Tech Qualified - SoundSage

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Justin Brown sits down with Jonathan Bland, Co-Founder of Omni Lab Consulting, to unpack one of the most pressing conversations in B2B marketing right now: how to use AI responsibly in content creation without contributing to the wave of slop flooding LinkedIn and the broader web. The two agency owners open with a candid take on "scrappy marketing" — including a pointed conversation about why expensive ABM platforms like 6sense are losing favor with heads of marketing who never needed that level of tech in the first place.

From there, the conversation pivots to the heart of the episode: the difference between responsible and irresponsible AI use in content. Jonathan and Justin agree that AI itself isn't the problem — the problem is lazy prompting, missing point of view, and content created without source material or proprietary insight. They explore how brands like Ahrefs and Influ2 are getting it right by leading with original research, first-person perspective, and real product snapshots, while many B2B teams are publishing volume for volume's sake.

The episode closes with a real-world case study: Justin shares how his business partner Tristan went from zero content to a thriving M&A practice in six months by using AI to scale content derived entirely from real conversations and lived experience. The throughline is clear — AI is a force multiplier, but only when human POV, source material, and active community engagement sit at the foundation.

Guest-at-a-Glance
Name: Jonathan Bland
Role: Co-Founder Company: Omni Lab Consulting
Context: Jonathan leads a demand gen and paid media agency focused on SaaS brands. He's an active content creator and commentator on B2B marketing strategy, AI in content, and the evolving role of paid media. He's known for sharing tactical POVs on LinkedIn and championing scrappy, high-leverage marketing plays over bloated tech stacks.
Where to find him: LinkedIn (Jonathan Bland) | omnilabconsulting.com

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.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Justin Brown sits down with Chris Corcoran, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Blue Tusk Partners, to unpack more than two decades of trying to grow a B2B services company without ever building a massive marketing organization. Chris walks through the evolution of memoryBlue's marketing function — from a word-of-mouth-only era driven entirely by client referrals, to early agency partnerships, to bringing on a high-performing junior hire, to eventually building an in-house team led by a director of marketing. Along the way, he candidly discusses what worked, what didn't, and why he ultimately wishes he had started investing in marketing earlier and more aggressively.

The conversation digs into the realities of being a sales-led founder running a services company, including how memoryBlue differentiated itself in a crowded SDR outsourcing market, why their website became their best salesperson and recruiter, and how 70–80% of their business came in through inbound channels despite being an outbound-focused company. Chris also shares hard-earned perspective on managing agencies — arguing that the tighter founders manage their agency partners, the better the outcomes — and reflects on channels that didn't deliver (like SEO) versus harder-to-measure investments like the company's podcast that paid off in culture, recruiting, and brand affinity.

For founders and small marketing teams trying to figure out whether to hire, outsource, or do it themselves, this episode delivers a rare, honest look at what scaling marketing actually looks like when you're a services company without endless resources.

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Chris Corcoran

💡 What they do: Cofounder + Managing Partner

💡 Company: Blue Tusk Partners

💡 Noteworthy: Chris spent more than two decades helping build memoryBlue into one of the most recognizable outsourced SDR firms in the industry. He had a front-row seat to nearly every growth challenge a scaling B2B services company can face — from founder-led sales and word-of-mouth growth to agency partnerships, in-house team building, content, PR, podcasts, and events.

💡 Where to find him: LinkedIn

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Justin Brown, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand. They explore what marketing ROI means when your team must both “keep the lights on” and drive growth.

Justin draws a hard line between table-stakes marketing and growth marketing. Your website, basic content, and consistent presence work like HR or accounting: you need them to run a business, and not every dollar ties to a clean return. Problems start when leaders demand perfect attribution for everything, or when marketers accept vague goals like “more” without a definition.

For growth work, Justin pushes for a model built on history: cost per lead, cost per opportunity, and pipeline targets. He shows how board numbers can set teams up to fail, even when performance rises. If you lack data, he recommends setting a baseline, using benchmarks, and getting leadership to sign off on metrics.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Tristan Pelligrino, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand. They explore the realities of account-based marketing (ABM) for small B2B tech teams, focusing on practical ways to build effective programs without big budgets or expensive software.

Tristan explains how scrappy ABM differs from enterprise approaches, breaking down the process of connecting with target accounts using lean tools and smart workflows. He highlights the value of layering outreach—using cold email, targeted ads, and LinkedIn sequences—to create momentum and gather early signals. Tristan shares how his teams track website visits and ad engagement to spot interest before leads fill out a form, making sure marketers have data to report real progress.

The episode closes with advice for teams getting started: focus on a strong, relevant offer and keep friction low for your prospects. Tristan stresses that even with modest tools, clear messaging and ongoing testing drive the best results.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Content Logistics, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Justin Brown, founder of Marketers in Demand. They explore what it means to build a true marketing roadmap and why small B2B teams need more than just ideas to see growth.

Justin breaks down the gap between having a “strategy” in your head and having a documented plan with real goals and actions. He explains that most teams think they have a strategy but lack a written roadmap that outlines what needs to happen and why. Without this, teams chase tactics—like paid ads or new messaging—without tying them to outcomes, which wastes time and budget.

The conversation focuses on the power of starting with clear business goals, then building tactics to support them. Justin shares why teams should prioritize content creation and test internally before spending on outside help. He closes with simple advice: if you can’t send someone your marketing strategy in a document, it’s time to create one.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Justin Brown, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand, to tackle the real challenges of measuring content ROI for small B2B marketing teams. They dig into why direct attribution is so hard when you’re working with limited budgets and lean teams—especially when enterprise tools are out of reach.

Justin shares why not every marketing activity needs to show a direct return. He explains the concept of “table stakes marketing”—the foundational work like keeping your website and social media fresh—that builds trust and credibility but rarely delivers a clear, immediate payoff. Justin stresses that this work matters for brand health, even if you can’t tie every action to a new lead.

Together, Baylee and Justin explore smarter ways to track progress, like watching for growth trends and engagement, rather than obsessing over single-channel metrics. They remind listeners that investing in marketing is a long game, and lasting results often come from consistent, visible effort—not just short-term wins.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Justin Brown, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand. They explore the real work that goes into launching and sustaining a successful B2B podcast, especially for small marketing teams. Justin shares why consistency matters more than flashy production and explains how a podcast can anchor content strategy for tech companies.

Justin pushes back on the idea that business podcasts should focus on executive stories or product launches. Instead, he urges listeners to build shows around real audience problems and to use targeted questions that give practical takeaways. He also describes how podcasting can fuel content for blogs, social media, and sales outreach, making it a practical choice for busy teams.

Throughout the conversation, Justin stresses the value of starting simple and building over time. He encourages marketers to respect the medium, aim for steady output, and use podcasting as a tool for lasting relationships and trust—not just vanity metrics.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Kiyan Klocker to explore what makes a paid landing page work. Kiyan explains why landing pages must focus on a single audience and a single goal, and why sending paid traffic to a homepage usually falls short. Instead, he shares how to reuse strong content from other parts of your website while tailoring each landing page to match the campaign’s purpose and the visitor’s needs.

Kiyan walks through the difference between marketing and sales, stressing that marketing should center on helping prospects solve problems. He outlines how to build campaigns for every stage of the funnel, from raising awareness to driving action, and why every landing page must set clear expectations for what happens after a visitor hits submit. He also highlights common mistakes, like adding too many calls to action or mismatching ad copy and landing page content.

The conversation wraps with practical advice on measuring success, customizing by audience, and keeping the user journey smooth from ad to form. Kiyan’s insights offer a clear path for anyone looking to improve campaign performance with better landing pages.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Tristan Pelligrino, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand. They explore how B2B tech companies can craft offers that cut through the noise and drive real engagement in account-based marketing (ABM).

Tristan explains why strong offers start with a deep understanding of customer pain points. He shares the importance of moving beyond generic content and building no-brainer offers that deliver meaningful value—sometimes even quantified as a percentage of the annual contract value. Tristan also stresses the difference between resources and true offers, urging teams to segment and qualify prospects before extending high-value opportunities.

The conversation turns to messaging and testing. Tristan outlines practical ways to reach buyers through tailored emails, ads, and sales outreach. He encourages teams to test different angles, use real customer language, and rely on frequent iteration instead of waiting for perfection. The key is to launch, learn, and keep refining with real feedback.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell sits down with Tristan Pelligrino, Co-Founder at Marketers in Demand. They explore how B2B tech companies can build stronger content strategies by focusing first on understanding their ideal customers. Tristan explains that content isn’t just about producing blog posts or white papers—it starts with knowing exactly who you want to reach and what problems they face.

Tristan shares why small marketing teams should prioritize real conversations with customers and internal experts. He shows how these discussions reveal the challenges buyers care about and help teams create more meaningful, specific content. By gathering insights from sales calls, customer interviews, and feedback sessions, marketers can move beyond generic messaging and stand out from competitors.

The conversation wraps with practical advice for scrappy teams: start with one type of conversation, such as a podcast or video chat, and repurpose that material across channels. For Tristan, this approach helps teams stretch their resources, reach the right people, and build a content engine that actually supports growth.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Baylee Gunnell joins Colin Costigan, Head of Accounts at Marketers in Demand, to discuss a common marketing challenge. Many teams want to launch a perfect campaign, but the market demands speed. Colin explains why perfection is unattainable and how teams can shift their thinking.

Colin suggests moving from an "architect" to an "engineer" mindset. Instead of endless planning, marketers should build, test, and gather real-world data. He advises treating every launch as a live experiment, not a final exam. This reframes failure as a learning opportunity and removes the pressure of a single, high-stakes release.

To build momentum, Colin advises a consistent cadence for reviewing data and launching new tests. This creates a continuous loop of learning and iteration. By focusing on progress, marketers can adapt faster and achieve better results in a constantly moving market.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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Marketers often jump directly into tactics, feeling pressure to show progress. In this episode of Tech Qualified,, Baylee Gunnell and Colin Costigan, Head of Accounts at Marketers in Demand, discuss how to build a stronger marketing foundation. Colin explains that the desire for tangible results and leadership pressure cause teams to skip essential planning.

A strong marketing plan starts with a business goal. This "North Star" guides your strategy, which defines who you will target. Only then should you develop tactics like email outreach or social media ads. Every tactic must trace back to the strategy and serve the main business outcome.

Knowing when to adapt is critical. Colin explains how to tell if a problem is tactical or strategic. Signals like a low click-through rate may require a tactical change. However, major issues like a doubling cost-per-lead signal a need to revisit your strategy. This framework helps teams stay structured while remaining flexible.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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Building a website can feel overwhelming. In this episode of Tech Qualified, Erin Ham, Account Director at Marketers in Demand, shares a clear roadmap for website strategy. She joins host Baylee Gunnell to discuss why every project must start with a single, defined goal. This foundation guides all future decisions, from content planning to tech stack integration.

Erin highlights common pitfalls, including overloaded menus and confusing jargon. She recommends a "five-second test" to ensure visitors immediately understand how you can help them. This means shifting from "selfish content" about your company to customer-centric messaging that solves a problem. It’s about focusing on what the user gets, not just what you do.

The discussion also covers practical tactics for improving an existing site. Erin suggests talking to your sales team to learn customer pain points and using tools like heat maps for user insights. The key takeaway is to build a simple, strategic path that guides users and helps them succeed.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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Justin Brown, co-founder of Marketing in Demand, explains why founder-led content matters more than most executives realize on this episode of Tech Qualified with host Baylee Gunnell. Justin argues that founders bring irreplaceable industry perspectives that employees simply can't match, especially those who've spent decades in their field.

The conversation explores three types of founders: those who resist content creation entirely, those who are open but hesitant, and those who fully embrace it. Justin emphasizes that most founders fall into the middle category and need content creation made as simple as possible. He suggests quarterly recordings that can be repurposed across multiple channels rather than demanding weekly commitments.

Justin challenges traditional ROI thinking around content marketing. He views founder content as essential business infrastructure rather than direct revenue generation. Content serves multiple purposes: sales enablement materials, customer testimonials, and relationship building with industry leaders.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Justin Brown talks with Joe Michalowski, Head of Client Services at New North, about the importance of documenting marketing strategies. They discuss the value of creating detailed plans for various marketing channels.

Justin and Joe explain that a written plan keeps everyone aligned, from internal teams to client stakeholders. It provides clarity on goals, target audiences, and metrics for tracking success. They also delve into the risks of neglecting documentation, such as inconsistent brand messaging, missed business goals, and difficulty in measuring marketing ROI.

Joe emphasizes the need for living documents that evolve with a company's marketing efforts. He outlines key elements to include in a comprehensive plan: clear identification of the target customer, well-defined goals, specific metrics, and assigned responsibilities for execution.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker welcome Florian Delval, Director and Technical Product Marketing Manager at ActionIQ. Florian shares his journey from software engineering to product marketing, highlighting the skills and insights he brings from his technical background.

Florian discusses a recent fast-track product launch at ActionIQ, where his team had just eight days to prepare. He emphasizes the importance of internal communication, having a clear plan, and focusing on essential tasks to ensure a successful launch. Florian also talks about the value of understanding market trends and staying ahead of the curve.

Listeners will gain insights into how ActionIQ empowers marketers by simplifying access to customer data without requiring deep technical knowledge. Florian shares his strategies for effective collaboration between marketing and technical teams, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards common goals. This episode is a must-listen for marketers navigating complex technologies and striving to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving field.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker chat with Greg Elfrink, Director of Marketing at Empire Flippers. Greg shares his experiences and insights on building and maintaining a successful newsletter, scaling content efforts, and leveraging global talent in the M&A space.

Greg dives into the creation of the "This Week in M&A" newsletter, detailing its transformation from a simple content wrap-up to a robust weekly update with 118,000 active subscribers. He explains how switching to a more diverse and engaging format, inspired by popular newsletters like The Hustle and Morning Brew, significantly improved metrics and audience engagement.

Throughout the conversation, Greg emphasizes the importance of curating relevant content and staying updated on industry trends to provide value to subscribers. He highlights the strategic use of both internal and external resources, including influencers and social intelligence software, to keep the newsletter fresh and informative.

The discussion also touches on the challenges of marketing to entrepreneurs in the digital space, the benefits of a well-structured content strategy, and the impact of effective communication tools on team alignment and productivity. Greg's insights offer valuable takeaways for anyone looking to enhance their marketing efforts and connect with a broader audience.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker sit down with Allys Ton from Qortex to discuss the intricacies of brand building, particularly for small marketing teams. Allys shares her extensive experience in creating and nurturing brands at various companies, highlighting her unique approach to personifying brands. She explains how a comprehensive branding exercise can define a brand’s personality, voice, and values, making it easier to communicate the brand’s essence across all marketing materials.

Allys emphasizes the importance of collaboration within a company during the branding process. She advocates for involving different departments to get a holistic view of the brand's identity. This approach ensures that the brand’s personality resonates with everyone, from engineers to customer-facing employees. Allys also talks about the practical steps involved in launching a brand, such as updating websites, social media, and marketing collateral, to align with the new brand identity.

The conversation also covers the challenges and strategies of maintaining brand consistency with the help of external contractors. Both Allys and Meredith share their experiences working with designers and content creators to keep their brand’s voice and visual identity cohesive. They discuss the balance of in-house skills and outsourced expertise, emphasizing the need for clear communication and feedback to ensure that all content reflects the brand’s core values and personality.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this illuminating episode of "Tech Qualified," hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker engage with Ryan Tidwell from Saltmine, exploring the unique challenges of marketing within niche B2B spaces. Ryan shares his journey of marketing in underrepresented sectors like prop tech and how crucial consistency and tailored strategies are for his 'small but scrappy' team. His insights reveal that success lies not in grand gestures but in steady, thoughtful marketing that resonates with a specific audience.

Ryan emphasizes the importance of understanding the audience's needs, avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions, and instead focusing on what truly matters to them. This approach requires marketers to think critically about the utility and clarity of their content, ensuring it speaks directly to the concerns and interests of their niche audience.

