B2B marketing—how customers helped a software company develop a new product category

Creating a new product category is the dream of many B2B marketers. What could be more differentiating than being in a category of one? Getting there is complicated by the fact that it isn’t a new category until analysts and customers deem it so. Recognizing this, software company Workato decided to write a book that celebrated how customers are using its automation tools in new ways. “The New Automation Mindset,” which launched in August 2023, is performing beyond expectations, helping customers, prospects and analysts buy into the new category, said Bhaskar Roy, the company’s chief marketing officer. Why did you decide on a book? Workato brings both integration and automation in one single platform with one user interface and democratizes the way people do this—it felt like a new category in the innovation and automation space. The initial idea was to tell our customer stories as a means of differentiation and to in turn inspire our customers with additional use cases. What they were doing with the platform was just inspiring. Was this a hard sell internally? We didn't have to persuade our CEO, Vijay Tella. He saw the potential very early on when we spoke with the folks at Gainsight, Zuora, Andrew Chen and others who have had successful book launches that helped create a category. There wasn’t much that we had to do, honestly, to convince the board either—they were fully supportive when we shared the “why.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs How long did it take to write? It took about two years. When we started, we underestimated the time it would take. Wiley signed up to be a publisher early on and we thought that we'd get it out in six months. But it takes much more time to write this kind of book—especially with all the iterations as you go. It was rewritten two or three times until we felt we could publish it. During that time, there was this new market wave of AI, so we had to again go and refine the book. If we hadn’t done that, I think the book would’ve been a dud. Everyone is talking of AI and automation, and you launch an automation book without talking about AI? No one is going to pay attention to it. How did you keep Workato’s content flowing? We weren’t just off in a vacuum writing this—we were testing across the board. As we were writing our chapters, we would publish the core concepts on LinkedIn or our blog, gather reactions and feedback, and then incorporate them into the book. We also talked about the concepts at various events, including Activate, and at our user conference. When we had the PDF version of the book, we sent it to a bunch of influencers, customers and friends to review and provide feedback throughout the entire process. Their feedback gave us a lot of confidence that this was going to work. How did you promote the book? We hosted various curated events, one at the NASDAQ with approximately 100 influencers and a curated panel. We took over the CIO National Awards, sponsoring a keynote by our CEO plus a panel discussion and handed out signed book copies of the book. And we officially launched the book at our Automate conference last August.We did all the standard marketing activities as well, from emailing to educating sales development representatives to direct mailers. We sent the book to customers with customized bookmarks pointing to specific chapters we thought they’d enjoy, including QR codes that linked to additional online resources. Then we got more ambitious and hired vendors who could help us achieve bestseller status—which we got with The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Publisher Weekly. Can you speak to the business outcomes of the book launch? There are signals that adoption that is broader than what we initially projected. We talked about three mindsets in the book—growth, automation and process—and these are being written about and coded in several places. Vijay and the other authors, Scott Brinker and Massimo Pezzini, are invited on podcasts to talk about the book. The head of HR at a big health care company read the book, and now she has invited Vijay to talk to her entire team. Prospects have read the book and bring it up in sales calls. We are getting pulled into offline conversations by executives who have read and like it. We see posts on LinkedIn with people sharing what they liked. With competitors, we’re seeing very similar headlines to ours everywhere. What have you done since the book launch? We started a weekly podcast hosted by our head of strategy—and it's not about Workato, it’s about the “hero stories” of our customers and this wave of AI automation. We are building something called Walnut IQ. It's like ChatGPT for all your automations. The book has been fed into it, use cases, what customers are doing all anonymized. It will be able to suggest the places in your process map where you should automate. We are building this almost like an accessory to the book, where that content will live on forever. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here

B2B marketing—how customers helped a software company develop a new product category

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