The slogan “Go big or go home” has been slapped down by COVID-19 restrictions. Risk-taking as a strategy seems ridiculous when so many companies are struggling just to balance the books.

But many companies have assets that were overlooked when business as usual drove the economy. Now is the time to capitalize on those, and data is the answer for avoiding risk and going big in a post-COVID world.

“People are trying to re-factor all of their operating plans,” said Martina Lauchengco (pictured, left), operating partner at Costanoa Venture Capital Partners LLC. “They’re trying to say, ‘What is this actually doing to our demand?’ And so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been.”

Lauchengco and Greg Sands (right), founder and managing partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, joined Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, for a Digital CUBE Conversation at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio. They discussed how businesses are changing marketing tactics in response to social distancing and remote operations. (* Disclosure below.) Answers have been condensed for clarity.

“You’ve got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention to figure out where you ought to go,” Sands said. “If you’re all in one direction, you can only go forward; and when the environment changes, you’re toast.”

What is the specific advice you’ve been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days?

Sands: We’ve always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times. In a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly. I think the first piece was we all had that hair-on-fire moment. Almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles trying to understand where we were.

Lauchengco: Now what I’ve observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that’s also true for all of the customers that they’re trying to reach out to. The big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Everyone has moved to digital and virtual, but people did that initially because they had no choice. Now they’re looking at the data they’ve been collecting saying, ‘Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do physical events because we’re having five or 10 times the amount of registration that we did before? Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising.’

How are you looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? 

Lauchengco: Dreamforce is canceled, AWS [Summit] was canceled. All these [live events] have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift. One thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they’re getting a lot more in engagement. This happened at Atlassian where they rapidly made the shift to virtual. What they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously. It also became this virtuous loop where more and more people were talking. It was creating this intrigue where people wanted to participate and see what was happening.

So, I think people are looking at that and saying, ‘Well how does that affect our business, and how does that increased potential for evangelism actually positively convert towards a future customer or more people talking about us in a positive way?’ So this is where they’re looking at what they’ve put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that.

I’d say that’s the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies. Look at what the data is telling you and try to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective.

What are some of the changes you’ve seen companies make that are unique and novel?

Lauchengco: People are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past. So, one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications. Now they’ve made it free, and they’ve had over 1,000 signups in the last couple of weeks. So that was a small program, and it’s now the single largest generator of new leads for them because they reexamined it and asked, ‘What assets do we have and how can we use them differently?’

So, I’d say it’s not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven’t tried before, but they’re examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and asking how they can be deployed differently. And the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way.

Sands: There are somethings that digital is uniquely good at. One is inferring intent, which you don’t necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets.

One of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first-party data — their own data about their own customers and their own interactions — with third-party data, which includes that intent data. When you combine those together in a business-to-business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things. And many companies have been underoptimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face-to-face marketing activities.

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE