Masha Petrova, CEO of Nullspace, a simulation software company joins the latest episode of the Marketing B2B Technology podcast to share her journey from aspiring astronaut to engineering expert and marketing leader.
She delves into the importance of effective marketing when targeting technical audiences and discusses the challenges of mergers and acquisitions in the engineering software industry. The conversation also explores current engineering tools, the role of AI in accelerating technological advancements, and the need for efficient simulation software.
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About Nullspace
Nullspace is a deep tech software company that develops products and solutions for RF and quantum computing applications across defense, aerospace, and automotive industries.
About Masha Petrova
Dr. Petrova is an experienced executive with a passion for leading multi-disciplinary global teams toward successful results by focusing on operations and creating a unified vision. After receiving her PhD in aerospace engineering, Dr. Petrova spent 15+ years in the engineering simulation and design software industry, including holding global marketing executive roles at Ansys, Altium, LLC, and MSC Software (during acquisition by Hexagon MI) as well as 3 simulation software start-ups all acquired by Ansys, Inc. in the last 10 years.
Time Stamps
[00:46:2] – Masha provides some background to her career and what led her to become CEO of Nullspace.
[01:50.2] – Masha discusses EDA and simulation tools.
[03:22:0] – Masha explains the impact of industry consolidation and acquisitions on marketers and CMOs.
[09:42:2] – Masha talks about how to balance the demands of wanting to get leads and drive sales quickly with the longer term goal of building a strong brand.
[18:34:9] – Masha discusses how she deals with the issue of sustainability and how she conveys Nullspace’s commitment to sustainability when talking to engineers
[24:52:3] – Masha gives her best advice to those entering a career in marketing.
[26:24:1] – Masha’s contact details.
Quotes
“Because of AI, there is a lot of acceleration in technology itself that’s happening… but the tools that the engineers use are still kind of stuck in the past. These are still conservative tools that’s been tested and validated for over 40, 30 years. So, it’s like using a hammer to build a car or something like that.” – Masha Petrova, CEO of Nullspace.
“Measuring brand effectiveness is really hard. It’s not like lead generation, where you can track from inception to a sales deal. With brand, it’s much subtler, so we tracked our spend versus views, comments, and social media engagement to demonstrate interest in our content.” – Masha Petrova, CEO of Nullspace.
Follow Masha:
Masha Petrova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mashavpetrova/
Nullspace website: https://www.nullspaceinc.com/
Nullspace on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nullspace-inc/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Masha Petrova – Nullspace
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Masha Petrova
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I’m Mike Maynard and today I’m joined by Masha Petrova. Masha is the CEO of Nullspace. Welcome to the podcast, Masha.
Masha: Hi, Mike. So excited to be here.
Mike: It’s great to have you on. So, what we like to do at the start is always get someone to talk a little bit about their career, and how they’ve got to where they are. So, can you tell me a little bit about your background, what you did, and what led you to become CEO Nullspace.
Masha: Sure. So, I am an engineer by background, my undergraduate was in mechanical engineering, and then I went ahead to get a PhD in aerospace engineering, I was going to be an astronaut, and then decided that I, I don’t like risk that much. And Earth is a pretty exciting place to be. So, I got my PhD in Engineering and was a real engineer for about a year at a software startup. And then salespeople realized at that company that I was too extroverted to sit in front of a computer and kind of suck me into customer conversations. And I love that so much and fell in the world of sales and marketing and became head of marketing, but always in a very deeply technical engineering space.
Mike: I used to be an engineer as well. I think I got moved into sales and marketing, because I wasn’t very good at engineering.
Masha: That’s not true. You’re probably too extroverted as well.
Mike: So, your background, you’ve been through a number of different companies, one of the areas I think you’ve been focused on has been, you know, electronic design tools. EDA, is that correct?