The discussion also delves into the broader implications of marketing strategies that prioritize authenticity and strategic thinking over flashy, transient tactics. By sharing examples from his own experience, Ryanl illustrates how effective marketing in specialized fields doesn't always follow the mainstream but instead builds its own path to resonate deeply with its intended audience. This episode is a must-listen for marketers aiming to leverage limited resources for maximum impact.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In the latest episode of "Tech Qualified," hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Medsker engage with Drew Moffitt from Kumospace to explore innovative strategies in B2B influencer marketing and virtual office environments. Drew details Kumospace’s virtual platform, which simulates a physical office digitally, enhancing remote collaboration. The discussion also covers how Kumospace has been effectively utilizing influencer marketing to boost visibility and engagement, demonstrating substantial impacts on their growth and customer acquisition strategies.

Drew explains the mechanics behind their successful influencer campaigns, emphasizing the importance of organic and relatable content to ensure authenticity. He shares insights on the careful selection and management of influencers to maximize reach and engagement. This approach has not only increased Kumospace's visibility but also significantly contributed to their revenue, demonstrating the effectiveness of influencer marketing in the B2B space.

Furthermore, the episode dives into the operational aspects of running influencer campaigns, including the tools and processes Kumospace employs to manage and measure the success of these initiatives. Drew’s candid discussion provides valuable lessons for marketers looking to leverage influencer marketing, highlighting the potential for substantial returns when executed with a strategic and genuine approach.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker chat with Stephen Robles of Riverside about asynchronous recording technologies. The discussion kicks off with an overview of Riverside's features designed to ease recording processes for busy professionals. Stephen explains how the platform allows for recording without requiring all participants to be online simultaneously, a boon for busy CEOs and subject matter experts.

The conversation dives into specific functionalities of Riverside, such as creating links for asynchronous recording, which simplifies the collection of high-quality audio and video content. This feature is particularly beneficial for journalists and businesses needing testimonials without coordinating schedules. Stephen highlights the intuitive user interface that guides users through the recording process, ensuring quality submissions with minimal technical know-how.

Towards the end, the podcast covers Riverside’s innovative approach to content creation and its potential applications in various fields, including marketing and education. Stephen discusses upcoming features and enhancements that streamline the editing process, enabling users to produce polished content directly within Riverside. This episode is a must-listen for professionals looking to leverage technology for more efficient content creation and management.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker host Nick Lafferty, a seasoned growth marketing consultant and founder of the Early Exit Club. Nick discusses the crucial role of paid marketing strategies for B2B organizations, emphasizing the rapid feedback and optimization opportunities it provides. He details how paid marketing efforts can be a valuable tool for small teams looking to test ideas quickly with minimal initial investment.

Nick explains how to align marketing strategies with business objectives and select the most effective channels, such as Google Ads and LinkedIn. He stresses the importance of matching these channels to the company's stage of development and budget, guiding businesses through the initial steps of creating a paid media program from scratch.

The conversation also covers common challenges and pitfalls in paid marketing, such as inadequate budget allocation and the complexities of channel prioritization. Nick shares insights on when companies should consider investing in paid channels and how to measure the success of these investments, providing practical advice for companies at various growth stages.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker dive into the world of social media's role in business growth with Kirsti Lang from Buffer. The conversation starts with the importance of having a strong digital presence, even for small teams, and quickly transitions to the power of authenticity in social media marketing. Kirsti emphasizes that people trust individuals over brands, making the personal stories and posts from company leaders crucial for engagement and trust-building.

Kirsti shares practical advice for executives hesitant to embrace social media, suggesting starting small with regular posts to showcase the human side of business. She explains that sharing the founder's journey and the company's story can significantly impact audience engagement, resonating more than traditional brand posts.

The discussion also highlights the need for consistency in social media efforts and the value of having a strategy that includes content pillars and audience understanding. Kirsti suggests that marketing teams can support their leaders by providing tools, content calendars, and encouraging a culture where posting on social media is seen as an opportunity rather than a chore. The episode wraps up with the insight that anyone within a company who aligns closely with the ideal customer profile can be a valuable voice on social media, not just the executives or marketing team.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Meredith Metsker and guest Justin Brown of New North explore the transformative impact of episodic content for small marketing teams. Justin shares his journey from struggling to produce regular content as a small business owner to discovering the strategic advantages of podcasting. This transition not only facilitated consistent content production but also significantly boosted engagement with key audiences.

Justin emphasizes the flexibility and efficiency of episodic content, particularly podcasting, in enabling small teams to punch above their weight. By leveraging podcasts, companies can generate a continuous stream of content, enhance their brand’s visibility, and establish themselves as industry thought leaders without the resource drain typically associated with traditional content creation methods. This approach not only aids in content distribution but also fosters valuable connections within the industry, making it a potent tool for businesses aiming to expand their influence and reach.

The conversation dives into practical tips for developing a successful episodic content strategy, highlighting the importance of audience-centric content planning and execution. Justin’s insights underline episodic content's role in not just attracting but also retaining an engaged audience by consistently delivering valuable and relevant insights.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown dives into the intricacies of content creation with limited resources. He discusses the unique challenges faced by small B2B tech marketing teams with Meredith Metsker , the Director of Content and Community at uConnect. The conversation explores strategies for building an efficient content machine, underscoring the importance of adaptability and resourcefulness in a constrained environment.

Meredith shares her journey from working in larger marketing teams to embracing the agility of smaller groups, highlighting the advantages of reduced bureaucratic hurdles. Her experience across various roles in the tech sector has shaped her preference for lean teams, where the rapid execution of ideas thrives. The discussion also touches on the common misconceptions about content creation capabilities of small teams, debunking the notion that quality content requires a large workforce.

The episode concludes with actionable insights into establishing a successful content strategy. Meredith emphasizes the value of consistency, strategic planning, and the power of outsourcing certain tasks to maintain a steady flow of engaging content. Her approach, focusing on leveraging podcasts and multimedia, showcases the potential for small teams to make a significant impact, driving increased web traffic and generating leads for uConnect.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker welcome Joe Michalowski from New North. They dive into the evolving landscape of B2B marketing, discussing the critical shift from in-house roles to agency settings. Joe shares his unique perspective on adapting strategies for client success in a competitive digital environment.

Joe emphasizes the importance of leveraging content to address customer pain points. He outlines effective methods for creating content that resonates with target audiences, highlighting the need for authenticity and value-driven messaging. The discussion also explores how small marketing teams can punch above their weight through strategic planning and execution.

The conversation wraps up with insights on measuring marketing success. Joe stresses the significance of aligning marketing metrics with business goals to truly gauge the impact of campaigns. This episode offers valuable advice for marketers looking to refine their approach and drive growth in the B2B sector.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this insightful episode of Tech Qualified, Meredith Metsker hosts Lindsay McGuire, Associate Director of Content and Campaigns at Goldcast. They dive into the art of crafting effective event strategies for small marketing teams. Lindsay emphasizes the importance of aligning events with business goals, highlighting how different event types serve varied objectives - from brand building to community engagement.

Lindsay shares practical advice on efficiently running events with limited resources. She stresses the significance of roles like hosts and producers in ensuring the smooth execution of events. The discussion also explores leveraging virtual events to extend brand reach and content strategies, underscoring the value of audience engagement and feedback in shaping event direction.

Concluding with key insights, Lindsay offers guidance for small teams considering event strategies. She advocates for using events as content generators and prioritizing audience needs, ensuring impactful and sustainable marketing efforts.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, Meredith Metsker and Justin Brown dive into essential marketing strategies. They reflect on an interview with Tory Kindlick, VP of Marketing at Corti, discussing the fundamental role of content marketing. Kindlick's approach to building a marketing team prioritizes content creation, highlighting its vital role in successful marketing strategies.

The conversation shifts to the importance of diverse skill sets in marketing teams. Justin, with a background in content, emphasizes the need for technical expertise in tandem with content creation. This balance ensures a comprehensive approach to marketing, facilitating both creative and analytical strengths. They underscore the need for marketers to possess a blend of skills to adapt and thrive in various marketing environments.

Lastly, the episode focuses on the art of interviewing in marketing. Justin stresses the significance of asking the right questions to gain deeper insights. This skill is crucial for understanding market needs and crafting relevant content. Their discussion reveals how effective interviewing can lead to more impactful marketing strategies and better audience engagement.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, host Justin Brown welcomes Meredith Metsker, Senior Content Marketing Manager at uConnect. They delve into the challenges and strategies of content marketing in a small team environment. Meredith shares her experiences in creating effective content strategies that balance both execution and strategic planning.

Meredith emphasizes the importance of agility and autonomy in small teams. She discusses how these qualities enable quick adaptation to changing market trends and audience needs. The conversation also touches on the significance of understanding the audience to create relevant and engaging content.

The episode concludes with insights into the future of content marketing. Meredith provides valuable tips for solo content marketers, stressing the need for a balance between hands-on content creation and overarching strategy development. This discussion offers a comprehensive look into the dynamic world of content marketing from an expert's perspective.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In this episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker welcome Rachel Cottam, Director of Content at Delivery Solutions. Rachel shares her diverse experiences in marketing, emphasizing the unique challenges small marketing teams face. She draws parallels between her past as a high school English teacher and her current role, highlighting the nuanced skills required in content marketing.

Rachel dives into the isolation often felt in small teams, discussing how content marketers, despite being part of a niche, need to ensure their strategies and metrics are well understood organization-wide. She stresses the importance of community building among marketers and the need to recognize the varied roles and responsibilities within the marketing sphere.

The conversation shifts to the balance of creativity and strategy in small teams. Rachel advises embracing a growth mindset, encouraging marketers to say "yes" to diverse tasks and learn through experience. Her approach underlines the importance of adaptability and feedback in honing one's skills, especially in compact marketing teams.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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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.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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In the relaunched episode of Tech Qualified, hosts Justin Brown and Meredith Metsker dive deep into the evolution of the podcast. Justin reminisces about the podcast's earlier days, where they interviewed VPs of marketing and CMOs, emphasizing the shift towards creating more targeted and meaningful content.

Both hosts highlight the significance of addressing core audience issues when crafting content. Meredith, drawing from her journalistic background, underscores the importance of starting with the most pressing information and genuinely adding value to the audience. She champions the idea of facilitating genuine subject matter expertise rather than feigning it.

From an agency standpoint, Justin elaborates on the centrality of content in effective marketing. He believes that understanding the customer, producing content tailored to them, and then amplifying that content are the pillars of successful marketing. The episode serves as a rich exploration of content creation from both in-house and agency perspectives.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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?’”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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).

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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.”

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The startup world isn’t for everyone, but Claudia Ring can’t help but be drawn to the “craziness” of them — even after working at IBM for several years.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Claudia about her most recent startup adventure as the Head of Marketing at rENIAC, a data engine platform.

rENIAC is a bit technical, to say the least, but Claudia succinctly defines the company’s mission, product and target audience before walking us through her experience building the startup’s marketing department from the ground up.

“A lot of teams will just start to try to run demand-gen programs without that foundation beneath their feet,” Claudia says. But you need, at the very least, a tool to track your analytics and a well-established voice and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

As if launching a startup’s marketing department isn’t enough, COVID-19 has really thrown a “monkey wrench” in things, Claudia says. But she’s rolled with it by planning a number of virtual events. Attendance has been surprisingly high, though she doesn’t expect the enthusiasm to last forever. When interest wanes, she’ll simply adapt — much like she does day-to-day at any startup she’s worked with.

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A great product is easy to sell, says Chris Gaebler, CMO of Marketing at Guardicore, a data center and cloud security company.

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Gaebler discusses collaboration with channel partners, the ways he maintains those relationships and the exploding creativity coming out of changes in the industry following COVID-19 restrictions.

“We're a leading cybersecurity company. It's an easy product or a solution to be a marketer of because it's really good, so I would say it's really fun to be a marketer in a company whose product is so good,” he says.

Chris was quick to come up with creative solutions for marketing during a pandemic and maintaining relationships at a distance. Chris believes marketers will be forced to push their creativity even further as the state of the world continues to evolve amidst the pandemic.

“I think we're actually moving quickly beyond that to the post-COVID era kind of communication, which is like, what is the new value you can offer your customers?” he says.

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Providing digital banking software requires a long-term commitment between the service provider and the financial institution. For Kevin W., Brand and Marketing Manager at Tyfone, and Josh DeTar, VP of Sales and Marketing at Tyfone, that relationship is like a marriage.

In this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, the duo talk about how they work to establish and sustain those relationships and how their approach has had to change due to COVID-19.

Tyfone helps its customers make extensive digital change over a number of years. As a result, the company’s approach to sales and marketing is relationship intensive, enabling them to best help customers through the transition.

“It really takes a partnership between the provider and the financial institution to make that happen,” says Josh.

They used to rely on face-to-face interactions and trade shows for a lot of the relationship building. With the global spread of COVID-19, they’ve had to adjust their strategy to find similarly meaningful ways to connect with customers.

“We've had to quickly divert a lot of funds and our way of thinking into content generation through creating relevant informative packets or just fun things that we're doing as a team and as a family to promote that relationship,” says Kevin.

One thing never changes, and that’s the quality of the relationship they’re seeking to build.

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When COVID-19 hit, most marketers — especially those in the foodservice space — feared for the future of their industry. Jen Kern, CMO at Qu, an enterprise restaurant chain POS platform, saw an opportunity to reshape the way she markets to customers.

She listened to her customers’ needs, focusing on earning their trust when they needed it most. Though Jen doesn’t use annual marketing plans, 70% of the marketing budget was in events — so she had to quickly pivot Qu’s marketing efforts. That meant switching content plans, among other efforts. Qu’s marketing team created a COVID survival kit and a blog post about how restaurants can optimize their online menus for COVID.

“Doing things that are going to be helpful — and that's the whole premise of inbound marketing … is helping and educating your buyer — not selling,” says Jen.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Jen goes into detail about how Qu shifted marketing plans to reflect the realities of the pandemic, which included launching an online ordering product that restaurants of all types can access and an initiative pairing restaurants with local first responders for food delivery.

Plus, she discusses her top tips for success in marketing. “Listen to your gut. That’s the best advice I could give to marketers,” Jen says.

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Sean Spicer’s experience in digital marketing spans 20 years — and he hasn’t looked back.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Sean, who is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Agile IT, a company that provides cloud-first managed services.

His company has been at the forefront of the digital revolution for years. But recently some things have changed.

When the stay-at-home orders came in as COVID-19 started spreading in the US, the phones started ringing off the hook. Companies needed solutions for their sudden remote workforce — and they needed them fast.

“We're in a really fortunate place that this is a solution we've offered, and now we're just developing it a little bit more and delivering it a little bit faster,” he says.

For Sean, being able to provide essential services that allow people and their companies to work in safe conditions from their homes has also affected him personally, giving him renewed purpose: “Seeing those impacts and seeing how we're actually helping instead of just being another technology company really gives me chills.”

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As SVP of Marketing at Alpha, a rapid consumer research platform, Tom Burg has always pushed his clients to think digitally. Now, this is even more imperative — Tom’s team aims to find the best ways to reach and interact with people virtually.

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Tom Burg talks about the ways he and his team are pushing the bounds of their marketing strategies, especially given the changing spaces of human interaction.

One way he has done this is by taking advantage of their podcast, which has been streaming for four years and has an established listenership. The podcast has been a great way to attract clients.

“If people are taking the time to listen to the podcast, generally they're going to be a pretty good fit for our business.”

They are currently working on an experimental webinar program as well, which will focus on how to navigate the world today.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life for everyone. Nowhere is that more true than for the healthcare industry. So what do you do if your buyers are precisely those people, the ones on the frontlines of the crisis?

In this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Elyse Lazartic, Senior Manager of Sales and Programs at Waystar, a company that provides RCM technology for the healthcare industry, talks about the ways she has had to shift her thought process and marketing tactics to adapt to our current reality.

“We've had to pivot quite a bit in terms of who we're targeting and how we're messaging and what solutions of our portfolio are most urgent for those providers right now, given the situation,” Elyse says.

