Tech Qualified

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker dive into the intricacies of marketing in the tech industry with Tory Kindlick, VP of Marketing at Corti. They explore the challenges and strategies of creating content and leading marketing teams in specialized fields.Tory discusses the transition from interviewing experts in various fields to leading marketing efforts in the healthcare technology sector. He shares insights on leveraging storytelling and subject matter expertise to build credibility and trust with medical professionals, a key audience for Corti.The conversation also touches on the importance of clear communication and simple tools like Google Docs for team alignment. Tory emphasizes the value of an agile approach to keep the team focused and efficient without micromanagement.Finally, Tory and the hosts reflect on the leadership styles that drive marketing success. They highlight the shift from directive to collaborative roles, with Tory advocating for a "lead from the front" mentality. The episode wraps up with Tory's perspective on prioritizing hires in content creation and paid media to bolster marketing operations.This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

Dan Daron of Searchspring links an improved e-commerce customer experience directly to a company's bottom line. Merchandising and improved search solutions are important to this improved customer experience, whether the company is a retailer, brand, or B2B wholesaler or SAAS company. "If a customer can't find the products that they're looking for, you've basically lost them. They have, little to no attention span these days," says Dan. Calling on his experience at Searchspring and as an e-commerce and marketing consultant for 16 years, Dan provides tips on merchandising. He also discusses how Searchspring works with e-commerce teams to provide the tools and services to enable them to succeed. He describes how Searchspring is building relationships, becoming a thought leader in the e-commerce industry, and creating a community among e-marketers. He also gives hints about what the company's recent merger with Nextopia will mean for the industry.  Highlights include: Improving your search engine is a quick way to improve your bottom line. Customizing product recommendations will drive both upsells and cross-sells, while simultaneously improving the customer experience.   Searchspring gains customers through building relationships. It builds these relationships through a variety of channels including Sales Development Representatives, thought leadership, trade shows, media, and developing relationships within the tight-knit e-commerce community.

As a marketer and a creator, you know creativity is essential in this industry. But what you might not know: You could be thinking about creativity all wrong. Now, that sounds a little oxymoronic. Isn’t creativity all about not having boundaries? Thinking big? Creating that “wow, genius” viral moment? Jay Acunzo begs to differ.  The award-winning podcast host, global keynote speaker, and author firmly believes creativity is less about coming up with sporadic, disruptive ideas and is instead something that should occur consistently on a more micro level. Spoiler: Putting processes in place to help you harness your creativity is key. Jay has worked for some major tech companies, including Google and Hubspot, and he’s had a hand in helping grow startups, like Dailybreak Media and Boston Content. Now he’s doing his own thing at Marketing Showrunners, where he helps marketers from brands like Red Bull, BBC, Adobe and The New York Times best serve their audiences. On a recent episode of Tech Qualified, Jay explains how he’s rethinking creativity — plus the essential role creativity plays in marketing.

Stephanie Cox, VP, Sales and Marketing at Lumavate talks with Tristan Pillegrino about her journey as a marketer. She reflects on the challenges of making her opinions and ideas heard earlier in her career.  She recounts her progress along a path of personal growth from that early career experience, which led to her ultimate adoption of a professional philosophy grounded in proactively tackling problems independently, without permission.  Stephanie reflects on her former sense of relentless determination to achieve perfection on all projects, and the problem with striving to maintain that personal standard over time, especially in terms of the trade-off of speed and quality. She discusses the evolution of her mindset from commitment to incessant pursuit of perfection in outcomes to a principle of iterative stages of development. Stephanie compares the objectives of achieving top quality and providing rapid results and talks about how the switch to focus on incremental improvement through processes of iteration has transformed her project management and team leadership methodologies.

Lindsay Tjepkema has spent her career in marketing, usually on branded content and improving customer experiences.  She wanted to broaden her reach and explored using audio content as a content marketing strategy.  However, in her previous role at a technology company, she found that the technology for marketing with the spoken word was pretty deficient. While many pieces of the puzzle existed for podcasting, nothing existed to pull all the pieces together.  Lindsay wanted to create a new way of using the podcast as part of a content marketing strategy. Thus, Casted was born.

According to Aashish Dhamdhere, the VP of Marketing at Skilljar, optimizing customer experience is at the core of every marketer's goal. Any interaction should add value to the company. Companies need to have a clear sense of their brand projections to ensure that they give customers the right impressions. Aashish Dhamdhere emphasizes that the number one driver of business decisions is how customers respond and interact with the products. A close second is the support and education provided by the company to the customers. Deliver content in a variety of formats. The goal is to find what works for the company. Options include webinars, question and answer sessions, and conferences. Marketers must put themselves in the mind of the customer. What type of experience is the company providing to the customer? Along with being particular about the content offered by the company, how is the content being delivered? Websites need easy navigation with user-friendly designs. Building and nurturing connections is also an essential facet of marketing. The more interactions, the more likely that trust levels improve between customers and the company.   Sales and marketing departments need the same goals, which boils down to pipeline. The pipeline for sales and marketing is always the same. Aashish Dhamdhere stresses how his goal is to pipeline everything up. Sources of lead generation are less important than securing the high numbers, no matter what channel used. Collect data, but collect the right data to make high-value decisions. To achieve this, focus on designing a reliable data infrastructure.  

