Todays feature and last in this series celebrating marketing ingenuity in the face of the pandemic focuses on what has become for many a critical communications channel for remote workers. Here is the abridged interview with Julie Liegl, CMO of Slack.

MaryLee Sachs: When the pandemic hit in March, what happened at Slack. How did you mobilize?

Julie Liegl: It feels so long ago now. Taking myself all the way back nine months ago, or what feels like nine years ago, there were a few different areas of focus for us. First, we had to think about our employees and our offices. We can't forget that, as much as we had to think as marketers and about our customers, the first thing we had to figure out was, are we shutting down? Are we not shutting down? Are we canceling our global sales kickoff? What about the three trade shows we're supposed to go to at the end of the month?

Julie Liegl, CMO, Slack

There was definitely a lot of work as the news was unfolding and the decisions we made seem really obvious now, but back then, it was really unclear. Like, do we shut down our office? That seems very extreme. Restaurants are still open, school's still in session. I'm very thankful that I work in Silicon Valley where I think in general companies were more conservative and we did shut down before schools did, before a lot of other things did. But making sure we had the safety and then plans around how we were going to manage through that has been an ongoing focus area for us.

Secondly, we needed to think about what we were going to do for our customers and how were we going to make sure that they knew that we were there, that our service was available and ready to scale to whatever needs they had. But also that they had customer support reps and customer experience reps and all sorts of people that can help them. So I think we really went from that place of focusing on them first.

And then as a marketer, I obviously had to think about what is the opportunity beyond this? And I remember thinking at the time, This is such a scary thing. I don't want this to seem like Slack is chasing an ambulance or anything like that. But as we focused on our customers, what we saw was they were coming to us asking for help. And so this idea that we had a service that could help people be more effective as they were going through the same shift that we were going through of going from whatever businesses as usual looks like, to suddenly fully remote with no advanced planning, no advanced notice and no experience doing that. That we had a role to play there.

The future of B2B communications: Slack Connect replaces email, enabling secure collaboration with ... [+] external partners, vendors, and clients.

So we pivoted a bunch of our marketing focus to lean into that. And we did it in a way that felt authentic to Slack and didn't feel tone deaf to the situation that was going on in the world.

Sachs: What role, if any, did your sort of organization's purpose play in the ethos around how you mobilized?

Liegl: The idea of Slack is very much built as a human company, a very user customer-centric company. I think that that came to bear very much for us. We really took a human-first mindset. I don't know if you remember this, but everyone was coming out with free offers, A month of free video calls, or two months of free trials.

That was great and hugely valuable for people, but Slack already has a very robust free offering that a lot of companies use and a really great non-profit program. So we thought, Instead of just throwing it out under their discount, what do people really need? We have this world-class customer support experience, so we decided instead to offer free one-on-one consultations and lead with that. To be fair, we did not have all the answers either, but we knew how to use our service. We were trying new things every day. We were talking to other customers. So almost all the marketing that we led with at that time and the big sort of banner on our homepage was, click here to sign up for a free one-on-one consultation.

A Slack leadership Zoom meeting with (clockwise from upper left): Stewart Butterfield (CEO), ... [+] Jonathan Prince (VP, Comms), Brad Mattick (VP, Product Marketing), Tamar Yehoshua (Chief Product Officer), Ilan Frank (VP, Product), Paul Rosania (Director, Product), Jesse Hulsing (VP, Investor Relations), Julie Liegl.

The whole company ended up pitching in and signing up to take shifts. And literally there'd be messages in Slack channels. Like the person at two o'clock speaks Farsi, does anyone speak Farsi? It was really inspiring to see the way the whole company came together. But we really led with that sort of human touch thing. And it was extremely well received. We had thousands and thousands of sign-ups. And we also learned so much from doing this consultations on what the key challenges were, what questions people needed to have answered. And that then led us to build even more content, more stuff to put out in the world that there was going to help people as they went through this.

Sachs: What were the sort of two or three biggest challenges to making it all happen?

Liegl: I think the first is so obvious that it almost seems silly to say, but we were going through this too. We were human beings who had also been sent home, suddenly had kids at home, or roommates and bad wifi, and fear and anxiety, and a lot new challenges. And I'll be honest, Slack was not a company that did a lot of remote work. Certainly we have a global presence. We work with people that don't work in our office, but we were not a work-from-home culture. And suddenly everyone had to do this and we didn't have setups and desks.

Making space for people who suddenly had very different challenges and who were going through different things was really important. We had to come together as human beings and leaders first. That was just the first challenge.

Slack's Melbourne office/cafe

We had to embrace this idea that everyone's looking for answers and that none of us. That was challenge one.

Challenge two was, just as our culture wasnt about remote work, Slack as a product or service has so many applications, but we hadnt done a ton of work around why its so great for remote teams. It's funny, the team that originally built it as the company was developing, did have people in remote offices and they were using it that way, but we had not done a ton of work on that. So we had to harvest a whole bunch of new content and figure out how to repackage that. It was a shift in our positioning and messaging that we had really been leaning into. That's definitely always a challenge as a marketer and as a marketing team.

I think the third challenge was trying to figure out how tone should shift and how things should shift. Things were happening so quickly and also staying the same a lot. Even as everybody pivoted it then became, what do you stay true to? What do you stay attuned to that you know is true and core to your brand is? And how much do you respond to the shifting world outside? And don't forget, when this happened there was also the huge spotlight on racial injustice. It was not a year where one thing happened that changed everything. A lot of things happened that changed everything. And each time you felt like you kind of had it figured out, the ground would shift again.

Sachs: It was the perfect storm here for sure. When you think about going into 2021, what things have you adopted this year that you will carry forward?

Slack team developing remote applications

Liegl: I hope that we really have changed the way that we work. And obviously, I'm selfishly coming from Slack where I think Slack has a big role to play in that. I look forward to being back in an office and seeing people again and having some separation from home and life. I do not look forward to or expect to ever go into an office five days a week again. We have really leaned into and pushed the limits on how we can use our product to really change the way we work, not just to make work more fun and more productive, but really change the way that we work, and really lean into the idea of, does this need to be a meeting? Does this need to be, Zoom I love, but like, does this need to be a video call or are there other ways that we can accomplish this that are more welcoming to people with different schedules, different circumstances, different working styles? And I really hope that that stays.

My little rally cry has been like the future will be asynchronous and we still are getting the same amount, sometimes I think more work done, but being able to jump into a brainstorm when it works for you or review the materials and get all your questions answered in a dynamic natural way that isn't everybody sitting and staring at the same slides being read aloud. I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to stay on top of work, to stay involved in ways that allow them to integrate more balance into their life and have more flexibility. And I really hope that's here to stay.

Sachs: Are there any other apps or hacks that you've discovered working from home and working remotely that you think are useful to people?

Liegl: I think virtual whiteboards are huge and we're playing with those a little bit. I'm using Zoom to do more video recordings and putting them out to the team, such as recording a top of weekly mind update, and then just uploading it to Slack.

Finding ways to provide that human touch I think is really key. And then of course, obviously all the virtual event platforms that we've all been experimenting with. We had a great experience running our user conference virtually. And we used Slack in a way that we hadn't before to engage our attendees and create community there. So I guess our own products in different ways and Zoom in different ways.

Sachs: Going into 2021, what are your new priorities for marketing?

Comedian Sarah Cooper guest keynote at Slack Frontiers 2020 conference. Previously a UX designer at ... [+] Yahoo! and Google, Cooper worked with Stewart Butterfield, Slack Co-founder & CEO, and Cal Handerson, Slack Co-founder & CTO, together at Flickr.

Liegl: I don't think at the core our priorities are changing. I just think the way we get there is different. We still need to tell stories and create a brand that our customers love. We need to make our customers super successful so that they love our product and are advocates for us. We need to generate demand. We need to do all these things, but our toolkits just changed a bit.

Just like with my team, how do I inject more humanity and more connection? I think as marketers, its how do we drive more humanity and connection when there's no in-person. I think content has been king for a while. Its even more important because to get your story out there that people can consume in a way that they want and to keep that momentum going while you don't have those more in-person type experiences.

Sachs: Aside from the lack of face-to-face interaction, what else has been the most frustrating aspect of trying to market through the pandemic?

Liegl: This is maybe a strange answer, but I think in some ways a lot of positioning for a lot of different types of things coalesced. It's almost like everyone's talking about remote work instead of specific software tools, or contactless pickup in the retail world. We've coalesced around a certain set of messages. It's natural; we're all kind of chasing the same ideas. But it's made it even harder to break through. Like, what is the difference between Zoom and Slack? We're partners. We don't consider ourselves competitors, but you could start to see a world where people start to conflate them all together because they're all remote work tools. So some of the marketing is starting to sound a little similar. So how do you break through in that world and explain what makes your solution unique versus the other 55 solutions that are saying, We're going to make remote work easier? Because there are a lot of different solutions. It's very natural. Its become even it's more important than ever to be crisp on that differentiation.

Sachs: What have you put in place this year that you're likely to keep, going into the time where we can actually start getting together in person?

Liegl: First of all, I'm very much looking forward to having in-person events again, but I think they will now always have some sort of virtual component to allow that broader participation. I think that's going to be a best practice forever now. You can have the best of both and get more out of that content, more out of that stories, more out of that great marketing that you're doing.

For us, I think we also got a little scrappier during the pandemic, this idea figuring out what we can achieve in a short period of time. I hope that we keep a little bit of that grittiness as well.

We also launched Slack Connect. We did a lot of things separate from the pandemic. This was a huge new step forward on the ability to work with people outside your organization and channels. And we've been doing a ton of work on that. And I think that's another thing that's probably even more valuable in the pandemic because it's just another way to have closer relationships with your partners when you can't meet them in person.

View original post here:

Marketing A Backbone Of Remote Working In The Pandemic - Forbes