Matt Lawson: How To Use Digital Transformation to Take Your Company To The Next Level

For leaders attempting to infuse innovation into the culture, building visibility and cross-functional buy-in to the customer experience roadmap is the most important thing they can do. Ensuring that teams are empowered with an understanding of how change is prioritized and undertaken, and importantly, how customer feedback will be incorporated, will ultimately guide you towards a path of innovation and continuous improvement.

As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Lawson.

Matt Lawson is the chief marketing officer for Juniper Square, the leading provider of investment management solutions for commercial real estate (CRE). Having an expansive track record of driving transformational change and quantifiable marketing impact for nearly 20 years, he has vast experience scaling technology businesses of every size, from series A to IPO, to public companies. With deep expertise in digital and performance marketing, content marketing and analytics, Lawson is an industry thought leader with more than 80 published articles and 40 speaking engagements.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve been working in digital for over 20 years now. When I first graduated from college, I was fascinated with the startup culture in San Francisco and decided to join a SaaS company building web analytics solutions before the term SaaS even came into vogue. The rest, you might say, is history. But, along the way, I’ve had the unique opportunity to see entire markets transform. For example, 20 years ago, there simply wasn’t a good way for brands to analyze and optimize their website traffic. Now, the practice of digital analytics has become so core to brands that it’s hard to imagine them not doing it. Not only that, but with every evolution of media, we have new ways to analyze and optimize — mobile analytics, social analytics, and now machine learning is a part of that mix.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

As a marketer, your mistakes are so public that sometimes the results can be very unexpected. In the early days of search advertising, for example, I remember putting together a report to explain how a search feature Google had launched called “Instant” would impact ad clicks. At the time, we were trying to reach marketers to interest them in our service. Much to our surprise, however, we were deluged with interest from hedge fund managers and Wall Street analysts hoping to understand whether they should buy Google stock. Needless to say, that campaign missed the mark. But, we learned something along the way. Sometimes, if you’re a small company, connecting your content to bigger brands can really help increase your name recognition. After that campaign, we started to do a lot of work commenting on Google, but we became much more careful and targeted about how we did it.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

It’s hard to imagine picking just one person. With that said, Chris Lien, the CEO at Marin Software comes to mind. When I joined Marin Software, I was the first marketer there. As the company scaled, rather than hire over me, Chris just kept pushing me to hire and grow a team. Before I knew it, we had a marketing team of twenty people and were taking the company public. One of the things I took away from that, especially in a startup environment, is the need to invest in growing the talent you have. It’s always tempting to make a big hire from the outside to fix a given problem, but oftentimes, you really just need to do a better job of empowering and mentoring the talent that’s already in the building.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I’ve always enjoyed reading stories about entrepreneurs. When I was first out of school, I had a subscription to Forbes Magazine. Among other things, they would always feature entrepreneurs and the new and interesting businesses that they were bringing into the world. Since then, the business press has come to be dominated by technology, but often it’s about the disruption that a given company is driving. I like digging into the founding stories to understand what the original vision was and how the founders got to where they are.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

Juniper Square was founded to expand access to and participation in private markets. Today, the wealth management industry manages more than $100 trillion dollars in client assets, with private markets representing a small fraction of that — less than 10%. Historically, only large institutions or extremely wealthy individual investors have had access to private markets, allowing them to achieve diversification and returns that aren’t available to the average investor. We believe that opening these markets will expand opportunities for wealth creation to a new generation of investors.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Over the course of the last eight years, we have enabled over 400,000 individuals to more easily track and manage investments in private funds using our portal technology. Think of it as the equivalent of the Charles Schwab app for tracking your portfolio, only for private funds. Right now, we are in the process of enhancing this technology to make it faster, easier and more intuitive for investors to manage communications with their investment managers.

So much of what we take for granted today in digital is driven by our experience as consumers. Can I access it on my mobile device? Is it fast? Is it intuitive? Was it useful? As those consumer expectations permeate our expectations for digital, there is a tremendous premium placed on UX/UI when it comes to software. At Juniper Square, we try to lean into those investments, because meeting and exceeding those expectations is critical to the adoption of technology, and ultimately adoption is critical to driving better access and investments in private markets.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation is ultimately about rethinking the experiences that drive your business from a digital-first mindset. That sounds broad, and it is because it can mean anything, from rethinking processes, to rethinking systems, to re-evaluating your data architecture, your organization, and more. And, while all of those areas of your business may be impacted by digital transformation, it’s easiest to think about Digital Transformation as starting with the customer experience and then working backwards.

I mentioned how today’s consumer is more demanding than ever. They expect immediacy and usefulness from brands, and they have become accustomed to it because of their experiences on mobile. As a brand, you have to start from the point of view of your customer, and then ask what would have to change about your business to deliver the experience that your customer demands across every touchpoint — in-person, web, mobile, social, etc. That’s not easy, but if you start from that frame of reference, you at least have a north star for driving investment decisions.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

Every company can benefit from Digital Transformation — we live in a digital-first world. With that said, the industries where processes remain highly asynchronous and offline — where people are emailing static documents back and forth or working in spreadsheets as opposed to using purpose built applications for sharing and collaboration — are the industries that stand to gain the most from digital transformation.

We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

At Juniper Square we are helping to enable digital transformation in the private funds industry, so we get to see the impacts this change can have on a daily basis. When an investment manager, for example, is out fundraising, digital transformation plays a critical role in all three of the areas you mentioned.

When someone invests in private funds, they typically sign a document called a Limited Partnership Agreement or LPA for short. Oftentimes the investor has to not only fill out personal information such as their name, tax ID, and payment details, but also answer a variety of questions for regulatory and compliance reasons indicating what type of investor they are, their accreditation status, etc. When that’s done over email, or worse, via sending physical documents back and forth it’s often slow, prone to error, and insecure.

Juniper Square is helping to digitally transform this process between investors and investment managers using a digital subscription. By allowing managers to configure the parameters of their investment, investors can be presented with a dynamic set of questions in a secure portal, complete with error checking, making the process easy to understand and quick to sign up.

Bell Partners, one of America’s largest and most consistently recognized apartment operators, reduced the time needed to process investor subscriptions by at least 60%, while improving the accuracy and completeness of the documents — improving regulatory compliance. As a result, senior management has more time to devote to higher impact activities since they no longer have to manually review and sign hundreds of subscription packages for every fundraise.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

Change is hard in almost any context, and the difficulty can be increased when you introduce the need to identify, deploy and learn to use new technologies. With that said, the most common and persistent challenge we see with digital transformation arises when companies engage in it in a partial way or approach it with an unfunded mandate. What do I mean by that? Well, sometimes digital efforts arise from specific pain point in the customer experience or in response to a need that arises from a single department as opposed to rethinking the digital requirements holistically and cross-functionally.

Today, there are a seemingly limitless set of solutions for digital transformation, so it’s incumbent on business managers to truly take stock of their requirements and build the business case for digital, inclusive of cross-functional stakeholder needs. If the business is small, oftentimes you can solve for that by appointing a champion. As businesses grow larger or more complex, it’s not uncommon to see that role become a full time job. One thing is certain — you can’t fully outsource the strategy for how you digitally transform to meet the needs of customers. Vendors and consultants can help inform the journey, but it’s critical to firmly designate ownership internally to an empowered business owner.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

We work in the private funds industry, helping investment managers to deliver a better experience for their investors and the employees who administer their investments. In that context, we’ve seen almost limitless opportunities for transformation, including:

1. By using investor-specific CRM capabilities to personalize outreach, Coastal Ridge increased their fundraising productivity by 50%.
2. By modernizing their data room experience, Excelsior Capital was able to reduce the time it takes to raise capital from more than 60 days to less than a week.
3. By migrating their investor subscription process to a fully digital interactive workflow, Bell Partners decreased time spent on investor on-boarding by 60%.
4. By consolidating all of their global partnership data on a single platform — more than 60,000 documents — Greystar improved the security and efficiency of their fundraising, resulting in increased investor loyalty.
5. By ditching legacy systems in favor of AI-driven business analytics, Ignite Investments was able to provide insight-rich reporting to investors and their Board, and gain a better understanding of investor preferences.

The consistent thread across all of these opportunities starts with gathering a universal understanding of investor and investment data to infuse every communication touchpoint with the right information, in the right context to enable fund managers to do their job more efficiently and effectively.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

A culture of innovation is a culture that prioritizes the customer experience.

That means building a roadmap for all of the possible improvements you could make to the customer experience, prioritizing that list, and then using testing and qualitative feedback loops to understand what works, what doesn’t, and how you should re-prioritize.

For leaders attempting to infuse innovation into the culture, building visibility and cross-functional buy-in to the customer experience roadmap is the most important thing they can do. Ensuring that teams are empowered with an understanding of how change is prioritized and undertaken, and importantly, how customer feedback will be incorporated, will ultimately guide you towards a path of innovation and continuous improvement.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I’ve always been drawn to Teddy Roosevelt’s quote about being in the arena.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

To me, the quote represents the importance of attempting to drive big, transformative change, while still being humble enough to acknowledge what you don’t know and learning from your mistakes along the way.

How can our readers further follow Juniper Square’s work?

We publish regular insights into digital transformation in the private funds industry on our blog at blog.junipersquare.com.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!