Nathan Bliss is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Kinsta, a WordPress hosting platform that knows what it does well and continues to get better at it.  “We don't bend a lot on where we feel we fit in,” Nathan says. “It’s kind of like why you can't Google a discount code for a Tesla. The price is the price. So that may sound a bit standoffish, but we ultimately feel that we want to provide that level of value.” Nathan’s previous roles include everything from account executive and solutions specialist to sales coach and regional sales manager, so he calls himself a sales and revenue guy “through and through.” That background gives him a unique approach to his current position as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, in which he combines his passion for recruiting top-tier employees with his knowledge of what strengths a company should emphasize from a selling standpoint.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Nathan discusses how to move from a broad to a more targeted marketing approach, why it’s possible for a bootstrapped company to grow with the right marketing and the aspect of management he’s currently struggling with the most: delegating.  “We are not institutionally backed and we have no institutional financing,” Nathan says. “So we had to use very scrappy, time-tested methods to grow the business from its historic past. And now if you go to Google and you search a term anywhere related to WordPress or building a website that kind of falls anywhere on that spectrum of interest, it's hard not to find a search result [for us] on page one of Google.”

Amy King’s path into marketing was a little unconventional. She got her master's in art history, and along the way, discovered it was really about critical thinking. This ultimately led her to product marketing for ad tech and software companies. Amy is now the VP of Marketing at Zaloni, a data management and operations software company that helps customers streamline their data ecosystem by making it run faster, better and at a lower cost. Amy has a multi-channel marketing approach, relying on inbound marketing to get to know Zaloni’s customers and ensure her team is attracting quality leads. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Amy talks about how marketing at Zaloni evolved in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how inbound marketing became its most valuable source of leads. She also shares about the highly personalized and long sales cycle its prospects go through, using a mix of different content types, in order to get them from the marginally interested phase to wanting a demo.

From product marketing to corporate comms to sales, Lindsay Duran has finally settled down in marketing. As the CMO at Zilliant, a B2B data science and software company that assists large organizations with sales and pricing, Lindsay helps companies reimagine their approach to commercial decisions. Her experience in different business areas only helped her grow as a marketer, allowing her to fully understand the sales cycle and what “qualified'' really stands for with MQLs.  "Moving a prospective customer down the path to becoming an actual customer is really about taking the time to understand a company's business … and helping them see how this is actually going to improve their employees' productivity, decision making and their overall business performance," Lindsay says. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Lindsay talks about her focus on finding highly converting MQLs and the in-depth content strategies she uses to provide value to customers in every industry. She also shares how she warms up prospects to the idea of overhauling a large portion of their business and what it takes to be a successful marketer. 

When Michael joined Revenue Analytics as its Vice President of Marketing more than two years ago, he was a one-man team. Since then, he’s built out a small team of talented marketers, executed a complete brand refresh and solidified the company’s marketing strategy.  Over time, Michael has found that rather than investing in sales and business development reps, content prevails. People don’t want to be told what their problem is; they want to discover it for themselves, and content allows them to do just that. “I like to tell our team when we’re creating something, pretend it’s for your brother-in-law or sister-in-law, someone you’re genuinely trying to help — not someone you’re trying to sell,” Michael says. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Michael talks about his trials and tribulations when building out the Revenue Analytics marketing team, and he explains what he’s learned along the way. He also shares how his team has weathered 2020 and what he’s doing to best support them (and himself) during these trying times.

Crystal always had a passion for marketing and knew that's where she wanted her career to take her.  After working at Hewlett Packard and starting two of her own companies, Crystal helped conceptualize The 20 — a marketing agency for managed service providers (MSPs) that helps with lead gen, sales and scaling their businesses. The name is derived from the 80/20 rule, "as our intention is to dominate the top 20% of the IT industry," Crystal says.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Crystal dives into how she approaches lead gen for a service that requires customers to make major changes within their business and how she cultivates thought leadership at The 20. She also shares what her most successful marketing campaigns are and what it takes to be a successful B2B tech marketer.

Amber Herndon wears many hats. Whether she's sitting in on sales calls, managing new clients, or brainstorming content strategy, Amber is always laser-focused on driving leads and building an engaging brand.  While she's living the typical startup life and wearing many hats in her role, her official title is Director of Marketing and Client Success at Signal Insights — a customized "daily digest" platform that delivers news, updates, and content trends on competitors and key accounts.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Amber talks about how you can transform discussions with prospects and clients into valuable marketing material, what she did to break through the noise of countless other B2B Martech platforms, and why you should always ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

At business intelligence agency Praxis Metrics, AJ Yager and his team harness the power of data to help e-commerce companies grow. The agency evolved from an offering AJ launched within his marketing agency Yager Media Group.  Referrals have been huge for expanding Praxis’ business in the early days — and AJ found a lot of success by being a guest on podcasts hosted by people in his network. The agency grew around 400% in 2019, which he attributes largely to being a guest on five to seven podcasts that got him in front of the right audiences.  With the help of Praxis’ Marketing Director Spencer Connell, the agency has increased inbound leads through an expanded content library. Once a lead is in the funnel, they go through the nurture sequence with the goal of getting them on a sales call. “All we're trying to do is get people from understanding what Praxis does, get them excited about what Praxis does, and then get them on a call. That's our marketing ideology,” he explains.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, host Justin Brown talks to the duo about their latest content strategies, which includes the launch of a new podcast and videocast series of their own as well as a potential book.   “Now what we're doing is saying we want to own this conversation around data. We're going to simplify the complicated subject of data,” AJ says.

Unlike most SaaS professionals, Aaron Stillman didn’t end up in software because it was a longtime passion. Instead, he wanted to drastically increase his fresh croissant intake. In other words, he saw his first SaaS job as an opportunity to live in Paris while developing his product management — and eventually marketing — abilities.  That first role kept him in the global market, where he now works for international customer experience optimization platform AB Tasty as its “director of storytelling” — or, as some prefer to call it, director of product marketing.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Aaron discusses the importance of using a multitude of marketing tools to reach customers and why it’s vital to pay attention to which tools are most appropriate for a particular moment in time. Currently, the tool he finds most effective is video.  “Video’s really a first-class citizen for us,” Aaron says. “I want to make sure that our story gets across in a video in a way that will have that human impact when somebody watches it. When people log in to use our platform and ... create a personalization campaign, they'll receive a video helping them understand the key value propositions and the how-tos of using the product.”

Half a year doesn’t seem like much time to take a marketing department from idling to racing ahead, but Mary Ford moves fast. Mary recently became the Chief Marketing Officer of CENTEGIX, an internet of things (IoT) company making emergency alert software. Its main clients are K-12 schools and hotels. School safety is a potentially heavy subject, but Mary focuses on the positives of what CENTEGIX’s product can do. “My job as a marketer is to help people understand the day-to-day value the solution brings to those who feel more protected because they're empowered to get help when they need it,” she says. Although Mary only joined this year, she’s been busy improving CENTEGIX’s brand awareness and profile. When she first came onboard, the company had a website — and not much else. “We needed to build some basic marketing competencies and fundamentals,” Mary says. Under her watch, the CENTEGIX marketing team launched a social media program and started producing white papers and email campaigns, improving internal communications (especially with sales) and hosting webinars. Fortunately, working at four startups in the past has given Mary a taste for juggling lots of projects at once. “I like to build things, and it's fun to see how our marketing function has evolved over the past six months.”

Michelle Tilton fell in love with B2B marketing while working at a small boutique agency after college. It wasn't the "glamorous B2C space" everyone else wanted to get into, but something pulled her in and she's been in the B2B world ever since.  Now, Michelle works as the VP of Marketing at Infutor, a data solutions company that helps its clients better understand their customers through data. Michelle uses a multi-channel, multi-touch marketing approach to drive demand and integrates processes between marketing and sales to ensure a consistent, high-quality lead flow.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Michelle talks about how Infutor nurtures different MQLs and the seamless handoff between its sales and marketing teams. She also shares about how she properly attributes lead data and the ways each team in her company works toward obtaining highly qualified leads and closing a higher percentage of sales.

Laura Scruggs attributes her company's "astronomical growth" to a strong alignment between sales and marketing. As the Director of Marketing at Mindgrub, a full-service digital marketing agency that focuses on tech companies, Laura tailors both Mindgrub’s and its affiliate companies’ marketing strategies to the changing needs of the B2B world.  In a time when marketing budgets are slashed each quarter and most businesses are just trying to stay afloat, it’s not easy to stay relevant.  "That window of relevance got so much smaller once the crisis hit because there are so many industries who are in absolute crisis right now,” Laura says. “If you're trying to approach them with a sales-forward message, they're not going to be receptive to that," On this episode of Tech Qualified, Laura details Mindgrub's successful marketing strategies, which include segmented advertising and creating content for every part of the sales funnel. She also shares about the importance of building authentic partnerships with clients instead of seeing them solely as a source of revenue.