Her team has had to rethink tactics to try to understand what is most useful for the market at this time, which has meant adapting the content they are producing, the format of that content, the way they get buyer attention and how they interact with them throughout the customer journey, relying a lot more on digital and virtual methods.

“It's about deeply understanding the problems, identifying with the buyers and then taking the solutions that you have developed and aligning them really closely with what that person is trying to solve for,” Elyse says.

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When Taylor Vossler joined technology consulting firm C3 Technology Advisors to lead marketing efforts, she wanted to pull a list of clients that had just experienced an outage with one provider and suggest that they reevaluate and create a backup plan.

Good marketing, right?

It would have been, but the company didn’t have the tools in place to segment a list that way. Fast forward a few months — Taylor convinced the company to implement Salesforce to better align sales and marketing. Next, she added Hubspot to improve marketing automation.

Her timing was serendipitous for a company that has relied heavily on physical events for demand generation. With face-to-face off the table for now and their largest event postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taylor has helped the team pivot to more of an inbound strategy.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown talks with Taylor about how she’s expanding the 12-year-old firm’s marketing efforts, the challenges of positioning the firm as a trusted advisor since its service offering has changed over time, as well as how she’s able to align sales and marketing efforts.

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Collaboration seems to be a motto to live by for Kieran Farr, and as VP of Marketing for Bitmovin, Kieran has made it his particular mission to get his team working alongside the sales team to create positive change and forward momentum.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Kieran about how that alliance was formed, being a thought leader for different target audiences and how content plays into Bitmovin’s demand generation strategies.

Over the past two years, Kieran’s marketing team has worked alongside the sales team to implement a system of unified metrics through pipeline generation. This helps both teams work toward a unified goal and improve the quality of leads.

Kieran also builds relationships with other marketing executives, so he can ask questions and share information. For him, this has been an effective way to confirm strategies, make comparisons and explore improvements.

“It does take time. It takes effort, but it's worth it, because you learn a lot and you make great relationships as well,” he says.

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Content production is important, but building relationships on the ground is far more crucial, according to Jeff Perkins, CMO and Head of Product at ParkMobile, an app that helps people find and pay for parking in over 400 cities across the U.S.

“Build a peer group that you can go to and bounce ideas off of and share insights and share learning,” he says in this episode of Tech Qualified. “That will be one of the most valuable things you can have in your career.”

Jeff is a 10-year veteran of the advertising industry who now leads the marketing team at the startup, reinforcing their reputation as an industry thought leader.

At ParkMobile, Jeff nurtures crucial relationships with business partners, suppliers and municipal employees in the parking service industry while also navigating the behaviors and needs of customers.

“It really is a fun opportunity where I'm able to work across B2B marketing and B2C marketing,” Jeff says.

Jeff has championed his company’s role as an industry thought leader, particularly through the production of meaningful content. At both his previous and current job, he has found that providing information through webinars, newsletters and trade show events helps bring in new clients and partners and reinforces relationships.

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When Steve Pollak describes his marketing philosophy, he uses a baseball analogy.

“You can't hit a home run from the dugout,” says Steve who is the Director of Marketing and Design Services at Banyan Hill Technologies, a firm specializing in the Internet of Things (IoT) for a range of industries.

As a result, Steve spends a lot of time in the top and middle of the sales funnel, focusing on increasing brand awareness so that when prospects are ready to execute a project they go with Banyan instead of other companies.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Steve, who started his career as a newspaper journalist before making his way into SEO and marketing, details how he juggles marketing priorities across brand awareness, lead generation, and customer retention.

Plus, he discusses how the lengthy customer journey — which is at least six months long — affects marketing. “You're really getting married to the person when you sign up with Internet of Things software — this is pretty big enterprise relationship,” he says.

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Jaimie Anzelone, the Director of Marketing Communications at Sitehands. This interview focuses on how she helped build the marketing infrastructure for a startup that spun out of another 25-year old company. Jaimie talks about the challenges posed by the pandemic and how the organization communicates with their technical community and customer community.

Highlights * Jaimie starts the interview by providing some insight into her marketing career and she mentions how she got her first exposure by writing about FinTech. Jaimie started a blog called FunTech to explore a lot of the new companies offering payment functionality (i.e., Venmo). * Jaimie mentions how she sees different companies emerging every day, and that's what attracted her to the IT services space. * Jaimie talks about the company's ideal customer profile, which would be any large enterprise company that needs IT field services. * The company provides the technicians at the customer locations, to help, support, maintain, upgrade the different technologies that they have in their organization. * She talks about how the company is dealing with the current pandemic situation and coping with the new environment of remote working. * To pivot and support their clients, they are working from their client's conference room and setting up remote working stations. * Sitehands has big fortune 500 companies, even some smaller, medium-sized businesses as their clients. A lot of initial clients, who were very large enterprises, stemmed from relationships that existed with the original IT company. * Sitehands is a provider community, and their technicians are going out in the field and implementing and delivering the work. * She talks about the company's efforts to make sure that their technician community feels secure and knows that there is still work for them...but it’s just a different environment. * She also discusses how the Coronavirus pandemic has impacted businesses and mentioned how many organizations are trying to figure out how to keep their business running while still complying with company standards, security, and regulations. * She talks about her concerns regarding remote working and its proper implementation, which is impossible without appropriate collaborative tools and the right setup. * In current times, communication is quite different, and the channels which are brought into use are changing, and communication has become more personalized. * Sitehands offers a great platform that allows their clients to see the work being done in real-time, which is often a big differentiator from other IT service providers. * The company had no brand presence on social media platforms until Jaimie came onboard. * In the past two years, the company has grown tremendously on the social channels, specifically Facebook and LinkedIn. These channels are the most important as they've implemented significant marketing campaigns across both of them. * If a person wants to acquire their services, they could get a technician right through their website and at their location within a few hours. * The company has over 30,000 technicians and are working with big companies in 107 countries across the world. * The company uses retargeting to stay in front of prospects and these campaigns run across their social channels. * Sitehands strives to deliver their services to their clients regardless of location. * She talks about their marketing strategies, which include blog writing, podcasts, and speaking events, which will not happen because of the Coronavirus.

Key Points * Sitehands provide essential service throughout the world and ensures that your technology is running and maintained. * Sitehands was started with a clear goal to make a faster, higher quality, innovative approach to delivering IT field services to big companies. * While sharing her work experience at Sitehands, she mentions that "Her first year at Sitehands was all about building that foundation of our brand and getting our name out there. And building up a certain level of trust and credibility.” * Sitehands has a whole provider team that continually looks at the different client sites and builds relationships with the provider communities throughout client's websites to ensure that they're always providing local technicians to their clients, regardless of where the location is. * Sitehands launched a university as a way to offer domain-specific and client-specific training to the technicians. Through Sitehands University, they learn new skills and prepare them for the work that's being done on-site. It allows them to make sure that they're all following the same standardized procedure when they're delivering work.

Resources * Jaimie Anzelone: LinkedIn * Sitehands: Website * Sitehands: LinkedIn * Sitehands: Facebook * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown and Tristan Pelligrino chat with Josh Blanton, VP of marketing at Corevist. This interview takes a deeper look into Josh’s past experience as a marketing consultant- where he worked with both startups and larger organizations like Cisco. Josh highlights some of the key demand generation activities at Corevist and discusses how the company competes with larger organizations by focusing on organic content for the enterprise.

Highlights * Josh starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his background and how he enjoys the faster paced environment of a startup. * Josh introduces the audience to Corevist, which is a B2B commerce platform that directly integrates with a company’s ERP system - most notably SAP. * The company is helping its large enterprise clients move to online commerce and avoid archaic situations with fax orders, phone orders, etc. * Josh breaks down the company’s lead generation efforts which mostly stem from the development of organic content and paid ads (to organic content). * Corevist does not have BDRs or SDRs in place to sell to the enterprises - nearly 95% of leads come from inbound marketing efforts. * Josh breaks down the approach he took when arriving at Corevist, which was to initially identify what’s working and validate using real data. * At many tech companies, there are large investors in place and there’s access to a wide range of resources - at Corevist, Josh had to build something scalable without these types of resources. * A combination of SEO tools and techniques are used to drive Corevist’s organic traffic strategy - tools such as ahrefs are important to detecting what enterprise level prospects are searching for. * Identifying keywords and long-tail keywords with the right search intent have become an important part of the organic content strategy. * Generally, over the life cycle of a normal sales cycle, the company gets anywhere between 100 to 200 different clicks on thought leadership content through different channels. * Josh heavily relies on SEO and Backlinko for B2B marketing.

Key Points * Corevist has built its lead generation efforts mostly on organic content - “95% of new business comes through, organic, which is a bit unusual.” * During a long sales cycle, Josh mentions that the company often sees between 100 - 200 clicks on thought leadership content. * Josh is an avid reader and recently he and his team read the Challenger Sale. After reading he concluded that it's less sometimes about the product and more about your interaction with the buyer and in a 9 to 18-month sales cycle, there are lots of interactions, calls and sometimes it's hard to know which ones are more important than others.

Resources * Josh Blanton: LinkedIn * Corevist: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Emily Negrin Director of Global Communication and Marketing at GEOSYS. This interview focuses on Emily’s past work experience and how she transitioned from the B2B side of the food business to the agricultural world. Emily takes a deeper dive into how she helped implement marketing strategies for a 30-year old company battling a number of new agtech startups.

Highlights * Emily starts the interview by providing some insight into her past experiences prior to joining GEOSYS - she started her career with the consumer side of public relations and worked with several agencies in the Minneapolis area. * She decided to change her career from the B2B side of the food business into the world of agriculture and “Agtech.” * Emily mentions how she worked for a few years at Land O’Lakes - in their wind field business and was introduced to GEOSYS from that experience. * GEOSYS is actually an older company with over thirty years of experience in the agricultural technology industry. * The company uses satellite imagery to monitor how crops are growing across the globe and this data is used for all of the businesses “around a farmer” which include insurance companies, bankers, commodity traders and more. * Emily came on board at GEOSYS about four years ago and helped them start their marketing and communications efforts. * GEOSYS found that a variety of Silicon Valley startups surfaced within agtech and a stronger focus on marketing and communications became inevitable in order to differentiate the company from new players. * Emily talks about the difference between agency work and being on the corporate side of marketing and communications. * GEOSYS doesn’t sell anything directly to farmers and is focused on being a trusted advisor to those who are working directly with farmers. * Emily talks through an earlier initiative, which was helping business people understand the market so they could ask better questions and make better decisions themselves - it wasn’t about promoting anything around GEOSYS. * Emily describes the overarching custom journey which is very long and requires a lot of information along the way. * GEOSYS has several different levels of service, some solutions are completely custom and involve a lengthy implementation process. * The company uses social heavily to distribute content and educate the market around the types of services it provides to farmers and the entire community. * GEOSYS believes that partnership efforts and open and honest communications within the team and regular communications are important for company growth. * She talks about how they are using content in the form of blog posts and interactive presentations (produced using Microsoft Sway). * She mentions that they have done promotional posts through LinkedIn and have seen success in using the LinkedIn platform to reach people. * GEOSYS has a dedicated business development team that's in charge of sales and working with prospects and customers. * They also have a customer success team and are looking at ways to grow and help troubleshoot issues facing customers.

Key Points * Emily talks about some focus areas moving forward, “...we're also starting to take a focus of how can we use some of the data and insights that we have gained in our 30 plus years of operation to help people make some better decisions about sustainable agriculture and….where can we have a greater impact and help them best utilize their resources so that they can continue to do what they love. And a lot of times that's farming.” * Emily mentions how the technology surrounding the farmer has changed quite a bit, “You know, when you think...today's farmer has more technology in the cab of their tractor than the first spaceship that launched to the moon. You have big players like John Deere that are developing all sorts of technology for inside of their machines.”

Resources * Emily Negrin: LinkedIn * GEOSYS: Website * GEOSYS: Twitter * GEOSYS: LinkedIn * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Mae Cichelli, Senior Marketing Manager at Bluedot. This interview focuses on Mae’s past work experience and how she transitioned between B2C and B2B in the retail and sports industries. Mae talks about how the company transitioned into ABM and what was involved when the team decided to get more focused with targeting.

Highlights * Mae starts the conversation by sharing her past work experience with both B2C and B2B technology companies. * She talks about her experience in the sports industry where she sold software to sports teams. * After selling software to sports teams, Mae worked as a Marketing Director for the University of San Francisco and helped them with selling tickets online, implementing mobile ticketing, building an app, launching an app...and really just taking care of season tickets holders. * Mae talks about Bluedot’s ideal customers, which include tolling companies and enterprise companies who can take advantage of a customer’s location (mobile ordering with retail or restaurants, etc.). * Instead of getting cash out, Bluedot helps their customers “unlock the power of place” and use location data to enhance experiences for their customers. * She talks about how working with enterprise clients requires a lot of specific needs, which drove Bluedot into more of an ABM strategy. * Mae talks about some of the challenges with website traffic that’s not targeted - this led to leads that weren’t really qualified and contributed to a lot of “noise” with their marketing. * After analyzing the leads and realizing that a lot of traffic was noise, the team decided to analyze the types of traffic that they wanted - and really honed in on their SEO strategy. * The company makes strong use of introductions made by investors and this process has really helped get their organization to the next level. * Bluedot is very thoughtful about content and strives to be just very deeply embedded in the industry. * She loves launching different kinds of campaigns, with different types of content formats, to strike up engagement with prospects. * Bluedot strives to have a fair mix of new top of funnel content, which is educational. * She explains that once a prospect has downloaded their demo app, they send them an unexpectedly delightful message - this helps to delight a prospect right away. * Mae talks about some of the resources she finds helpful - one of them being the local Marketo events and webinars which helps in developing more complex campaigns.

Episode Key Points * Bluedot is a geofencing software for apps and their tagline is “unlock the power of place”. She explains how geofencing works and how it can be used to trigger unique experiences for customers. * Bluedot’s key to success is that they have some incredible AEs who have built really strong relationships with their customers and have always been in touch with marketing along the way. * Mae talks about how COVID-19 has impacted the business, with events getting canceled at the last minute. She states that offering digital solutions (alternatives to in-person events) in 2020 will be a very important component to surviving throughout the year.

Resources * Mae Cichelli: LinkedIn * Bluedot: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Scott Ablin, Chief Marketing Officer at Keeper Security, Inc. During this podcast episode, Scott talks about his past work experience and explains some of the key marketing initiatives around promoting data protection and preventing password-related breaches.

Highlights * Scott starts the conversation by sharing his past work experience as a B2B tech marketer. * Scott discusses how he has run marketing organizations at healthcare companies and IT organizations. * Scott talks about Keeper and mentions how it’s a SaaS business, focusing on cybersecurity and password management. * Keeper works on a subscription model that is applicable to business enterprises as well as independent consumers. * Keeper is Scott’s first venture into the security space because when he decided to leave healthcare IT, he wanted to be part of an organization where he felt at home. * Keeper prevents password-related data breaches and cyber threats. * Keeper reduces the risk of password-related data breaches for the consumer by offering a modest subscription. * Keeper is a great fit for financial services, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, hospitals, hotel chains, retailers, all of these, big businesses and segments, that possess customer data. * Scott talks about how he figures out how to best leverage the finite resources, how to prioritize efforts, energies, and budget. * Keeper’s revenue is derived predominantly from the SMB market, but it also serves the enterprise segment as well. * Keeper has an incredibly viable market-validated solution for enterprise customers. * Experiential stuff, conferences, and trade shows are the few digital efforts that are put in practice to be enterprise-driven in nature. * Keeper has a very effective lead generation strategy, focused on a 14-day free business trial. * Currently, Keeper generates 1200 to 1400 MQLs per month. * Keeper is leveraging G2 and other software review sites to validate its offering with prospects. * Scott discusses the competition of the consumer market on app stores, highly polluted, highly commoditized with free versions.

Key Points * The company’s ideal customer profile is any company that transacts business online and has workers that engage in business activities using online transactions. * Scott mentions how Keeper has swapped out the marketing automation platform and migrated to HubSpot and built out content.

