Sure, the bottom part of the marketing funnel fetches you leads. That’s why companies focus most of their time and resources there.
But customers in this part were going to buy your product anyway. Around 90% of buyers choose a vendor from their day-one consideration set.
“By over-indexing on the bottom part, you’re not shaping the market,” believes Lena Waters, CMO of Grammarly. Companies must balance attention across the funnel. They must strive to also win customer hearts at the top of the funnel, the part where customers start narrowing down their options.
But it’s difficult to track how much you’re influencing buyer intent. For this, Lena calls upon marketers to resort to old-fashioned research.
In a chat with me, Lena stresses the importance of effective communication as a strategic imperative for businesses to succeed. She also explains Grammarly’s recent foray into the enterprise segment and what this means for the workplace.
This interview is part of G2’s Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.
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Warm-up questions
What’s your favorite beverage? When do you enjoy it?
I guess the correct answer is Canadian whiskey since that’s where I’m from. But these days, I believe sparkling water is more thirst-quenching than regular water. So, that’s typically my beverage of choice.
What was your first job?
As a teenager, I worked at a ski resort in Canada. My family grew up in the mountains, and I was an early skier.
The lesson I learned there was that you can fit work-life balance into anything. I used to work in my ski boots so that I could do some work and later do a run on the hill. You can work and still have fun.
What’s your favorite software in your current tech stack?
Well, Grammarly is my favorite. I wasn’t a customer before I started working here because I thought my writing was fine, but when I started using it, I realized everyone could improve their communication.
So, I use it every day, and it really helps me get the outcomes I want. I realized that the right tonality is important when I’m trying to get a job done, have a debate, or convince someone of something. That’s where Grammarly helps.
What problems at work make you want to throw your laptop out the window?
It’s about communication again. I think being understood, coming across clearly, and making your value known are challenging for everybody, regardless of their function.
So human-to-human interactions are really important, but they can, of course, be frustrating. However, as a leader, you shouldn’t get too riled up. Your job is to lower the temperature. It’s also important to recognize those frustrating moments.
Could you briefly describe your professional journey and any transformational projects you led? What did you learn from them?
I started in demand marketing and tried to be close to revenue. That was the advice I got when I started my career. Over time, I started taking more responsibility across the entire customer journey.
Once I understood one function, I became curious about adjacent functions and tried to determine their dependencies. I think how you work out dependencies between you and your business partners varies with your function. It’s important to figure that out to understand how business as a whole operates.
Working across the customer journey eventually took me to the CMO’s role. The role is different today, but the first principle I must consider remains the same: How does marketing interact with other company functions to drive revenue and create value with customers? What do stakeholders need? How do you communicate with them and create value together?
To your point about transformational projects, I was at a marketing technology company where our pricing model was tied to email volume, so the more we got customers to send emails, the more revenue we drove. We were successful with this, but we reached a point where companies were sending so many emails that the end consumers were tuning out. There was too much. The emails weren’t differentiated enough, and they stopped responding.
We found that the revenue per email for our customers was dropping. We investigated and found that to drive more revenue, our customers were just sending more emails. So, we focused on building a platform that reached consumers across channels, such as display and SMS instead of just email.
We advised our customers to send fewer emails, which contradicted our initial business model. But, we learned that personalization and targeting were beneficial.
“Value is better than quantity. You shouldn’t be afraid to change your business model if needed.”
Lena Waters
CMO, Grammarly
You have to look at the trends and see how they will impact your customers. Sometimes, you may need transformation for a few functions. At other times, you must look across the company and ensure the customer value chain aligns with customer success.
Grammarly is increasingly stressing the transformation of workplaces. We knew it as a B2C solution, but lately, it has been targeting enterprises, too. What prompted this diversification?
We examined our customers’ usage patterns to determine where they were really getting value. Our self-serve motion, where people try and buy our services through the website, is still an important discovery driver for Grammarly.
We found that users were taking us into corporate environments for use at work. We saw people at similar companies using us in teams. As a consumer product, we didn’t have enough security and controls for companies. So we quickly developed those.
Now, we have an enterprise product that’s secure and deployable in a day at a company. In the end, individuals use our product. So, there’s a crossover when people use us for personal communication needs, to talk to others in a group, and to accomplish outcomes.
Why do you believe communication is a strategic imperative for businesses to succeed?
It’s interesting how everyone is expected to be a great communicator at work. It’s part of every job description. It’s also difficult to tell someone if they’re not a good communicator.
There are gray areas in communication. The context and tone can be tricky to get right. And when you have a diverse workplace that’s growing, communication can get challenging. You may have on-premises or remote teams and people from different cultures.
Even individual teams have their ways of communicating. Sales and marketing speak different languages. We know this, and yet, there isn’t a platform that helps you improve communication or that gives you guardrails around the dos and don’ts of communication.
“There is not a single executive in a company who owns communication, and there is no definition of what good communication looks like. It’s just a set of norms and unsaid expectations about how we’re all supposed to do it.”
Lena Waters
CMO, Grammarly
Today, professionals spend 88% of their day communicating, which is hard to believe. It’s an activity for which we don’t have a rhythm, invention, or platform. That’s where Grammarly steps in.
Solutions like this let you have meetings and send memos adhering to your style guides. The older way of using Grammarly was around grammar and spelling checks only. But today, workers need support across their entire communication journey. That’s why we’ve seen a rapid adoption of our tool.
In a LinkedIn post recently, you said: “You can’t rush enterprise-ready AI. It’s built on years of expertise and trust.” According to G2’s recent State of Software report, AI product satisfaction among enterprise buyers trails mid-market and SMBs.
What’s the reason for the low satisfaction levels? How is Grammarly implementing its solutions across enterprises?
The AI industry is still new. When you look at where we are — the peak of heightened expectations and the trough of dissatisfaction — I would say people are toying with and piloting individual use cases using different pieces of bespoke software. Often, they do it within individual platforms.
“If you use different pieces of AI within different solutions, it can be tricky to piece it all together.”
Lena Waters
CMO, Grammarly
A lot of the development you see is very low-maturity. Just because an individual application, platform, or ecosystem has some AI features added in, it doesn’t mean they are or can be deployed comprehensively across an entire system.
We’ve seen great success with Grammarly in this space because of our presence in every application, platform, and ecosystem — virtually on every surface where your mouse is.
Very few platforms provide end-to-end solutions, so that’s been the real pull for us towards enterprises. We are a tool people have been using for a long time, and now it has evolved into a readily deployable solution for enterprises.
Another G2 survey shows that the marketing function leads other teams in AI adoption. What is driving this rapid adoption?
The marketing function is data-driven and does various things. We execute tasks using the art of persuasion and creativity. We talk to customers and package every message that goes to every stakeholder. We’re across every stage of the customer journey. We create content and build the execution engines to deliver it.
There isn’t a stage across the customer journey where marketing is absent. This gives marketers more opportunities to leverage AI and experiment, as opposed to other functions with homogeneous responsibilities. For them, baking AI into processes could take longer. That’s why the marketing function is piloting the use of AI. Ironically, marketing is also the function where you require the human touch the most.
Grammarly serves both B2C and B2B customers. What are the differences in marketing strategies for both these segments? How do you present a uniform brand image?
People come to us for personal value because they care about how they communicate and want to improve. But when they bring us to workplaces, we focus more on ensuring the brand is consistent across the whole piece.
You know, the stretch across both is not that different because the value we provide to individuals and groups is somewhat similar. For instance, the student segment now uses us for long-form content, and we have specific applications designed for it, such as authorship. This is important as educational institutions start to have policies around AI.
So, ultimately, it comes down to whether you’re clear about delivering value to customers. I don’t think there’s necessarily a separation for us in terms of branding, no matter the channel you’re in, the story you tell, or how you use us. Being consistent across both those channels has been important.
You’ve talked about many marketers obsessing over the bottom part of the marketing funnel, which can be easily attributed and measured. Why should brands focus more on the full marketing funnel and not over-index on the bottom part?
This is a hotly debated topic. When you think of the marketing funnel, it’s interesting that the biggest part is at the top. That’s where you have everybody before you lose them to your conversation metrics. That’s where most of your audience is and where you shape the biggest part of your audience’s perception and get on people’s radar.
According to Harvard Business Review, 80% of B2B buyers already have a set of vendors in mind before they research, and 90% of them choose a vendor from that day-one consideration set. So, if you only focus on the bottom part of the funnel, you’re talking to a smaller group of people who have already decided you’re in their consideration set. But you’re not creating buying intent from early on or influencing whether or not you’re even in that consideration set in the first place.
It’s tempting for marketers to attach themselves to the bottom part of the funnel to capture demand. But we have to ask ourselves whether those people were likely to convert, whether we are really creating intent, and whether we are overreliant on sending MQLs into the funnel.
