The Brand Equation
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The Brand Equation
Jul 7, 2026
How Docusign grew past the product it was built on w/ Carla Weis, VP of Brand & Creative at Docusign
How Docusign grew past the product it was built on w/ Carla Weis, VP of Brand & Creative at Docusign
00:00
35:13
Transcript
0:00
So most brand strategy is written for the underdog, how to break in, how to disrupt, and almost nothing useful exists for the opposite problem. What do you do once you've already won?
0:09
There are very few people, um, who can actually speak to that, who are that sort of category creator, own their space, have become the Kleenex or the Verb or the Google of their category.
0:21
And Carla Weiss is the VP of Brand and Creative at DocuSign, a company that did something almost no brand pulls off, really became that verb. You can DocuSign it, right?
0:29
That's the dream to have that, but also, as you'll hear in this conversation, the trap.
0:33
Carla led the four-month rebrand that moved a 22-year-old company off the dotted line and into a whole new category of intelligent agreement management.
0:42
So she's living the exact problem that most of my clients are terrified of. How do you evolve a brand people already love without betraying the thing that made them love it?
0:50
So if you run a category leading brand or if you're trying to build one, this is the episode that I would save. Carla, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it, Alan. Appreciate you making the time.
0:58
I'm so psyched to talk today. You and DocuSign sit in a spot that almost nobody gets to occupy, right? So it's not just that you compete in a category, it's that you are the category, right?
1:09
I think that's so crucial because it flips kind of every rule of brand strategy on its head. Most brand books are written by the challenger, right? Everyone loves, especially in America, everyone loves the underdog.
1:21
Um, that's kind of scrappy disruptor story, and your whole world every day is the opposite of that. You're the incumbent. So let's start out with, with a question about that.
1:29
What do you think that brand leaders get wrong about the difference between running a challenger brand and running a category that you already own?
1:38
If you are the category leader and dominator, I definitely think we have a different mindset because it is a place of privilege, and it is a place that we have earned, and we talk a lot about being a trust brand, and that's, that's something that, like, not many people get to experience, like you mentioned.
1:56
That being said, the rules are a little different. Like, you can't necessarily play ideas off the cuff as much as we would like.
2:03
We've tried a couple things, like little campaigns or little guerrilla marketing tactics, and every time we've done that, our audience and our customer base usually says something like, "That doesn't feel like DocuSign."
2:14
A competitive campaign that a challenger brand can run, if a category leader is running that same campaign, it's seen as, like, punching down and, you know, not being very mature or classy.
2:26
And so we think about that kind of stuff a lot. Will whatever marketing tactic or brand tactic we're looking at, will it enhance our reputation or detract from our reputation?
2:35
And then we've also been exploring the concept of trust is this sort of vague idea when we just say, like, we're a trust brand.
2:42
Trust is made up of credibility, reliability, you know, being close to the customer, other things than just beyond, like, site uptime.
2:51
Super important to be, you know, to have the site up, of course, but it's bigger than that. So yeah, being in a trust brand, in a category leader brand position is, it's an interesting one.
3:02
You get to have fun in very, very different ways, but you don't get to do the, like, little sort of upshot sort of things that, um, a challenger brand would do. Yeah, it's, it's interesting.
3:11
Y- you know, we talk a lot about brand being the relationship that a buyer or the world has with you, right? Especially in the case of DocuSign, where everyone knows you, everyone uses you.
3:20
It's B2B, B2C, enterprise, down to, you know, individual consumers experience the brand. And you don't, as much as we try to control the brand perception, it's really in what those people in the world experiences of you.
3:33
So I'm curious, what are the pros and cons of, of that, right? The ownership versus the ubiquity of the brand. Yeah.
3:40
I think the ubiquity is something, again, that we have earned, and I like to say the job of brand in general is to make a company rich and famous, right?
3:51
To, you know, build competitiveness or to build lifetime value with the customer, but also the fame part is really interesting, and I think that's what people want to achieve when, you know, they go run a big out of home campaign or something like that is, like, a sense of fame.
