Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Milo Van Boeijen, director of marketing for the EMEA/APJ regions at MarkLogic, on the importance of sales enablement:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Milo Van Boeijen, who heads marketing across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific at MarkLogic, which is a global B2B software platform that curates enterprise data. Thanks so much for joining us, Milo.

Milo Van Boeijen 0:27
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

Shaheen Samavati 0:30
So could you tell us a bit more about your background, where you’re from and what you do?

Milo Van Boeijen 0:34
Sure. So I’m Milo Van Boeijen, Dutch native, living in France, working for MarkLogic, as you said, a data management platform. We call it the data hub that runs on our MarkLogic server that helps companies with their data integration challenges. So I’ve been working for MarkLogic for the past six years and I’m currently the marketing director for the EMEA and the APAC region.

Shaheen Samavati 1:01
Okay, so what’s a typical day at work like for you?

Milo Van Boeijen 1:04
So I run an international team. So there’s a few people, so someone in APAC, in Japan, and people in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and in France. So it’s quite an international bunch. I see myself as an enabler for the team. So we split out the tasks if we are in, let’s say, preparation mode and execution mode. In preparation mode it’s working with the team on getting the plans together and making sure that they have the tools and all the things that they need in order to do their jobs, from a team or from an organizational perspective, anywhere from getting the budget or the stakeholder alignment, all that stuff. In the execution mode it’s being an enabler for them and being a sounding board, making sure that they have everything they need in order to do their jobs as best as they can, help them remove roadblocks and make sure that we have smooth processes and smooth execution all around.

Shaheen Samavati 2:07
So MarkLogic has regional teams all over the world and you’re coordinating with all of them?

Milo Van Boeijen 2:12
Yes. So it’s an American company. So the headquarters is in San Carlos in California. So with offices throughout the US, Chicago, Washington, New York, EMEA headquarters over in London, in the UK offices, in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany. In the APAC region there’s also Japan, Singapore, and Australia.

Shaheen Samavati 2:35
So how did you end up in the France office, if the European headquarters are in the UK?

Milo Van Boeijen 2:41
I’m Dutch and I’ve been living in France for almost 15 years now. So maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that later on. In my previous adventure, when that ended and I was looking to go back into the IT industry, I ran into MarkLogic and they were actually opening the office in France at that time, so six years ago. So I was actually one of three, we jokingly call ourselves “The Three Musketeers” that opened the French office so to speak with the two sales guys. So it’s sort of a coincidence actually, but we are on LinkedIn and I found MarkLogic and they were looking for a marketing manager for the French and the Northern Europe, Benelux and the Scandinavian region, the Nordic Region. Having experience in that region, and being a Dutch guy.

Shaheen Samavati 3:36
You speak French as well I presume?

Milo Van Boeijen 3:38
Yes I speak French. It’s sort of a best of both worlds in a way. So it was a really good mix, a really good fit. So I joined six years ago and moved up, but started in the French region. From a marketing perspective as well, I built out the Northern Europe region up to a point so that we grew, and we onboarded people locally in regions, and eventually I moved into this EMEA leadership role and then APAC as well. So we got the additional responsibility for the APAC region at the end of last year. So that’s how it all developed.

Shaheen Samavati 4:19
Okay, so let’s go back further in time to your career story. I mean how did you get into marketing in the first place and get your first role? Your career was mainly at Sun Microsystems, right? You were there for 10 years so tell us the story.

Milo Van Boeijen 4:36
Yes. So when I finished studies, my business school education, well do you choose to work in marketing? I don’t know. I don’t think it was a deliberate choice to work in marketing. It was my first job and I ended up at at Sun Microsystems because I knew a few people that worked there in my hometown in the Netherlands. It was actually part of, again sort of a recurring theme, but a new team that they started up based in the Netherlands but very quickly growing to be a European, then a global organization. So we grew from three or four at the beginning to a team of 25-30 people in a few years. Then how that goes in bigger organizations is that opportunities arise and come and teams will disappear and merge into bigger organizations. Then we became part of the field marketing organization of Sun Microsystems and I rolled into a proper marketing role, more field marketing, more field oriented, partner oriented, a lot of partner work as well. That’s where I found out that it’s the relation, the closeness to the field and to the sales side of the house, that’s something that I like very much. Not necessarily being a salesperson, but enabling sales and being close to the commercial side of the house. So I’ve been on that side ever since. So after Sun, I spent 10 years at Sun as you said, in the meantime I moved from the Netherlands to France, working for Sun as well. Then after 10 years Sun was acquired by Oracle and Sun was a big company, 30-35,000 people— Oracle is huge, right? The question there was, okay, are we going to continue with Oracle or is it maybe time for a change? I said okay, time for a change. So after 10 years at Sun I changed careers completely and I started a camper van rental company, which is completely different but a very interesting experience I guess. So I did that in the south of France and I created the company from scratch. So again, a very interesting experience that I learned a lot from and I still use a lot of the things that I learned in that period today. As a foreigner starting up a company in France, France is quite heavy on administration, for example. So all the administration, all the legal side of things, setting everything up from a sales, marketing and communications perspective. Yeah it was very interesting. I did that for about four years. Again, a great experience but then after four years I had some personal changes as well, got married, had a baby. So it was time to leave, let’s say, the wild period behind and go back to not a serious role but back to some more stability. That’s where I started looking around, and then I found MarkLogic. So that’s a brief experience sharing the steps and how that happened.

Shaheen Samavati 8:17
So how has your experience as an entrepreneur shaped your view of marketing and your approach now?

Milo Van Boeijen 8:23
I guess two things. So it made me realize the importance of marketing as a sales tool. Marketing is great but for me, in marketing, the end goal is to sell to make money. I think marketing is a great tool to help that but I think that having your own company, the pressure is on, even more than if you work for a company. If it’s your own company, the pressure is on to sell and to make money. In my case it was renting out the vans but it had to work. So every activity and everything that we did I did from a marketing perspective or a communications perspective. So you get very sensitive and very aware of cost and how much you spent, the budget that you have or that you don’t have. So be quite careful with spending, I’d say. Then the sales bit, the importance of sales and the importance of marketing for sales. It made me more of a creative person as well because the campervan business is completely different than the tech world. But I think that the way we created the website, talked about content, the go to market, doing the events and trade shows that I did when I had this campervan ebusiness, it helped me later on, and it still does, in being a bit more creative and being a bit more open minded in the way that we view marketing and view going to market in general and how we position MarkLogic today and the differences within the regions. So it made me more open minded, a bit more creative, but also from a business perspective, more careful around budgets. For example, $1 you can spend it only once and when you have your own company, you’re actually quite conscious about that.

Shaheen Samavati 10:43
Yeah. So it helped you see the big picture and think about how everything relates to the bottom line. So going back to what you’re doing now, I wanted to ask you if you could share any example of a campaign or a piece of content that has worked really well for you? You probably know on The Content Mix, we’re focused on the content side of marketing.

Milo Van Boeijen 11:02
Content is key, right? Or content is king. It’s especially relevant working in, as a lot of my peers, a lot of people that have appeared on this show as well, working in an international environment, it’s really important that you adjust your content to your audience, right? I know it’s like kicking in an open door, but in a lot of cases, in a lot of organizations, it’s not so obvious, right? It’s really important because you want to address the people with relevant content and address your audience with relevant content and really adjust your content to the person or the persona that you are reaching out to. So what’s working well for us? Content is not an independent element, for me content is part of a campaign. A campaign or an activity is not just sending one email but if we talk about a campaign, it’s always like a sequence of events or activities, or actions that we perform and content is a key factor, it plays a key role. Especially in an international organization, if we look at, for example, Germany or the DACH region as an example, that is three countries, right? It’s Germany, Austria, Switzerland, different languages, different industries, different cultures. In an American company, for example, a lot of the basis is English but you still have to adjust the messaging to the audience. We talk about it, we cover a vsariety of use cases, in a variety of industries, we work a lot in the aerospace industry, in the manufacturing industry, pharmaceuticals. The message cannot be the same and the used cases that we address are different for the different industries. We can talk about regulatory compliance for financial services, for example, or in the pharmaceutical industry we talk about clinical trials. You need to make sure that the message that you bring is relevant for the person that you try to speak to. So it’s really important, not just from a language perspective but also from an industry perspective and the person that you’re going after. So you speak differently, you have a different message for a business person than you would have for an enterprise architect in an organization. So that is key. So content is really important. It’s the same with everybody, everybody receives so many emails on a daily basis and if the message in the email or in the phone call or on social media, the poster, if it doesn’t appeal to you, you’re not going to read it, it’s going to delete, gone. So that is key. So we spend a lot of time not just in the marketing team, because for me it’s a team effort. Also the stakeholders that we work with, whether that is sales who know the customer, who know the accounts,who know the people that we want to go after, the SDR teams, the sales or business development teams that we work with, they are very involved in profiling the personas within a certain organization.

Shaheen Samavati 14:40
By the way, I was curious, who are the personas in your target audience? But anyway, you can finish about the marketing team, sorry.

Milo Van Boeijen 14:48
The marketing team of course sort of ties it all together. From the corporation, we’re in the IT industry, we sell a technical product, right? I’m not a technical person, I can explain what it is that we do but if we look under the hood, I’m not able to explain to you all the functinalities of the database and how that works. So we have technical teams that can help us with providing the content. If we talk to an architect, it needs to be a certain technical level. So all these different stakeholders make up for the team and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out or figuring out who do we want to go after? What are these people’s pain points? What are their challenges and how can we from a MarkLogic perspective address those challenges? How can we make our messaging and our content optimal so that it reaches the right audience and we can engage with them?

Shaheen Samavati 15:46
Yeah. So then my next question was about the target audience, who makes up your target audience and what are your most important channels for reaching them?

Milo Van Boeijen 15:53
It depends a bit on the use case, like the problem that we’re trying to solve. I think what we’ve done at MarkLogic, over the past year and a half, is that we are trying to move away from the navel gazing. It’s not just MarkLogic, you see it with a lot of other vendors as well, we go out to people presenting what it is that we do and presenting our offering, saying, This is what we can do for you. We should actually be saying, Okay, what is your problem? Listen, stop talking, listen, then understand the challenges and the pain points, and then say, okay, we can help you with that because we’ve done this in another job for another company with similar challenges. So depending on the use case, or the business problem, the challenge that we’re facing, or the prospect is facing, it can be more of a business audience, but often the main stakeholders or the main personas that we want to go after were the technical people like architects. Enterprise architects are a key persona for us in the organizations that we go after because they’re the ones that are heavily involved in the technical or the technology side of the house and are often either decision makers or influencers in making that buying decision for my customer or prospect.

Shaheen Samavati 17:27
I didn’t even know that enterprise architect was a role.

Milo Van Boeijen 17:32
They’re very important. Yes.

Shaheen Samavati 17:36
But I guess they only exist in very large companies, which are your target clients?

Milo Van Boeijen 17:40
Well we do enterprise sales, so we go after big organizations, but an Enterprise Architect, or the equivalent in a smaller company, is the technical person that has an understanding of the business, which is an influencer to the person that has the chequebook that will eventually sign a check. Often the people that sign the check are in a position where they don’t always see the impact to the business. So you need to make sure that you reach the people that feel the pain, in a way, that know what needs to happen in order to make a change. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

Shaheen Samavati 18:25
So when it comes to the types of content that you create, maybe you could tell us about the channels you use, but also any specific examples of particular content pieces that worked really well?

Milo Van Boeijen 18:45
So the key word for me is focus. So we have a sniper approach to web. We don’t do “spray and pray” anymore. We are very focused on the organizations that we want to go after, the industry, the organizations and the people within those organizations. We adjust our messaging to that. So we don’t do a lot of mass marketing, but it’s quite focused. So that can be anything, we do a lot of social media, of course, working with teams, with sales, so very close aligned with sales in identifying the people. With the SDR team they will do the profiling. So we do a lot of social media. So LinkedIn, for example, is a key tool for us. LinkedIn, Zoom, info, those kinds of things, we create messages for them. So we use a tool called Outreach where we can create sequences of messaging that we send to them which can be an email or a reminder for a phone call. The idea is really to adjust our approach to find the customer where they are or meet them where they are. So if the customer is active on social media or expressing a preference for a certain media, whether that is email or social media or phone, we’ll try to meet them where they are. If a customer is explicitly saying “I don’t want people to call me” we’re not going to pick up the phone and call them, it’s probably going to be an email or social media, or some other way that we can do it. But it’s about the journey and getting to the right people and getting them interested. Taking them by the hand and taking them on a journey from the first contact to making them interested in the solution and what we can potentially do for them and educating them and nurturing them through email, social media, webinars. Of course, in this COVID, remote world, face to face is more and more difficult. Hopefully, we’ll get back to face to face, not necessarily events, but smaller, focused workshops, dinners, that kind of stuff. We can go back to that. But it’s a variety of actions that we perform in order to reach the right audience. So from a content perspective, email and social media, different things but trying to meet the customer where they are.

Shaheen Samavati 21:29
Do the channels vary depending on the market? You’re responsible for some really diverse markets so i’m just wondering if the approach changes?

Milo Van Boeijen 21:38
In Europe, it’s quite similar. I guess it’s also because going after the bigger accounts, most of the people and the personas that we go after are overall fairly international people. So we do see them on similar platforms like LinkedIn, there are some regional variations like Zing in Germany or Vimeo in France, but we don’t really use that. I would say from a social media perspective it’s quite International, quite similar. But then, as we said earlier on, if you talk about regional varieties, of course if you talk about Germany or France from a language perspective, we’ll adjust the messaging and the contents because we’ll localise it. We’ll localise it from a language perspective, so French or German. But also sometimes the way that we put content forward is different. The Germans are very keen and they like statistics, for example, and proof of why you say that we can do it 10 times faster, prove it to me and show me how did you get that? If you say it, it’s like okay, great, 10 times faster. The Germans are more into statistics, they want more proof. Customer stories are important. So there is, of course, a regional variation in the content that we create and how we bring it to market.

Shaheen Samavati 23:18
Yeah and actually, when I asked you for examples, ahead of the interview, you mentioned one, about a pharmaceutical campaign around clinical trials that you have done for Germany and then adapted for the UK. So could you tell us about that?

Milo Van Boeijen 23:29
Yes. That’s very important, the team is key for me as well. What I really try to do is economies of scale and use best practices. I try to avoid reinventing the wheel every time, this pharma is a good example actually because even if we have different regions, sometimes we touch the same industry, right? Pharmaceuticals is a good example, so we’re big on pharma in the German region and in Switzerland, some big companies there. So we started a programme with a few companies in Switzerland, but at the same time, we cover pharma in the UK as well. So there’s AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. So there’s a few big pharma companies out there. So we said, okay, you know what, we started that in the German region, is there a possibility for us to reuse it? Not one to one, adapting it locally where needed, but reuse that in the UK? So yes, so again that’s the importance of the team, because it’s not just a marketing decision, you need to make sure that the sales is on board, the stakeholders are on board with it and see the added value. But that was a good one and I said okay let’s do that.

Shaheen Samavati 24:57
What does the campaign involve? It’s Case Study or it’s a webinar?

Milo Van Boeijen 25:02
In this case it’s clinical trials. Pharmaceutical companies, they make drugs so in order for that to go to market, there is a lot of testing and trialling and it takes years. So it’s all about data. So there’s a lot of data involved, whether it’s drug data, customer data, patient data, there’s all kinds of things. What we’re trying to do is optimise the clinical trial process because let’s say it’s a process of 10 years from designing a drug to bringing it to market. They do like hundreds of thousands of clinical trials with patients, if you can optimise that and say you can win a year. That is huge in terms of cost savings. Or if you can say the number of clinical trials, you can get to a result, whether it’s a positive or a negative result in deciding to move forward or stop the trial. If you can, based on the data that you have, if you can make the decision quicker, there’s a lot of money involved. So that’s it in a nutshell. We started doing that in Switzerland, and exported that into the other regions. There’s a few other examples as well. So for me that’s really important, the team element, sharing what we’re doing and sharing best practices. If possible reuse campaigns content, used cases, topics that we address in one region and try to reuse that in other regions where we can.

Shaheen Samavati 26:44
Yeah and I’ll point out that pharmaceuticals is just one of the many industries that MarkLogic works with but a particularly relevant one right now.

Milo Van Boeijen 26:56
Yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 26:57
Okay, so switching gears, I wanted to ask you about some of your advice and recommendations. So first of all, just how do you stay up to date on marketing trends, and any recommendations you have on resources to track or how you stay up to date personally?

Milo Van Boeijen 27:14
So marketing trends, like everyone, I watch the news and I watch some of the industry material at The Content Mix. There’s social media where leading companies or other companies or competitors in the industry follow how they do things, how they position themselves. If they have similar offerings, how do they, from a marketing perspective, position themselves? What kind of stuff do they do? How do they communicate? So I follow that, I spend a fair bit of time on that. There’s a book here Crossing the Chasm, it was one of the questions, my favourite business books. Crossing the Chasm is one that I’ve read and that we’ve used at MarkLogic, from a sales and marketing and go to market standpoint. An interesting one, but there’s loads out there, but this one I particularly like and we use it as well in how we define our go to market strategy and the focus on specific industries, accounts and how companies adopt technology with different audiences, from the innovators, early adopters, and how you can bridge the gap between the early adopters to the mainstream audience, and how from a software vendor perspective, you can position yourself in order to get there. So it’s really interesting.

Shaheen Samavati 29:00
Speaking of technology, do you recommend any app or tool that you’re using lately?

Milo Van Boeijen 29:05
Well, lately this is probably the same for everyone now, Zoom. Internally we use WebEx, so Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Slack. Of course all that is standard practice for most people today. From a personal perspective, Spotify, I should mention it because i’m a big music fan. So I always have music on, so Spotify is a big one as well, from a personal perspective.

Shaheen Samavati 29:37
Cool and then I wanted to ask if you have any productivity hack you could share?

Milo Van Boeijen 29:42
That’s an interesting one. Not really from a tool perspective, but more from an operations point of view. So I try to start the day and get the hairy subjects out of the way early on, the difficult phone call to make, a tricky budget proposal you need to write. Difficult conversation to have or a more difficult emails arrived, get that difficult stuff out of the way early on in the morning, because I tend to feel that when you’re fresh in the morning and you get that out of the way it makes you feel lighter the rest of the day. It’s like at least that’s done and if you wait too long, it’s like your whole day you see that thing looming in the back. Like I need to get to this. Just get it over with in the morning, then it’s done.

Shaheen Samavati 30:40
Yeah, definitely. That’s a good tip. I then just wanted to ask if you recommend any other resources for marketers, whether it’s an industry group, online community or publication?

Milo Van Boeijen 30:51
So in France there’s a good group called the CMIT. It’s a group that regroups all the marketing leaders in the tech industry in France. So it has hundreds of people and members that get together when we can, but also virtually they do a lot of webinars, a lot of training, a lot of like coaching sessions. It’s quite an active community that interacts with each other to share experiences. So from a French perspective that’s an interesting one. That’s a good one.

Shaheen Samavati 31:32
Okay, excellent. We’re reaching the end of the interview so I just wanted to give you the chance to give us any final parting advice or takeaways for other marketers in Europe?

Milo Van Boeijen 31:42
So from my personal view, for me it’s very important to make it a team effort. So for me there’s no such thing as a marketing plan, it’s always a team plan. My takeaway is that for me marketing is the conductor of the orchestra, we work with different stakeholders, whether it sales, SDRs, presales team, consultants, partners, other internal organizations, customers. Everybody has a piece of music that they play as a responsibility. I see marketing as the conductor of that orchestra to make sure that everyone of those stakeholders plays their music and plays their piece. So from a marketing perspective we organize that and we turn it into a cohesive, beautiful piece of music in a way. So make it a team effort. That’s probably my takeaway for my peers.

Shaheen Samavati 32:45
Excellent. Well, that’s a great point and a good note to end on. A good musical note. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Milo, for sharing your insights with us today. It’s been great.

Milo Van Boeijen 33:08
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure, a really good one. Thank you.

Shaheen Samavati 33:12
Thanks to everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out veracontent.com/mix and keep tuning into the podcast for interviews with content experts. See you next time.

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