Resources * Scott Ablin: LinkedIn * Keeper Security, Inc: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Rob Yoegel, the Senior Director of Marketing and Angel Guarisma, the Director of Content at Linode. Rob and Angel break down their past work experience in marketing and how they shifted into their roles at Linode. This interview focuses on how a marketing team can employ technical content, in a written format, to generate demand and fuel an overall marketing strategy.

Highlights * Rob starts the interview by sharing some of his marketing experience and mentions how he was a journalist by trade. * Rob mentions that with his journalism degree, he had a dream to one day become the Sports Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And even though he got a position at the Inquirer, he quickly learned that a career in journalism wasn’t the future. * Angel starts the conversation by providing some insight into his past work experience which includes various roles; as an engineer, teacher, and a developer. * Angel and Rob provide some background on Linode - it’s a cloud computing provider that gives someone everything they need to start and run a business on the web. * Linode has almost two decades of experience and evolved with the industry over the last twenty years. * During the interview, the guests discussed Linode’s ideal customer profile - consisting mostly of developers and then enterprises who are using cloud technology. * Rob talks about marketing at Linode and mentions how the company has relied heavily on word of mouth marketing and traditional trade shows to drive revenue. * One of the ways the company has grown is through its highly technical writing and a dedicated effort to high quality content on the blog. * Right now, the company employs a large marketing team with nearly 20 employees - but most importantly, almost half of the members are on the technical writing team. * The company has grown to attract SMB and Enterprise customers and the technical content has been a major driving force for garnering interest in these areas. * Angel mentions how Linode is the largest independent cloud provider in the world and because of that strength, the company must have a focus on thought leadership. * Rob mentioned how Linode is building out a Rev-Ops team, which includes sales leaders, sales directors, to drive the customer base with larger spends. * Linode believes in the Paid, Earned, and Owned model and does a lot of paid media buys with Google ad words, both display, and search, to drive traffic to high quality technical content. * Linode focused on consumer’s and developers’ journeys which includes few calls to actions such as going to their website, creating an account, and spinning up services for $5 a month. * Linode also has a Reseller Program and Partner Program and a dedicated team of individuals working to bring on those partners. * Rob explained how Linode offers the same core services like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure - so Linode competes with some of the largest IT companies out there. * Linode provides support 24x7 and 365 days per year, which is totally free for all customers and includes phone support. * Angel talks about how his team has tested starting with a video first to drive the highly technical written formats. * Linode.com/docs gets millions of visitors and page views a month because of the content marketing strategies Angel’s team has followed in the past years. * Content development at Linode is treated the same as software development, which really helps them focus and get content published regularly. * Linode’s newsletter is composed around the two-week intervals and shares some insights into researching and writing all of the pieces of developed content.

Key Points * While talking about the history of technical writing at Linode, Angel said: “the idea was to have content that inspires the user so that not only they just choose our platform, but feel competent enough to deploy their entire business on it and feel comfortable enough to try to troubleshoot some of the stuff themselves.” * According to Rob, “...every marketer is challenged to make sure that they’re delivering the proper message and content to the right person at the right time, in the way that they consume the content.”

Resources * Rob Yoegel: LinkedIn * Angel Guarisma: LinkedIn * Linode: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Jennifer Rathgaber, the Senior Marketing Manager at SQA (Software Quality Associates). Jennifer talks about her tenure with a B2B SaaS company focused on associations/nonprofits and her transition to a role at SQA. With SQA, Jennifer is now focused on modernizing a business which has been relatively stagnant on the marketing side of things for almost twenty years.

Highlights * Jennifer talks about her past experiences in the marketing world - recently transitioning from a B2B SaaS company. * In previous roles, Jennifer has worn several different hats - responsible for demand generation, content development, digital marketing, branding, and every other leg of marketing that you can think of. * Jennifer discusses how SQA is primarily a services firm and it helps other organizations transform digitally. * SQA is predominantly a regional company, focused mostly in the New England area. * For the most part, SQA has experienced stagnant growth as of late and there are initiatives in place now to optimize for growth. * Before arriving, SQA really had a passive marketing strategy, where an agency was driving the team and Jennifer came in to really kick off demand generation. * Right now, Jennifer is crafting the customer journey and still working through the process. * SQA actually has two sides of their business - services and then staff augmentation where they are responsible for recruiting and placing specific roles. * SQA is using a variety of pillar pieces to then use for a foundation of shorter pieces of content - webinars, panel discussions and longer white papers. * Jennifer has found that it’s important to weave in thought leadership content in a variety of situations - from PPC to email outreach. * Jennifer has leveraged internal subject matter experts to get a sense of the ideal customer at SQA. Many internal resources have been buyers of their types of services in the past.

Key Points * Jennifer compares and contrasts services with B2B SaaS, “In the B2B SaaS space, that was a little more black and white, where if you hit somebody with an email, they raise their hand saying, yes, I want a free demo - that's an MQL. If they go to an SDR, then they go to the sales team. The services space I'm finding is a lot more different. The services space is more of a long game.” * Jennifer mentioned “I have to stop being so focused on MQLs and be more focused on the relationships that we're building. Whether it be through marketing or through sales or a combination of both...”

Resources * Jennifer Rathgaber: LinkedIn * SQA: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Brooke Browne, the Marketing Manager at Smartbridge. This interview focuses on her past experience in marketing, often operating in smaller teams. During the chat, Brooke talks about her priorities at Smartbridge and how the company uses the talent of all employees to contribute to their content marketing initiatives.

Highlights * Brooke mentions how she started her career in marketing while she was getting her college degree. * Brooke has been working with Smartbridge for the past eight years. * Smartbridge is an enterprise business technology consultancy, and targets those companies that are looking to transform their digital roadmap. * Smartbridge deals with a lot of robotic process automation - upgrading, and modernizing ERP systems, CRM, ECM...all the acronyms. * The digital presence of Smartbridge was non-existent when she joined the organization eight years ago and she’s been a big part of leading the charge ever since. * During the initial years, content marketing was their fundamental marketing strategy and remains a core focus of the company’s plans. * Brooke chats about one of the first blog posts that generated interest - it was a very simple “how to” post that generated traffic and led to revenue. * At present, Smartbridge uses a wide range of marketing techniques such as content marketing, search engine marketing, advertisements on the radio and more. * She mentions that Smartbridge is hyper-focused on content marketing and publishes their content on different social media platforms and through podcasts. * Smartbridge is quite consistent with articles and writing posts but also works on video content to drive more interest. * Smartbridge uses a lot of sales intelligence tools that help them understand what a particular company is looking for (intent-based data). * While getting started with podcasting, the organization concentrates on authentic thought leadership and sharing a little information about them; to people who want to listen, even if it's competitors. * At Smartbridge, business analysts, data scientists, developers - all contribute to marketing content and the company ensures this is outlined in the hiring process. * Their hiring process is quite transparent; a candidate may or may not be a marketing person but must contribute to their marketing and sales efforts. * When producing content, the marketing team gets help from a variety of employees - even if it’s just doing a screen recording or a rough draft to get a piece started. * Smartbridge implements an incentive program, so anytime an employee gets published, he/she receives a $50 gift card.

Key Points * According to Brooke, what was old is now new again, “We're doing radio ads locally which is a fun thing. We even dabbled with the idea of running some billboards.” * Brooke said that “...cadence is so important. It's always challenging when we're always limited on time and what we can do. So we have to triage what we are working on and what's going to reach the audience. You know, the best audience has the best time and you can do what you can with the data that you have, but a lot of it's a combination of luck, experimenting and data-driven insights.”

Resources * Brooke Browne: LinkedIn * Smartbridge: Website * Smartbridge: Podcast * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Courtney Porcella, Marketing Director at coUrbanize.The interview takes a look at her past experiences with marketing and PR agencies for B2B Technology companies. Courtney then takes a deeper dive into her current role leading a marketing team at coUrbanize, a technology company that connects new real estate projects with the surrounding community.

Highlights * Courtney talks about her background where she studied marketing and worked in marketing for ten years with various B2B tech companies. * Before transitioning to an in-house role at a technology company, Courtney talks about her four years working for marketing and PR agencies. * Courtney breaks down some of the pros and cons between agency life and being an in-house marketer. * Courtney discusses how she’s had a relatively linear career path, by serving the commercial real estate industry, and eventually ending up at coUrbanize. * coUrbanize is the real estate startup where she is leading a marketing team-including lead generation, branding, and communications. * coUrbanize is a tech company that focuses on connecting real estate companies with people - these are often cases where large real estate projects are a part of an area and getting community buy-in is critical to the overall success of a project. * coUrbanize serves large real estate companies that are owning, maintaining, and developing buildings. * coUrbanize specifically works with people within the real estate company who are tasked with building projects. * coUrbanize did a brand strategy exercise to get some insights around how they can better position their company. * Courtney breaks down inbound versus outbound outreach and explains how content marketing helps them get customers. * coUrbanize does a mixture of digital marketing content and also live in-person marketing. * When coming on board at coUrbanize, Courtney was supplanting a marketing function that was relying mostly on junior talent and one of her major goals was to show immediate value to the board and senior management. * One of Courtney’s biggest challenges early on was hitting the company’s Q4 number and she breaks down how she approached that goal. * The organization’s 2020 goal is to become recognized experts by more people in the real estate industry. * Courtney’s reading a weekly newsletter called a very good copywriter that publishes micro-content. * She also follows companies and like-minded people on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Key Points * Courtney talks about the importance of brand and her focus early on “The reason why I wanted to do the brand work was because I think there's always an opportunity to assess your brand. Big brands typically do it, you know, every 6 to 12 months. When you're a smaller company, you don't have the cash flow to have a brand agency do it.” * Sometimes small changes can have a large impact and Courtney talked about this concept as she states, “...our demo request page just needed some additional design quality. When you clicked to get a demo, it opened a new page. And even that experience felt a little bit disjointed. So a really easy thing...we spent about three hours redesigning our demo request page to increase the conversions because we were already getting a lot of people to land there.”

Resources * Courtney Porcella: LinkedIn * Courtney Porcella: Twitter * coUrbanize: Website

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Nick Waterhouse, Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. This interview takes a deep dive into his past work experience as an entrepreneur - when he built and sold a company that made headphones. After exiting his headphone company, Nick took on a role as Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. Evaluator Group is an IT analyst consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

Highlights * Nick starts the interview by providing some insight into his entrepreneurial efforts when he started and then ultimately sold a headphone company that specialized in ergonomic, memory foam earbuds. * When starting the headphone company in China, Nick was introduced into a wide range of digital marketing disciplines and realized how much he enjoys spending his time there. * After a period of success, Nick describes how he sold his headphone company and decided to dive into the marketing field head-on by working for an IT analyst firm. * Nick explains the fundamental similarities and differences between B2B and B2C companies. * Nick describes how a consumer can easily see a set of headphones and understand its cost structure, whereas the same is not the case with working for a consulting firm. * Nick takes some time to provide a description of Evaluator Group’s ideal customer profile, which really includes two major types of customers - vendors and end-users. * For vendors, the company mostly relies upon relationships with major players such as IBM, VMWare, etc. * From an end-user perspective, Evaluator Group’s ideal customer is anybody who’s looking for a new solution in the data storage industry, or a person who's having a problem with the way they're currently managing their data. * Nick discusses the challenges with marketing the company’s services because, in this day and age, there are so many types of roles who manage a company’s data - IT Specialists, Cloud Specialist and a range of other titles.

Webinars are one of the successful approaches to attract potential customers - and the company really tries to keep them unscripted and “personal.”
Product reviews of data storage products attracts prospects and also serves as a great tool for marketing.
The company is completely unbiased and does not have any pay-to-play relationships with vendors. All information available on their website is researched by analysts.
Nick’s team sits down and schedules video interviews with either past clients, current clients, or potential future clients which have helped them in relationship building.
Promoting webinars natively on BrightTalk and pushing videos out on social media ensures the company gets the most out of these webinar and video assets.
Video interviews are posted on various social media platforms and in emails which further adds a lot in relationship building.
The company is focusing on SEO and it’s working efficiently for them so far. In-depth, free information on the site is what’s attracting the right prospects.

Key Points * Nick pinpoints the basic similarity between B2B and B2C companies and said “in terms of digital marketing, you're really just selling a product. So...I was selling headphones before, now I'm basically selling a service. But it's still, somebody's knowledge, solving a problem for somebody.” * On Evaluator’s website, a prospect can find every single product in this space, access a detailed writeup and view a product brief - all of which are free and beneficial for people who are actually looking to make a purchasing decision. * Each analyst at the organization has a different technology they cover and they are some of the foremost experts in their respective fields.

Resources * Nick Waterhouse: LinkedIn * Evaluator Group: Website * Evaluator Group: LinkedIn * Evaluator Group: Twitter * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Kristen Moore, Chief Marketing Officer at InVia Robotics. The interview focuses on

past work experience and how she’s applied a lot of lessons learned to her current role with a “robotics-as-a-service” startup. She also takes a deeper dive into her marketing strategy and how she’s focused on collaborating with the sales team.

Highlights * Kristen started her professional career in telecom, working for companies like Lucent Technologies and AT&T, before transitioning to other tech companies. * Later on, she moved to digital media and other internet-related companies and software as service e-commerce companies. * She mentions that throughout her career, she has always been interested in new technology and figuring out how to bring that to market. * She discusses her roles as a contributor, in areas such as advertising, business development and even PR, which helped her figure out the right combination of marketing and how to make marketing more powerful overall. * Searching for creativity in her role and new technologies brought her to InVia Robotics. * InVia Robotics provides a mobile automation solution to e-commerce companies and helps them become more efficient. * InVia also helps e-commerce companies to fulfill their orders. * Kristen discusses the antiquated processes (at the warehouse) that are often in place for many e-commerce companies. * Figuring out how to implement a technical and complicated solution and determining how to select the right solution is the main challenge InVia has dealt with along the way. * Kristen mentioned that e-commerce has become very popular and the whole shopping process is frictionless, but a buyer doesn’t have knowledge that it creates a lot of pressure on the vendors. * The ideal customer for InVia is any customer that’s selling products online, but not on Amazon, and needs help to be more efficient so that buyers get the right product to the right people quickly. * She talks about how a common theme in her career is tackling technologies that are new and that often don’t have a precedent in place within the market. * The customer’s journey of an organization is quite different from other technologies - a lot of the journey involves helping people understand automation and the importance of the new world. * InVia Robotics has established a mobile and agile solution that is different from traditional automation which was very fixed and rigid. * InVia has been in the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, and CNBC. * Instead of going out and selling equipment, InVia sells robotics as a service, which is quite different from how other solutions are sold to the same types of customers. * She states that trusting your team is helpful in understanding goals and will help you find a solution. * She mentions that she has a virtual team and tools like Slack and Zoom are used for seamless team communication.

Key Points * Kristen talked about her role in the organization and how she gathered research early on, “We asked customers questions about how they felt about their current system. What were the things that they thought were challenges for them?” * While talking about sales and new initiatives, she mentioned that “this year is really focusing on the sales support materials, effectively communicating what we do and the value that we add.” * With regards to working in a startup, Kristen states “I mean, you have to just sort of loosen the reins and let those failures happen and learn from them and let everybody else learn from them too.”

Resources * Kristen Moore: LinkedIn * Kristen Moore: Email * InVia Robotics: Website * InVia Robotics: Twitter * InVia Robotics: LinkedIn * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Rebecca White, Vice President of Marketing at Databook. During the podcast episode, Rebecca talks about her past working experience in B2B organizations. Her experience stems from mostly field sales organizations where she’s driven pipeline from a marketing perspective. Rebecca also discusses her current role at Databook which is a startup that differentiates itself as an Enterprise Customer Intelligence platform.

Highlights * Rebecca graduated with a degree in English and feels this helps her understand how to analyze information and share information which resonates with people. * Rebecca starts the podcast by sharing information about her past experience working with B2B organizations and building marketing functions. * She talks about how she got into marketing after taking jobs at an entry-level after school. * She spent about ten years in marketing, consulting, running a marketing strategy company. * Rebecca introduces Databook as a platform that reduces the time that Account Execs spend on research and then provides them with a financial case for change so that they can close more deals faster, which drives pipeline acceleration across the board. * She discusses how it’s important for marketers to have industry expertise, because it’s easier to learn a product than it is to learn about an entire market. * She discusses the marketing function of startups which change every three to six months. * Rebecca states that it’s good to be a generalist because tools change, flows change - find out what works and what doesn’t work. * When discussing the platform, Rebecca mentions that apart from the regulatory, compliance-related part, one needs to have the right data to send the right messages to people. * Tech stack and data is a storyboarding process because you need different inputs and outputs - the entire process is like putting a puzzle together. * Setting up a foundation, making sure everything is correct, making sure that, everything is in compliance, building out the messages, building out all the materials are things that are required to accelerate the business. * Creating an inbound engine is a lot more expensive than creating an outbound engine, but it bears much more fruit in the long term. * One of Rebecca’s early initiatives was at least installing a “billboard” for the Databook brand and this involved a simple website, with clear messaging in place. * According to Rebecca, Digital marketing has created an incredible amount of noise - fruit that’s a little bit too ripe. * Rebecca discusses the importance of creating a valuable network and how this is as important as following/reading publications or other online resources.

Key Points * While talking about the benefits of an English degree and moving to marketing, she said “you can do anything because it's just about learning how to sort of analyze information and disseminate the information so that it resonates with people.” * According to Rebecca, inbound takes longer and is more expensive, but has larger benefits long term. She stated “I'm always focusing at least 50% of my time on trying to move us forward on inbound, which includes the branding and the corporate comm and the awareness activities...because that drives people to your website.”

Resources * Rebecca White: LinkedIn * Databook: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Gaurav Harode, Founder of Enablix. During this interview, Gaurav talks about his past work experience in enterprise software and how he embarked upon his journey of creating Enablix - a company founded in 2017. Gaurav talks about the challenges sales professionals face with organizing and sharing the best content and pinpoints how technology can help them break through the noise.

Highlights * Gaurav starts the conversation by sharing some background information about his fifteen years of working experience in financial services, selling risk, and compliance products. * He talks about his experience working at Oracle leading their go to market and product management strategy. * Enablix was founded in 2017 with the vision of making the process easier for B2B and product marketers, to manage content and help their sales team. * The ideal customer’s profile is a midsize or small organization that includes a salesforce of one hundred sales representatives or less. * The main challenge of many of Enablix’s customers is utilizing content throughout the entire sales process - once a campaign is done, or sales meeting is complete. * The primary driving force of Enablix is to allow marketers to scale their content and ensure that the content doesn't get lost within the typical cloud storage platforms. * He talks about the sales process of Enablix and how, as a startup, he really focused on just getting feedback from prospective customers versus trying to close immediately. * He shares some of his highs and lows which he has encountered during his startup’s journey. * Enablix’s top priority is their prospect list and this ensures that all outreach is highly targeted and is within the ideal customer profile. * The organization uses blog content to educate prospects and to fuel engagement within emails and other outreach. * One of the biggest challenges many salespeople face is personalization because automation most often prevents highly personalized emails. * Gaurav talks about the challenge he faces with being consistent with outreach because he values a lot of personalization in his process.

Key Points * Enablix works with B2B marketing teams and enables them to organize the content, as the content is the nerve center of the marketing and sales process. * Gaurav said that “There's no automation tool that we're using. We have a bunch of different email templates and ideas keep growing every week.” * One of the challenges which Gaurav faces is being able to be consistent about outreach while he folds in a lot of personalization and research with each prospect.

Resources * Gaurav Harode: LinkedIn * Enablix: Website * Enablix: LinkedIn * Enablix: Twitter * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies * DC Marketing Talks: Website

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Joan Silver, the VP of Marketing at Sixgill. Joan talks about her experience in digital marketing - which began with an internet pioneer, Mapquest. Joan talks about the addiction of going along for the ride in a venture like Mapquest and how some of what she learned applies today. With experiences of more than a decade in B2B marketing, Joan brings a lot to the table with her role at Sixgill.

Highlights * Joan starts the conversation by providing some insight into her past working experience in digital marketing. * She started her career with Mapquest which offered free maps and driving directions to anyone who had internet access. * She worked with Mapquest for over a decade and learned about B2B marketing as the company transitioned from B2C to more enterprise customers. * At Mapquest, she worked with brands like Walmart who used their services for transportation, logistics, and supply chain applications. * She explained how Mapquest launched her career in the combination of B2B, B2C branding. * The goal of MapQuest was to make maps ubiquitous, to make online digital mapping ubiquitous and accessible to everyone. * Joan discusses the exciting challenges with Sixgill and how the company helps others manage the data associated with the internet of things. * Sixgill also helps companies in solving the accurate and continuous collection of data, through maintaining its integrity with a blockchain solution for data security. In this way, Sixgill makes sure that data does not tamper. * For the most part, Sixgill is a B2B tech company, but there are some applications applicable in a B2C context. * Joan mentioned that a journey from MapQuest to Sixgill has been remarkably successful and a great learning opportunity. * Joan discusses the types of customers the company targets and how it’s more of a horizontal market versus a select group of industry verticals. * Sixgill has worked successfully within the construction space and healthcare, by helping companies eliminate the manual process of data automation. * Sixgill is associated with quite a few cutting edge technologies and video AI is a very interesting use case for customers across several industries. * The organization emphasizes on customer needs and how they respond and adjust throughout their journey. * Joan mentions the types of personas they’re working with - mostly focused on individuals leading innovation within companies. * Sixgill targets a particular group of people who might be involved in data collection and grappling with people, places, things, and context challenges that they’re solving.

Key Points * Joan highlighted the importance of communication in a startup (especially with marketing and other teams), “...it is a continual process of digital communication where we're always checking in. We do have the weekly calls ...they are super important. And they are important to have with our product and engineering teams. I often sit in and at least listen to some of the technical challenges that are in play and how they're resolving them.” * Joan mentioned... “waking up a market is a very interesting and challenging thing to tackle.”

Resources * Joan Silver: LinkedIn * Sixgill: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Veronique Lafargue, Vice President of Marketing at STRIVR. This interview takes a deeper look into Veronique’s past working experience and highlights how she helped build one of the first marketing teams for Google Cloud. She also covers how she transitioned form content marketing to more of a marketing leadership role at STRIVR.

Highlights * Veronique starts the conversation by sharing some of her past working experiences at companies like Google. * She then talks about some of the earlier efforts she made as a content marketer where she worked for over ten years. * Veronique led some of the first content marketing campaigns for Google Cloud, focusing on Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa target audiences. * In many ways, content marketing for enterprise cloud services was very new and she had a passion for storytelling to connect with B2B buyers. * With her success on Google Cloud, Veronique transitioned to lead the content strategy for all of GSuite internationally. * Veronique switched to her current company about one and a half years ago. * She talks about STRIVR and how it’s a leader in immersive learning and virtual reality training solutions which was incubated at Stanford University. * STRIVR started off early by signing about 14 teams in college football, professional football, and NBA, and even the U.S Ski Team. * Veronique talks about how they moved from training for athletes to training for employees and associates, and especially the art of frontline workers. * STRIVR has developed a unique methodology based on learning and development expertise and uses the unique benefits of VR to train people. * STRIVR’s ideal customer is someone who can see how learning and development today can impact the business. * She the core departments that STRIVR typically works with, mostly starting with the HR organization of a company and then moving to other departments who are interested in the benefits of immersive learning. * She talks about how STRIVR rebranded themselves by building a strong foundation and built their website from scratch. * According to Veronique, influencers are really important to spread the word and connect with the executive level buyer. * STRIVR has a software platform, where one can collect a lot of information, push content, and manage content. * She discusses the importance of the orchestration between what the marketing team does and what sales needs. * Salesloft is a tool that is used internally for driving a lot of discussion and orchestration, and how salespeople connect with prospects. * STRIVR really focuses on the long-term vision of their customer, there are a lot of qualification steps required to become a fit.

Key Points * Veronique said “We've developed really a methodology that is based on learning and development expertise. So how do you train people, how do you use some of the unique benefits of VR to train people?” * Veronique quoted that “We're all brand ambassadors and it's really something I truly believe in.”

Resources * Veronique Lafargue: LinkedIn * STRIVR: Website * Salesloft: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Adam Kranitz, Senior Director of Marketing, Brand & Communications at CloudCheckr. This interview takes a look at Adam’s past work experience which includes more than 20 plus years in creative services and technology marketing. Adam takes a deep dive into his role at CloudCheckr and shares his perspective on storytelling and other marketing campaign tactics.

Highlights * Adam Krantiz starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his past work experience - starting with more technical roles before transitioning into marketing. * He started his career as a video editor, graphic designer, and producer of corporate videos and has seen a transition from analog tape to digital to high definition content. * He took his first job right after college working for a video production company in Washington, D.C. * He joined CloudCheckr four years ago and is focused on cloud computing, AWS, and how businesses can transform how they function, using the power of the public cloud. * He explains why he decided to initially take up a producer role, creative role, and then eventually marketing to sell and market services, but not be the guy behind the computer screen. * This career change was quite transformational as he could actually focus on storytelling using any type of media instead of just depending on video or graphic designers. * He talks about the marketing field in general and how it’s one of those disciplines that perhaps touches more fields of study than any other. * He breaks down the struggles of marketers which involves the psychology of a buyer and the ability to understand how to use technology in the service of a story. * CloudCheckr works in the industry of cloud computing and especially with those who are actively using a public cloud. * CloudCheckr is using a combination of Salesforce as CRM of record and Marketo for its marketing automation platform. * Adam breaks down some of the challenges marketers have with data and discusses how CloudCheckr commits to cleansing their data and appending their marketing/contact data with the latest information. * At CloudCheckr, Adam is primarily responsible for brand messaging, communications, external comms, copywriting, creative services, etc.

CloudCheckr is currently working on creating a more personal connection and establishing more of a humanized brand - introducing more webinar content is just one of the tactics.
CloudCheckr is a partner-centric organization and its partner channel ranges from mid to large-sized companies.
Adam uses an app called Feedly which is an RSS reader that helps him understand what is happening in the marketplace.
Adam is an avid podcast listener as well and said it’s one of the easiest and free sources of consuming information for free.

Key Points * Adam Krantiz said that “We work in the industry of cloud computing and the big topic among enterprise buyers these days, especially those who are actively using the public cloud is the idea of data lakes. There's so much data collection happening that's just getting dumped into….a database. It's just growing and growing and growing and no analytics are done on top of that.” * Adam mentioned the future of marketing and what he’s looking forward to, “The amount of tools that we have are at our disposal as digital marketers is unparalleled.It's amazing, from HubSpot to Marketo and everything in between. I really am excited to see what in the next five years, how companies like Adobe...bring AI and machine learning to the field of marketing to help us as marketers do less with our guts and more with those data lakes that we're filling up really quickly.”

Resources * CloudCheckr: Website * Adam Kranitz: LinkedIn * Feedly: Website * Bloomberg: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Blair Felter, Marketing Director at vXchnge. The interview focuses on her past experiences with programmatic advertising before shifting over to an in-house role with a technology company. Blair also breaks down how she’s built marketing functions at a few technology companies, blending content, advertising and other marketing tactics to drive demand.

Highlights * Blair starts the conversation by providing insight into her past working experience which includes oil, gas, pharma and the fintech industries. * She talks about her working experience and how she helped a mobile app company and fintech financial services company to start their marketing departments. * She also talks about her responsibilities at vXchnge, which starts with establishing the brand and getting the other core components of marketing in place. * Blair highlights what vXchnge does and who the company serves. vXchnge is a data center and co-location operating service provider. * The company mostly focuses on an organization that has to process online transactions and needs their services for auditing purposes - this is the company’s ideal customer for the most part. * vXchnge is a data center that is engineered for perfection and has an incredible SLA uptime rate. * She mentions the fundamental difference between vXchnge and its competitors which have built locations in a variety of growth markets. * She discusses how the company has evolved its marketing since she joined and she’s witnessed the focus shift more towards doing shorter blogs and videos instead of long-form blog posts. * She believes that a customer needs to know what you’re doing for them...plain and simple and this comes through education. * In 2018 to 2019, their traffic grew 525% only by doing SEO building and just being smarter with the content. * She explains the importance of Google reviews and how it helped vXchnge in establishing customer relationships and allowed people to find them based on their location. * vXchnge has a nurture program that is purely based on educating customers - the focus is more about the content and moving them into sales when they’re ready. * For generating long term content, vXchnge relies mostly on organic engagement with a target rollout of one blog post per week. * vXchnge is concentrating on tech talks and webinars as the content has worked quite well over the last year. * Blair mentions how webinars helped them reach people in the short-term - in one scenario within a week of advertising. * One of vXchnge’s primary pieces of content is its data center migration checklist - it’s super simple, but has had a large impact on prospects. * vXchnge strives to work on the content that has less information available online and that’s where they stand out from the rest. * vXchnge uses HubSpot for marketing CRM and can track everything from their website and nurture their programs. * Blair mentioned that podcasts are her favorite outlet to learn about marketing strategies working for B2B buyers.

Key Points * Blair said that “our company built this proprietary software where basically you get to see everything, like, your cabinets, your power consumption, and bandwidth. You get to see all of that within the software. So that security blanket or that transparency that you didn't have before.” * Blair mentioned that “...from 2018 to 2019, our traffic grew 525%. Just by doing SEO, we didn't do any paid in 2019 and it was strictly organic. Just being smarter with our content.”

Resources * Blair Felter:LinkedIn * vXchange: Website * Gartner: Website * HubSpot: Website * Digital Summit: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with James Winter, VP of Marketing at Brandfolder. The interview focuses on James’ past experiences and current role working in the B2B software as a service (SaaS) industry. Brandfolder is a company that helps marketers and creatives track, manage and protect their brand elements across all platforms.

Highlights * James talks about his past working experience and the different industries he has worked with, including roles in telecom and other software firms. * James talks about the paradigm shift within brands functioning and how they have been inundated with the explosion of content, whether it’s video or photos or 3d files, or 360-degree viewer images. * James discusses the different challenges faced by brands managing various digital assets. * James mentions that he strives to get inside the customer's head and that’s what interests him the most about marketing. * Brandfolder is working on inbound marketing and G2 for reviews as it tends to influence their deals. * James discusses the typical customer’s journey which ultimately leads to a traditional SaaS opportunity stage model, ultimately leading to a purchase of a subscription or even a multi-year deal. * James explains the challenges within a customer’s journey and making them understand the difference between DAM and Cloud storage - as technology can easily solve their problems. * James explains some of the aspects of Brandfolder’s content strategies and covers a focus on generating content through videos and advertising on social media platforms. * Brandfolder is more inclined to focus on the demand-side and works on how to illustrate the brand value with the ads on paid social media platforms. * Brandfolder’s main goal is tied around a qualified pipeline and this is determined based upon the deal value after a qualification call occurs with a sales representative. * James mentions how there is reporting around leads and other marketing metrics, but the big focus on what marketing is accountable for is tied to a qualified lead pipeline.

Key Points * James Winter said “And you know, if you're selling one or two products, it can be relatively easy to distribute that asset or, organize it in the sort of typical folder base structure. But, when you're talking about these lengthy supply chains and the stakeholders at a lot of different touchpoints, it gets a little bit more tricky.” * While discussing challenges, James said that Digital Asset Management is in a weird category where it's simultaneously really new and really old - depending on the type of prospect and their familiarity with the technology.

Resources * James Winter: LinkedIn * Brandfolder: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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Episode Summary During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Sarah Peduzzi, the Director of Marketing at Jetpack Workflow. During the podcast episode, Sarah talks about her past experiences with agencies and how she applies a lot of that knowledge to her current role at a tech company. Sarah also covers how she likes getting a little deeper with one company versus working with several different companies while at an agency.