AnnaMaria Turano is Vice President of Marketing at Synzi, a company that was facilitating telehealth services before it was cool — or, rather, before it became an overwhelming necessity because of COVID-19.  “In late 2017, entering 2018, we figured out Synzi was the right name, the right brand. And then we determined the look and feel of what that brand identity should be, including the colors, including the font, etc., to be markedly different from everyone else in the telehealth space,” AnnaMaria says. “We saw ourselves as having been a pioneer of bringing forth a different type of solution and a different way of thinking about how that solution would actually work in a provider organization.” Because Synzi started using the term “virtual care” before other telehealth providers, AnnaMaria and her marketing team knew it was important to establish the company’s unique identity.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, AnnaMaria discusses marketing’s role in making a company stand out, the importance of maintaining customer relationships (and adapting based on their changing needs), and how helpful it is to think of varying marketing objectives as working hand-in-hand rather than achieving separate things.   “We've got all these things we're doing at once. They're all important. They all feed into each other, and there is no reason to just put one aside versus the other,” she says. “You can't drive lead gen without strengthening brand awareness, and at the same time … you're going to have to enable sales and make sure that your sales force has the right tools they need to close the deals, but also the right tools they need to get the customer started.”

Heather Knutson is a seasoned marketer who has spent the last eight years in the housing industry space and data market. In the beginning of 2020, she took a new role as VP of Marketing at Ascent360, a computer software company that supports B2C marketers with its comprehensive customer data platform. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Heather explains her marketing philosophies and how she strives to keep Ascent360’s marketing strategy fully aligned with its sales team. She also shares her love for thought leadership and why it’s a big “vein” in her marketing strategy. “I'm big into having good thought leadership where ... you don't want to give everything away — but you want to give enough information that you pique interest,” she says. Heather goes on to discuss building a library of content that she can use to repurpose across the industries that Ascent360 works with. The library helps her set processes in place, reuse good content from platform to platform and better align with the sales team as they go after customers in the pipeline.

Knowing when to play it cool and let the customer come to you can work better than a hard sell. As VP of Marketing at Narrative Science, Cassidy Shield has learned that the most effective approach for drawing customers to the company’s product is by showcasing its abilities and the brand’s values.  What exactly does Narrative Science do? The brand calls itself a “data storytelling company” — its software Lexio transforms analytics data into plain language stories that people can easily understand and use without a degree in data science. Cassidy says it takes a special type of customer to understand the product’s value. “They're not afraid to make a decision that's against the norm,” he says. “We're looking for early adopters of technology.” On this episode of Tech Qualified, Cassidy explains how he’s restructured and reinvigorated Narrative Science’s marketing team since joining 18 months ago, and why a subtle marketing approach works for the brand. “It's been largely that strategy of building content we feel is valuable and providing experiences, and putting our people first so we’re seen as humans, which is critical to establishing that trust and relationship. People then get comfortable taking the next step, which is, ‘How can you help me?’”

With almost 30 years of experience in the IT field, the majority of which was spent in sales, Andy Jonak isn’t your average marketer.  As Director of Marketing at Vicom, an IT solutions provider that services enterprise firms, Andy approaches everything in his work with the perspective of the sales team in mind.  To strengthen Vicom’s thought leadership and expertise, Andy leverages data from internal subject matter experts and members of the sales team to give customers exactly what they're looking for. After all, he points out, “They’re talking to the customers on the front lines, talking to our customers and our prospects each and every day.”  It’s thanks to these experts that Andy’s team can produce quality content across Vicom’s digital marketing channels — but that's only one piece of the company’s overarching marketing strategy.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Andy talks about how he approaches marketing in a highly competitive B2B market where differentiating factors can be few and far between.  Andy also shares why he sees telemarketing as the "unsung hero" of marketing, how he nurtures prospects into loyal customers and the unique insights he leverages to establish Vicom as an expert in the IT space.

Anusha Sethuraman has been creating and promoting content ever since her days on the theatre production team at R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore. These days, however, it’s a lot more business-oriented creativity.  Currently, Anusha is the Head of Marketing for explainable AI platform Fiddler. The company is a startup, a business structure she has prior experience with, though she came to Fiddler after working at Microsoft. While Anusha credits her time working for companies of all sizes and stages with making her a more well-rounded marketer, startups are her passion because they’re where she can make a bigger impact.  Her current role as the sole marketer for Fiddler certainly allows her that opportunity, but it comes with its own set of challenges.  “I just wish I had a lot more time to actually sit and write content,” she says. “I used to do a lot of this in my previous roles, especially at New Relic. … Developing an abstract and trying to reach out to a writer to help me write it — it's hard because sometimes the topic means a lot of reading and knowledge and research, and that's not always easy to come by in a writer. … That is something I’m figuring out.” On this episode of Tech Qualified, Anusha discusses how she executes Fiddler’s marketing strategy as a one-person department. (Spoiler: She’s all about outsourcing to freelancers and agencies, although this process requires careful vetting.) She also shares how she navigates demand generation marketing with the help of ex-colleagues and industry experts that act as a sounding board.

The past seven months have been a whirlwind for Nick Bennett. In March, he began building his personal brand on LinkedIn by commenting on others’ posts and sharing his own content. Within six months, he grew his network to 10,000 followers.  What got Nick started on crafting his personal brand in the first place? A simple LinkedIn challenge from a former colleague. “I was really the only one that kind of stuck with it,” Nick says. Along the way, he learned that consistency was critical: “If you're going to do it, you have to do it consistently. You have to invest time into it if you want it to be successful.”  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Nick, the Director of Field Marketing in North America at Logz.io, shares about his experience in all things personal branding.  For Nick, the most significant thing to come out of this initiative is the community of like-minded people he now feels connected to.  “I just want more people to join my community, to engage in the content that I put out there. … Going forward, my only goal is to continue to put out content that adds value and to grow the number of people that follow this journey,” he says.

Molly Clark has spent the last decade and a half working all across the marketing industry, beginning with a role as an interactive marketing coordinator at a pharmaceutical software company.  Through the years, her passion for marketing, advertising and logistics has grown — but Molly also discovered a second passion for marketing operations along the way. This led her to becoming Director of Marketing at her current company, inMotionNow, a B2B SaaS company that offers a workflow management solution.  On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Molly discusses the collaboration between her marketers and the sales team. Applying a multichannel approach to the sales funnel, the teams work hand-in-hand to convert leads into signed contracts. She describes them as having a “healthy tension” but at the end of the day, determining who gets credit for a specific lead doesn’t matter. “We have shared goals amongst our two teams, so that we're always trying to work in lockstep to accomplish the same overarching goal, because then both of our teams win,” says MollyMolly shares that inMotionNow’s customer base includes marketers, advertisers and creatives — the same people her team is made up of. This works to their advantage, as they understand how to relate to their target audience: through educational content marketing that explains how inMotionNow’s product can bridge the gaps in their work processes. Molly’s team also uses customer stories to share how their product is used as well as customers’ achievements.

Working alongside sales has always been a priority for Lori McInerney, the current Vice President of Marketing at Hunt Club.  As a recruiting firm, Hunt Club functions as both a B2B and B2C organization, attracting both businesses and job candidates as its customers. Because of this unique structure, sales and marketing must drive demand on multiple fronts — and it’s partly why Lori is a fervent supporter of a strong sales-marketing coalition.  The other reason: her experience in both fields. Lori originally started her career in B2B marketing before trying out sales for four years, an experience she calls “one of the greatest career choices” she’s ever made. In fact, she credits her time in sales with making her a better marketer; she even describes herself as “a marketer always wearing a sales lens.” On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Lori talks about her approach to sales-marketing collaboration and the strategies her team has implemented in the post-COVID era.  “Marketing is fully responsible for bringing in demand and for working closely with sales to convert that demand and to bring in the right leads. I think the better our teams can work together, the better success for the company. We're all striving for that same goal,” she says.

Phil Rimmler’s entire job revolves around marketing crushed diamonds.  “We help companies attach a digital record to a physical object, similar to inventory management, anti theft detection, things like that. And we do that by crushing up diamonds, literal diamonds, and mixing them with a UV epoxy,” he says. That UV epoxy, when applied to objects such as fine art, creates a one-of-a-kind tag for the object, and finding customers for this niched product is Phil’s job as Marketing Manager at DUST Identity.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Phil discusses what it’s like working for a fairly new company selling a product that’s only appealing to particular high-end or high-profile clients such as the military. Phil explains how much of his day-to-day work is detailed ethnographic, user and competitor research to keep DUST both appealing and relevant — particularly during a global pandemic that causes customer needs to change constantly.  “What our efforts are mainly focused on is creating that collateral so that during that customer journey when an organization knows that they want to solve this issue, how can we best position ourselves to seem like the likely and logical and economical answer?” he says.

Marketing isn’t about taking advantage of people — although that doesn’t stop some brands from taking an exploitative marketing approach. Andrei Faji, the Vice President of Global Marketing at Shopgate, wants to do the opposite.  “We've intentionally decided not to go down that path. We found that we had a real opportunity to level-set and get to the bottom line around what actually matters,” he says. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Andrei talks about what marketers should really focus on: starting and maintaining conversations with consumers, especially now in light of the pandemic.  For Andrei, marketing is about communicating your organization’s value sincerely, with the goal of solving a problem rather than selling a product or service. To do this, it’s important to create a message that accurately reflects your company, one that every employee can get behind. Andrei applies this to Shopgate’s strategy with direct response marketing, which he feels cuts through the noise of today’s digital chaos. “Direct response allowed us to put together some unique offline campaigns to really get in front of decision makers and make a real statement,” Andrei says. “I think one thing that we as marketers sometimes take for granted is the power of being bold and making a true statement, knowing full well that not everybody is going to respond to that statement, but the statement still needs to be made because you need to put a flag in the ground.”