Masha: That’s been one of the areas. Yeah, so my focus, where I’ve headed up marketing was a span of engineering software. And that’s been EDA was one of the areas but also simulation of a wide variety type of application. So, engineering simulation, and now I actually head up a company called Nullspace, that develops stimulation software for electrical engineers as well. So engineers, developing antennas, radars, various RF devices, they need to test those devices, right as they’re designing them to make sure the device is performing properly, your phone, spearing with the antenna on your whatever it is your ATV, your vehicle, your smartwatch, and so on properly, in order to do that, engineers test those RF devices and computer through simulation by doing an electromagnetic simulation or running electromagnetic simulation with tools like tools from an old space.
Mike: That’s fascinating, because, you know, you’re obviously selling to a very technical audience, I think something similar to a lot of our listeners.
Masha: Yes, very highly tech. I mean, it’s highly technical as you can get PhD, you know, electrical engineers and RF engineers. Yes.
Mike: Before we really delve into what you do at Nullspace, and how you approach marketing to these engineers, one of the things I know about the simulation and EDA industry is there’s been a lot of consolidation or acquisition. And I think you’ve been through quite a few acquisitions, both for being on the acquiring side and also being acquired. How do you feel that impacts marketers and CMOS?
Masha: Yeah, that’s very true. And I’m happy to talk about that. One note, just an interesting industry shift that I have been watching, I’ve been in the space of engineering software for the last 20 years or so. And we really haven’t seen that much acquisition has been pretty conservative, slow-moving space, for the most part. You’re an engineer, it’s very exciting. If you’re not you don’t know what these companies are probably never heard of them. The ones that develop engineering tools and engineering software, but they are these kinds of companies. And this kind of software is key to developing any new technology, whether it’s a car or plane train, any kind of technology, device, computer, smartwatch, smart tick, whatever it is, right, like anything you think of in terms of technologies, some engineer somewhere designed it. And to design it, they needed engineering tools. They didn’t do it with the sketch paper, maybe initially, but at some point, they transferred it to a computer, and then needed to design and simulate that thing that they’re designing in a computer. So, there’s this whole space of companies that develop engineering tools that have been pretty, pretty conservative, non eventful, very slow growing, but kind of trucking along. And in ALEKS, the last six months or so there. You right, there has been quite a consolidation and m&a activity in the space of engineering tools, because we’re seeing because of AI, there is a lot of solar acceleration in technology itself. That’s happening overall, right? Again, any kind of technologies that you could think of from a plane to a satellite to a spaceship to a smartwatch to, you know, AI chip itself. All of that is being accelerated, but the tools that the engineer’s users still kind of stuck in it. Ask these are so conservative tools that has been tested and validated for over, you know, 40 30 years. So, it’s like using a hammer to build a car or something like that. And so there has been a lot of acquisition activity, because the industry leaders are realizing like, hey, these engineering tools are super important, and technology is being accelerated. And so, more and more engineers will need more and more of these tools. So, this one, though, I wanted to make, like this m&a activity has been pretty new to our engineering tool space. And then as far as your question of kind of my thoughts or observations on being in an acquisition, so I have been through a total, I want to say six acquisitions, where being the I was the head of marketing, either VP or CMO on the small company side that being acquired, as well as being the head of marketing and a large company side and acquiring small company, having to assimilate all the marketing and all everything that goes through that. And if you’ve ever run marketing, whether you’re just ran a marketing department, or ran the whole entire marketing team, and either been acquired or had to assimilate, like the Borg, that from Star Trek, the acquiring company, you know that that could be quite a bit of a headache, because you’re dealing with? How do you kind of like, put the brands together properly? Are you just erasing the small brand? Because that happens quite often. And you’re racing it as fast as possible? I’ve been through that kind of acquisition. Or are you sort of leaving the company alone and leaving the brand alone and it making it seem like, you know, things are going to run as is? And there’s so much kind of thinking that has to go behind everything from the PowerPoint slides? And how do we present the branding there, right to training the sales team and giving the right talk tracks to kind of talking to both marketing teams and making sure they’re working together. And a lot of times there’s tension, because a lot of times a smaller company that’s being acquired, they might have been around for a decade, and they might have had their own CMO or VP of marketing role kind of was the god of marketing in that company for a while. And now all of a sudden, they’re almost irrelevant. That happens as well. How do you navigate that? So that’s, there’s a lot of really interesting topics that we can dive into on that side.
Mike: It’s interesting, I mean, the first thing is that this question of whether you keep the brand when you’re acquiring or whether you basically assimilate into the acquirer’s brand. I mean, it seems like there’s a difficult balance there, particularly, as you mentioned, that engineers can be quite conservative in what they buy when it comes to tools. And perhaps they want a brand they’ve known for 10 years, rather than wanting everything being, you know, merged into one, what’s your view on that?
Masha: Yes, and that’s been my experience in the space, for the most part, usually, that direction will come from the CEO, right, the CEO will kind of have an idea of what they want to do in terms of how closely do we want the brand to be sort of assimilated into the large, large brand. The idea right, in the engineering space, the tendency is to kind of leave the brand alone for a few years, and then just kind of slowly piece by piece. I mean, it takes a lot of times years, you know, five years or more to really kind of assimilate the technology in after the acquisition. And probably this time when I’ve seen a brand get, sort of, I don’t want to say erased, because it sounds mean, but you know, minimize, should we say and not focused on as much is at a startup that was acquired that I was running, I was head of marketing, and the startup was acquired. And it wasn’t around for very long, so the brand wasn’t well known. And the branding was confusing, the naming of the tools was confusing. Also, when you’re acquiring something from another country, like I remember, there was a company that I was a CMO at a larger company, we acquired a Japanese company, and one of the products was called pickles. It is a software product for engineers called pickles. You know, it’s probably very cute in Japanese language, you know, or in that culture, which just didn’t quite work. So, you know, we had to get rid of that pretty quickly, like within days. And then the other example that I was talking about where that was a smaller company that’s being acquired. And it’s just not a lot, there wasn’t a lot of brand recognition. And it was easier to just kind of get the technology and fold it into the larger brand that’s been around for a while.
Mike: It’s interesting. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about brand. And I think, you know, some people perceive that technical audiences by, you know, purely on features, but I think brand is super important. So, as a CMO, when you’re marketing to engineers, how do you balance the demands of wanting to get leads and drive sales really quickly, with that longer term goal of building a strong brand?
Masha: That’s a million-dollar question, right? I think for me, because I was an engineer myself for a while. I know that engineers being very conservative, they can smell BS very quickly. And so for me, my philosophy is build a brand that is built on trust as much as possible with engineers, which means you stick to facts as much as you possibly can, you know, you don’t break that trust within with engineers as much as you possibly can, which means you can’t move as fast can be as flashy as consumer space, for example, because consumers are much more forgiving much more, they’ll take all kinds of BS, no offense to consumers. But if you compare, you know, engineers to just your main, middle of the road consumer, they’ll forgive a lot more if you don’t have all the facts straight, whereas engineers don’t. And so, for me, it was always very important to have trust as the underlying side of things. So I will always push back because you always have that push for more leads, more leads, right sales always needs more leads, and getting stuff out there getting marketing campaigns out there, getting whatever webinars out there to just get more leads, I would always push back on that and try and make sure as much as possible, we’re going back to like, will this break the trust of our customers or our engineers, as I think it’s super important with technical audiences, and you just have to be really aware of that, especially if you’re coming from consumer space and just know that the tolerance for intolerance for Bs and the tolerance for things that are not facts, is much lower in the space?
Mike: I think that’s very true. I really like that point Masha. It’s all about building trust and trust is built through basically being direct and being honest. I mean, do you think there are any elements of you know, consumer campaigns, you see, that can be used effectively to market for engineers? Or do you think you really have to take a fresh approach when you go to market such as specialist audience?
