Herb Wong

Franco Caporale:

Hello, and welcome to the new episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Herb Wong, senior vice president of product and strategy at rfxcel. Founded in 2003, rfxcel is the first company to focus on the safety of the pharmaceutical supply chain and to bring advanced traceability technologies to manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors. After three heads of marketing departed within four years, Herb in his current role rebooted the marketing organization, generating and increasing marketing qualified leads of over 500% through an improved SEO and public relations efforts. A versatile and highly creative leader with more than 20 years of experience, Herb brings skills in strategic planning, solution architecture and relationship building to leading organizations. His team deliver elegant products and programs that enable sustainable and predictable growth. So, I'm really happy to welcome today Herb Wong, senior vice president of product and strategy at rfxcel. Herb, I'm really glad to have you on the episode today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Herb Wong:

Hey, Franco. Thank you for the opportunity.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. Let's begin right away. Tell us more about your career trajectory, your background, and a little bit about you.

Herb Wong:

Sure. So, my background is actually not in marketing. I spent most of my career doing professional services and blooming projects. I got into this one at this company because we had a user group started and the VP of marketing who was supposed to run this, right after we announced our first user group, this person quit. And so the CEO asked me to run the user group for the first time ever. We did it successfully. We got very high marks for our user group. So, he asked me if I would take over the marketing group. So, my current title now is I'm VP of marketing. I think everyone knows what that is. The other hat I wear is also VP of strategic initiatives. What that means officially is I'm responsible for taking rfxcel as a company and we partner with industry. My job is to contribute back to the industry. Internally we make a joke. Everything that other people don't want to do at rfxcel becomes a strategic initiative. So, I have to do a little bit of-

Franco Caporale:

That makes sense. And so tell us what rfxcel does. What's the company? What's the solution?

Herb Wong:

Sure, no problem. So, rfxcel, what we do is we give you detailed visibility into the supply chain. So, regardless of what you manufacture, we can actually help you track the details from beginning to end. We can track you down to individual units. We have things to let you know a real-time IOT devices so you know exactly where it is, what the temperature conditions are. We can track the raw materials that go into that, and allowing you for immediate recall. We started off in the pharmaceutical space helping different pharmaceutical companies meet different regulatory requirements. But we've expanded into food and bev, into cosmetics, into many other industries. We're one of the few that actually also do government contracts. We're helping some governments actually do track and trace within their governments.

Franco Caporale:

And you have been there for a few years now and you have a really tremendous success growing in the company, which we'll talk in a second. How much different is the company from when you joined to what it is today, especially on the marketing side?

Herb Wong:

Oh my gosh. We like to look back at this last. So, I look back at the PowerPoints we used to have. The PowerPoints we had in terms of price, it was basically four colored boxes that we did in PowerPoint. Today I think our portfolio includes over a dozen different product solutions. And we did this by building this organically, not through acquisition. So, the company has really stepped up, but we've also cleaned up the marketing message. We've really been working hard on the branding and the visibility of what we do.

Franco Caporale:

And we might need to do a separate podcast on the whole strategic initiative thing because it's very interesting and I would love to learn more about that because I love your product development and product management experience. But I think today I want to really focus on this guerilla branding that came out of our conversation. And you said you were able to really get your name out without paying for it, without spending too much money for it. So, tell us a little bit, what is guerilla branding for you,? How we define that?

Herb Wong:

Sure. So, basically for us, guerilla branding is figuring how to get our name out there with very little money. And so we do a lot of creative things. I think where this started is at one point I think the company felt generous and for a short time they gave us a lot of money to work with a PR firm. And this PR firm was charging us $10,000 a month to get our name out, to get articles published with various magazines. For $10,000 they helped us cover Europe and the US, and we were getting about one article a month. But what they didn't do is they didn't cover the rest of the world.

So, Asia, Latin America, they didn't cover that. So, what we did was we did it ourselves. And so while they were doing it for the US and Europe, we didn't have the tools. We started reading publications in these countries. We found these people on LinkedIn. We hired temporary workers in these countries who spoke the language to help us reach out and connect with them. We found that for literally pennies we could get the same amount of volume if not a little bit more than a company we were paying $10,000 for. And I think that was the start of our idea for guerilla branding. We found that if you do it right, if you're clever, you can actually do this yourself.

Franco Caporale:

And so if I'm a VP of marketing in a startup and I want to obviously give it a shot to this guerilla branding, what is the first step? What is the one thing that you recommend doing and what is that worth for you?

Herb Wong:

So, I'll tell you what worked first initially. I think initially we were just trying to get our name out into articles. And so before I started, before we tried and use the PR firm, I think before this we were lucky to get about one article a year referencing our name. So, what we did was basically we started looking through publications. So, today what we do is now we don't need to go through LinkedIn anymore. There are tools we buy where you can actually find out if you want to talk about certain topic, you can type it in and you can find out people who are out there writing these types of articles. You go in. You read what type of articles they publish. You find out what they want to talk about and you basically just reach out to them and say, "Hey listen, would you be interested in an article on X?"

And you always pick X to be something that they want to talk about. But one of the keys we learned is it's not just a general article just to talk about things, but we find that either you talk about what to do or what not to do. And people tend to hear all the mistakes you've made or mistakes other people made. Those are the articles that are most interesting. So, we find that when we do that and we reach out and we offer, one, we offer to do that. But two, when we write it, we never write it to highlight our capabilities. Our capabilities at best two, three sentences of, "Hey, this is so-and-so. This is rfxcel. We do this." The other thing we do is when we write or when my team write, we ghostwrite. We ghostwrite for our CEO. We ghostwrite for our VP of services. We ghostwrite for our CTO.

And so we've worked long enough where we know what they think about. We know some of the funny jokes or not so funny jokes. And we tend to put that in. We tend to inject the personality of our company and our leaders into the articles. So, I think that's the first thing that help. But then just to add on, what we learned last year during the pandemic or pre-pandemic, we also learned that with my hat of VP of strategic initiatives, where my task is to partner with industry, we found that just going out and working with the industry, volunteering, not so much just volunteering, like things like Habitat for Humanity where you help build a house, but literally things that the industry needs. And I can give you examples. But we volunteer to do some of the things that people find hard.

And you find that once you volunteer, your name gets out there. You get known as a person. "Hey, this company can pull together something." I'll give you an example you and I can talk about. So, within the industry we worked in, many of us are building solutions to meet certain FDA requirements. But the problem is no one knows if all these solutions we're all building works. And so we reached out to the FDA and we offered to run a pilot where we tested every solution including our competitor's solutions to prove that they met the requirements. And that's pretty challenging because you realize if you're testing your competitors, you run the risk of getting sued. But we were fairly smart about how we did it.

We put together a process that was very above board. What we found out was we had two competitors who reached out and say, "Hey, your test cases aren't good enough. Let me show you how to improve them." One of our competitors said, "Look, we believe this is the best for the industry." They actually brought us into their offices. We sat in a conference room with engineers. We talked through how the technology worked and our technology worked. You find out that if you work for the good of the industry, there's so many people who want to work with you. So, not only did it give us more visibility, but it opened up for people that used to be our competitors. Now we work with them hand in hand for the good of the industry.

Franco Caporale:

So, basically your approach is producing a lot of content that a publisher wants to write about or they want to share, as well as doing good for your industry, which I really am really interested in that. Let's go back to the content for one second because I know everyone knows that the content is important and they need more, but how do you produce a consistent output of great content, one after the other, when you don't have a big team under you?

Herb Wong:

What you do is you network with the people in your company. So, as an example, if you talk to the people in professional services and they're doing implementation... And this is, you're not looking for content. You talk to me and find out what they're doing. And so for example, at one point we were talking to our professional services team and they were telling us about the difficulties of implementation. And all of a sudden that's a story we had. We weren't looking for it, but they'd tell us of the things they've learned. And also, we'd put them on a webcast with us. So, they did a webinar. And then from the webinar we got the bits and pieces of story. And then we had a content writer listen to that webinar and then we developed further content from it.

Another example. We talked with the CTO and he mentions these deadlines coming up that we didn't know about. And so we talked to him and said, "Well, what do you need to do?" And all of sudden you have content. Even if you're a small company, if you talk to the people who are actively engaged with customers who have to deliver, you'll find a wealth of stories out there. Because they know it. And truth is, these are the people that your customers want to hear from, the people who are in the trenches. Get those stories, surface those stories, and everyone will want to read them.

Franco Caporale:

And you had also an interesting opinion about outsourcing the content. Because I think you try, probably everyone that is listening to this podcast as well has tried at some point to outsource content creation. How was your experience here and would you recommend it?

Herb Wong:

It depends on what you're selling in your company. So, for us, outsourcing didn't work well because the solutions we sell are very niche. And so unless you understand in-depth of what we do, what the industry requires of what we do, it's hard to put the content. So, we found it easier to hire a good writer, bring him in full-time into our company, and then teach him our products so he can develop our voice. Because if you think of what you pay for a generic content writer versus a full-time employee who has to learn it, it's actually not more expensive to bring it on full-time. If you're working in an industry such as maybe some generic technology, I shouldn't call it generic, but broader technologies such as data warehousing, you can get away with hiring a content writer. But then again, they don't develop your voice. They don't know what's special about you and you spend more time teaching them and telling them what to write. So, for us it was easier to take it inside.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. So, you built basically a team and you are leveraging some of other departments to provide some content, maybe in other form like webinars, I think you mentioned, or interviews. And then you turn that into something publishable. Yeah, that's a good one.

Herb Wong:

No. Yeah, we are not afraid to beg, borrow and steal in this marketing. We talk to everyone internally and then that's how we get a lot of our content.

Franco Caporale:

And do you drive this content also based on SEO? So, how do you match your SEO requirements or your SEO plan with the content that you are getting published into these third party channels? How do you balance that, SEO key words that you want versus what they want to publish?

Herb Wong:

That's a great question and I think it depends, first. So, for example, in markets where we're established and we know what the message is, we drive the message. But as we try to enter into new markets where we try to bring our technologies into different places where we may not have a strong standing, it's a little bit of an experiment. We publish. We track for certain keywords as we see what comes in via SEO, right? At the same time we're pushing out a message. So, that gives us guides to what we want to speak about. We speak about that and then we watch how many people go back to those topics or publications. One of the other things we find very helpful is videos.

I mean, one of the things is people really, really hate to read now. And if you had a choice of reading a five page article or just watching a video, people will always go to video. We found that once we started pushing out videos, we saw a lot more people going out for that content. And so when we go into new areas, we're always testing. We're testing the message. We're testing the words. We're testing what pops people are interested in. And what makes it a challenge is, what people are interested in, we have to align what we're good at. If I talk about something that is maybe very interesting, but we don't solve the problem with, well, it's my marketing dollars not returning and doing a return on investment.

Franco Caporale:

And so also you talked about doing good for the community, even if it doesn't come with a return attached or at least not an immediate one. And so that triggers my question on, how do you measure the effectiveness of all these initiatives? Because obviously you are allocating resources to where you're locating budget, head counts, et cetera. How can you measure the results at the end of the year, even if there are long-term plans? And how do you decide if you want to do more of it, if you need to do less? How do you balance that?

Herb Wong:

Yeah. That's a really good question. And I think most marketing people say the further away you move from the tangible efforts. So, we can measure SEO very effectively. We can measure a webinar. We can measure. But branding is hard because sometimes what you do in branding, you don't always tie to people coming to you. Unless they tell you. And so, one way we measure it is we measure it by the stories we're able to give our sales people. One of the things I know our sales people always ask is, "Herb, can you give me a story I can tell? I don't want to just tell about the company. I want to tell about what our company is doing." So, that's one way. So, the more stories we can equip our sales people with to help them paint our company in a positive light, I think that's one way.

But that doesn't always tie back to a deal won. Because it's many things that do. That's only one of it. I think the other thing we do tie back to is we do know occasionally people will reach back to us. And so we do always ask, if they didn't come through a webinar, if they didn't come through an event, we do ask, "Well, how did you hear about us?" And we find that those are the ones that we can measure. Those are few and far between. But I will say that if you're working in a space where the problem is not easy to solve, when you get your brand out there and people know who you are and they reach out to you, a lot of those informal meetings tend to be much bigger deals.

The deals that we win through those, we call them the elephants. These are the few elephants that walk in. They're really big, but they're complex problems. And the thing is, if they could find the problem easily through advertising, they would. A lot of these problems that come in, they'll come and say, "Herb, we have a problem. It doesn't fit what other people are doing. These are the things we're trying to solve. Can you help us?" And those are the ones that come into us through branding. Maybe that's specific to our industry but I'd be curious what other people are experiencing.

Franco Caporale:

And what else have you found that you were able to do for the community? Other examples of things that you guys have done that have helped your industry, your community, or the specific roles that you help?

Herb Wong:

I'll say that, in our industry, because many of our competitors are trying to solve government deadlines, a government has given you a deadline to do this or do that, one of the things that we've learned to do, we've found is by reaching out to competitors and helping us all together to work together to help for a common good. If you've got an industry where you have some mandate where some deadline comes in or some requirement, I'll use, for example, even something simple, just getting COVID vaccines distributed, just simply reaching out to your competitor and saying, "Hey, listen. This is for the good of the world. This is for the good of the deadline. This is for the good of our customers. Would you work with me to put together a program to help make this easier?" You'll find out that more often than not, a lot of competitors will work with you, especially if you don't try to hog the spotlight.

When you come together and present, you acknowledge them, that they're on the stage with you. It helps, because people see that you can work together. And I think that's one of the areas we've been working towards. And I got to be honest, I think a lot of the competitors that we've reached out to that worked with us, to be frank, in certain areas they've actually taken the show. They're stronger in certain areas than we are because I can't commit all my resources. But it's good for the state of the industry. It's good that we work together. It's good that collectively we work towards a goal instead of spending all our efforts fighting each other and trying to win against each other.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. And I agree that nothing builds a better brand than your potential customers seeing that you are dedicated to help their community or their peers. But obviously when I think of the name guerrilla branding, guerilla marketing, one of the first things that I visualize is the Salesforce stance that they pulled back in the days when they were a young startup at the Siebel Conference and they would wear costumes and try to drive press at their Siebel Conference or Oracle Conferences. Have you tried anything like that? Does that work?

Herb Wong:

Yeah, this is embarrassing because this is an example of something. So, I talked about stories of things that don't work. So, I remember that Siebel story. I actually know that story. And so we had a conference once where I thought, me, I'm going to take credit for this failure, I thought it would be funny to give out handouts to get people to work with us. And so I convinced my team to make these first aid kits. And inside we had stickers. Something like, "Is your current provider making you constipated?" I think that was one of the slogans we had on there. That did not actually go off that well. I think one of the things I learned was, in Siebel you work with sales people, that kind of aggressive marketing worked. But because in the time we were working we worked with pharmaceutical companies where they're a little bit more conservative, that actually didn't work.

And I think that was the genesis of where we fine-tune our guerilla marketing. We realized that, you know what? Don't try to paint others in a negative light. Just work with them. The fact is, we work in an industry that is trying to do good for others, like medicines, pharmaceuticals. I know they get a bad rap, but if you ever talk to some of the people working in those companies, there's a passion about saving lives. They want to help. A lot of people who are in this industry want to help and they don't view that type of marketing as favorable. And so that's an example we tried and that's an example where we realized, you know what? That's not the way to do it in this industry. But it's not the image we want for our company, actually.

Franco Caporale:

It's less about trying to be clever at all cost and more just think of the good, think of what people actually need versus taking the spotlight in different ways.

Herb Wong:

Yeah, exactly.

Franco Caporale:

And is there any other initiative that you have in mind that maybe you want to try in the future or things that could potentially work that you haven't tried yet, but you might want to test it that will work towards the purpose of this branding?

Herb Wong:

I think we're not seeing new ways to try it, but well, I think one of the things we're trying to do is as we move into different verticals, one of the things we find is we find that instead of us reaching out to experts in other fields and trying to speak their language, we're finding it's better to hire experts in within the marketing group. So, for example, if you look at what we did is, in the pharma space, we were always trying to be active in the industry, but until all of a sudden we put a marketing person who's responsible for being active, it changed it. Because we had a different mindset. Previous to this one, we had engineers and sales people who work in the industry try to make ourselves known. But especially if you're an engineer, you have a different focus. But when you put a marketing person in, they instantly understand. They want to not only make a difference, but the way they make it, they try to leave behind a perception.

And so, one of the things we are looking at seriously is bringing in more vertical expertise into the marketing group versus us reaching out and partnering with them. Because when you have a person within the marketing group that, let's say, is an expert in food and beverage, and then that marketing person goes out and speak, they always know what they want to get out of the marketing and then they drive for a certain message. Versus if I get someone who's an expert in the helping market, it's one of the things they have to do that they don't care about. I shouldn't say they don't care, but they're not focused on our brand. They're focusing on helping market and then going on to do the other things they have to do.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. No, this is spot on. I love this last advice. And I have one more question for you, which is separate from the guerilla branding, but I like to ask this question to every guest. Which is, tell us one thing that is keeping you up at night. One thing that is really top of mind for you. You're trying to solve it right now.

Herb Wong:

So, what keeps me up is I'm trying to figure out how we do more with less. I think when COVID hit, it happened right at the beginning of our fiscal year and we were told, "Herb, you're not going to get more money. In fact, I need you to take a cut off your marketing budget." And so what happened last year was not only did we take a cut, but the workload for us increased significantly. And in that year of COVID, we learned how to really take the money we have and really make sure we spread it. There's a joke we sometimes make. We say we've learned to spread the peanut butter really thin here, but we still manage to produce a good product.

And I think that's the thing. If you look back to my example of we outsourced a PR company. We paid a lot of money for it. But the truth is, if you really step back and you look at how things are done and you take a pragmatic approach, you'll find that you can do a lot with very little. One of the things we've learned to stretch our penny is we do do a lot of outsourcing using Upwork. We can reach out to people around the world who can give us expertise. And for us, that was a game changer. But also you'll find that in some cases, bringing certain skills in-house is actually cheaper than trying to outsource.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. This is counterintuitive, your last point about outsourcing skill versus hiring. Because the immediate thought is, "Let's outsource. We don't have the budget to hire internally." But you are saying instead it might be cheaper sometimes.

Herb Wong:

It is. And we're very careful about what we bring in-house. Wherever we want to make sure we develop the voice of the company or that someone truly can understand what we do, those are the things we want to bring in-house. Because if you outsource that and teach someone else how to talk about your company, as soon as the contract's over, you got to teach someone else again. We want that in-house. We want people who really live and understand the company to be the spokesperson. Things we do outsource? SEO. It's not a skill that requires special knowledge of our company and people can do it better. Those are things we outsource. But things that require special knowledge of the company we want to keep in-house.

Franco Caporale:

That makes sense. Herb, this was absolutely great. I really enjoyed the conversation. So, thanks again for joining the Demand Generation Club and speaking on our podcast.

Herb Wong:

Oh, Franco, it was great talking to you and I loved hearing what you were doing with your group. I mean, it's actually kind of cool. I envy you. I wish I was younger this time of year.

Franco Caporale:

Thank you so much, Herb.

Herb Wong:

All right. Thanks, Franco.

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