4:04
And for us, it is those big things, but it's also some of the smaller things. You know, we think a lot about that end-to-end experience.
4:11
We're thinking a lot about the signer, um, who may never spend a cent with us, but their experience matters just as much, um, if sometimes not more, because they are experiencing the product, they are experiencing the brand in moments of joy, but also some really tough ones.
4:27
Like, I've been a part of some interesting signer stories where it's like, you know, divorces or business litigation.
4:34
And so it's really about being there for the individual in those moments of intimacy and closeness, um, and always operating with a sense of customer orientation rather than a DocuSign centric orientation.
4:48
This is one of my favorite things about working with you and just knowing you as a, as a human, even just, like, kind of following you online and how you think about it, is that you do such a great job of articulating brand as emotion.
4:58
Mm-hmm. And I think that gets lost so much in technology brands, in B2B brands. We'll get pushback a lot of times where like, "What's their motivator?" "Oh, it's, it's to make more money."
5:07
Yeah, of course, businesses wanna make more money. Like, so do I. Everybody does.
5:10
But finding those moments and unlocking those moments of joy and of pain or sadness or frustration or whatever that kind of experience entails, whether you are in charge of it, whether you are enabling it, whether you are supporting and just surrounding it, is such an interesting place to play.
5:25
Is that something that you feel like you need to advocate for internally for folks? Like, "Hey, what are- Mm-hmm... what's the emotional motivation?"
5:31
Or is it a thing that is sort of built into the DNA of DocuSign and everybody gets it? That's a great question. Um, I think, you know, in my journey, I've been at DocuSign for six years.
5:39
I, I was with DocuSign during the pandemic. That was a really interesting time. Um, generally speaking, our customer base during that time Was high stress all the time, right? Like, we were high stress.
5:52
Every- the world was high stress.
5:53
Like, you know, it was literally, quote-unquote, "unprecedented events," and, and you're buying a software in that time that you probably didn't research, you probably didn't, like, spend time really thinking about it.
6:04
You probably just remember the DocuSign name, and that's what I buy. And that's- Right... that's great, but it's also, like, a customer base who's coming in sort of stressed out. We thought about that a lot at that time.
6:15
And then now moving forward into, you know, beyond e-signature and moving into a platform play, there's a lot of different steps of the agreement life cycle that we call it, where it's like you're in the creation phase of the agreement.
6:28
You might be negotiating. Usually negotiations have a lot of emotion in them.
6:33
Even if, you know, it's between two very big businesses, it's still usually a set of parties negotiating with each other that are individuals, right? And so there can be emotion back and forth there.
6:46
Um, certainly, uh, procurement teams face a lot of emotion and pressure to sort of get the best deal, and that's how they're evaluated within their jobs.
6:55
And really at the end of the day, all of our users and buyers are being evaluated not just on the choice of DocuSign, but on how successful that agreement was or was not, right?
7:06
So for example, if you hire a vendor and you, you know, the vendor lets you down, you know, the, the person who chose that vendor is in the hot seat. Yeah. And so agreements naturally just contain a lot of emotion.
7:18
You know, we think a lot about that from sort of like an arm's length distance, 'cause DocuSign in that moment is just the facilitator.
7:25
But then there is very much a close, intimate relationship that DocuSign has with the customer, which is what happens when something goes wrong?
7:33
And so, um, how we operate in those moments I think is really, really clear.
7:38
And frankly, the space that I'm most interested in, that I think we have a lot of opportunity for, and every brand is dealing with this right now, is with AI.
7:45
Because we're using AI in a way to either augment, even take the place of humans in some cases, like within support or, you know, different channels, and that makes me both excited but also nervous.
7:57
It's exciting because it's, you know, it can be quicker, it can be faster, it can be more, um, you know, sort of omnipresent for the customer. And at the same time, it's obviously lacking that human side.
8:09
And so, you know, I'm a big fan of, like, the statement of garbage in, garbage out. Like, we need to train these AIs.
8:16
If it's in a support case or if it's in a success instance, like, we need to be really clear, um, on our point of view so that the AI can, you know, uphold the brand that we have spent so hard, you know, so much time building.