You could say that data has informed most of Derrick’s professional decisions — starting with his first job as an SEO specialist.  Derrick moved his way up the marketing ranks before eventually joining ConvertKit, an email marketing platform that makes email easier and more robust for professional creators.  As ConvertKit’s Marketing Director, he helps online creators grow their businesses to earn a living online. During Derrick’s first year at ConvertKit, the leadership team noticed a dismal lack of growth. Taking a look at the data, they decided to drastically change their core product.   “We decided to innovate by leading with a core product change to achieve a better product market fit,” says Derrick. This didn’t come without challenges. He notes, “Our current customer base wasn't super excited about it. Part of that was because of our market positioning.”   In this episode, Derrick discusses how ConvertKit revamped both its product and business model, and how this shift affected its marketing strategy. Besides product changes, he’s seen the brand’s marketing evolve considerably in just two and a half years.  For instance, when Derrick first joined, ConvertKit relied heavily on affiliate marketing. It has since expanded its marketing avenues to include organic search, podcasting and video storytelling. Now, Derrick’s team is focused on product marketing; to complement ConvertKit’s strong brand advertising, they hope to better convey how its product brings value to users.

COVID-19 hit the hospitality industry hard. So much so that Heath Shatouhy, the VP of Sales and Marketing at the staffing marketplace Jitjatjo, reports, “If you look at the recent jobs report, nearly two-thirds of people filing for unemployment are from the hospitality and leisure industry.” As a staffing platform that focuses on connecting companies and workers in the hospitality industry, the pandemic has thus taken a big toll on Jitjatjo. Yet this hasn’t stopped Heath and his team from working hard to support Jitjatjo’s gig workers. In fact, since the emergence of COVID-19, the platform has cut its margins to keep money in the hands of workers, or talent, as it calls them. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Heath explains how his team has adapted to get through these difficult times and help those struggling. Knowing that many workers join the hospitality industry because they want to help others, Heath felt there was no better way to support them than by protecting their livelihoods. “If you approach clients and customers with a genuine desire to help without worrying about paybacks, it will come back to you. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow, but it will come back because they will remember you because you were genuine and you did try to help them out as best you could. And that really goes a long way,” Heath says.

For Ewa Baska, Marketing Director at Buildout, a SaaS company that creates marketing software for commercial real estate brokers, the marketing fundamentals she learned in school and early jobs have always been her inner guidebook.  “I always knew that I wanted to go into marketing just by always wanting to know more about brands and studying all the exciting things that companies can bring to humans,” she says. But some things you can’t learn from school — like what to do when a pandemic hits.  In such circumstances, it’s important to think before you act, Ewa says. For Buildout, that meant taking a step back to reflect and create a strategic marketing response plan rather than reacting hastily. It was a move that’s made all the difference in connecting with new customers and retaining current ones. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Ewa shares how her team conducted an audit to adjust their marketing strategy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. She also discusses the value of adding a human touch to Buildout’s brand messaging, one that focuses on being humble and genuine.

Taking the reins of an established marketing team shouldn’t mean throwing out everything that’s come before. Put the hard work of your predecessors to good use. Adam Lambert joined scheduling software company Calendly as its Senior Content and Digital Marketing Manager in January 2020. He spent his first three months studying what his team had achieved before his arrival. “Customer service was really strong: people had good resources to answer current customer questions. So I didn't have to spend a lot of time with current customers, compared with connecting with people who might find this tool useful,” he says. Adam identifies content marketing — especially video — as one of the strongest mediums for getting word out about your product. In this episode of Tech Qualified, Adam tells Tristan Pelligrino why and how marketers should put their time and budget into video. “The money doesn't hurt as bad when you're getting 12 pieces of content. You're making this video, a transcript and a blog about this video, and you're doing thought leadership because you're going to share clips,” he says. “You're doing a lot more than the one deliverable that's laid out on the contract.”

With more than 20 years in marketing, Steve Wagner has watched the demand generation concept “grow up,” so to speak. When he was starting out, it was in its “baby phase,” and he has since watched it become an integral part of the marketing life cycle. Steven started his career on the account management and sales side of business — which helped him better understand and appreciate those teams — before working his way over to marketing. These days, he’s the Senior Marketing Manager at Webbula, a data quality platform, where he heads marketing initiatives for its data hygiene and enhancement solutions for email marketers. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino interviews Steve, who gives us an overview of what email marketing looks like in today’s climate. He discusses the importance of targeted email campaigns and explains why it’s important to have a “clean” email list. (Did you know companies get assigned sender reputation scores?) Since joining the team more than a year ago, he talks about how he’s prioritized his marketing efforts, and he shares what he hopes to accomplish post-COVID.

Audio has always been Jaclyn Schiff’s favorite way to consume information. Whether it was a book on tape or early versions of podcasts, she was right there listening — donning a cassette player or nestled up by her desktop computer.  With about 15 years of combined experience in journalism and content marketing, Jaclyn started PodReacher — a company that helps podcasters increase their brand visibility by turning each episode into engaging content for their website.  “I think any savvy marketer in 2020 understands that content today is about getting in front of audiences in the format they prefer and wherever it is they hang out,” Jaclyn says. It’s not enough to just record a podcast, hit publish, and call it a day.  In this episode, Jaclyn breaks down why every podcaster needs to transform each episode into meaningful content to post on their website and across social media.  Jaclyn also talks about what it takes to create a successful podcast, why turning podcasts into content is beneficial for SEO, plus how it fits into your overall marketing strategy and helps build a loyal customer base.

For Melissa Greiner, establishing a human connection is the key to developing — and keeping — a successful customer, no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at. Before entering the B2B marketing world, Melissa studied journalism in college. It gave her valuable experience that would eventually land her as the Director of Marketing at WizeHive, which is a SaaS platform for nonprofit organizations.  On this episode, Melissa discusses her strategies for developing successful content, including planning for every stage of the customer journey by leveraging and learning about what the customer is looking for, their pain points and exactly why they need WizeHive.  “You have to make sure you have that broad breadth from the very beginning to the very end, so that [at] the end of the day, you’ve spent time making sure that every stage and every possible way people are coming into contact with your name and your brand and your product has been covered,” says Melissa.  She also shares how WizeHive’s messaging reflects and takes into consideration the tough time that many nonprofit organizations are facing due to COVID-19 and the approaches she and her team are taking to ensure customer satisfaction. “We are individuals at the end of the day, so if we can keep that in mind and really just be respectful of everyone’s situations right now, I think it will make all of us trying to move forward a little bit easier.”

Marybeth Sheppard spent years working at a B2B marketing agency before joining Seamless, the online food-ordering service owned by Grubhub. She spent more than five years there, marketing the product to hedge funds, law firms, tech companies — really, anyone who was ordering large amounts of food or catering company events. Now, Marybeth serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing at SEVENROOMS, a hospitality technology company.  On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Marybeth, who is more than three years into her time at SEVENROOMS. She talks about the process of growing her marketing department to a team of eight, how her team works closely with the sales department and how she keeps her employees motivated. Marybeth also addresses how COVID-19 has reshaped day-to-day life for SEVENROOMS, a company that focuses heavily on the restaurant industry. She shares the steps the SEVENROOMS marketing and sales departments have taken to continue to drive leads and close deals despite the shuttering of restaurants around the country.

At Lessonly, a training software company, marketing and sales play on the same team. And Chief Marketing Officer Kyle Lacy wouldn’t think of having it any other way.  “Part of the reason why I wanted to move the BDRs and SDRs under marketing is that you force alignment,” Kyle says in this episode of Tech Qualified.  At other companies, the marketing department might focus on attribution or proving influence. Kyle’s goal is to focus the marketing team on revenue. He says they’re not quite there yet, but he aims to have the marketing team influencing 100% of revenue. He doesn’t mince his words: “I think this idea that marketing is an influence metric is just a load of BS because you’re going to be the first one cut, nobody’s ever going to align to you because they don’t need to — you’re just going to be an order-taking team.”  Kyle shares some of Lessonly’s major marketing initiatives since COVID-19 hit, which includes doing virtual whiskey tasting with enterprise prospects. He also discusses his personal process for professional development — and why he focuses on learning from people rather than books.

In her role as the lead marketer at a small company that offers IT services, Megan Battaglia says she has the best of both worlds.   After beginning her career in consumer product marketing for the popular spice company McCormick, she next landed a role working on the tech side for a health company. Now at ThunderCat — where she is Director of Marketing — she gets to combine her creative side with her tech background.  “I kind of have the best of both worlds with marketing for a tech company,” she says. The veteran-owned business provides IT services for the U.S. federal government, state and local governments, and Fortune 500 companies.  Megan’s goal is to create marketing campaigns for the business’ B2G and B2B sides. “We’re really just bringing awareness to the company that, hey, we’re not just government, we’re also commercial. We’ve really used our name and our reputation in the government space to brand ourselves in the commercial space.”  In this episode, Megan shares some of her most effective marketing strategies for reaching prospects in the government as well as private industry. COVID-19 has affected marketing strategy, but she says the company has been digital-first for a while. Though she says about 60% of the marketing budget is for digital activities, the remainder was for trade shows or other kinds of in-person events.

Account-based marketing isn’t a buzzword Juliana Pereira can get behind.  “I actually call it marketing because I think that’s the only type of marketing you should be doing,” says Julianna, Vice President of Marketing for Flow, which provides software to help brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business. In pre-pandemic times, Juliana invested carefully in getting the right people to Flow’s events. Of course, in-person events are no longer possible given the current state of the world, but she’s still keeping the focus on people and relationships. Instead of bringing crowds together in physical spaces, Juliana has put emphasis on webinars. In this episode, she also describes how she’s getting Flow’s well-connected investors to help her scale relationship-building with important partners.  Juliana is also all about finding creative ways to get the message across. She’s published assorted content formats to keep Flow top of mind for potential customers —  including a calendar with specially commissioned cartoons that was sent as a 2020 gift. The cartoons speak to prospects’ familiar e-commerce pain points. Before they were used to illustrate the calendar, the cartoons were featured on Flow’s blog.  Plus, Juliana uses the cartoons in prospecting emails, which have gotten some good responses from prospects who identify with the pain points and want to talk further.

When Louisy Raymond joined the Zipari team more than two years ago, she was the second member of its marketing department — and the only one who actually had a background in marketing. Tasked with establishing a marketing strategy for the SaaS health care company, she used her 18 years of experience in the field to build her team and map out a cohesive plan. This included everything from redesigning the team’s sales decks to planning conferences and webinars. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Louisy who is now two years into her tenure as the senior vice president of marketing at Zipari. She talks about how she approached the startup’s marketing strategy (health insurance companies are wary of startups — they see them fail all too often), targeted the software’s ideal audience (the highly educated C-suite) and built out content (super niche white papers). At the end of the interview, Louisy reveals how she keeps her finger on the B2B marketing pulse. Spoiler: She loves Medium.com and podcasts.

Playing it safe with content is not optional for Chris Damico.  With almost 20 years of marketing industry experience, he’s taking Penta Technologies — where he’s the Marketing Director — to new heights by introducing thought leadership into the organization’s content marketing strategy to help tackle some of the challenges facing the construction industry. The company develops enterprise construction software that helps construction, service, and engineering enterprises improve business performance. “It’s just getting that knowledge out there that, Hey, you have a problem and here’s how you can streamline your payroll. Here’s how you can streamline your planning. It’s really helped us gain the trust of customers who might have not looked to us as a solution before.”  In this episode, Chris explains how he’s doing that through webinars and testimonials.  Additionally, Chris discusses content marketing hurdles. “I think the biggest challenge in content marketing is not deciding what to do. It’s deciding what not to do,” says Chris.  “And you know, a lot of times you’re not going to know that until you try it, so I say that when you try something and it doesn’t work, you have to be comfortable with letting go and then going for something that does.” 

Michael Wise says he’s selling a solution not a product, and this is essential to all aspects of marketing and the customer journey.  As Director of Marketing & Strategy at Intelligent Contacts, a company that provides innovative cloud contact center communication, billing, and payment software for the healthcare and financial services industries, Michael focuses on brand management, lead-generation and strategy development for a technology product that can be difficult for clients to understand.  So that’s why he tries to look at it from a different perspective, showing clients how to leverage their use of the latest in data management systems and machine learning to hook their own new clients.  “The big thing is solution selling. We're not selling a product, we're selling a solution, so all of our communication is based on: ‘Hey, remember that problem that we both kind of identified that seemed to trigger some emotion in you that you want to get fixed immediately? Is that still a problem? We did agree that was something our solutions could fix.’,” Michael says.  They try to look at these relationships more as partnerships, working alongside client companies to help them understand how to market their own products and services by showcasing the solutions Michael’s company offers.  “We're saying not only will this help your business grow from today, but it'll help you get new business because you're now using the types of technology that are required to reel in the big fish.”

When Trinity Nguyen joined lead generation solution UserGems as its Director of Marketing she made a bold move: She got management to move revenue contribution tracking to the marketing team.  "Revenue is the only number that matters to us in marketing," she says.  In this episode of Tech Qualified, Trinity discusses why marketing should have a front-row seat to the sales lifecycle. At UserGems, marketing takes an active role in listening to sales calls in the pipeline review, and both departments agree on leads before outreach.  They don’t partition the pipeline like MQL and SQL, she says, "We look at the pipeline together. We review our pipeline pretty intensely every single week. It’s all hands on deck." She notes this collaboration is possible because UserGems is a small company, but they want to maintain that teamwork even as they grow. She discusses why they’re more focused on LinkedIn than other social channels, and shares how she’s thinking about expanding content operations in the future (hint: They don’t want to create stuff that won’t actually be consumed).

Liam Moroney is no stranger to the ups and downs of startup life.  “[T]here’s enormous risk that comes along with working at a startup, you don’t have the stability or predictability that a lot of big companies have,” says Liam who is VP of Marketing at Rocketrip, which helps enterprise companies reduce travel costs through employee award incentives. Rocketrip is Liam’s fourth startup.  It’s a good thing that Liam can handle riding a professional roller coaster — doing marketing for a travel-related startup in the age of COVID-19 is tricky.     In this episode, Liam discusses his tactics for changing the game for the travel rewards industry through content marketing, including the importance of updating Rocketrip’s messaging and the overall go-to-market strategy, with the understanding that there will be new concerns for travelers post-COVID.  “There are anxieties. There are going to be challenges. There are going to be stresses when it comes to travel,” Liam acknowledges. “So we want to make sure that we’re leaning into that because we don’t want people to travel more than they need to, or more than they’re comfortable to.”