I also think there’s an imbalance here. It’s trickier to propose spending more at the top of the funnel. It’s difficult to get the buy-in and show you’re driving business. Leaders can ask, ” OK, you’re advertising. People are more aware of us and have us in their consideration set. But show me how that attaches to revenue.”
It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s the wrong question.
You should instead think about changing the minds in the market and research to make sure people pick up what you offer them. You must ask: do customers believe what you need them to believe so they will consider you? And that’s something you can’t find easily in a dashboard.
Not much SaaS technology in the MarTech stack helps you understand this, so you have to resort to old-fashioned research.
In a way, we’ve trained the business to expect those data and metrics for marketing. It’s easy to skew the bottom part of the funnel to show numbers. You can show the proof of investment and conversions from it.
We have trained the boards and C-suites to focus on those conversations.
“We should discuss ways to win customers’ hearts and minds at the top of the funnel, where people start narrowing down their options.”
Lena Waters
CMO, Grammarly
If you don’t do it, you’re not reaching all the people you can or shaping the market. You’re just responding to people coming to you.
Somehow, in SaaS and B2B, we’ve decided not to research customers. But I continually think we need to do so. I foresee the challenge of balancing marketing spends across the funnel in the coming years. We need to have a balance. Right now, it’s tilting to the bottom.
You’ve led events teams in the past. How can brands successfully engage customers as remote work and virtual events become more common?
I think the pendulum swings both ways. During lockdowns and remote work, virtual experiences have a place. They’re great for reaching people at scale, people who aren’t engaged yet, and those who don’t want to engage in person. And they should always augment a live event.
But so far, I haven’t seen anything that truly replaces human interaction and connection you get from an in-person event. You can’t fully replicate that online.
You know, the fact that a virtual event is even called an “event” and that you would compare it to an in-person meeting is kind of funny. Some people replace offline events with live events. But virtual events are an “and”, not an “or”. In-person events aren’t going anywhere.
You have to offer a mix. There’s the digital format to reach large audiences with low intent and engagement, but the goal might be to get you to an in-person experience.
I think we can be back at live events now. There’s already a huge uptick in them. We will see some curation of events and more exclusive experiences that are smaller and targeted.
On the question of events, don’t you think it becomes difficult to prove an ROI?
Proving ROI is tied to the concept of attribution. Attribution is just a term that means I do many things, and I must figure out which is the most important and who gets credit for it.
And again, I think that’s the wrong question. If someone asks you what made you buy a car, pick that one thing that made you decide; it’s an artificial question. That’s because that’s not how people interact with brands. In marketing, we ask a similar question: show me the one thing that works the best so we can put all our money into it.
But we’re missing the point here.
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A B2B buying team can have many people, but not all show up at events. You might have a specific persona that goes there. You might have a different persona who consumes virtual content, another engaging in other marketing programs. It’s a sum of all of those parts put together. It’s difficult to locate the stage where you were able to influence the buying decision. I don’t think that narrowing the focus and trying to attribute the success of a deal to one specific touchpoint will solve anything. If it did, the conversation would be over, and none of us would be asking these questions anymore.
I’ve always believed that you should be thinking about pipelines in the room. An event may not have originated or closed a deal, but it could affect your pipeline. Ask yourself: is it bigger or smaller than before the event? What activities will you undertake with those people after the event to continue the value through?
If you see growth in your pipelines, then you know people enjoy such events and find them valuable, and that’s something you can continue.
MarTech is among the 10 fastest-growing markets today. With marketing tools flooding the market, do you have any tips for companies building MarTech stacks?
I don’t think the fundamentals have changed. You must still look at the data you will put through your tech stack. Tech stacks don’t exist in a vacuum. Do you have the data sources that’ll fuel the technology you’ll buy, and do you have a clear plan and resources to connect them?
Have you brought your stakeholders together and united them on the impact of a technology? How will you all use it together? Are you aligned on the expected outcomes? Are the teams prepared to lean in and help accomplish those outcomes together?
You must consider these questions. It’s after these considerations you ask about the tools that can make it happen.
I think we’ve all had experiences where we assumed that buying a tool could help deliver an outcome. But we know you must fit it into strategy, fuel it with the right data, and surround it with the right talent to power it.
When I see tech stacks gone awry or bloated or people paying for things they don’t really use, it’s mostly because those fundamentals are neglected.
Follow Lena Waters on LinkedIn to learn more about modern marketing approaches and strategic communication in the workplace.
