B2B marketers need to feel empathy for the customer’s pain points and spend less time talking about product features, says former CMO, now President Armin Molavi in this Q&A.
Business-to-business marketing needs to apply the same customer focus and customer empathy that direct-to-consumer marketers employ, said Armin Molavi.
That’s what he’s trying to accomplish at education technology company Instructure, which sells learning management system Canvas. Molavi has spent his career in business-to-consumer marketing at top brands including Hilton and P&G. Now, as the recently appointed President of Global Customer Organization, Molavi oversees sales, customer success, learning academics and marketing. Molavi spent a little over a year as Chief Marketing Officer at Instructure before moving into this role.
The software-as-a-service brand’s top product is Canvas, which has roughly 60% market share in higher education, Molavi said. Instructure also offers an assessment product called Mastery Connect and credentialing platform Parchment. Investment firm KKR acquired Instructure in 2024 for $4.8 billion.
One of the brand’s goals is to make a teacher’s workload easier with its platform, and it develops its features with those end-users in mind. Instructure uses content marketing and community events to showcases how the brand is a leader in the space and keep its brand top-of-mind before the request for proposal process, Molavi said.
Molavi dives deeper into these tactics in the below Q&A.
Chief Marketer: How does your marketing team find the people that can influence the decision to update their learning management system? This is a big investment for any educational system.
Molavi: Not only is it a big number, but it’s also quite a bit of change management. If you think about a school district, for the IT team to show up and say, ‘Hey, we’re changing the LMS,’ it’s a big deal.
So how do we find the team, it’s actually not our priority. What our priority is, to get out to the education community that we are ahead of the industry. We are an ed tech company. We are not a big tech company.
The distinction there, is all of the software that we develop is in service of driving education outcomes. We are constantly trying to showcase to the community, whether or not they’re a current customer, regardless of whether or not they’re even in the mindset of looking for a new LMS, I want them to see us as innovative. I want them to see us as a thought leader. I want them to see us as education first, not technology first.
Because at the end of the day, the thing that I fundamentally believe is by the time the official search for a new LMS begins, whether that’s with an RFP or whatever, there is a front-runner in that team’s mind at that institution. Unseating that front-runner in the middle of a pitch is hard. I want us to be the front-runner on Day 1. And that’s the goal.
Chief Marketer: How do you get to be so known then in the industry? Not to find the team, but to just be known?
Molavi: I get to say this very proudly about us, we are known in higher education, K-12. It’s not about driving awareness. For example, when I worked at Hilton, if we launched a new brand, I had to drive awareness of that brand. I don’t need to drive awareness of the brand here. What I need to prove to everybody are some of those attributes that I just talked about because that’s what they care about. If you’re an LMS administrator, if you’re a CIO, you want to know that the LMS that you’re about to choose is ahead of the industry and is driving educational outcomes.
We do that through content marketing first and foremost. A lot of what we do is about driving content that is pointed about our point of view on the education landscape. Like what’s happening, what’s happening with AI, what’s happening with teacher workloads? How do we leverage AI to streamline the workload that a K-12 teacher has on a day-in and day-out basis? If I can prove that, I will be ahead of the game in that RFP. So content marketing is one.
Another one that is a big part of what we do is live events. I’m proud of the fact that the people that work at this company, not only are we proud of what we deliver, but we have a huge population that are actually current or former educators. I was an adjunct professor at Brandeis. Many of our employees used to be K-12 teachers, used to be college professors. We understand what our customers are going through. When we see them at live events and they realize that we really understand education, unlike any other player, we win.
The other thing that I’m proud about is we’re a quirky company. I want nothing more than for our people to show up as their true selves at all of these events because when we show up that way, people love it. It makes them realize that we are phenomenal partners. We are phenomenal at trying to understand what they need and trying to figure out how to evolve our roadmap so that we can deliver on it.
Chief Marketer: I would love more details on content marketing and live events.
Molavi: For us, the content marketing takes all shapes and size. The reality is that the people that we’re trying to deliver this content to, some of us like to read, some of us like podcasts, some of us like videos. As a marketer, as someone who’s trying to engage audiences, you have to meet them where they are — a lot of our own channels, there’s a lot of paid sponsored support, paid distribution. As you can imagine, LinkedIn is a fairly decent place for us. And now we’re starting to really think through how do we evolve our presence in social? What does Reddit look like for us? What does an AMA with our chief product officer look like?
In regards to events, so we have our own set of events that we do ourselves. We have InstructureCon, which we just had a few weeks ago in Louisville, Kentucky, and we were so honored to have 3,000 of our customers join us. We’re also having our regional events. We just had CanvasCon in Sydney, and then Manila and London are coming up in the next few weeks. Beyond our own events, we probably attend and in some cases host upwards of 300 events a year. We have about 50 events just in Q4 planned alone.
Chief Marketer: How big is your events team?
Molavi: We have a core events team of about seven. And then my business units put on their own field events as well. So we probably have anywhere between, I want to say 10 and 12 folks that are really responsible for putting on the events.
Chief Marketer: If the community events are all customers, it’s not really customer acquisition, is it?
Molavi: What’s interesting about those is they are primarily customer events. However, we do end up having a lot of potential customers show up. If we have a K-12 event, for example, and you’re a K-12 administrator or a CIO for a K-12 district in the area, the reality of education in this country is they probably don’t have a big travel budget. For them to be able to go to these events and talk to other customers, hear from other CIOs, hear from other superintendents how the Canvas integration went? How the Canvas rollout went? And, most importantly, what are the educational outcomes that they’re seeing? It’s the best advertising for me. So we do get a lot of new customers there.
Chief Marketer: The sales team just invites them?
Molavi: I joined this company 18 months ago and everyone here kept telling me, ‘Armin, just wait till you start going to these events. You’re going to see it.’ And I have heard many companies tell me this. But I have never seen such a loyal customer base that are so passionate about Canvas. You go to some of these events and you meet people that are prospects and you ask them how they got there. Sure, sometimes a salesperson might have invited them. More often than not, they heard about it through the education community and they went on their own.
Chief Marketer: What are some of the learnings that you’ve taken from your other positions and are bringing here?
Molavi: Prior to this, I’ve worked entirely in consumer marketing. I have never worked in B2B marketing.
The biggest thing that I would say to your readers is I think B2B has kind of lied to themselves for quite some time.
This concept of let’s create an ideal customer profile. There’s a lot of beautiful consultant decks that segment the marketplace into three, four, five ICPs, and a good company will prioritize them, et cetera. Then we’ll develop what we want to call product-market fit. Yes, we know what the needs are of this ICP. We have a product that meets their needs, so great. They will come and they will buy it.
The reality is this field-of-dreams strategy is not a thing. Kevin Costner is not going to save these companies. You still have to spend the time to understand the people making these decisions, the people that would be impacted by these decisions, and have empathy for their pain. If you’re an educator, you’ve got a lot of different pains. It’s not easy doing this job. How do we help you? How do I understand what your needs are? B2B marketing has kind of skipped over that step, and there’s a lot that B2C marketing could be teaching B2B about that.
The other big thing I see — not just with our competitors, but with B2B marketing in general — is the feature parade. Our software does this and this and this and this and this and this. The reality is, that’s not really meaningful. What people really want to understand is if they choose to work with Instructure, will their day-to-day be better? And so that’s what we all about.
When I worked at Procter & Gamble, which were some of the most formative learnings in my career, we were ruthless about trying to understand Mom, what’s important to her, what is she thinking about, what’s hard, what’s easy, what is meaningful to her? B2B needs to do more of that here.
Chief Marketer: As a top marketer, what’s on your radar for the rest of the year?
Molavi: Obviously, AI is important. From a marketing standpoint for us, I love the idea of how do we use AI to create more capacity? How do we use AI to create more content, to deliver more content, to engage with more people, more diverse groups of people? I can segment much more now and create content for all those different segments a lot more easily, a lot faster.
There’s a lot of chatter around how AI can reduce workforces, but I think before you get to that conversation, you need to think about how can you use AI to create more capacity, to do more. Because at its core, marketing is an optimistic skill. I can make your life better if you pay me X amount of dollars. It’s a creationist skillset. You have to look at AI with a creationist mindset and not a reductive mindset.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