8:30
Yeah, especially when you're centered on trust, right? Um, and you- Yeah... guys have won every, every trust award there is.
8:35
I wanna come back to the AI stuff, but I, I wanna talk about something that you mentioned at the top. Most people, I think, think that becoming a verb of your, of your field is the Holy Grail, right? Mm-hmm.
8:45
It also, it's a trap that most companies don't even sort of recognize or, or plan for. So I want your take on this, the, it, that catch 22 of when your name means one single thing, literally DocuSign.
8:58
[laughs] You have to fight for brand permission in the other spaces that you wanna go in. So in your head when DocuSign becomes a shorthand for the whole category- Yeah...
9:06
what did you gain, and what do you think you maybe lost in doing that? How are you addressing it? The gain is exponential.
9:14
There is no tech brand I can think of that comes to mind with, especially in B2B, that has as many customers as we do. I mean, it's very rare.
9:21
We have, um, 1.8 million customers globally, and that's, like, just a volume play that's, like, massive. And like you said earlier, they're all sizes, they're international, they're all over the world.
9:33
They're at different ages of maturity. Like, some are startups, some of, you know, are Fortune 500s who've been around 100 years. The customers were asking for more, even if they didn't know it, right?
9:44
Like, even if they didn't, you know, like, say, "Oh, we really want this feature or this thing," they would just explain how they were using DocuSign in their businesses, and we sort of saw this door open where it was like, oh yeah, there's a real need here.
9:58
Where email and Microsoft Word, and Microsoft's a huge partner, so, like, no shade to Word, but, like, that was the channel for, um, negotiations for years and years and years. Still is, right?
10:09
It's like negotiations between lawyers, lawyers prefer and love Microsoft Word. Like, that's it. Like- Okay... they're not doing Google Docs. They're not doing anything else.
10:18
Like, and so, um, you know, we saw this whole part of the agreement workflow that was really antiquated. I mean, it might as well have been paper and pen still, frankly.
10:29
It was, you know, email read lines back and forth between parties for, you know, could be 12 rounds, you know, or something crazy.
10:36
And so you imagine, like, the future of, you know, your entire corpus of agreement from managing, you know, employees to managing facilities and trucking and all the way through, you know, managing their agencies, their ad spend, everything runs on agreements.
10:52
It's...
10:53
I think what you're saying is so important, too, because i- i- you know, you're, you're talking about kind of shifting perception, but you're not talking about sort of, um, uh, moving away from the clarity of what your business and your brand stand for, right?
11:05
And, and that, as we think about AI, as you just mentioned, right, clarity is how you get found, right? Yeah. Repeated, consistent, clear, differentiated messaging consistently gets you found.
11:15
But there's a difference between having clarity in brand and what you stand for and the promise that you put in the world that people trust you for, and a really narrow sort of product feature that you're known for.
11:25
Mm-hmm. Those are two very different things, and I think that brands, um, and even CM- even some really savvy CMOs Have a hard time separating those two things. Mm.
11:34
And I think that's super important, because the job isn't, your job isn't to blur, blur anything or kind of take too many steps away from, uh, too many steps away from what you're sort of known for overall, or people won't buy it, right?
11:49
You have... You're asking people to take too much of a cognitive leap. You'll confuse the hell out of them, right? Um, the job is to earn permission for more.
11:57
So exactly as you just spoke about how that, um, sort of credibility push and what you were talking about.
12:02
We started here, we heard what people needed, we moved into X, we moved into Y, and storage, and management, and sort of intelligence, et cetera.
12:09
Um, I think that brand permission is what lets you walk into a new category and pe- people believe that you belong there, not that you drop a signature feature.
12:18
'Cause in some ways, like changing your name from DocuSign, though we would obviously never do that. [laughs] Like, interesting way to, to push that, right? Right.
12:25
Instead, instead we sort of say, "Hey, how do we actually, um, how do we actually build more equity into it?" And I, I mean, this is something that we see in so many different, um, so many different categories.
12:36
Uh, you know, the most obvious is that nobody thinks of Amazon as a bookstore anymore, right? They- Right... are an e-commerce, and even Salesforce, right? It owns CRM and now it's an entire customer platform.
12:45
And they both did that by not sort of blurring the lines of their clarity, but by kind of taking specific steps- Mm-hmm... to extend the permission in which they go into business.
12:55
Where have you guys seen that be easier than you thought, and where have you seen it be more challenging, where you're like, "If we could just get them to know that we..." Mm-hmm. I think, yeah, that's a great question.
13:08
I think the e- quote-unquote "easier" part has been on the, um, storage and extraction piece. Oh. Right?
13:15
There is a very easy sort of tee-up in a sales conversation or in a campaign where you say, "Well, you're already signing your documents in DocuSign. They're already stored there. Now what?" Right?
13:26
Like, and so what if they were all there, and what if, you know, every person in your business who needed access had that access?
13:33
Um, that's relatively a hook that is very interesting to people, because they have not solved it, and they know they haven't solved it, and they haven't solved it well.
13:41
I think the harder sell for us has been in, um, the document creation space. Most people have a, you know, standard way of doing things with creation and negotiation, right?
13:53
Like, it's like I go to Google Drive and I use this template, and then I upload that template to DocuSign kind of thing. Usually that's a really painful sort of manual process that most people have not, um, invested in.
14:07
Um, and so there's just a lot of ways that, like, you know, I think businesses are ripe for disruption on the creation part. Um, yeah, and I think we'll, we'll be the winners of that. Yeah.
14:18
I m- I mean, there's no one that's set up better for it, for sure. But that's, that's, uh, even a, even a more challenging ask, right? 'Cause you're asking people to change behaviors- Yes... in there.
14:27
So what do you see as brand's role in helping to change behaviors? I think it's, you know, the adage of, like, hearts and minds.
14:34
Um, because I think, you know, it's easy to sort of grok it, like, emotionally, um, and understand it. It's much harder to change, like, repetition and muscle memory, um, and to say, like, "There's a better way."
14:50
And so for brand, I think it's telling that story, but then also sort of backing that up with proof points. Like, there are actual...
14:59
Like, we have pretty, pretty amazing stories of customers who've lost sales deals because of that.
15:05
I think the other thing is most people are not currently open to the idea of a document being edited in the browser between parties. But to invite your counterparty into the same instance together, right?
15:20
Like, that's an interesting thing, because the, you know, the email back and forth is very much a passing of the baton. It's your turn, now it's my turn. It's your turn, now it's my turn.
15:30
And so I see a world in which negotiation could happen much quicker, like potentially two people meeting on Zoom. They have DocuSign open in front of them. They're negotiating together live.
15:40
The process is quicker and faster. Um, you know, I don't know. You know, maybe lawyers wouldn't like that. I'm not sure. [laughs] But, um, but I think that that is highly plausible.
15:51
And I think, you know, there's another emotion in this, which is, well, what if those two parties who are negotiating together live in the browser and on that Zoom call, like I mentioned, what if that was a way for them to build trust and to actually, like, start working together collaboratively before the deal's signed, you know?
16:10
I used to be in agency life, and we would say the sale is the sample.
16:13
And so, like, what if we helped sellers build more trust with their customer base because they're, you know, they're operating in a way that feels maybe a little more, um, transparent. Mm. You know?
16:26
They're co-working on the agreement together, whereas I think other times it can feel very hands-off. We're circling around, like, just the idea of change overall- Mm-hmm... which, you know, nobody likes.
16:35
And I think when you think about brand leaders often have to be the representat- Well, I guess it goes either way.
16:41
They're either the representation of change, or they're the ones that sort of hold in, become brand police, right? Mm-hmm.
16:46
Um, and when you've earned trust and every change that you make feels like a betrayal of the people who got you here- Mm... I often see clients freeze at that moment, right? They, they know they need to evolve.
16:59
They know that there's more opportunity out there. They know that their equity is not where it should be. But the cost of that change feels almost personal to them. Yeah. When you're
17:09
thinking of pushing a- and, and moving the brand forward, because y- you're never standing still as a, as a brand leader, how do you actually decide what to protect and what to push on? Mm-hmm. What's worth risk?
17:21
What's worth the uncomfortability, and what's not? Yeah, it's a fantastic question, and we talk a lot internally. And, and, you know, we rebranded, um, a little over two years ago, and that was a really-...
17:31
tough moment and a fantastic moment, very rewarding. But it was this question that we wrestled with, like, do we just tweak the brand? Do we actually rebrand all the way? Do we rename?
17:44
Do we, you know, all these things that you're sort of existential questions.
17:47
And, like, you can run a bunch of, you know, user studies and stuff, but at the end of the day it's kind of gonna come down to, like, your gut and what you think is right and, um, what you believe.
17:57
And for us, um, we think a lot about
18:01
constants and variables within the brand, and there are constants which are things we will never flex on, like we should and never flex on, and then the variables are the things that are like, um, you know, internally we'll talk about two-way doors.
18:18
Like, we can try this thing, and then we can walk it back, and then there are certain things that we cannot try, like we should not try. For us, those constants are, um, for sure it's trust and security.
18:31
Like, that is a non-negotiable. Like, and that plays out, you know, in different ways internally, um, with, for example, like how budgets get spent, or how, you know, time and roadmaps are built.
18:44
Like, if it's a trust and security line item, it is top of the list, right? Um,
18:50
but then the variables for us are actually some interesting brand things that, you know, can be a little frustrating to say it's a two-way door, but it actually has worked for us.
18:58
Like, for example, naming, um, has been an interesting one where we have rolled out some different names, and then over time and through, you know, sort of customer feedback and real world scenarios, we've said, "You know what?
19:10
That probably wasn't the right name, and not enough people have seen it or adopted it, so it's actually okay to roll it back."
19:17
Um, you know, that's not an, you know, that has a cost to it and a, you know, a, a workload associated with it, but it's, it's actually doable.
19:25
Like, it's not, you know, it's not the end of the world if we misnamed a product or feature or something. We can, we can walk that back.
19:31
But it would be the end of the world, for example, if, you know, trust and security wasn't our top priority. So those are the things that we think about.
19:39
That's really helpful, and kind of having that mapped out for everyone. It also kind of brings up timing, too.
19:45
When you guys did, two years ago, when you rolled out the rebrand, and really any time that you're rolling out new things, you have a employee base of 7,000 people at DocuSign. Is that right? Yeah.
19:56
That's an audience in and of itself, obviously, a massive one. [laughs] So how do you balance timing, right? You got a sales team that sells, still selling one thing. Yeah.
20:05
And then you're making a change in the market, right? Are you going sort of market first 'cause you gotta move quick, or are you going- Yeah... internal first? Who decides that? When is it break?
20:14
When is it the right thing? You know, what have you learned about the kind of internal, external timing?
20:19
We have established a decent, pretty, pr- actually pretty good sort of what we call internally the rhythm of the business, where we think a lot about how stuff will hit the market, and then how it hits our internal teams.
20:32
Um, we're certainly not perfect at it, but we're pretty good, which it, for us is it kind of always looks like, um, the internal rollout is, give or take, two to three weeks before the external rollout.
20:44
For example, with the rebrand, the rebrand launched on April 11th to the public, but to the internal employee base it launched on April 3rd. So I mean, incredibly, incredibly tight, and we did that very intentionally.
20:58
Um, number one was we didn't wanna have any leaks. Um, that was a big one. Uh, especially with a brand like DocuSign, you really can't afford to do that.
21:07
Number two, it was, um, we didn't have a lot of time, but we knew we had to enable people, um, and ask people to move really fast with us.
21:17
Um, and then number three, it was actually to sort of, um, pump up and inspire the employee base, and I, I think we really wanted to maintain a sense of, I don't know, sort of like adrenaline going into that rebrand moment.
21:31
So, like, people had seen it just the week before. Now, where we were exceptionally judicious, and kudos to, um, my project management team, with the rebrand itself, we built an entire cohort
21:47
of sort of like first-line receivers of the brand internally. We called them brand ambassadors. Um, and they were essentially, like, brought on the journey without seeing anything [laughs] the entire time.
22:01
And so we would have these fantastic, like, um, sort of like almost like brown bag lunch and learns. We would have them at multiple different time zones to maximize, like, our global employee base.
22:13
Um, and we would, you know, they were in charge of their department's rollout of the brand, for example. So maybe, for example, it would be the website team. "All right, website team, here's what's happening.
22:23
Here's this. Here, here's, like, a sneak peek of something. Here's what you can expect. Um, here's the timelines you're gonna have," and so on.
22:31
And so even though people weren't, like, in the room, so to speak, seeing logos and colors and all of that, they were very much brought on the journey, and I think for us that was extremely successful.
22:42
Because, um, without that change, you know, if, if people feel like change is forced upon them and then they haven't, you know, had a voice or been read in early enough, I mean, you're already putting up this massive emotional roadblock where it's like, "Well, you know, why would I care about your project when you give me, you know, three, three days notice or something?"
23:02
Um, and you know, we're a big company, so we don't always move fast, but I've actually been really impressed at how fast DocuSign can move when,
23:13
when we communicate really well and when we explain the rationale and the why.
23:18
You said something at the top of that, too, around energy and giving people, like, hey, we wanted to kind of have the momentum push us forward.
23:25
You know, thinking about something that incumbents usually don't have is that kind of motivation, right? Like, being the underdog helps you to push, right? You're, you're hungry. You wanna take their lunch, right?
23:34
You wanna take the incumbent's lunch. How much of that needs to come top down versus bottom up and grassroots? And, and- Right... sort of where do you see the role of leadership in brand?
23:44
I think the top down that I believe in, that I think is really important, and I think, you know- Um, our, our executive team and then, you know, our VP level team definitely models is the, what is the bar?
23:58
Like, what is the bar of excellence, right? What is that bar in that customer experience or in the brand experience that someone has? Because theoretically, we have earned the right to be able to, like,
24:12
actually not treat the customer very well, and they'll still stick with us. Hmm. That's not a great place to be.
24:18
That's not sustainable, especially in the age of AI, but also in general, like, I just don't think that any, any of the senior leaders at DocuSign would say like, "Yeah, we wanna be like, uh, a winning brand who has low love."
24:30
Like, that's not, that's not great. So we wanna aim for that high love and high choice. That looks like establishing a really clear line in the sand at the top level of like what does quality mean?
24:43
Like, we're going through that exercise internally. So I talk a lot about, you know, what is the DocuSign way? What is the DocuSign way to answer the phone? What is the DocuSign way to answer the email?
24:54
Well, how do those interactions go? Um, and that, I think, does need to be modeled top-down. Yeah. Um, because if the s- most senior leaders aren't doing it, then it's... You can't ask the employee base to do it.
25:05
The grassroots of it all, I have some really amazing, in, in marketing especially, but across the company, like some really amazing sort of lower level, more junior ICs, finding cool and creative ways to express the brand that I wouldn't have thought of.
25:20
You need to allow for the expression, um, you know, at the grassroots level. And as long as people kind of understand the constants and variables, like I mentioned earlier, like we will never bend on trust.
25:31
We will never be the top dog who's punching down at the lower, you know, at the sort of like lower competitive set. Um, you know, if you're sort of in those guardrails, like then brand expression can be okay.
25:46
Like, we can try different things. You know that we talk about all the time that we should tie brand to the metrics that CFOs care about, right? Yeah.
25:53
Like, exactly as you were saying, hey, if we speed up the process of creating contracts, then sales cycles get tighter.
25:59
I'm curious how it works with you guys, your CEO, your CFO, folks who are responsible for the growth and the hard metrics of the organization. Mm. How do they view brand? How do you interact with them?
26:10
How do you make the case for brand? Is it not making the case for brand, right? And not even saying, "Hey, this is a brand metric, this is a business metric"? Yeah. Or is it something totally different? Yeah.
26:20
I, I think I'll answer that question in two different ways. One is the internal employee base, since we were talking about that.
26:26
Generally speaking, I don't talk about that as employee brand or talent brand or anything like that. Um, it is, uh, all housed in the guise of how the company operates.
26:39
I'm a huge believer that company strategy and company operations have to be thick as thieves and have to meet in the middle. Um, and if they don't, you're really, really screwed.
26:51
Um, operations and how employees work e- especially at 7,000 people, like you can't micromanage everybody. There's just no way.
27:01
They're gonna do stuff, and so you have to have given them enough guardrails, um, on, you know, everything from like how to believe about the company and believe about the customer.
27:13
At that point, it's sort of on the employee, and you sort of build like that skill set among 7,000 people. So I don't talk about it as brand. Um, I think of it more as like what does it mean to be a DocuSign employee?
27:28
So earlier this year, for example, um, with- in partnership with our learning and development organization, we launched, uh, new company principles.
27:37
And brand people might call them [laughs] like brand tenets or, you know, any, any number of things, and that's, that's indeed what they are.
27:45
But, um, now we, we just call them employee or company principles, and you just see the employee base really embracing them. So that's one way that I think brand expresses itself internally that's super important.
27:58
Number two is what we're trying to drive here is not just brand for brand's sake. Yep.
28:05
It is, to go back to that, that point of when I say rich and famous, what I'm really mean is customer lifetime value, preference, pricing premiums, and, um, you know, retention over the long haul.
28:20
You know, we have some customers... I'm, I'm in a customer, um, scenario right now with a customer who's been with us for 12 years, you know?
28:27
And so how do you retain somebody for 12 years when there is other choice, when there is, you know, really lower priced competitors, when they could move their business over?
28:36
Well, it's actually through brand, and it's... You know, maybe it doesn't look like logos and campaigns.
28:41
Maybe it looks more like, you know, the, the offerings we're giving them, the access to our sales team, the access to our senior leaders.
28:50
That is the point of brand, and so everything we do, you know, across the board, it's certainly like much deeper than that too. Mm. And you are measuring that.
29:00
We're measuring ch- a choice when DocuSign is chosen over someone else. We're measuring premium w- when we can charge more than others. We're measuring loyalty overall, and you're reporting that to the executive team?
29:09
Yes, and, um, we're measuring it with existing customers, but a new thing we're also doing is win-loss analysis. Yep. So when we lose deals, um, the interesting things of like, why did we lose that deal?
29:24
I mean, usually we win the deal, but generally speaking, if somebody doesn't go with us, it comes down to sort of, in their minds, a ratio between cost and then brand value. Will I get what I think I'm gonna get?
29:39
Will it be the ROI I think it's going to be? And that's usually like why currently, why we're maybe losing, you know, a handful of deals here and there. You've nailed- That point really well.
29:50
I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause on that and kind of reiterate, because every client that I talk to when I say, "Hey, give me your win-loss reports" Mm "...
29:56
and the one you lose" And the entire column written by salesperson is price, price, price, price. Mm-hmm. Favor price, right? I love how you said that the ratio between essentially the ROI on the brand value.
30:07
I was promised X, I got that, I won't get that, I don't value that. Yeah. Whatever that is. Um, and did we make the case for that, you know, charging that premium or being the right choice overall? Totally.
30:17
We're wrapping up our time here. I wanna ask you kind of a closing final question, if that's okay.
30:23
If you were briefing someone else in your shoes, like a VP brand in another category defining business, what's the one thing you'd warn them about that no one warned you about? Mm.
30:34
I think the, you know, during our rebrand moment, um, I mentioned how we brought a lot of the company along, and I still feel really good about that to this day.
30:43
I think there is one thing I wish I would've done a little differently, which is I wish we would've interlocked better with product and specifically product design. Mm.
30:53
Um, I think that's a really hard thing to do in most companies.
30:58
Like, usually the organizational charts are not set up for this to be successful naturally, and so I think anybody who's taking a rebrand effort or, you know, category creation moment or anything like that, the brand makes the promise, and then the product delivers the promise.
31:14
Yeah. And if those two things are not tightly interlocked, even if you think they're loosely interlocked, I don't think that's good enough.
31:21
I think you need to, like, have them in your, you know, sort of sphere of influence and vice versa, and that is usually all... comes down all to, like, relationship building and communication.
31:32
If the brand makes this promise, and then a customer buys based on that promise, and yet they don't feel it in the product every day, um, you're just asking for churn in the long run. Yeah.
31:42
Or a lack of adoption or whatever metric matters to you. Yeah, I think that's the one thing that I would caution all brand leaders on is, like, tightly interlock with your product teams. Yeah. I mean, credibility.
31:52
When we build strong brands, we're looking at differentiation, credibility, and relevancy as our three kind of core tenets, and relevancy and differentiation tend to be upstream, if you still believe that some form of a funnel exists, sort of top of funnel stuff, right?
32:04
Mm-hmm. LLMs are looking for that, how different are you from where you stand out and, you know, do you align with what people are searching for and need? But credibility is a little bit further down the funnel, right?
32:12
Yeah. I'm willing to take a chance on the, on the hopes that you're correct. Um, that comes up a fair amount, the integration piece with acquisitions too, right?
32:19
Like, we acquired a company, and now we need to sort of integrate what they do with what we do to tell an overall story, and I see two things happen.
32:27
One is they either sort of just go all in, have this new brand be the tip of the spear for us and sort of say, "We have this, uh, offering, and now it represents this larger parent brand, and we're adopting that equity really quickly, and it's okay if things break."
32:41
And then there's the other side, which is like we are gonna hold these brands as separate brands until we get our integration aligned, and then we're gonna make the change of, of shifting equity forward, um, into whatever the parent brand may be or, you know, a hero brand structure overall.
32:56
I think it's an interesting approach either way, as long as you're looking at kind of consistently delivering on that promise that you make in the market. Yeah.
33:03
There are so many acquisitions that come to mind when you mention that. Like, I'm thinking of, like, Canva and Affinity. Like, they've kept the Affinity brand alive.
33:11
DocuSign has certainly made acquisitions, but generally speaking, almost all but one of them, we've just folded the acquired brand into the bigger brand.
33:19
And, you know, I'm a big fan, especially in, especially in tech, for the bigger brand to be the parent brand and just to ladder up everything to the bigger brand.
33:29
I think, you know, consumer is very different or, you know, packaged goods are very different. Like, I think those are very different things.
33:35
Um, but at the end of the day, when you're a software business, asking your customers to, like, grok and understand too many different names and how they...
33:45
the relationship between them, that's just not a good use of energy across the board. Um, so I just don't think that that's a successful play. Yeah, I think you make a great point. I mean, look at Adobe and Omniture.
33:57
Omniture was, it was Omniture for years under a different bill. Mm-hmm. Because Adobe didn't have the credibility to be able to have Omniture sit there. Now Adobe Analytics, right? Yeah.
34:06
And they've done that job of transferring equity. So you can do it too soon, for sure.
34:11
But to your point, like, it comes back to what we talked about at the top of this conversation is are you making it easier for people to buy?
34:16
They're being bombarded with 5,000 plus brands a day and different touch points and ads. Like, make it easier for them, not harder. Yeah. Carla, thank you so much.
34:25
This is exactly the conversation that I, I really hope that more brand leaders have, and hopefully we can help them have, but I appreciate it. Love it. Thanks. Of course. So welcome to The Brand Equation.
34:35
I'm Lauren Warnock, and I run Villain Branding, where we help enterprise B2B companies build brands that actually move the business. Here's the premise. Brand isn't the soft part of a company like most people think.
34:45
It's the part that decides whether your sellers close faster, whether you charge more, whether the market gives you permission to grow into something bigger, and that's what we call the brand equation.
34:55
Almost nobody talks about how that gets built or at least talks about it honestly. So that's what we do here.
34:59
Every episode, I sit down with a CMO or brand leader running one of the most recognized companies in their category, and we skip over the polished case study version. We get into the real stuff.
35:09
So if you're building a brand that the business can actually feel, you're in the right place
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