Masha: Oh, no, for sure. So, I would always look for innovation and marketing, I look to consumer space, for sure. Because there’s really not much innovation in the enterprise space on the marketing side. Lots of innovation on the technical side, right. But marketing definitely lags as you probably know. So absolutely. consumer space is the kind of go to for, for inspiration for marketing. So, one of the things I’ve done, which was really interesting that I’ve adopted was, for example, product placement. So, product placement that’s done quite frequently. And consumer marketing, and influencer marketing as well as engineering, software space are very technical enterprise space, at least a few years ago, that wasn’t done at all. And so, I was at a company where I was very lucky. It was heading up brands, I was VP of brand marketing. And I did a project where we did many documentaries, where with our customers with engineers, where we kind of did many movies, we hired award winning filmmaker to do this, right. So, these were not testimonials. They were truly mini documentaries on our customers that were really interesting. And they took off like crazy, like, we got so much truck traction, I was a YouTube channel, that YouTube channel just blew up. Because they were really like really interesting informational, sometimes funny pieces of art, essentially right in many movies. But what we did there because it was not, we didn’t do blatant testimonials, right? Like, the customers weren’t supposed to talk about using our software. But we would have product placement, like we would have our software had a very distinct user interface. So, we would have our software with a distinct user interface. And like on a large computer, behind, you know, the engineer talking, we would do things like ship a bunch of branded mugs, T shirts, swag to the company before we went to film, right, and they would be holding a mug was the company’s name, as they’re talking about their own thing, not mentioning our company, by the name at all. So doing product placement was really cool. And that was a really cool way to kind of adopt a consumer marketing technique into our space that worked really, really well. I still don’t see a lot of enterprise people doing that. Well, because I think engineers are very literal by nature. And so, for them, it’s hard to understand how do you just how do you like, fit in a bunch of money on the marketing campaign, but don’t actually talk about our product.
Mike: That’s, I mean, that’s very true. I love the concept. But as an engineer, I feel I have to ask, you know, how do you take the data you get from like the YouTube views, and understand whether those videos which can be, you know, placed your product in, but don’t overtly sell a product? How do you understand whether they actually generate return? I mean, what’s the data you use to analyze that?
Masha: Yeah, and that’s hard. That’s another issue with measuring brand effect effectiveness, right. And I’ve at my time, I read write a bunch of books and watched a bunch of videos on how do you measure brand effectiveness? And the answer is that it’s really hard and there isn’t a clear way of measuring it. And that’s why the default a lot of times is lead generation. Because you can measure that very easily. You can track a lead all the way from inception all the way down to sales deal, right? If you have your sales operation set up properly, but with brand when you’re doing a brand campaign like that, when you’re doing things like product placement, or much subtler, subtler ways of marketing, it’s much harder. And so, you know, all we had to rely on was we started a YouTube channel from scratch. And we had that company at the time had a huge A channel that was well established that was, I think, over a decade old, that had a certain number of views on it. So, we started a separate YouTube channel just for these movies for these documentaries that we were doing. And we just tracked our spend, right, which was the budget versus the number of views, comments, engagement, for sure. Social media engagement, and how much people were talking about these videos. And engagement was through the roof. Like, it wasn’t even comparable to anything else I’ve seen in this engineering software space. And so, you know, that made it obvious. And just tracking, again, like views, likes, shares, things like that, that we can at least demonstrate that look, people are interested in this content, which means that the logo of our company is being placed in front of their eyes, right, like, our UI is being placed in front of their eyes. But, you know, there’s a lot of internal marketing that I had to do explaining to the executive teams that, listen, branding doesn’t work the same way as lead generation, you’re not going to put out a brand campaign, and within a few months, all of a sudden, you have a ton more sales, it takes time, it takes persistence, it takes consistency, you know, people need to see something, whatever it is five, seven times before it actually starts to stick. And so yeah, that was a lot of internal education. And it’s just, I don’t have a clear solution for you for how do you measure brand effectiveness?
Mike: I think that’s very true. I think a lot of us struggle with measuring brand effectiveness. And realistically some of the approaches that people use, particularly consumer a completely impractical in B2B. So, things like, you know, awareness and perception studies can often cost more than the actual campaign themselves, because it’s so difficult to do it. So, I totally agree with it’s very hard to measure brand.
Masha: Yeah. And you know, what’s interesting now, as you’re, as you’re talking, kind of comparing contrasting my education, my engineering education, right, and engineering training, and my marketing sort of education by experience was marketing or 20 years, right, I educated myself, engineering is so much more rigorous. And there is such specific things that you need, like you either know what the equation looks like, or you don’t you either solve the problem the right way, and you get the right answer or you don’t in marketing, It’s so fluffy, a lot of times, and I almost wish, like, and maybe this does exist, but I haven’t seen it, there was a very rigorous marketing program specifically for enterprise marketing, that that has some of the structure of the engineering, oh, how do you properly measure brand? How long does it typically take to build broader brand effectiveness because that data exists, but it’s kind of all over the place, you have to dig for it. And consumer marketing, I think, is very different from enterprise level marketing, especially in technical fields. And that’s why it’s easy for somebody to come in and say, oh, I’ve done marketing, like, how hard could that be? And kind of jump in and mess a bunch of things up. But you can’t do that with an engineer. Like there’s certain things that you either have a degree or you don’t have a degree?
Mike: Yeah, I think I was very through I mean, engineering is very black and white marketing is definitely shades of gray.
Masha: Exactly.
Mike: I’d like to switch back a bit, Masha, and ask you something that, you know, I think lots of people care about, which is sustainability. And in your sector, I mean, you’re obviously producing a tool that is pretty computer intensive, probably, you know, has a fairly significant energy demand to run it. How do you deal with the issue of sustainability? And how do you convey your company’s commitment to sustainability? When you’re talking to engineers? How important is it?
Masha: That’s a great question. I mean, ideally, if we’re talking about ideal sustainability, we wouldn’t have things like engineering, we wouldn’t have technology, and we’d all live in the woods peacefully with major, right, that’s ideal scenario, if we’re talking about sustainability, specifically, our tool because it’s, again, fully in the computer. And yes, it’s computer intensive, however, because we’re modern solvers. So, our tools for engineers, especially for Engineering Simulation, have been developed 30 plus years ago, and kind of remained pretty much unchanged. Without that the kernel itself, the solver itself has remained unchanged for the most part. And so those solvers meaning the core of that engineering simulation engine, has been developed for prior computing architecture for all computing architecture, and has not been modernized. And so, it does take a lot of computing resources, and they can’t solve really large problems. Our solver is more modern, and it has been developed for current parallel computing architecture. So, it’s much more efficient as far as computing resources are concerned. So, number one, we could solve much larger problems, much more sophisticated problems, you know, next generation type of simulations. But we also are more up more conservative by nature with our software because of how it has been written. It has been written for modern computing architecture, and so it’s much more efficient with the computing resources.
Mike: That’s interesting, is something your engineering audience really care about? Or are they really focused on your ability to solve those bigger, more complex problems?
Masha: Not really. I mean, this these tools are a must, I don’t know, for probably the most simple example is like trying to build a house without a hammer. Like these tools are the hammer of engineers, engineering simulation tools are a must. They at this point, you can’t really design new technologies, whatever it may be, from any of your gym equipment that when you go to the gym and see that has electronics in it, to get into your car, to your smartwatch to your computer, like anything, at this point requires engineering simulation tools. And so, because they’re a must, engineers are gonna have them, right. And because they’re not like some sort of new social media craze, you know, or some sort of new CRM system or something like that. There are very solid, you know, hard to develop tools, there’s only a few of them. So, it’s not like engineers have a whole lot of choice. So as far as sustainability, it’s kind of like, you got what you got. And there’s we don’t really get many questions. And again, probably, engineering software tools are the most conservative, the simulation tools are the most conservative as compared to, you know, your alternative, if you didn’t use the engineering simulation tools would be to design whatever technology you’re designing, to build the whole thing, test it. So physically build it, right. So, it’s a part of a car, it’s a whole part of a car that you are buying the parts from, you’re shipping them from somewhere, you putting them together, assembling them, you measuring them, that is a lot less sustainable than simulating the whole thing in the computer.
Mike: And that makes a lot of sense. So, you know, I think it’s great. You’ve obviously got some sustainability credentials. But I think we often see with a lot of engineering audiences, sustainability isn’t always that top priority, particularly when it comes to developing products. I really appreciate all you’ve talked about Marsha, it’s been really interesting, before we end the interview, there’s a couple of general questions we always like to ask our interviewees and, and, you know, really build up knowledge on, you know, things like marketing advice. So, I’m interested to know what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever received.
Masha: I think one of the areas that I had to learn the most in has been on the art directing side of things. So, I worked with a few really good art directors, because I was lucky enough to actually lead the brand, right. And so I actually would build an in house agency and a few of the companies that I worked at as a CMO or head of marketing, they would actually build an internal agency, because I felt it was a lot easier to control, you could move a lot faster, you know, and I had always had specific creative vision that I wanted carried out, as opposed to hiring an outside marketing agency. For brands, specifically, probably the biggest thing I learned is how important the detail is, when it comes to branding, specifically, you know, the little curlicue on a letter and a font could all of a sudden create a completely different mood on your you know, Banner, or an advertising campaign or something else, just from like, where the letter is slanted to the left or to the right, or you know, how curly little edges of the letters are the color, and being the ability to create a mood board first. So I would say this is one of the biggest things is working with an art director, when you’re trying to sell to executives in your company, let’s say you’re a CMO and you’re trying to sell an idea or campaign or get more budget for executives in your company, getting buy in on sort of the mood board and storytelling piece first before you actually create a campaign makes such a difference. Because all of a sudden, they’re allowed to voice their opinion about how I like the color yellow, and you know, I like whatever certain name for this product, and you kind of flush that out. And a good sort of art director and a good, you know, storyteller will be able to work through all those issues with the executive team and tell them you know why yellow does not work in this case or whatnot. And then the executives feel like they have a buy in, right, like it’s a campaign, it wasn’t just shoved on their lap, and you haven’t spent a whole bunch of time actually creating a full-on campaign, you just kind of playing around with you know, putting together a story for a particular campaign. And you can change it and you haven’t dumped a bunch of time in it. And so, I’d say that’s one of the biggest learning experiences and things I recommend is putting together sort of a mood board for whatever your brand campaign is, get the buy in from your executive team at that stage, and then work from that.
Mike: love that. That’s such good advice. The other question we asked it’s advice from you. If you were talking to someone who was just entering a career in marketing, what would you tell them what would be your advice to them?
Masha: Well, okay, so there is a lot of people who think they want to do marketing. So I would say if you’re going into marketing, don’t do it just because The default and you don’t know what else to do, like have a passion for it, you know really feel like you are very creative and you love to create and you love to work with colors and fonts and stories, and you truly love it, and then go into it and then explore it and be rigorous about it. Or if you think you want to go into enterprise marketing, because let’s face it, a lot of times, that’s where the money is, I recommend getting a technical degree first. And you know, either minoring in marketing or kind of studying it on your own because you can study marketing on your own. All the marketers are gonna hate me for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway. You can study marketing on your own, but you can get you know, you can study physics on your own, but for the most part, like no one’s gonna take you seriously as a physicist, you kind of need a physics degree or you need an engineering degree. Or if you’re going into FinTech, right enterprise market or you’re interested in a FinTech area, get a finance degree and minor in marketing, or starting to study marketing on your own or study art on your own. For example, because you really need an artistic eye for that or study, study storytelling or on your own. That would be my advice.
Mike: I love it. That’s great advice. And as a, you know, a recovering engineer, I really appreciate it as well. Marsha, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate all your insights. If somebody’s listening, and they’d like to find out more or contact you what’s the best way to learn more about you know, either no space, or get hold of you.
Masha: So, on LinkedIn, I am Masha V Petrova. And if you want to learn about null space if we do have some engineers listening, it’s Nullspaceinc.com.
Mike: That’s awesome, Masha, thank you so much for your time.
Masha: Thank you so much, Mike. It’s a pleasure.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at NapierB2B.com, or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
