Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Geoffroy de Lestrange, International Product Marketing & Communication Director for Cornerstone OnDemand, on the benefits of having an MBA in marketing:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Geoffroy de Lestrange who has extensive experience in marketing and communications in the tech industry and is currently working from Paris for a US software company, Cornerstone OnDemand. Thanks so much for joining us.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 0:27
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Shaheen Samavati 0:30
So, could you just start out by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about your background?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 0:34
So my name pronouned the French way is Geoffroy de Lestrange. I’ve got more than 20 years experience in marketing in B2B, mostly in technical environments, software implementation, a bit of manufacturing. Now I’m working for, yet again, a software company, fascinating topics. More recently, I started an executive MBA at HEC Paris, where I’m learning a lot about entrepreneurship, innovation, new business models and it’s a great experience that I can only recommend to anyone.

Shaheen Samavati 1:13
Excellent. So can you tell us a bit more about your career story and how did you get into marketing in the first place?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 1:22
Well, I did study marketing, I attended a Business School, which is now ESCP Europe, where I could study in the UK, France and Germany, a trilingual programme, which was great to have students from all over Europe. It was an interesting challenge to have the classes in each language and also to do an internship in the country where we were at the time. So very European. I chose as majors, marketing and management information system. So obviously, my first jobs were in what we were calling at the time the .com scene. There was quite a lot of movement, I did quite a few companies in a short time frame. Many of them don’t exist anymore. Then I worked a little bit in France and then in Germany. After a while, I moved to Luxembourg, where I spent eight years in different companies, a great country at the heart of Europe, where you can really work in English, French, German, depending on who your counter part is, it keeps changing all the time and that’s great. I also learned Luxembourgish, which is obviously the local language. After a while, for family reasons, my wife and I decided to head back to France which we did 10 years ago. I worked three years for a training company where I implemented salesforce.com. Not just as a CRM tool, but almost like a custom made DRP system to manage the whole catalogue. Obviously, the CRM part, the marketing automation part, up to the administration and invoicing of the clients. So a pretty significant project that I was in charge of, I learned a lot from it. Working on that project literally gave me the idea to move back into software, which is what I particularly like. That’s how I applied to Cornerstone in 2013 and I joined them in April of that year. I’ve been there ever since.

Shaheen Samavati 3:48
So could you tell us what’s your area of expertise? I mean your background is in product marketing, also in communication. So what’s the area of marketing that you liked the most?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 4:03
What I particularly like is the idea of messaging or storytelling if you want, but in a way that has a positive impact on the business, on the people you want to reach out to. So usually, especially in the tech business, you like to talk about your technology, about your products, about the technical aspects on how you do things. But your clients don’t care. Your clients have a specific issue and you’re trying to bring a solution to help them. So it’s very interesting to try and look at things from that angle, what are the problems we’re trying to solve and what is the job to be done? Then it really helps you go to the main elements of your company vision and mission in really focusing on the core elements of the story. Then, depending on who you’re talking to, you will be more or less detailled. In my case, if I speak to an industry analyst, the level of detail would obviously not be the same compared to a journalist for social media. So it’s pretty, pretty large. Then it’s also about creating interesting and engaging content to support region activities. So the whole topic of content marketing has become absolutely crucial. I’m a great proponent of a glocal approach to content where you can have some messages that can work at a global level, but you really need to take a local approach. I’m not just talking about language, but really culture, mindset, when you talk about specific topics. So a good example that we had last year is in the HR world, because Cornerstone is a HR software company, is the topic of diversity and inclusion, which is obviously a critical topic all over the world. No question about that. But the way you would address it might be very different, depending on each country’s historical background and challenges today on that topic. So that’s a good example on how you may have a global message that you adapt to local requirements and cultural backgrounds.

Shaheen Samavati 6:30
So for context, Cornerstone does people development solutions. Could you just tell us briefly what that is and about your role right now at Cornerstone and what’s your responsibilities?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 6:41
Yes, so Cornerstone started to sell learning management systems 20 years ago. Now they really cover the full spectrum of what is called talent management. So that includes performance management, career planning, recruiting, more and more employee data management too. So it’s quite complex. It’s really the power of HR that has the highest impact on the company’s business. So you have a part of HR that is very administrative, like payroll, so it has to work. Then you have that part of HR, where you train people to work better, you check that they work properly, you try to hire the right person. Whatever you do on those fronts will have a strong impact on the company’s results.

Shaheen Samavati 7:37
So the company is quite global, it has operations all over the world. It’s an American company, you’re working for them from Paris. You’re doing global product marketing and communication. So could you tell us what that means, what’s your responsibilities? I know you’re working across several different languages, different markets, correct?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 7:57
Yes. So I’ve done that for, let’s say, five years, give or take. It’s really about the whole messaging, which includes talking about the product, talking to analysts, industry analysts, like Gartner or IDC. But also creating content for lead generation as well as supporting PR and social media. More recently, my role has changed a little bit, dropping the full part of content and communication to really focus on go to market for specific product lines. So that’s a more recent change. As I said, marketing is very interesting in that sort of environment because you really try to support the sales team and have a strong impact on the business.

Shaheen Samavati 8:51
I know in B2B a challenge is often creating this thought leader content and getting the right people to create the content. I noticed you talked about, you worked a lot with analysts. I saw that on your LinkedIn you built a network of 100 influencers, these are analysts. Did they help you with the content creation? Where do you source your content for thought leadership?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 9:22
You have a mix of people. So you would have those that are very product centric. So you typically work with them to look at for example, the return on investment of your own product. So they would really dive deep into some client case study and really look in a neutral way at your product. If you do this yourself, obviously people will say, we can’t really trust what you wrote about yourself. But if an external analyst looks at things in a neutral way, then obviously it’s much more impactful. Then you have also people that are specialized on specific topics. Experts, take the example of Cornerstone’s business lines, that might be experts on recruiting. You have a whole group of people, for example, in the UK or in Germany, that write blogs on recruiting, that look at trends, that try and analyze what’s happening on that particular front. So we would obviously engage with them, and maybe write blog posts with them or organize webinars, and try and bring a local flair to what we are talking about. So because obviously, the recruiting process is more or less the same all over the world. But the way you do it might have some significant cultural differences whether you’re in one country or another. So that’s another way. The third way which is also quite interesting is working with universities. So some of them being more or less engaged with the business world. So you want to work with those that are way more engaged in the business world. Just to take an example, we have great relationships with the university Politecnico di Milano, in Italy, they have a great working group on HR topics. So it helps to bring people from different horizons, to think about that in a more strategic way. So you see, you have all these different ways to engage with experts, depending on how they work, how they address the topics. It’s always very interesting for us, but also for the reader, when we write, publish a blog, or when it’s a video or any type of content, any type of format. We really try to have content that helps our audience build an opinion, from expert advice on the different topics.

Shaheen Samavati 12:07
I was curious, you’re someone who’s been working in the industry for quite a while. This approach to content marketing, how have you seen it evolve or change since your early experiences working in the tech industry?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 12:22
Well just like in any other areas of marketing, you have more and more technology and automation in a good way. So there are some pretty thought provoking pages where you can see AI generated blogs. It’s a bit frightening but on the other hand, it’s good to force us to rethink how we do our work. We don’t want to write generic pieces that an AI bot could write, obviously. So the automation part will help to bring structure in how you do things, for example, in ensuring that you are working with the SEO experts to ensure that the text that you write, or the content that you publish, or the video that you publish, has the proper words that your audience might be looking for using a search engine. So it’s really a way to ensure that you reach out to the right audience using the vocabulary that they are looking for. So that’s an example that I think is quite critical. Another way is to also ensure that you do not ask for too much information. Having gated content is useful because you want to be able to get an email address, for example. You want to be GDPR compliant, obviously. But you don’t want to annoy the visitor in asking for contact details that might be a bit too much. So how many fields do you really need? Maybe you can do it in a funnel way so that at the first contact points you only ask for an email address, and the GDPR compliance. Then over time you may ask for more detail in engaging with that person. So you have different ways to look at things to avoid being annoying and losing the audience.

Shaheen Samavati 14:22
Yeah, so when you talk about automation, you mean the kind of tools that allow you to check in with people at different times or target people with certain content in different situations.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 14:31
Yes.

