s a very strong relationship. We are part of management in the global accounts team, we are part of each of the sales calls that happen. You can say sometimes we need to prioritize not to be in there if there are no concrete marketing actions, of course, but we are fully aligned to the full accounting you can see. We understand perfectly what is expected from us, that could be a one to one specific account plan or communication, go to market model, whatever right? A full member of each of those account teams.

Carlota Pico 22:22
Okay, so are they like your feet and your eyes on the ground?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 22:26
Definitely, but we also take part in customer calls. We host advisory council meetings, these days in light of COVID, we’re doing those virtually as well, so we are a business partner together with sales, making sure that everything goes hand in hand. We’re not just that little support piece in the back end, we’re very much a part of all that happens within each of those accounts.

Carlota Pico 22:54
Excellent. Okay, Andreas, let’s take a walk down memory lane. Could you talk to me about some of your favorite campaigns or projects that you’ve led to date, their purpose? What made them stand down and your career? Stuff like that.

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 23:07
Sure. There could be a big handful of strong cases that we have done. I would say actually, currently, the plans that we have done, and this is the success of being in an account based marketing role, not only do we have a lot of flexibility, we don’t need to adhere to the corporate guidelines, as much as potentially the field marketing team can, we can stretch those barriers a little. But since we are so much focused on the individual accounts, we can make some really cool personalized programs. Lately, we are doing that for a big professional services corporation that is part of our public accounts program. This is a VIP treatment, so we are building some customized boxes, customized booklets, we provide some sample products to make sure that all of those new stakeholders that we are soon to engage with, fully understand what we have available for them right. So it’s really a intrapreneurial role that we can play within Jabra and in this global accounts team. It’s really good fun and there’s a ton of those very personalized projects that we do.

Carlota Pico 24:23
Okay, and that’s very interesting. So how do you know what pivots to make? Is it done through surveys? How did you gather customer feedback and know what to do?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 24:32
Yeah, really good question. So our account managers, they know a lot about their portfolio of customers, and they would normally manage anything between three, four and potentially eight or ten. So this is very much about doing a lot of research so that would be reading the customers annual reports, go online, what do they do in their talent recruitment, etc. That’s always a really powerful place to do research because that gives you an idea on how do they cater for new employees? How do they attract talent? That also reflects the way that they would like to be perceived. You can say, computers, desktop PCs, mice, all those accessories that you expect when you join a company, but they need to live up to certain expectations from the employees and we can cater for those needs as well.

Carlota Pico 25:29
Okay, very interesting. So before we wrap this section up, if you could do anything in this world Andreas, would it still be marketing?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 25:38
I think so, there’s only one little side project. This is like, every time you play the lottery, what would you do? I’m sad to say yes, I think I would actually leave Jabra but really only to try and fulfill working with foster parents. My family, my wife actually, initiated the funding of a child in foster care in Bolivia and we’ve had that foster care, you can say substitution, ever since we got our daughter 13 years ago. So it’s actually a girl the same age as our daughter, we’ve been following her for 13 years and it’s remarkable how that fostercare place in Bolivia helps and brings so much comfort and trust into those abandoned kids and I think that would be my ultimate desire to work with foster care children, if salaries and all that stuff that we need to cater for wasn’t a worry.

Carlota Pico 26:47
Andreas, you literally just sent chills up my arm, I’m about to cry. So let’s move into the next section of our interview, it’s basically your advice for our audience. To get the section started off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. So a professional model or an influencer, that you just really admire.

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 27:06
This is the time of an interview where you would like to call out the people around you, I have to do that as well. So not only the the global account program and all of the wonderful colleagues, I have some really powerful engagements with these people. We’ve got a really, really inspiring marketing director running the field marketing team. Brian at Jabra actually just won a digital award in Denmark, which was a really positive recognition of the last five, six years of hard labor that the marketing team in Jabra has gone through, but they have achieved some really, really impressive results, not just on the commercial support, of course, but really the way Jabra is now quite a dominant player in our market. So they’ve done a fantastic job. I’m not giving them any more praises on the interview here. I would say from external people, especially one guy that I love following is a guy called Doug Kessler and he’s founded a creative agency called Velocity Partners and I really urge you guys, if you’re watching this and hear about Doug Kessler and Velocity Partner’s, they do an amazing job with that blog. They’re not only a really well spoken agency, but they bring so much perspective into all of their blog posts, and they really challenge you as a marketeer or as a communication professional to look at things a little differently. So they’ve been a great source of inspiration over the past couple of years. If I can just call out one piece, they are terrible at coming back, they actually sent a request at one point to learn more about their ABM focus and I was really curious to engage with them, but that piece they haven’t been as good at, so a little nag on that piece they can have here, but they really are an inspiring company.

Carlota Pico 29:17
Excellent Well, I’ll have to check them out. What about a book, a community, an event, a group that you find to be particularly valuable?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 29:25
Yeah. So you could say a great part of marketing and communication and especially ABM is very much about understanding behavior, right? One of the biggest playing points that Jabra has is about conveying the message of why do you want to use certified devices for your professional audio experiences. So that part behavior is a really important phase to understand from a change management perspective or even just getting to know why people behave in certain ways. There’s a Danish guy called Morten Münster, who’s released a book a couple of years ago, it was called a Jytte fra Marketing, but he just released his second book and I’m anxious to get my hands on it, to read that second version on behavioral design because he also brings some really valuable perspectives into any markets here. Anyone engaging with customers in their daily business.

Carlota Pico 30:31
Okay, excellent, Andreas. To finish off this interview, what’s your favorite app at the moment? And why?

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 30:40
I love the LinkedIn app, getting to know what goes on in my network. Getting to get that daily feed of news, it’s probably my favorite app and it has been for a lot of years. I think it’s a really valuable one. I think LinkedIn has done an amazing job to get that up and running and be of high quality. You can say, yes, there are articles within the LinkedIn newsfeed that doesn’t bring you any any good use. But it’s so easy to scroll through, and I’m probably opening that app, I would say 10 or 20 even times a day just to get that little kick.

Carlota Pico 31:22
Wow, I’m sure the LinkedIn team will love that comment. Okay, Andreas. Thank you so much for joining us on The Content Mix. It was awesome to meet you, to learn about your ABM experience and to get to know you as a person.

Andreas Mosegaard Villumsen 31:35
Thanks very much. It’s been a true pleasure joining this interview. Thanks a lot.

Carlota Pico 31:38
Thank you, and to everybody listening in today. Thank you for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspective on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every day. Keep on tuning in. Thanks again. Have a fabulous day and I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai