Katherine Lehman on International Shipping and Marketing

It is great to be here. Thank you for having me as well.

I started marketing way long time ago. We’re not going to say how many years, but I started as a designer. I thought that design was where my head was and that’s where I wanted to be. I wanted to design marketing and make beautiful things for the industry. My data brain canceled that out and said, No, we’re going to do things that involve data. I was introduced by a professor during college to social media marketing back when Facebook was young. That sparked my interest in marketing. Through that evolution, it took me into B2C marketing, where I worked with a brand that was trying to do fitness and sports equipment and things like that. I fell in love with the data side of it, the social aspect of it, and pretty much all things marketing. But I realized I didn’t always want to sell directly to the consumer. I wanted to solve business problems. That led me to B2B marketing, which kicked off a whole other trajectory in my career. Went through a couple of different industries, including manufacturing, chemicals, HVAC, welding, aerospace and defense, automotive, and silicon shipment manufacturing, a different hop, skip, and jump up until technology and supply chain.

Really fell hard for the tech life, started working for some startups, started doing some consulting work, and really fell in love with supply chain in general and pretty much all of the logistics space. It’s this beautiful hidden world that lives and powers our world, and we don’t think it. We just hit a button and something shows up at our door. I love the whole hidden world aspect of the supply chain and all the different pieces that make it run. When I was finishing up at my previous company, which was on the fleet in Last Mile Logistics, I was offered an opportunity to talk to Flavorcloud, and I was impressed with both the product and the team. I thought they were going somewhere and building something truly unique and different for the marketplace that was needed. So that’s how I ended up here, rebuilding a new marketing team for FlavorCloud.

Our mission, plain and simple, is to unlock global commerce. We say that because we exist to enable a little bit and large enterprise merchants and 3PL partners to offer that global guaranteed delivery promise. If you know anything about the industry, there is a lot of complexity. There’s a ton of complexity around moving products across borders, customs clearance, carrier disruption, trade compliance, merchants, customers, taxes, duties, fees, you name it. It’s a super complex problem. We are simplifying it, streamlining it, derisking that process, and making it easier for brands to go global. We’re backing that up with a guarantee because if you don’t trust the process, you’re not going to want to do that business. However many merchants struggle with the problem that they have a ton of international demand. All it takes is going into your Google Analytics and saying, Hey, I got a bunch of visitors from this country. But until you turn on that switch to serve that country, you’re losing out on all that GMV. So we enable that process for our merchants. We are an API-first platform, and we do this for B2C companies and B2B merchants. So if you’re shipping wholesale, if you’re shipping in 10,000 lipsticks from across the world, that’s a lot of money, that’s a lot of movement.

And derisking that entire process to make it easy to ship anything from anywhere to anywhere, that’s our mission, right?

Yes, I mean, I will say that how we have put it on Instagram and our website and everything is like we make cool jewelry with waste. And this is what we have become known about pretty much. We’re trying to revolutionize the fashion industry, more so the jewelry one, to explain to the people and kind of educate them to tell them, hey, we can still do fashion, but we can do it in a sustainable way. And so in any of our campaigns or the videos we do and everything with that, we’re not just trying to sell cute jewelry because you can find cute jewelry anywhere, but we’re also explaining to you, to the audience itself, it’s just like to buy from sustainable products.

And so this is, I think, that has made us unique pretty much. So yes, our pieces, like I actually spent a lot of time designing them because I believe in design. I’m a creative myself and I love design, but I know that overall, if we want to make a positive impact, we need it to be sustainable. And this is why we’re not only sustainable in the design process, but we’re also sustainable in the production part of the brand.

Sure. On the B2B side, anybody that’s shipping wholesale, so anybody that’s going to be facilitating that B2B2C relationship, shipping a major product to stores and those end customers. But especially in the e-commerce space, We are servicing those larger enterprise merchants that have a lot of international demand. They have a high carb value because they’re going to see the most benefit from our product. We’re offering that guarantee that the price in checkout in an e-commerce way is the price that your customer is going to pay, which for a lot of people in the United States, we’re finding they don’t fully understand that experience. If you’ve lived in Europe or Asia or pretty much anywhere else, there’s a chance that someone’s going to show up at your doorstep with your package and a bill, and you have to pay that bill to collect your goods. That’s where our guarantee comes in. Our guarantee says that I’m going to show you, it’s going to cost you $10 a checkout, and you’re going to get that package. You’re going to get a guarantee to get that package. Someone’s not going to show up with a bill and say, Hey, pay us some money.

That’s where that guarantee comes in. Being able to offer that experience for our merchants who are doing high-value shipments is huge. In our 3PL and partnership space, we are partnering with 3PL WMSs and TMSs that are moving volume because they want to help enable their merchants to be able to ship more, sell more, and generate more revenue. We partner with them to plug into their systems to be that global distribution arm.

Absolutely. I’ve been here, I think seven months now, and it was a great opportunity to build a brand strategy from the ground up. They’ve never really had that here at FlavorCloud. It was a very reactive process. I got to sit back and say, What are the strategic priorities that are going to get our mission out there, make sure that we’re attracting the right customers, and making sure we’re enabling that business that we want out there? That fell into three pillars, the one being product marketing. How do we tell our story? With a topic so complex, how do you boil down and articulate the parts of the product that people care about, and that they want to hear about? So my strategic priority was to take this super complex topic and this super complex problem and boil it down into something that everybody can take away from. So when you’re talking to a 3PL, they understand exactly what you’re going to give. And when you’re talking to those merchants, they understand what that experience is going to be like for them and their customers. The second pillar that I’m focusing on is partnership enablement.

Our partners are a huge part of everything that we do. They are very near and dear to us. We work with them directly, but we want to make sure they’re having a good experience. Partnering them with making sure that we’re giving them all the information they need to both understand how we’re adding to their value chain, but also how they can pass that on to their customers. Whether they want to do it in a white label type of way where we’re just the solution that sits underneath it and they say, Hey, we can now offer global delivery promises. That’s great. Or if they want us to be involved and go talk to those merchants and walk them through our white glove onboarding. We can do all of those It’s different based on the partner, but our goal is to lift them and make them more successful and in return, are more successful as well. The third strategic pillar that we’re focusing on is thought leadership and brand awareness. It’s great I don’t think that we do all of these things, but if we can’t tell our story, if no one’s hearing us, if we’re in a room screaming about how amazing FlavorCloud is and no one’s listening, that’s not a great place to be.

We have so much knowledge and so much value that we can bring to the marketplace that lifts our voice and being that thought leader is important to us. We have one of the best compliance teams anywhere. That’s not at our head of compliance, but brilliant people work at FlavorCloud, and they understand the industry. Lifting those voices and saying, Hey, we’re FlavorCloud, and we know what we’re talking about. We’re a partner you can trust in expanding globally is a huge part of our strategic initiatives.

Yeah. It’s a combination of a couple of different things. You’re right. Our TAM is huge. There’s a huge opportunity for us to activate all these merchants, to activate all these partners, and make a big splash. But how do we talk to them? I’m a big fan of the water cooler effect. Find out where they’re going for information and meet them at their level. If that is LinkedIn, if that’s a newsletter, if that’s an event, you have to be where people already are having these conversations and then insert yourself into those conversations. It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to try to go out and net them in and bring them into you. When you are casting that net, it’s a combination of direct outreach and SEO. We use partner tactics to out and talk to people that are already connected to our network and tell them who we are and what we do. We do a lot of research to make sure that we are the right fit for these solutions before we go out talking to people. Email marketing is not as dead as everyone thinks it is. You’ll hear a lot of marketers say email is dead, but it’s still where most of us start our day.

You start your day in the inbox. So we do leverage some email marketing tactics to get people to talk to us. I believe that generic email is dead, but it’s the personalization and the A/B testing of pretty much everything that makes your message hit home for people. So maybe some people don’t want another email that says, Hey, contact first name, generic message. They want something personalized. They want to speak to what they care about, and what their pain points are. So I like to be very hyper-specific in my marketing, and then back that up with as much leverage as I can. Don’t provide junk. So for SEO, don’t do junk SEO. For email, don’t do junk email. For outreach on LinkedIn, don’t make it junky. Make it about a value exchange because that’s the beauty of B2B. You’re not talking to the end user that’s buying a pair of shoes. You’re building a relationship, and it has to be mutually beneficial. It’s not just, Hey, are you going to get me my sale? It’s, How can I improve your process and bring this to your customers so that we can rise together?

Yeah, I’m pretty ruthless with my suppression list because I don’t want people to receive emails that are junk. The worst thing you can do for domain authority is to hit the Junk button and mark something as spam, and the next thing you know, it’s not great for your network. I believe in really segmenting who you’re talking to. So if that means you’re going to create four versions of the same email to make sure that you’re talking to the right person at the right time, you should do that. You should be auditing your process every step of the way because it is better to send, yes, it’s email, and yes, it’s temporary, and yes, it’s probably going to be deleted in under five seconds. But if you are hitting the person with the right message at the right time when they’re expecting it or where they are in their life cycle journey, you’re going to get way better results than you will anywhere else. Our open rates, just from a subject-line perspective, are up over 35%. So it’s fairly high. A lot of industry benchmarks put it at around 18 to 20. If you’re good, I’ve worked in some organizations where it’s down around five.

And they say, if nobody is opening our emails, why is nobody clicking through? The open is the first door. The second door is, click, your call to action. What do you want them to do here? Is this just a, Hey, checking in? Or is this, Hey, I want you to do something? And can you make it worth clicking? Are you offering something they want? A lot of times it does take multiple passes to get people to engage. But if you are segmenting down, and I can simplify this by saying, say you have five buckets of customers, you have someone in apparel, someone in supplements, someone in shoes, and someone in, I don’t know, stationery. If you break it down and talk to them about their niche markets and their industry, you will get way further than the generic, Hey, I saw you were doing this thing on e-commerce. Let’s talk about e-commerce. You have to be personal with it. Because otherwise, and not personal in the LinkedIn outreach approach way where, Hey, I read your profile, and I’m going to pick some obscure fact from your history to talk about. I’m sure we’ve all gotten those emails else, too.

But it’s personal in the way that matters to them, matters to their role, matters to their business because, at the end of the day, marketing is a conversation. If the conversation is not worth having, you lose them.

We partner with our customer success team. If we’re going to take it to a one-to-one approach, so that’s the difference in the way I think about sales versus marketing. Sales, you’re going for one-to-one. It’s a one-to-one conversation. Marketing is still trying to talk to one-to-many. You’re still trying to talk to a lot of people. If we do take it to that one-to-one approach, we don’t make it a sales motion. We take it back to the customer success team and let them start to build that relationship because ultimately, they’re going to own that relationship if they’re going to win it back. Having them go out with that targeted outreach, there are some campaigns we run where it is an Outlook to Outlook type of email where it’s coming from their personal email client, and we get better results sometimes. Granted, there are a few more steps for the tracking to make sure that’s working because it’s not through a platform. But you can sometimes use that one-to-one approach, take a template, give them variations of that template, and have it go one-to-one. We’re seeing huge success right now from one of our campaigns doing just that.

It’s about what you’re trying to accomplish and how narrow your buckets can be because that’s not attainable if you’re trying to hit 20,000 people. Should you be hitting 20,000 people with the same message? No. But if you’re taking that approach you can’t do the one-to-one motion.

We have a few major partners that we love to work with. One that they’ll hear us talk about a lot is Ship Bob. We love Ship Bob, they love us, and we love working with them. But again, I think any partnership and any basis of any good partnership is building that mutual value. You’re providing them a tech solution that sits underneath their platform and powers their DDP program, Delivery Duties Paid. By doing that, we recognize that there’s still a responsibility for us to take care of the customers that are working with us. It’s not just a handoff of, Here you go, FlavorCloud, onboard these people, and then have a merry day. We are now taking them on as a customer. We have a shared customer and we have a shared best of interest in there. We don’t like to have partnerships where we just set it and forget it. We take steps with our partner account managers and things like that to be involved in the day-to-day with that, to sit down with their team and say, How are we building together? How are we achieving our growth goals? Set joint growth goals and not just make it a one-sided scenario where we’re just throwing leads over the fence or it’s one-sided.

We partner events coming up next month with two different partners, makes sense to be one of them as well, where we go to their events so that we can talk to them, participate in their content, participate in their webinars, lend our voice of expertise so that they can be seen as experts in the industry as well. It’s a mutual exchange there. We don’t think of partners as just plug it in. We nurture them in the same way that we do our customers. Our customer focus is one of the best things that we do. We are very vigilant about being a good steward of our customers.

I did build a new team here, and it follows neatly with those strategic pillars. For the brand awareness pillar, we hired a creative director who’s phenomenal in overhauling our public-facing presence as well as our internal product presence. We have a bit of a unicorn in who he hired because he can touch the product side and he can also touch the website. So he’s reformatting everything underneath that. And I love his approach to branding because it’s not just about the pretty colors, the pretty pictures, and everything like that. It’s how this brand makes you feel. He’s one of those types of brand builders that try to create an experience, like signature moments, but creating an experience that any time somebody interacts with us and interacts with our product, they have a similar feeling, they have a similar experience. I think that’s not common in the tech space and the logistics space. Most people pick a logo out of a hat and then throw a couple of colors behind it, or they hire somebody off 99 designs to just whip something up in a bottle. But we leverage a lot of research underneath that to make sure that it has stickiness, it has that what we’re building makes sense for our industry at our time and the industry 10 years from now, which is huge.

I don’t see that very often in this space. That’s something we’re doing a little bit differently. As far as the other two hires, we hired a Product Marketing Manager to be that voice to make that translation of our product to the rest of the world. Then we hired a content strategist to work alongside both of those people. It’s great that we have a great brand. It’s great that we have a voice. What platform do we need to be on to send that out into the world? All of that is aligning under our new strategy to help us take us where we want to be.

On the partnership side or just across everything?

Oh, on thought leadership. Yeah. So we do attend a couple of events. We like to be out there in the field. We go on podcasts. We’ve been picked up for a few awards on the leadership side as well. But we’re lucky enough to have an incredible CEO who doesn’t mind taking the stage and being the voice of the company. She has a tremendous story to share. We are getting out there and lending our voice to anywhere the industry hotspots are. That’s taking the stage at the women’s lunch at Manifest. That’s being on stage at the ship-up, the field event in Vegas next month, really not being afraid to step up and say, Hey, We know what we’re talking about and we’re ready to talk about it. Above and beyond that, it’s a PR motion to get us placed in articles and in those water-cooler spaces that I mentioned earlier, going to where people are already reading this news, already looking for this information, and making sure that our message is clear and front and center. In some ways, that is also a partnership angle as well, because we can co-author white papers, eat books, and things like that with our partners, and then share it out to both of our networks and then leverage SEO behind that to make sure it’s getting out to where it needs to be.

It’s taking every opportunity to speak up in our networks. A lot of members of our C-suite and our leadership team have deep connections in the network already. We have a lot of opportunities to go and put our voices out there and just talk more about what we do and not in a sales way, Oh, you need this? But no, this is what we’re doing. It’s incredible, and this is why you should listen to it. If it resonates, we’d love to have you. I think that’s a different approach than a lot of tech companies are out there. They’re like, We’re the best, but you need us. We get the opportunity to work with really great companies, and we’re building up that case study arm right now to show, Hey, it’s not that we’re just talking about it. We’re doing it. These are the success stories that you can look to.

All right. I love this topic, and I love it when people ask me about KPIs and metrics because I’m an outlier in the marketing world. I do not believe that tracking how many clicks you have on Google and your impressions and things like that. It’s not going to get you all that far. Those are the traditional marketing metrics that people like to track when they don’t know what to track. Often you’ll have four presentations, they’ll say, How many MQLs is marketing generating? And that’s because that’s what they know. I track things at a campaign level and not a Salesforce campaign level, which is more of a tactic, but part of those strategic buckets. So setting those goals at the top and then really boiling it down to, How do we get there? So instead of looking, Yeah, I’ll look at the SEO rankings and the clicks and the impressions and all that stuff, but it’s more of an indicator if we’re moving in the right direction. So like a leading indicator to see or a leading metric to see if we’re moving in the right direction. But what I’m looking at is those campaigns.

So if thought leadership is a campaign, what are the tactics underneath it? And how are we generating opportunities? How are we measuring success off of those? So I’m looking at opportunities generated because that’s where the revenue is. And as much as we love clicks and impressions, they don’t pay the bills. Revenue pays the bills. And at the end of the day, you need revenue to I’m looking at those opportunities generated from those campaigns as a whole, not individual tactic levels. What opportunities are closed and what revenue is being generated off of that about the lifetime value of the customer? Because the lifetime value of the customer will tell you if you’re attracting the right ICP fit. So if you’re attracting customers that churn out in two months, that’s not a good use of time, resources, or anything like that. And there’s a lot of variables there to keep track of. But if you do have customers who are staying with you a long time and experiencing a lot of success, they’ll turn into what I like to call brand champions. They will help you with things like case studies, reviews, and things like that.

They’ll be willing to vouch for you out in the marketplace, and those are extremely valuable. So on the customer success side, we’ll measure metrics like churn rate, MPS score, customer satisfaction, and things like that to identify those brand champions and make them part of that marketing cycle all over. Am I always looking at the money? Yes, I’m looking at revenue. Are we hitting our revenue goals? Is it from opportunities that were generated by marketing? And can we generate more of those opportunities through similar activities, or is it a one-off? And then the customer success side comes into play there. So are we taking care of our customers and turning them into champions to generate more opportunities?

Yeah. Our customer success team is amazing. They are really in tune with their metrics beyond what I just mentioned, but also keeping that customer satisfaction high. When they’re receiving feedback from that one-to-one relationship, they’re making sure it comes back to the product team, that it comes back to the marketing team. When they’re raising their hands saying, I need to talk to a group of customers are who saying all the same questions, what can marketing do to support you? I’m a full-cycle marketer. I believe marketing doesn’t stop at acquisition. So close the deal. You have to be monitoring. You have to find those brand champions and light up. You have to be involved with every single step of that journey, it doesn’t stop for marketing. I need to jump in and provide more resources if that’s what our customers need. I need to jump in and facilitate those case studies so that they feel valued. We launched a campaign at the end of last year where we were honoring our top shippers and giving them that customer touch of, Hey, we see you. We recognize that we were a part of your business, and we’re going to honor you in this way.

So it’s going above and beyond just saying, Hey, checking in. How are things going? But making those phone calls, making those connections, saying, Hey, I noticed your data, is saying this, How can we support you? And that rolls over into our product. So there’s a part of our product. I think I can talk about this. I know we haven’t officially launched yet, but there’s a part of our product that reads your data and says, Hey, you’re getting a lot of traffic from this market. You should consider turning on this shipping lane. How amazing is that to look at your customers’ data and say, This is an opportunity for you to get more revenue. Wouldn’t we want all of our partners to say that? It’s things like that, I think, that make a difference in the customer success five. We realized that you’re not business to business. You’re still human and treating people to help them reach their goals, too.

In our sales cycle or our retention cycle?

Retention. A lot of customers, the data has said that the longer they stay with us, the more profitable they become. Over time, if they’re staying with us long term, they’ll see their profits increase. There are to that. Obviously, during peak months, around the holiday season, there’s a lot more activity. A lot of revenue is actualized in Q4, which is fine. But the longer they stay with us, they see the value more and more because you’re building on that global delivery promise. You’re establishing trust with your customers. Once your customers see that the experience with you is better because of what you’re doing internationally, they are more willing to come back. They’re more willing to buy more. You can see sell them more, and they’re going to have higher CART values. Two of our claims to feign is because of the trust we build at checkout, conversion rates go up at checkout. So you’re not coming to checkout and abandoning CART. You’re converting and purchasing. And then also see higher CART values. If you go on our website, there’s a lovely case study from Loop and Tie. Their CART value increased because of the solution that we helped them put in place.

That makes a big difference.

I don’t have that metric in front of me.

Quote me on that because I don’t have that number and I don’t give out numbers I’m not confident about.

I would say it’s pretty low. For the companies that do churn out, it’s usually less of a function of how interact t with the product and more of a function of a change in the business model. I know companies have churned out for very specific reasons. They’re going in a different direction, they’re going to a different product line, or they’re just eliminating some parts of their business. Unfortunately, the economy has not been kind in the last few years. In some companies, unless they’re going out of business, everybody is going to churn with them.

Yeah, I have more hobbies than I know what to do with. The joke was always, that I never found a hobby. I couldn’t turn into a hustle, which is not true anymore because now I kayak, which is very much just a hobby. But I believe that our hobbies and our interests do overlap with our personal life. Even in ways you wouldn’t think about, they influence your attitude, they influence your approach, they influence how you like to do business. There are two that I’ll specifically call out that I think influence me the most. I am a huge reader. My crowning achievement as an adult is I have a library in my home, a voracious reading habit, and I read everything from fiction to non-conviction to random topics to books I don’t agree with just to see different perspectives and satisfy my natural curiosity of everything that’s going on. I’ll often find little tidbits that I can pick up and carry back into my personal life. There’s a quote from the book The Glass Hotel that talks about that hidden network of logistics and that background world that no one sees. As much as I didn’t care for that book, I took that quote with me, and it influenced some of my marketing life.

The other hobby I think that overlaps heavily, stays with me on this one because it’s a winding road, I’m a yoga instructor, so I’m very heavily involved in fitness. I’m a I’m a certified personal trainer. I’m certified in bar intensity. I have my RYT. Exercise makes everything better. It makes you a better human. Yoga is something that I discovered through my evolution and becoming a teacher, It made a positive impact on who I am as a leader and how I show up in workspaces. I used to be extremely extroverted, and had a really hard time talking to people, even from a marketing perspective. I was more comfortable with data than I was with humans, which is interesting. But discovering that, helped me bring better leadership thing. How I lead on the mat has made me more in tune with how multifaceted being a leader is. It’s not just an employee, it’s a human. They have thoughts, they have feelings, they have all these things that go into what motivates them at work. It overlaps with that psychological aspect, like what makes humans do what they do.

Every time I lead a yoga class, which I do every week, I always tend to come to an aha moment that I bring back to my work life, and it helps me become a better leader, which makes me a better professional.

Okay.

It would be Instagram because I just really love looking at pretty pictures. Even if I never read a single comment, I can just look at pictures all day.

I would have to say when I sprinkled poker chips all over an event hall in an attempt at guerrilla marketing and accidentally oversold my event by about 300 bodies. It was way too successful and we ran out of room with the event.

I once ran a 50-mile ultra-marathon, and somewhere around Mile 40, I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to do something bizarre at our next in-person event. I’m not going to say what it was because it didn’t work out, but it was a great idea at the time. It was just executed poorly.

Oh, wow. That’s a great question. I would buy more data, probably, because I think you need the data to find a strategy that you’re going to be successful with all that additional cash. I would try to double down on stuff that was working, so probably do some more events, and hire some more people who are going to have some great ideas for my team. Probably people, events, and data would be my three top investments that I would hit first.

If I could swap roles with any other, I probably would do it with customer success just because I love being on the front lines and hearing what people are saying about our product, hearing what their problems are, and what their challenges are. I think the more we listen, the more we learn, and the more we can be effective as a human and as a marketer. I’d love to spend more time on that team, I think.

Yeah. That’s a new muscle that we’re building out on how we can make what we call fast feedback. We have been traditionally collecting that feedback and moving it through the channels. My team is trying to make it faster so that we can action it better through some of these roles that I’ve hired in.

Thank you. It was great to be here. I appreciate the conversation.