Shaheen Samavati 14:32
Yeah, that’s definitely developed a lot. To get specific, could you share any example of a campaign or a piece of content that’s worked really well for you?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 14:42
I can give one example which was pretty ambitious and we did it three years in a row. What we did was, we worked with an industry analyst, in that case IDC to do a pan European survey covering 14 countries. So the idea was really to have enough data for each of the 14 countries to be able to write content at a country level. So we would write about engagement, or about digital transformation or about innovation and we would survey all those countries and be able to make some country specific analysis. So that you could get a stronger impact, both from a PR point of view, so in raising journalists interest, but also a legion point of view, when we would write not just a pan European report, but also country reports in local languages. So that was a very, very ambitious programme, which was quite a big investment as well, both in money and time. But the results were here, it had a very strong impact in terms of lead generation and PR. We could also get interest from smaller countries where it’s usually more difficult to create original content because you don’t usually want to invest in a small country, when you have a much bigger country next door. So if you look at say Scandinavia, either you do everything in English, because they all speak perfect English, or you pick up Swedish, because Sweden may be stronger from a business point of view than the other Nordics countries. But then obviously if you have a sales guy in Norway, he would complain that you’re not helping him a lot, or in Finland, or in Denmark does the same. So in doing that sort of activity, we could ensure that we also had interesting things to talk about also for the Norwegian, Finnish or Danish audiences. So that’s an example of something that we did, which was very impactful.

Shaheen Samavati 16:58
Very cool. Do you think there’s any formula to know when it’s worth investing in more specific local languages?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 17:08
That would be great if it existed. It really depends on the business targets, of course. So you need to start with the business and have a close relationship with a sales team to check why they need to reach out. Then you need to analyze in order to help my local salesperson, how local do I need to be. Sometimes, there might be some topics where you have to be very local, for legal reasons, for example. Sometimes you can just publish generic topics because it works all over Europe, for example. So one example was when we had GDPR, a few years ago, obviously at the time, the colleagues in the US didn’t really think about it from a marketing point of view, because it was not an issue for the US market but it was obviously quite critical for Europe. So i’m talking about messaging here, of course we did our homework and my colleague in marketing automation was very instrumental in ensuring that we were GDPR compliant very early on. But beyond the compliance, it’s also about the topic. Since we are a HR software company, we needed to be able to write about GDPR in this world. How do you manage employee data in a GDPR compliant way? So we gave it a lot of thought and it was a great topic to talk about. I think we were pretty well in advance on that topic compared to other vendors.

Shaheen Samavati 19:00
Excellent. So another thing I wanted to ask you was about the MBA that you’re studying, why you decided to do an executive MBA and how it’s influenced your approach in your marketing?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 19:12
It’s interesting because in my MBA class, we have people from almost 30 nationalities, from all over the world. Most of them are coming for different reasons. You have people that want to start their own businesses, for example, or people that want to completely change the direction of their career. In my case, it was more the idea to step back on my career while working because that’s the whole concept of the Executive MBA, that you’re still working parallel. It’s not a full time programme. To basically go back to school, but also to learn all the fundamentals of business in a modern way, because I did attend a business school more than 20 years ago but things have changed so much. Marketing, of course, is a perfect example. 15 years ago, we didn’t have social media, or barely, and we didn’t really have smartphones either. So look at how the world has changed in the last 20 years since I came out of school or the business school, so there was that part. But also to try and have a more strategic understanding of the business in general and business models. I have worked particularly on the topics of new recurring business models, entrepreneurship, innovation management and those are fascinating topics.

Shaheen Samavati 20:57
Have you been able to apply some of the things you’ve learned in the MBA so far?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 21:02
Yes, for example, I’m working on one of our product lines, which is for now particularly targeted at Europe, looking at how we can expand its reach in all the markets. I definitely used some of the instruments that we learned during the HEC MBA.

