Get curious | Profile of Don Bulmer

Vice President of Marketing, Consumer Products & Chemicals at Veeva Systems

Don Bulmer uses the word "circuitous" to describe his professional journey to his current role as Vice President of Marketing, Consumer Products & Chemicals, at Veeva Systems. You can add "highly successful" to that description.

Over the course of his 27-year career, Bulmer has worked at the executive level with companies ranging from tiny startups to Fortune 100 corporations, including SAP, Shell, Gartner, and AWS. While focusing on marketing and communication roles, he's also spearheaded seminal research projects, made groundbreaking strides in social media, launched startups, and much more. Currently, Bulmer is responsible for taking a new consumer packaged goods unit at Veeva, which also offers cloud solutions for the life sciences, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals industry, from startup to the scaling phase.

Curiosity is the common thread that's led Bulmer from one experience to the next—and he believes that curiosity is one of the keys to success in the world of enterprise marketing.

Bulmer's principles for success in enterprise marketing

Looking back on his career—including his time delving into the challenges facing chief marketing officers when he headed an executive research and advisory unit for Gartner—Bulmer has identified universal principles that can help to solve common marketing problems.

Know your customers

Bulmer dove into understanding his customers at SAP. In 2006, SAP was experiencing a significant downturn. As Vice President of Analyst Relations at the time, Bulmer launched a comprehensive research initiative to understand the trends and shifts impacting executive decision-makers’ approach to buying enterprise software. The research went deep to learn whom executives relied upon for research education and advice to support their decisions, how they consumed content from their trusted sources, and each source's impact on customers through each buying stage. The research was central in developing a map of the ecosystem of influence around SAP and the enterprise software industry as a whole.

“Spend time talking to people who are on the frontline driving interactions with sales. What are you hearing from your customers? You have to be curious and ask questions.”

Based on this research, SAP designed engagement strategies and asked Bulmer to create an organization—Industry and Influencer Relations—to manage engagement with key decision-makers and increase SAP's market share. The group covered IT influencer relations (industry analysts, bloggers, and consultants), business influencer relations (academics, consultants, and authors), university alliances, customer communities (SAP user groups), partner communications, and corporate social responsibility.

At the time, SAP had identified its total market opportunity to be around $75 billion. Using research-based strategies, the Industry and Influencer Relations team managed relationships with individuals, organizations, and communities that had an estimated $44 billion impact on software purchase decisions at SAP (against the $75 billion market opportunity). Over the five years Bulmer led the team, it directly influenced more than $3 billion in new business wins for the company. Favorable customer sentiment, as measured by customer surveys, also increased by approximately 60 percent during that time.

Bulmer emphasizes that even if you don't have a massive research budget to spend, you can do desktop research to better understand your customers' context.

"Read, synthesize, look for patterns, identify what's going on," he says. "Spend time talking to people who are on the frontline driving interactions with sales. What are you hearing from your customers? You have to be curious and ask questions."

Engage your audience

Once you know who your customers are, the next step is developing programs and activities to engage them in different ways, with content across various channels. The format isn't as important as reaching out with education and insight, according to Bulmer.

“While it’s technically possible to reach millions of people quickly, the art is in how you show up.”

In his time at Shell, Bulmer was tasked with, among other things, growing the company's social media reach. At the time, Shell marketed itself as an integrated oil and gas company in a very technical way to a few million people within its ecosystem. Meanwhile, consumers were the real drivers of the company's public perception. Engaging consumers more deeply was essential as Shell prepared to accelerate its energy transformation efforts.

"The way we were talking about our business was not accessible to individuals," Bulmer recalls. "It forced us to really understand our audiences. I saw my role as making Shell relevant and relatable to every single person on the planet. While it’s technically possible to reach millions of people quickly, the art is in how you show up."

During Bulmer's tenure from 2011 to 2015, Shell grew its number of Facebook followers from 10,000 to 5.5 million in two years. Followers on LinkedIn rose to 1.3 million and on Twitter to 500,000. Over a period of 18 months, favorable sentiment about the company, reflected in surveys on key areas of the company's operations, grew from around 20 percent to 85 percent.

Be agile

Agility is key for an organization to be able to shift in response to changing circumstances in markets and the world. Disruption will continue to be a constant going forward, and the ability to adapt will be crucial—a point that was brought home during the pandemic.

"It reminds me of the famous Mike Tyson saying: 'Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.' And over the last two years, every industry has been punched in the mouth," Bulmer says.

Marketers, especially, must be able to pivot along with—and even stay ahead of—their customers in order to remain relevant.

Provide value

Effective marketing does not necessarily mean promoting yourself. Sometimes, the most appropriate strategy is to identify how you can be helpful to prospective customers. Bulmer took this tack as Worldwide Head of Energy Industry Marketing at AWS when the pandemic struck in 2020.

During a very challenging time for the energy industry, he dove into research, reading all he could to understand the challenges and identify patterns. He worked with a leading business academic to produce seminal thought leadership in the form of playbooks, webinars, and presentations that would serve as trustworthy resources for customers at the most senior levels who were struggling.

“Executives are among the most marketed and sold to cohort in B2B. And the reality is they don't want to be marketed or sold to. The moment they smell a pitch, they tune out," Bulmer observes. "They want to be engaged, inspired, challenged. So it's important to understand the needs and challenges that they're facing and engage them in a way that will allow them to see the value of what you have to offer—on their own terms. Don't force them into your context; adapt to their context and add value.”

Sell outcomes, not products

“What we’re selling is not what people are buying. We sell products, but customers are buying the promise of outcomes.”

It's easy for technology marketers to get caught up in promoting the virtues of "features, speeds, and feeds about their products," notes Bulmer. But it's important to remember that these are becoming more and more commoditized and don't necessarily speak to what a customer really wants, at a deeper level.

"What we're selling is not what people are buying. We sell products, but customers are buying the promise of outcomes," Bulmer says. "It's the famous drill-and-hole analogy: People don't buy a drill because they need a drill. They buy a drill because they need a hole. Why do they need a hole? Because they are building something." Bulmer uses this analogy to emphasize the importance of taking time to understand your customers' business challenges and showcase how you can help them achieve their mission-critical objectives.

The future of enterprise marketing

In looking at the future of enterprise marketing, Bulmer thinks the Great Reshuffle, while a genuine challenge, presents a crucial opportunity for the tech industry to attract talent with new perspectives.

Bulmer's experience on an unconventional career path, going from the enterprise software industry at SAP to the energy industry at Shell, showed him how valuable a different outlook can be. He wasn't the typical profile or type of candidate for Shell at that time but was able to have a lasting impact. He believes that two of the best hires he's made over the last six months are nontraditional technologists from other industries who are bringing new energy and a different mindset.

"It's a really exciting time, with the diversity of talent and fresh perspectives and the fact that now we're in an environment that's no longer constrained based upon the fence lines of corporate headquarters," Bulmer enthuses. "The future of enterprise tech is unlimited, but you need people who help you show up in new and different ways that will drive growth."

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