Episode Highlights * At first, Sarah breaks down some of her past roles within various agencies - ranging from a focus on analytics to paid advertising. * Sarah talks about some of her new skills she’s been able to build - email marketing, content planning and customer engagement. * Jetpack Workflow services accounting firms, CPAs, bookkeepers that typically employ anywhere from 10-15 employees. * For the most part, the company focuses on accountants who have “big four” experience but have decided to strike out on their own. * According to Sarah, the number one thing about her target audience is that they want to make sure they do not miss deadlines - and that’s where Jetpack Workflow comes into the picture. * When scaling a small operation, it’s important for her target audience to ensure work doesn’t fall through the cracks - especially during time periods where seasonal staff are introduced within the operation. * From a demand generation perspective, the company has a range of paid advertising in place - including software review platforms. * The ultimate goal for the target audience is to start a 14-day free trial and then a nurturing sequence kicks in. * The company has a flagship “grow your firm” course that’s used to educate the customer base. * The company has a relatively short sales cycle (7-14 days) for smaller firms and larger firms require more of an engagement with the sales team. * Right now, outbound is something that the company is testing as a majority of the pipeline is established through inbound marketing efforts and paid channels.

Key Points: * Sarah mentioned “So some of the things that I learned in the first few months here was...things that I thought worked well for one industry doesn't mean they're going to work well for another. Best practices that you thought you knew on the back of your hand might have to go out the window because you're talking to a completely different audience.” * Sarah talked about some of the new exposure she’s had to email marketing, “I've really enjoyed learning the email side of things. It's something that I never really thought I'd be super interested in learning and owning. But as I've gotten more comfortable in this role in the last year that's the one area where I'm like, okay, I just can't wait to really dig into understanding these sequences and how can we improve it and how can we better segment our audience.”

Resources: * Sarah Peduzzi: LinkedIn * Jetpack Workflow: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Jess Otero, CMO at BI Tech. The interview focuses on how the company uses a predominantly ABM-focused approach to marketing and ensures content answers big questions from customers. Jessica also breaks down some of the key technologies the marketing team uses - from researching accounts with DiscoverOrg to maintaining nurture sequences in Hubspot.

Episode Highlights * Jessica started out studying to be an English teacher before getting into a marketing profession. * Jessica starts the conversation by sharing her past experiences as a marketing associate with a company named Paris Technologies where she worked for ten years. * A leader in the finance department who has a lot of import and export data processes is the ideal customer for BI Tech. * BI Tech’s consulting helps companies connect with almost any kind of data source or ERP system. * Jessica discusses her approach to reaching out to companies by trying to understand the company’s problem and if they’re looking to bring automation to some of their finance workflows. * BI Tech uses a marketing intelligence tool called DiscoverOrg to find people who might be good candidates for their solutions. * Jessica talks about how BI Tech has been ahead of the curve a bit with technology and now customers seem to understand their solution a bit more. * One of the biggest shifts Jessica has seen over the years is how they package and ultimately sell their solutions - BI Tech has migrated away from traditional licensing. * As a marketer, there is a lot of automation and tools available. However, for finance professionals, the same level of automation doesn’t really exist. * SEO is not a big priority for Jessica and BI Tech right now because a lot of their target customers are not actively searching for their solution. * The company has placed a big focus on researching prospects before writing emails or doing any outbound communication. * Rather than going to large industry events, BI Tech has shifted their focus to smaller events where there’s a bigger opportunity for in-person engagement. * Jessica points out how LinkedIn played an important role in changing the game for B2B business overall. * When attending events, it’s important to do some research about the people you plan to meet in person so that you have background and context to any conversations. * HubSpot is the most important tool for BI Tech’s content-based marketing efforts. * BI Tech is connecting with its audience by sharing content on LinkedIn and gets engagement by asking questions of the day and reusing content from their blog posts. * Jessica is a big fan of podcasts and often listens to them on her way to work. One of her favourites is Groundup.

Key Points * Jessica talked about the evolution of BI Tech’s marketing and said “the biggest change though has been how we sell. We used to sell software products and people would have a perpetual license and they would pay maintenance every year. And that model is out of date now. People just want to subscribe to things.” * Jessica said, “we have this outbound to an inbound idea where we do a big export from our marketing intelligence tools where we can say companies have a certain size who are looking for a forecasting solution.”

Resources * Jessica Otero: LinkedIn * Discover.org: Website * Groundup: Website * BI Tech: Website

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Amy Sitnick, Vice President of Marketing of Greenphire. The interview takes a look into Amy’s past work experience in the financial sector and then how she got into a new field of “clintech” at Greenphire. Amy discusses some of the challenges faced with the absence of events and how her team builds a content strategy around product launches.

Episode Highlights * Amy provides some insight into her past working experience which includes roles within financial services and B2B marketing. * Amy discusses how Greenphire is a unique combination of financial services and healthcare - a term she likes to call “clintech” as the company helps facilitate financial information within the context of a clinical trial. * Greenphire helps remove all the financial and logistical obstacles from clinical trials and stakeholders around the world. * Greenphire has helped automate the process of reimbursement of Clinical trials for participants. * Amy discusses some of the initial steps she took to understand Greenphire’s ideal customer profile - including interviewing people in her own LinkedIn network and staff members when arriving at the company. * Amy discusses the importance of messaging (referencing Simon Sinek’s “Know Your Why”) and really addressing a customer’s pain points when developing content. * During the onset of quarantine, Amy discussed how the organization put an even bigger emphasis on the messaging they were placing in front of prospects and customers. * During the interview, Amy mentioned that “patient convenience” really means a different thing during a pandemic and discussed how Greenphire is aiming to focus on education during clinical trials once those become more commonplace again. * The company typically participates in over 25 trade shows each year and that strategy has changed quite a bit in 2020. * As trade shows fall off, Amy and her team shifted focus to other initiatives like a redesign/redevelopment of the company’s website. * Pausing the traditional customer journey during a pandemic allows Greenphire to focus on some of their core marketing initiatives - like messaging and the website. * One of the challenges Amy discusses is the very active fall season that may materialize - as events get turned back on. * One of the ways Amy and her team determine the schedule of content is based upon product and feature launches throughout the year. * Amy discusses a strategy where she interviews senior members of Greenphire to capture unique insights for content. * Amy discusses the process she uses to determine the types of content created - whether it’s a blog post, white paper, video or other format. * Amy breaks down the nurture process once someone consumes content - from Hubspot to the integration with Salesforce.

Episode Key Points * Amy discusses the importance of analyzing some of the big product launches of a software company and using those efforts to fuel major pillar pieces of content. * Amy discusses some of the specific steps she took to understand Greenphire’s ideal customer profile - even before coming on board as the VP of Marketing.

Resources * Amy Sitnick: LinkedIn * Amy Stinick: Twitter * Amy Stinick: Facebook * Greenphire: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Ivan Gomez, Senior Director of Global Sales Development at Tenable Network Security. Ivan Gomez walks us through some of his major lessons learned from his 25-year experience in sales development and inside sales. He discusses what it’s like to establish, launch and grow a global organization using a very strong sales cycle process.

Episode Highlights * Ivan talks about his past work experience prior to joining Tenable - he’s worked for startups and large companies. * Tenable’s mission is to empower organizations to understand and reduce their cyber risk. * Tenable provides solutions to small, medium, and larger organizations to help mitigate their cyber risk. * The sales development team has a very clear mission on what their objectives are - to drive pipeline with qualified sales opportunities. * In order to drive opportunities, the sales and marketing teams must be closely aligned. * At Tenable, sales development reports to the sales team versus the marketing team...however, it’s important to recognize that they work closely with marketing. * When a company grows, Ivan talks about the importance of having sales development report to sales versus marketing. * Tenable has a strong focus on human capital development with the young professionals who are a part of the sales development team. * Ivan talks about the importance of a “full funnel approach” with sales development and how it’s crucial for sales to have a complete understanding of the industry and specific pain points of customers. * Ivan discusses the importance of understanding the entire buying committee - not just the CISO...but project managers, network security professionals and more. * When launching campaigns at Tenable, Ivan discusses the approach of a “campaign in a box” and how the organization aligns marketing and sales together from the beginning. * With outbound sales, you go after the prospects that you definitely want to work with versus those who engage with webinars or other inbound marketing efforts. * Ivan discusses Tenable’s focus on its website and the resources available (i.e., podcast about cybersecurity).

Episode Key Points * When discussing outbound sales, Ivan mentioned “...when you go outbound, you get what you want. There are some individuals that despite our best marketing efforts, they just don't raise their hands for a webinar. They don't attend a particular trade show. They don't download the information. These are individuals that are extremely busy. So consequently, we have to go in a very targeted approach and implement what we call our account based marketing strategies…” * Ivan spoke a bit about intent data and how it’s important to combine intent data with a very specific ABM strategy to ensure sales is focused on the right accounts.

Resources * Ivan Gomez: LinkedIn * Tenable: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Aditya Vempaty, the VP of Marketing at Synthego. Aditya chats about his past working experience prior to Synthego and highlights how it’s important to build trust with prospects with B2B marketing. Aditya also covers why he enjoys the startup culture so much and pinpoints what drives him as a marketer.

Episode Highlights * Aditya’s education included an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and he started his professional career as a programmer before moving into a marketing role. * Aditya discusses his inclination towards startup environments and highlights why he’s attracted to these types of companies. * During the interview, Aditya provides some context to what Synthego does - it’s a genome engineering company and develops products for scientists & researchers. * The organization’s ideal customer profile is someone who understands the power of CRISPR and can utilize full stack genome editing. * When coming on board, Aditya focused on purely understanding customers through conversations with researchers. Aditya had conversations with over one hundred customers in his first quarter. * Aditya utilized conversations from the Synthego inside sales team as a way to develop an understanding of the company’s customer base. * When arriving at Synthego, the team had content in place and had marketing running...but he then shifted the focus to educating the customer. * Aditya developed a process for creating content around CRISPR and its uses - not just from blog posts, but also guides that talked about how to get started with CRISPR and how to get started with genome engineering. * One of the big pillar pieces of content that’s worked quite well for Synthego is their industry report - a process that includes data from surveys (from customers, non-customers and industry leaders). * Developing educational content for customers (as well as creating SEO value) is not a short-term game...it’s a long-term strategy that does take time - so it’s important to set expectations with the company up front. * For short-term leads, Synthego focused on events and that helped balance some of their long-term strategies around content. * He explained the difference between scaling a business versus growing a business. * Long-term marketing initiatives can be less expensive overall, but they take a lot of time to build. On the other hand, short-term investments which drive leads can be more expensive. * Aditya breaks down some of the key metrics the team monitors on the marketing team and stresses the importance of always keeping an eye on revenue as well. * Synthego works hard on delivering valuable content for the end-user. * He pointed out the importance of storytelling for technology companies.

Key Points * Aditya discussed one challenge “One thing I've found is that regardless of industry, there's a problem that the customer is always trying to solve, and oftentimes products don't address the problem. They address how they can solve it for them. Instead of trying to understand what the problem actually is.” * There is a difference between scaling a business versus growing a business. * One can grow a business through events, Google Ads, LinkedIn purchases, but to scale it, you have to invest in long-term strategies that deliver value to the end-user.

Resources * Aditya Vempaty: LinkedIn * Aditya Vempaty: Twitter * Synthego: Website * The Startup Chat with Setli and Hiten: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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Episode Summary During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Jenn Steele, the Chief Product Officer at ORSNN. The interview focuses on Jenn’s past experiences with large organizations like Amazon and Hubspot, and then breaks down a lot of her strategy with a brand new startup environment at ORSNN.

Episode Highlights * Jenn confesses to being the most driven, most aimless person you’ll ever meet! * Jenn spent quite a bit of her professional career running IT departments at law firms and then moved to Amazon (as a product marketer), Hubspot and other startups in the Seattle, WA area. * Right now, ORSNN is pre-revenue, pre-funding - so it’s truly at a very early stage. * Jenn talks about the excitement around finding product/market fit, defining the true need within the marketplace, understanding customers and many of the other fundamental components of a startup’s success. * Jenn’s tenure with Hubspot allowed her to really get a true understanding of inbound marketing and how people struggled to get it off the ground. * ORSNN brokers whole loan trades between financial institutions - and this concept was very foreign to Jenn when she initially got started with the company. * Jenn’s roots in account-based marketing have proven to be effective with both raising money and initiating customer relationships at ORSNN. * After determining the “who” you are talking about, Jenn breaks down the importance of the messaging framework with customers. * Jenn talks about the difference of tactics between a very small team at a startup versus the larger, 30-person team she had experience with at other companies. * Jenn talks about understanding best practices within ABM and other marketing tactics...and then adapting them to your own ideal customer profile. * Jenn discussed the importance of ensuring content works across both sales and marketing when selling to the enterprise. * When selling to the enterprise, it’s important to keep in mind that the person conducting the research is often just a part of the overall buying committee.

Key Points: * Jenn mentioned “...the number one thing, whatever you're trying to do is answer two questions. What are you trying to do? And who is the person on the other end of the communication?” * Jenn said that “every marketing tactic works until it doesn’t.” * Jenn talked about content when marketing to enterprises - “So, you know, for enterprise it's not actually that you need less content, you just need it in different ways. And the way that you just talked about marketing and sales playing together with content is exactly what drives the enterprise content development process in my experience.“ * Jenn mentioned that “if you have no idea what your salespeople are selling, you're not making the right content.”

Resources: * Jenn Steele: LinkedIn * ORSNN: Website * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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Episode Summary During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Ryan O'Hara, the VP of Growth and Marketing at LeadIQ. The interview focuses on his past experiences and how he went from a prospecting role to more of a marketing-based role at LeadIQ. Ryan takes a deeper dive into account-based marketing strategies and pinpoints how he’s building the brand at LeadIQ through content.

Episode Highlights * Ryan O'Hara starts the conversation by sharing his past work experience as a BDR at a company called Dyn in Manchester, New Hampshire. * Ryan explains why branding yourself on social media posts and LinkedIn is important and discusses how it’s crucial to just showcase your own unique personality. * Ryan talked about his initial days at LeadIQ and how he changed the approach from a “sage brand” to a “gesture brand.” * LeadIQ saves sales teams time and makes it a lot easier for clients to capture contact data and push to different sales tools. * The biggest thing that LeadIQ does for their clients is it helps create a better first impression with prospects. * Ryan discussed account-based marketing strategies at LeadIQ. * Ryan loves to make people laugh and he discusses the approach he takes with the content he shares on LinkedIn and other platforms. * Ryan suggested a revolutionary idea of putting sales reps in the content (or ads) and retargeting the audience. * A key strategy Ryan discusses is retargeting using human beings (or reps) instead of constantly hitting people over the head with the brand. * One of the topics discussed included branding people within the organization and giving life to content (versus just a generic brand message). * He breaks down the concept of thought leadership and discusses how people at any level can create great content - because everyone has stories and can “connect” with those in their industry. * Ryan discussed his love for podcasts as it allows you to repeat, re-engage, and retell stories about your business. * He mentioned the importance of consistency in creating content which, by the way, shouldn’t be boring. * Ryan takes inspiration from many B2C brands and then tries to apply some of those same strategies to B2B content.

Key Points * Ryan mentioned his working pattern and said “all the videos I put out on LinkedIn, I'm trying to make fun and entertaining. I'll make fun of things, but I'll still offer you insight. Like...I'll give you advice on how to write a good cold email, but I might make fun of my stupid haircut.” * Ryan quoted “A brand is really important. If your name is recognized, you're more likely to get a higher open rate on your emails because they're from a friendly address - they're familiar with it.”

Resources * Ryan O'Hara: LinkedIn * LeadIQ: Website * LeadIQ: Blog * Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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Episode Summary:

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Jennifer Pepper, the Head of Content Marketing at Unbounce. This podcast interview takes a look into Jennifer’s past experiences with B2B tech companies, highlights some of the key strategies Unbounce uses for evergreen content and pinpoints some exciting new functionality rolling out with the Unbounce platform.