Shaheen Samavati 21:23
So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your best productivity hack?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 21:30
Well, if we talk about content marketing, the best productivity hack is basically recycling. So when you create content, you really need to think about all the possible ways you can use that content. By ways I mean all the possible formats, all the possible media and also all the possible languages and use cases. So you may work on a specific topic and maybe in your mind, you’re thinking, Oh, that would be maybe an interview or a video or whatever that is. But then you may think, oh, okay, maybe I can rewrite it to make it a blog post as well and link back to the original video content, for example. Then I may think, oh, that’s actually a great topic that we could dig deeper on. So how can we transform that into an opinion paper, or maybe a byline for the press? So you would work with your PR agency to try to byline on that. Then you may think, oh, I know that we have a client that does something like that so maybe we can have a case study. Then you continue this way. So you started with one idea that you had in mind for one specific type of use case and in thinking about it you expand the reach of your original idea. That’s a great way to develop both creativity and productivity.

Shaheen Samavati 23:13
Yeah, it definitely makes sense in B2B as well, when you’re going deep on some topics to really get the most out of that.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 23:20
Yeah. I’m talking in a B2B context.

Shaheen Samavati 23:22
Yeah. I think it applies in any case, but the more time you spent on creating the original content, the more important it is to get more out of it, right?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 23:30
Yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 23:31
I also wanted to ask you about a professional role model or a source of inspiration?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 23:39
Yes, I’d like to mention and pay tribute to a lady called Sophie Callies who sadly passed away about three years ago. She was a marketing professional in France. She had some leadership marketing roles in many big companies and then built her own consultancy. I met her when I came back to France about 10 years ago and she really helped me in being more up to date on all the marketing trends that are common place today but were really in strong development at the time, such as marketing automation, for example. That was very useful to me while I was implementing Salesforce in that training company. I had to work on some marketing automation tools that I found out in the Salesforce app exchange and I did that part of the implementation myself. In thinking about how I could use that in a productive way, having her strategic vision and having some discussions with her about that was very, very useful.

Shaheen Samavati 24:59
Very cool. Then I just wanted to also ask you about how do you stay up to date on business and marketing trends, any other ways?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 25:09
Yeah. So I can give two answers. The first one is really, for me, one very strong way to be efficient in marketing, especially content and messaging, is to have a strong general knowledge. So basically, reading the business press everyday for me is a must. So I’m reading the Financial Times, as well as Le Monde, living in France. That’s very useful because it helps you have a good understanding of what’s happening in the world and sometimes it can also give you ideas about specific pieces of content that you would need to address because there are some used in that area. So that’s number one. Number two, on the more technical aspect, I can really advise to read some vendors white papers like Pardot software or Marketo. They’re always very insightful and address more technical topics in a great and useful way.

Shaheen Samavati 26:29
Very cool, they must be excellent at content marketing.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 26:35
I guess so.

Shaheen Samavati 26:38
Well, also, any online courses that you recommend?

Geoffroy de Lestrange 26:44
It might be more on the general knowledge front but I’m spending quite a lot of time on Coursera right now, on top of the Executive MBA, we have some extra access. I find it extremely useful. I’m learning a lot. I spent quite a lot of time to learn about design thinking and innovation management, not just as part of the MBA but also on Coursera. I’ve just finished a class on negotiation, which was absolutely brilliant. It’s great to go a bit deeper on specific topics that are not directly related to marketing, but definitely quite useful for you as a business person in general.

Shaheen Samavati 27:32
Absolutely. I might ask you for the links to the particular classes because it’s always interesting to know which courses people recommend in particular. We can put it in the blog. So we’re reaching the end of the time for the interview. So as we wrap up, I just want to give you the chance to give us any final takeaways or parting advice for other marketers in Europe.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 27:55
Okay, so let me leverage my nerdy side. I love languages. I’m really interested in languages, I think it’s a great way to better understand people from other cultures. So whatever your own cultural background, pick up a language and learn it. It’s a great way to open your mind into different ways of thinking and different cultures, whichever language you decide to pick.

Shaheen Samavati 28:23
Absolutely great point and definitely a marketable skill as well in Europe. Well, thank you so much Geoffroy for sharing your insights with us today.

Geoffroy de Lestrange 28:36
Thank you.

Shaheen Samavati 28:37
Thanks everyone for listening in. For more perspectives on content marketing in Europe, check out veracontent.com/mix and keep tuning in to the podcast for more interviews with content experts. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai