Jonathan Andrews speaks to Mike Gundling, Vice President Product Management and Marketing, TerraGo Technologies about the importance of demonstrating the environmental and financial savings to public sector buyers
A self-confessed “lousy computer programmer” and the owner of a 115-kilogramme pet pig called Bacon, Mike Gundling is not your typical VP of marketing of a software company.
“Our daughters fell in love with these teacup pigs,” he says. “We bought it believing it would weigh 45 pounds [20 kgs] but it currently weighs about 250 pounds.”
Now an established member of the family, Bacon resides with Gundling and his family in Virginia, ironically home to approximately 1,000 pig farms but also headquarters for software company TerraGo Technologies.
Gundling has been with the company for nearly nine years which provides software solutions for IoT assets like smart streetlights, traffic signals, power line sensors, parking, and air quality. Customers include utility providers in London, Chicago and Toronto, among others.
“We don’t sell features,” he explains. “We try to sell real value and capabilities and translate the amazing software we have for cities into a statement of benefits. We show them what their city could be like with TerraGo software.”
He customises and tailors each story and every conversation he has with cities, in addition to trying to tell success stories through the company’s website and social media platforms.
Gundling has been part of venture-backed technology companies for nearly 20 years including CA Technologies and Metron Aviation. He believes the key to a successful marketing campaign is by translating software into a cause.
“At Metron Aviation we translated air traffic flow management benefits into tonnes of CO2 saved and the gallons of fuel saved with a more efficient traffic flow management,” he explains.
Similarly, he has taken this approach of highlighting economic and environmental benefits to his current position at TerraGo. One of his biggest initiatives for the year ahead is translating everything into dollars and carbon. With customers’ permission he wants to share their dashboards to other potential customers.
“The dashboards we create for our customers show them every day what they’re doing with our software,” he says. “It shows how much they’re saving. Whether that’s energy savings by switching to more efficient and better controlled lighting or how much they’re saving in dollars on operations and maintenance expenses.”
He dubs it real-world savings translated to real-world campaigns to share with others and show them it is not just a marketing campaign. One of his most successful campaigns was a simple e-book he wrote about street light operations tailored to cities and utilities.
“[Prospects] can see what the City of Chicago went through, which is one aspect of the e-book, and they get to see how that translates into their own city,” he says. “It resonates with cities and has been successful in terms of feedback and folks reaching out to us.”
Being a relatively small company and “not a Microsoft or a Google” means Gundling can easily track back to which campaigns were successful and which weren’t. If opportunities aren’t created from a campaign, he stops the campaign.
“We track pretty succinctly and simply where we have our contacts developed from which campaigns and how to score them,” he says. “We see very directly where we get our million-dollar deal from which event or campaign.”
With a long career in software, he notes how much vendors have changed, as technology and capabilities have enabled them to offer software as a service.
“One of the big changes has been that rather than dumping software on somebody’s network it’s all moved to the cloud and viewed as a service,” he says.
In the city space this has led to vendors and customers looking at “true performance” and vendors now being paid for outcomes as a service. He sees it more as a hands-off provision of capabilities and the end of selling software, putting out a roadmap and releasing updated versions to install.
“It’s in the cloud and we’re constantly monitoring it and maintaining it,” he adds. “It’s hands-off for the customer in terms of worrying about the next version and it’s gradual, so it changes much more quickly than it used to.”
After attending the prestigious Brown University, he graduated with a degree in business and economics and then completed a masters in computer systems management in Maryland.
He realised that rather than creating software, his strengths lay in being the liaison between managers of a business and developers of applications for a business. After moving into commercial software, he saw first-hand the ability to make connections between the technology and the solutions needed in the market.
“I love the pace of change and the constant change,” he says. “What I do love is that my job has changed every year, if not every day, in terms of what we’re doing.”
He has seen this during his nearly nine years at TerraGo, as the smart cities and utilities business was born out of the legacy business and effectively becoming a “start-up within a start-up”.
“For the last five years we’ve been building this zero-code platform for smart cities and utilities which came from our ideas and our conversation with customers,” he says. “There’s certainly nothing dull about [marketing and software].”
Although he loves working with government and utilities, he recognises their hands are tied in regards to the procurement cycle which is a disadvantage to them and to their citizens. He believes there needs to be a reengineering for utility and city procurement.
“It shouldn’t take 10 years to do a smart lighting project that is going to have an obvious ROI [return on investment] for economic and environmental benefits,” he explains. “And they sure as heck don’t need to do an RFP [request for proposal] that allows 100 bidders to come in and then do a proof of concept there. You don’t need a proof of concept anymore. It works.”
Looking to the year ahead Gundling, like many, is eager to get back to face-to-face meetings with customers and prospects. While webinars have been the only option to engage with customers, he laments it’s not the same as industry roundtables or conferences.
“We want to have more conversations and do more listening,” he says. “When you’re in a virtual mode sometimes it’s us that does a lot of the talking. If we get to some roundtables this year, we’ll be able to stop talking and be in a position to listen more.”
Gundling is not alone, and appreciates that one thing about the industry is that he doesn’t have to go it alone. In the UK TerraGo partners with Urban Control as well as other technology and software providers elsewhere.
He adds: “The great thing about marketing in this industry is that you can always find a technology partner or financing partner to help cities accomplish something.”