Episode Highlights:

Jennifer discusses her background before arriving at Unbounce.
Jennifer mentions her work with Vidyard, where she worked with great mentors and learned about full funnel video marketing campaigns.
Jennifer talks about how she built the content engine at Unbounce and mentions how the company has nearly tripled in size since her arrival.
Jennifer mentions what users get out of the Unbounce platform - designed to help customers building high converting landing pages.
Jennifer’s job with content primarily focuses on creating material that’s helpful and interesting to marketers.
Jennifer discusses the structure of Unbounce’s marketing team and covers how her role as Head of Content Marketing fits into the equation.
At Unbounce, the team uses a Miro board to track content ideas and brainstorm about content marketing projects.
Jennifer talked about three key components to the company’s content marketing efforts - focused on 1) “content bingo” or mapping content to the customer journey, 2) Organic opportunities to drive traffic and 3) Upcoming products and feature launches.
During the interview, Jennifer described the importance of determining the intent around keywords.
The company outlines major content initiatives quarter by quarter and develops a series of content briefs to plan for the content and distribution aspects of the piece.
Because blog posts weren’t having a long life, the company established a campaign strategy and promotions part of the marketing team - this helped extend the life of content.
The content marketing team strives to work alongside the product team to develop content around new features.
Jennifer walks through some of the trends with landing pages over the years and how Unbounce has adapted to customers’ needs.
Jennifer dives into the machine learning and artificial intelligence features that will be rolling out within Unbounce.
During the conversation, Jennifer talks about the importance of personalization and how Unbounce technology can help drive conversions with some of the new features on its roadmap.

Key Points:

According to Jennifer, “Unbounce is a landing page platform that marketers use to build and test high converting landing pages fast without having to rely on developers or anyone else.”
Jennifer stated “I would start by saying that Unbounce is a 10 year old company. We have a literal ocean of content available over that length of existence. So personally, I have found that our content strategy needs to encompass serving up everything evergreen versus making more things on like a set publishing cadence. “
According to Jennifer, “...So a big part of our strategy is a library approach to content versus the publisher’s approach.”

Resources Mentioned:

Jennifer Pepper: LinkedIn
Unbounce: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Matouš Roskovec, the Creative Lead at Avocode. The interview focuses on the past experiences of Matouš as a copywriter and how he’s transitioned to leading a team responsible for campaigns and content on a variety of different platforms. Learn how the organization builds their conversion strategy after attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to their content.

Episode Highlights * Matouš provides some insight into his past work experience which includes copywriting with a couple of advertising agencies before arriving at Avocode. * He talked about his working experience as a freelance copywriter for several years before joining Avocode. * Matouš discusses the ideal customer profile of Avocode...which aims to bridge the gap between designers and developers. * The company provides a design collaboration platform for agencies, startups, enterprises and pretty much any entity that needs to code websites or apps. * Matouš talked about how the web has evolved in the past four years and how Avocode originally started as a development agency. * Avocode’s founders dealt with the problem of combining design and development, developed several plugins and ultimately landed on developing a single tool which could open a variety of design file formats. * He explained their typical customer’s working process which includes the whole workflow of the design process and working through feedback until the design is finalized. * Matouš discusses how the Avocode marketing team is constructed - a combination of three teams in Growth, Creative and Customer Success. * Avocode’s growth team constantly evaluates the company’s pricing packages and feature set to align with customer expectations and requirements. * Avocode uses over 30 paid tools for marketing (Notion, Intercom, etc) and the combination of a variety of SaaS tools allows their small team to be highly efficient. * While talking about content, Matouš also talks about The Grit which is a blog series of branded content by Avocode. * The Grit is a set of written interviews with thought leaders in the design and development space (check out Product Design Tips from the Twitter Hashtag Inventor, Chris Messina) * He explained a content strategy which involves the 20% / 80% rule. The team spends 20% of their time creating new content and 80% of their time optimizing and distributing existing content. * Matouš emphasizes the importance of having marketing inspiration outside the industry you work in (he described StudioBinder as a key inspiration for him).

Key Points * Matouš says “building a beautiful website is no longer enough. You know, it has to be functional, it has to be used over and over again. So it has to bring in your customers, more times to show them value. And the only way you can do this is actually to ask for feedback.” * Matouš also mentioned that “Avocode is about to release a prototyping feature, and that would be built in very soon, to add in functionality in the whole process.” * Avocode has over 100,000 unique visitors every month coming to their website.

Resources Matouš Roskovec: LinkedIn

Email: Matouš@avocode.com

Instagram: cutandcotton

The Grit: Avocode.com/blog

Avocode: Website

Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown talk with Kirti Dewan, the VP of Marketing at Bugsnag. Kirti chats about her role as a consultant prior to joining Bugsnag and then takes us through some of the major marketing initiatives she’s spearheading at the company. Kirti has a wide range of marketing leadership experience with startups and brings a lot to the table with her role at Bugsnag.

Episode Highlights:

Kirti discusses a bit about her background both as a consultant and as an employee for various startup tech companies.
Kirti talks about Bugsnag and its mission to be an application stability and management platform.
Bugsnag helps companies capture errors and then prioritize and fix the errors within their development lifecycle.
When Kirti joined the team, it had three employees on the marketing side - now she leads a team of six.
When coming on board, Kirti had to focus on a lot of the foundational components to marketing - the marketing function inside a young company tends to need a lot more structure before growing too much.
Kirti discusses the responsibilities of a marketing organization now, it's very difficult to be both tactical and strategic at the same time.
Documentation was a big focus for the team as it started to build out various functions, especially for events.
Kirti discusses the importance of communicating feature launches with their product, especially for those that are very important to the customer base.
Kirti built out a lot of foundational elements for their content marketing - including explainer videos and other long-form materials.
During the interview, Kirti talked about how she helped change the structure of the company so that content became a focus and a responsibility for everyone.
Kirti described marketing and marketing initiatives as a “laser pointer” and how it’s important not to chase other projects or try to “boil the ocean.”
As a startup, you can’t place your bets all over the place - it’s important to focus on a few channels and go deeper with strategy and tactics.
Kirti discusses the development of their ABM strategy, which isn’t a “full blown strategy” - but a strategy that has a focus on segmentation.
At Bugsnag, the company divides their content into four different “swim lanes” - areas focused on engineering, product features, thought leadership and sales enablement.
The team develops a set of content initiatives for the entire quarter and assigns writers to each of the pieces to ensure a consistent cadence.
Bugsnag is fortunate to have excellent writers within their development team and these folks contribute greatly to the highly technical content featured on the organization’s website.
In many cases, Kirti uses an audio interview with executives to drive content pieces - this allows team members to just “riff” and produce content at the same time.

Key Points:

Kirti stated “The responsibilities within a marketing organization are quite immense. So you are down in the weeds. 10 minutes later, you're really high up at 30,000 feet. You're trying to be so strategic. So it's this constant gear switching, context switching that has to happen in the brain…”
Kirti discussed the status of marketing teams at SaaS companies and how many marketing teams struggle to get respect with product-driven companies, “...So depending upon the type of company that you are...marketing can be a different junk drawer, different place of respect. And what happened at Bugsnag is it is very difficult, like other SaaS companies in that it is very, very product driven.”

Resources Mentioned:

Kirti Dewan: LinkedIn
Bugsnag: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with the Head of Marketing at COTA, Jaimee Ryan. The podcast episode uncovers Jaimee’s journey as a B2B marketer, why she enjoys the startup culture, how she built a strong marketing foundation and what’s on the horizon with COTA’s marketing plans.

Episode Highlights:

Jaime talks about her earlier career...working for a series of startups
Jaime breaks down how she came across the opportunity to work with COTA and why she loves the startup environment
She discusses how COTA’s mission is important and how it connects with her as a marketer
COTA works with Life Sciences companies, Provider organizations and Payers - all which require different strategies.
The organization’s primary source of revenue is through the Life Sciences target audience.
COTA provides organizations with real world data that can be used to accelerate clinical trials.
One of the major challenges COTA’s target audience faces is the fact that clinical trials are constantly under scrutiny and must continue to be more efficient.
COTA’s technology takes a lot of unstructured data and formulates the information in a way that makes sense for their customers.
Jaimee describes the state of marketing when she came on board and what she did to build the foundation.
At COTA, it was important to establish the company’s credibility in their space and a lot of focus was put into that effort during Jaimee’s first year.
In-person events were never a big ROI for COTA and they focus on promoting the research done by their innovative employees.
Education material is a very large part of the company’s marketing strategy - building content around real world data and real world evidence.
One of COTA’s big company goals in 2020 is to increase brand awareness.
Jaime breaks down how her team develops goals - a focus on quarterly objectives called “rocks” drives the process.
COTA has a dedicated team member who manages the company’s rocks and holds everyone accountable.
Jaimee works to get feedback from internal and external resources - especially when trying to determine what content is the most effective.
One of Jaimee’s most effective approaches to understanding COTA’s customers is through listening to sales calls.

Key Points:

Jaimee talked about her decision process to get back into the startup world and stated “I decided life waits for no one, so, we just kind of had to go for it. So I jumped back in.”
According to Jaime, “When I arrived at COTA, it was messy. The state of marketing was messy, fragmented and disorganized. So really my job, when I came in, COTA had really evolved as a company. But, our exterior identity did not really represent that well. So we were doing very sophisticated things with very sophisticated customers.”
Jaime mentioned that she built credibility and thought leadership in a variety of ways “...we did that through white papers, promoting our research through, participating at the major industry conferences. So my job last year was really just to promote the efforts of our research team and our clinical staff, to build that credibility. “

Resources Mentioned:

Jaimee Ryan: LinkedIn
COTA: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Laurie Hood, SVP Marketing at Mobilewalla. The interview focuses on Laurie’s experience in a B2B capacity - mostly with technology and technology marketing. Laurie takes a deeper dive into how marketing functions at Mobilewalla, which focuses on selling to B2C companies across a variety of industries such as retail, telecommunications, travel and financial services.

Episode Highlights:

Laurie breaks down her past work experience before arriving at Mobilewalla in 2018.
Laurie started her career as a consultant at Accenture, and later on joined IBM where she was VP of Product Marketing.
Mobilewalla marketing focuses on three primary things, driving brand awareness, generating demand, and enabling our sales teams.
Mobilewalla is a data and insights company, with expertise in consumer intelligence solutions.
Laurie was the first marketer at Mobilewalla.
At Mobilewalla, the company also partners with advertising agencies to help them serve their clients.
They help companies increase customer loyalty, grow revenue and improve the predictiveness of their models and effectiveness of their marketing spend.
Mobilewalla places content on their own channels, website, social media properties and partners with groups who serve or try to attract the same target audiences.
Mobilewalla is also shifting towards becoming more digital by actively participating in webinars and other virtual formats.
Laurie talked about how her team is reaching out to local groups, who would have done in-person events, and then offering content to help them produce virtual events.
On a quarterly basis, the marketing focuses on publishing a significant piece of content - like a white paper - and then two to three blog posts a month covering themes such as data enrichment or leveraging artificial intelligence in marketing.
Laurie talks about how the company has developed content in a designated section on their website as “Technology Briefs” and discusses how these pieces take a much deeper dive into areas not available in traditional blog posts.
Laurie also mentioned that she started many marketing initiatives from a standing stop...and started with a website for the most part. So, there’s been a strong focus on just creating foundational material needed for the marketing team.
Laurie’s important lesson for marketers “What do I want to do, but what can I do and what can we do and do well".
Laurie uses HubSpot’s blog for staying up to date and for ongoing marketing education.

Key Points:

Laurie states “ So for most marketers, whether you're B2B or B2C, marketing boils down to the same key goals, attract, retain, and grow. I want to attract new customers, I want to retain the ones I have and I want to grow the business I'm doing with them.”
She also quoted “And with my customers who are B2C marketers, it's that much broader scope of attracting a consumer. Many of them are trying to leverage digital channels to do that and just that different perspective versus that much more structured sales process of a B2B sale.”
Mobilewalla’s key tactic is content marketing and focusing on providing quality thought leadership around a variety of industry topics.

Resources:

Laurie Hood: LinkedIn
Mobilewalla: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown sit down with Kevin Alansky, the Chief Marketing Officer of Higher Logic. The interview focuses on Kevin’s career as a B2B marketer, his experience leading marketing efforts for technology companies, the evolution of the CMO over the years and highlights some of Kevin’s goals with Higher Logic’s marketing team.

Episode Highlights:

Kevin breaks down his past work experience before arriving at Higher Logic in 2019.
Kevin talks about his experience leading marketing teams for analytics companies and going head-to-head with large analytics companies like Tableau and Sisense.
Higher Logic is predominantly focused on two areas - associations and corporate markets.
Higher Logic’s online community platform has a strong customer base and the organization has expanded into marketing automation with recent acquisitions (Real Magnet and Informz).
When Kevin joined the marketing team, it was at an inflection point and the team was moving from a startup to a more mature model.
Using and analyzing data was a key component of the growth within Higher Logic’s marketing team (now consisting of 16-17 team members).
As the team grew, project management and communication became more vital as the team had to organize their work more efficiently.
Kevin experienced a bit of culture shock coming from professional sports marketing to higher education (when he transitioned to Blackboard several years ago) and he was able to learn the importance of understanding your target audience.
When arriving at Higher Logic, Kevin focused a lot on regular cadences with not only the marketing team, but with teams outside of marketing.
With 3,000 existing customers, Kevin placed a focus on improving the onboarding experience and building out the customer marketing team.
Kevin discusses the strong content team that’s in place at Higher Logic - which includes a strong commitment to thought leadership material that’s beneficial to both customers and prospects.
Higher Logic is currently in the process of rebuilding the company’s website and improving its current marketing technology stack.
Kevin outlined the Community Leader Changemaker program launched by the organization and discussed how Higher Logic highlighted influencers and other thought leaders in the association space.
Kevin talked about the evolution of CMOs in the 90s (being brand-driven) and how the role has evolved to more of a data-driven role now...especially with B2B SaaS companies.
One-on-ones are a big part of the communication at Higher Logic and Kevin has a focus on his team’s career aspirations and helping them along their career path.
If you want to connect with Kevin on LinkedIn - make sure to mention you heard him on Tech Qualified!

Key Points:

Kevin states “So, you know, a lot of it is just getting the team and the experience that I've had to be able to give them the right tools, give them the right structure, give them the right vision. And quite frankly, it's my job to, you know, stay out of the way and let them do what they do best.”
Selling to associations is very much a relationship-driven business and shares many of the same qualities Kevin experienced when selling to higher education clients.
Kevin had a 16 or 17 person marketing team, but wanted to flatten the structure a bit so he could get into the weeds and understand the work that’s happening.

Resources Mentioned:

Kevin Alansky: LinkedIn
Higher Logic: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with the Vice President of Marketing at Backblaze, Ahin Thomas. The interview focuses on Ahin’s past experience, Backblaze’s highly effective inbound engine, and how the company competes with their competitors. Backblaze’s mission is to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind to SMB storage requirements.

Episode Highlights:

Ahin provides some highlights on his past work experience which included his role as a director in the E-commerce industry.
Ahin discusses the company’s ideal customer profile which includes SMBs (SysAdmins, CTOs or the people running the storage infrastructure at a company).
Ahin pinpoints that Backblaze’s storage solutions are more affordable than their competitors who are Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Ahin talks about their affordable pricing - a quarter of the price of Amazon’s storage costs and 1/9th the price of Amazon’s downloading costs.
Backblaze’s pricing table is a single line, with no fine print. This is a stark contrast to other competitors, with confusing price structures for the SMB marketplace.
Backblaze is a bootstrapped organization, with growth resulting from only $3 million in invested capital.
The organization believes that their storage server is the first ever open-sourced hardware project.
Ahin pinpoints the unique value proposition of Backblaze - that they are simple, reliable and just less expensive than anyone else.
Ahin is proud of the company’s success rate which has been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years.
Ahin talks about the uniques for their content posted on their blog...which is focused on storage (recent numbers hit more than 3.25 million views) and aims to simply provide content that’s useful.
Backblaze’s quarterly hard drive stats report has been an effective “content franchise” for over five years.
A majority of Backblaze’s customers come to the organization because they have a fundamental problem with their workflows.
Ahin says that Backblaze has over an Exabyte of stored customer data- placing it in the top 10 or 15 companies in the world (based on the amount of data stored)
Ahin pinpoints how the actual customer milestones are a big deal to achieve and how Backblaze easily achieves it.
Ahin says that listening to podcasts while commuting generates a lot of ideas for his work and keeps him up to speed with B2B tech marketing.

Key Points:

At Backblaze, we have been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years...entirely from our inbound efforts.
All five founders of Backblaze are still in their operating roles as the company competes with large organizations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Backblaze’s storage-focused blog received a little over 3.25 million unique page views - with zero of that traffic coming from paid efforts.
Backblaze is the largest single publisher of drive performance statistics on the planet.

Resources Mentioned:

Ahin Thomas: LinkedIn
Backblaze: Website
Cloudberry: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with the CEO of Triblio, Andre Yee. The conversation pinpoints some of the major challenges with B2B marketing right now - especially with standard MQLs and the traditional “lead model”. Andre talks about the shortcomings of using some of the standard marketing automation tools and how companies can pivot a bit to help gain rapport with prospects before they reach out and engage directly.

Episode Highlights:

Andre provide some highlights about his past work experience which includes a range of B2B technology companies
Andre was a very early employee at Eloqua and helped grow the organization from around $15-$20 million to $125 million - in about 5.5 years
Triblio was sparked by a lot of the experience Andre had with many first generation marketing automation platforms and technologies
Triblio helps companies execute account-based marketing from end-to-end instead of piecing several different types of technologies together
Andre discusses some of the major components to an account-based marketing strategy and how an organization can set up an effective foundation
To execute and account-based marketing strategy effectively, one of the most important things to note is the customization with your prospects
Based on research conducted by Triblio, it’s important to understand that many companies interact with prospects 90 days or more before they fill out a form
With an account-based marketing strategy, companies can actually be more proactive in how they engage their prospects and avoid sitting back until someone raises their hand and provides contact information
Retargeting is effective, but that whole process depends upon a prospect actually visiting the website first
With Triblio, companies have the ability to customize a visitor's experience on a website without any type of programming
Content is truly the fuel behind your ABM campaigns and if you don’t have great content, you’re going to have limited success engaging prospects
Andre sees a very strong trend towards video and developing a variety of types of content for prospects to consume in a number of different ways
For those looking to get more information from ABM experts, Triblio actually has a new video series featuring interview segments from experts in the field

Key Points:

Many of the methods and techniques used 10 years ago in B2B marketing no longer work in the same way - evidence points to the fact that MQLs only close at less than a 1% rate now.
The traditional model suggests that you go out and get as many leads as possible versus focusing on the specific accounts in your target market.
Most marketing automation platforms focus on the engagement after a prospect has filled out a form on a website, but in reality, a prospect often shows many signs of engagement before providing contact information.

Resources Mentioned:

Andre Yee: LinkedIn
Triblio: Website
Ask an ABM Expert: Video Series
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with the CMO of Apixio, Mark Scott. The interview focuses on Mark’s experience in a B2B capacity - mostly with healthcare companies that include direct delivery, medical devices, biotech and now software. Mark takes a deeper dive into how marketing functions for Apixio, which is essentially a data science company that takes structured and unstructured data inputs and creates unique insights from the information.

Episode Highlights:

Mark provides some highlights on his past work experience which includes jobs in a variety of healthcare companies
Mark pinpoints the unique value proposition of Apixio, which is essentially a data science company
Mark talks about joining a growth stage company and focusing on building brand awareness
The Apixio field sales team is one of the best that Mark has ever worked with in the industry
The organization focuses a lot on an ABM strategy - which includes targeting specific accounts and building towards an in-person meeting
Mark discusses the types of changes the organization had to make as the world battles with COVID-19
Mark discusses the types of communications the organization rolled out to prospects and customers during the period of social distancing
In many ways, Mark has seen that a lot of people in his particular environment were exhausted by the negativity surrounded by COVID-19, so it was important to strike a balance with communication
As the pandemic situation surfaced, Apixio has seen the buyer’s journey slow down
Mark sees that prospects are asking more questions and objections are coming to the surface - so this is fueling the creation of a variety of content
Some of the personas that Apixio works with are completely overrun with information right now with the pandemic...so connecting with them is not a huge priority - they don’t necessarily have open ears right now
Over the next three months, Apixio is really placing a focus on content that will help the organization establish their position in the marketplace over the long-term

Key Points:

When marketing in healthcare, it's crucial to build trust with your technology.
A big initiative of Apixio was surveying the organization’s key customers and determining what types of information they were looking for - especially as they started working from home.
Right now, in these tough times, is when a brand’s true colors come to the forefront.

Resources Mentioned:

Mark Scott: LinkedIn
Apixio: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino launches the first ever TechTalk Tuesday edition of the podcast. These episodes are designed to take a deep dive into a specific area and provide listeners with a clear path to implementation. In this episode, Tristan welcomes back Mariya Finkelshteyn, the owner of Orchid Agency, and the two discuss the strategies for virtual events. Virtual events are a new medium given the current state of affairs with the pandemic. As a result, many tech companies are struggling to get virtual events in motion and engage with their own customers. Mariya talks about the four key components to a virtual event strategy.

Episode Highlights:

Many technology companies are pivoting to digital or virtual events given the situation created by the pandemic
Before diving into the components of virtual event strategy, Mariya provides some background on her 13 years of work experience in B2B technology
After working and leading marketing teams internally at several companies, Mariya launched her own marketing agency - Orchid
Mariya now works with early to late-stage technology companies and helps them build, optimize or scale a repeatable B2B marketing engine
Mariya introduces the audience to the four key components to a virtual event strategy: 1) Operationalizing events, 2) Identifying a format, 3) Engaging the audience and 4) Measuring the results
With the uncertainty of B2B buyers, Mariya has seen many B2B tech companies engage their existing install base of customers; aiming to help their customers and enrich these relationships
When identifying the right technology for a virtual event, one of the first things a company can do is to look at their existing technology - most have solutions already in place and tools like Zoom or other web conferencing technologies can be used
G2 is an effective way to research different tools for a virtual event
Webinars are becoming more commonplace now, so it’s important to be creative and go beyond this medium (we’re going to see an inflection point where B2B buyers will get webinar fatigue)
Beyond webinars, there are a variety of formats available - using podcasts, panel discussions and “virtual talks” to engage audiences
When looking at engagement, it’s important to bring together your entire ecosystem and ask questions like “what are you learning?” or “how are you dealing with this?”
Now is the time to offer education to your entire ecosystem of partners, customers and prospects
Building rapport now allows you to to create trust and set your organization up for success (and conversion) down the road
Engagement can be created through an ABM approach - even running ads to a virtual event beforehand
After a virtual event, it’s important to have a follow-up sequence and a plan or offer to further help the audience
More and more individuals are craving genuine interaction...given this current state of the world
Right now, it’s not that important to monitor hard statistics for these events - you have to probably throw out the traditional “MQL” or “SQL” metrics
Focus on engagement statistics - how many true participants existed? Or, how many genuine conversations were created?
Identify the roles of those involved - who were the types of folks who participated in your event (decision-makers? Junior-level professionals?) - use this information to get more insights from the companies involved with events
Virtual events right now, are not a short-term strategy and you have to recognize that the steps you take now help position your technology company in the long-term

Key Points:

Virtual events can be more than the delivery of a Powerpoint, it’s more about engagement. It’s more about diving into a deeper conversation.
One of the ways to show compassion is to lose the formalities and just be human. So maybe you lose the deck and just have a face-to-face conversation...virtually.
When an audience member engages during an event, take the conversation further by sending a personal email or DM. Continue the conversation by being specific to their situation.

Resources Mentioned:

Mariya Finkelshteyn: LinkedIn
Orchid Agency: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Stacey Arenson, the Marketing Director at Chowly. Chowly is a restaurant tech company that integrates third-party online ordering platforms with restaurants’ point of sale (POS) systems. During the episode, Stacey discusses what it’s like handling marketing with restaurants during the pandemic, pinpoints some of the company’s initiatives with content and highlights how she diversified the overall marketing strategy.

Episode Highlights:

Initially, Stacey discusses her background in B2B tech and what brought her to Chowly as a Marketing Director
She discusses the primary value proposition of Chowly which helps restaurants avoid the manual entry of third-party delivery orders
Restaurants have been one of the hardest hit industries after social distancing measures were put into place
At the beginning of the year, one of the main objectives of the company's marketing activities was to ensure that every single person in the restaurant industry knew who they were
When coming on board, Stacey focused on diversifying the portfolio of their marketing initiatives and trying to get in front of restaurants in every way possible using a variety of channels
When developing content, the team always starts with the customer... What are they interested in? What are they going to look for? How can we start the conversation?
The organization’s thought leadership hasn’t been a quick process, it takes time to get in front of people and build awareness
As a start-up, Stacey looked to hire people that would hit the ground running and have an immediate impact on their marketing projects
Stacey walked through the customer journey for prospects who engage with Chowly
Stacey works very closely with the sales team and arms them with the collateral they need to engage with prospects along the journey
Stacey leverages feedback from the sales team to create a lot of the ideas for content
Case studies have proven to be a very effective form of content across both marketing and sales
Chowly launched a COVID-19 relief package for restaurants who are trying to get on the platform - restaurants had to make the choice to either close or shift to delivery - and this was really helpful to their situation

Key Points:

Right now, the organization is focused on what's going to be helpful for the restaurant industry instead of selling products.
During the current situation, Stacey and her team are planning marketing activities using two-week increments versus longer timeframes such as quarterly or even annual strategies.
It's important to not just talk about what everyone else is talking about, Chowly aims to be the first to bring their ideas to the table.

Resources Mentioned:

Stacey Arenson: LinkedIn
Chowly: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Monique Mahler, the VP of Marketing at Interviewstream. Interviewstream is an industry leading recruiting software company that helps you reach your top candidates more efficiently. Monique talks about how she accidentally fell into marketing, the challenges when marketing to three different sets of target audiences and what has changed during the pandemic.

Episode Highlights:

Monique starts the interview by discussing how she became a marketer accidentally after going to grad school (and having an undergraduate degree in Sociology)
Monique originally got her start in marketing as an Assistant Director of Marketing at a racetrack
Monique discusses the three primary markets of Interviewstream - Fortune 500 enterprises, Higher Education and K12
Monique identifies some of the challenges when marketing and creating messaging for three distinct target markets
During the episode, Monique talks about the company’s approach to helping people in the pandemic which includes the launch of a free access program of the product
Monique talks about the conversion strategy from the free version of the platform
Instead of using COVID-19 in messaging, the company shifted a bit to focus more on working from home and the different dynamics involved
In many cases, people just want to talk to people and conversations are a big part of marketing
Monique discusses her approach to running an agile marketing team and how this impacts the projects they launch
The focus of the company’s marketing team most often revolves around a 90-day plan versus big, overarching goals for the year

Key Points:

Interviewstream has really refined its marketing and overall solution set for the K12 market in the last 2.5 years.
Right now, it’s 100% about helping - especially for audiences that are hit the hardest in this pandemic. It’s a “help people strategy.”
The focus of Interviewstream during the pandemic is all about how the company can come out of the current situation as a thought leader - instead of just a focus on conversions.

Resources Mentioned:

Monique Mahler: LinkedIn
Interviewstream: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Deb Julius, the Senior Director of Marketing at CBI. CBI manages IT risk and ensures a company’s data is secure, compliant, and available. The company helps defend and secure networks and endpoints; tests and monitors areas of operational risk; and protects your data. Throughout the episode, Deb discusses her background in B2B tech marketing, how she transitioned into cybersecurity and how she’s pivoting marketing efforts during the coronavirus pandemic.

Episode Highlights:

Deb starts the podcast by discussing some of her past work experiences, specifically within the B2B tech marketing space
Deb outlines the various ideal customer profiles of CBI, which mostly consist of C-suite individuals in mid-market organizations
Deb mentions how CBI was very focused on content before the pandemic and now content is an even bigger focus within the current situation
One of the big objectives with the content initiatives at CBI is around getting connected with the prospects as early as possible within the buying cycle
Within CBI’s marketing automation platform, one of the main focus areas they have developed includes a lead scoring system
The company’s lead scoring system is a big determining factor as to whether or not sales gets involved with a lead
As a marketer, Deb is highly involved with the sales team...she’s included on the sales email alias and attends all of the company’s sales meetings
CBI has a big focus on integrated marketing and ensuring any content that is created can be integrated into several different channels
Education is a major focus with all of the content the organization produces and often most of the marketing pieces start off as an article and then are built into other assets from there
Deb ensures that marketing content is not just “one and done” and webinars or other content becomes repurposed and positioned in other ways

Key Points:

CBI’s lead scoring system evaluates the engagement of prospects through a variety of difficult digital channels.
CBI has had to shift from a lot of the in-person dinners and events...however, marketing has found that prospects still want to network and engage.
Right now, you have to be 100% authentic and you can not come across as opportunistic in any marketing messages.

Resources Mentioned:

Deb Julius: LinkedIn
CBI: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Nicole Lindenbaum, the Vice President of Marketing at Teampay. Teampay empowers employees with software that requests, approves, and tracks company spending in real-time. Nicole chats about her initiatives when coming on board, discusses some of the major processes she built out and highlights the creation of an online community for controllers.

Episode Highlights:

Nicole starts the conversation by breaking down her past experience as a fundraiser with a theater in New York City
Nicole talks about how she really fell into a marketing role in B2B technology
Nicole discusses how Teampay was founded about 3 years ago and the organization helps solve the challenges that corporate financial teams face when their employees look to make purchasing decisions
With Teampay, the organization's ideal customer profile includes controllers within a company
Nicole breaks down some of the processes she put into place for nurturing leads after they download a piece of content
With content, Teampay typically focused on material that was highly editorial and now the organization is focused a little more on thought leadership
Nicole talks about the coronavirus situation and how from a marketing perspective, many decisions are being made from a day-to-day standpoint
Nicole breaks down one of the major initiatives within the company which includes an online community called Controller Collective
The overall experience of Controller Collective includes a separate microsite and a highly engaging Slack community
Nicole breaks down the benefits of creating an online community for their ideal customer profile
One of the major advantages of a dedicated online community is the connections that can be created from a peer-to-peer perspective

Key Points:

Creating an online community dedicated to your ideal customer profile has many benefits and keeps your organization in touch with prospective customers.
The launch of the online community, Controller Collective, sparked over 200 sign ups of people in just a couple of days.
When creating the online Slack community, one of the things that was important to its early success was the creation of an Advisory Board where conversations were already brewing before the official launch.

Resources Mentioned:

Nicole Lindenbaum: LinkedIn
Teampay: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with the Head of Marketing at Theorem, Andrew Upah. Andrew breaks down his background and discusses how Theorem’s main mission is to upend the traditional world of consulting. Andrew talks about marketing and selling consulting services to the Fortune 100 and how it’s important to add value throughout the entire customer journey. With sales cycles of six, nine months...or even years sometimes...Andrew provides some insight into what Theorem is doing to keep prospects engaged.

Episode Highlights:

Andrew discusses his professional work experience what brought him to Theorem (hint: opportunity strikes at any time...even when sailing around the world)
Theorem builds innovative products for startups and even some of the biggest organizations in the world
Theorem uses a slightly different model for building digital products - the organization calls their teams of highly experienced practitioners - “squads”
Theorem has a very high price point, so sales cycles can be very long at times - sometimes 6-9 months, or even years
Theorem is a 100% remote work environment, but the organization still maintains a focus on one-to-one conversations with prospects and customers
Theorem often invites customers to co-present at events and other functions to help build rapport in the process
One of the biggest competitors of Theorem is internal teams - teams at their prospective organizations who are driving development projects
In the world of social distancing, events are no longer an option - so Theorem has looked to stand up other virtual initiatives to fill the gap
Content generation stems from a lot of feedback and experiences with customers
If Theorem could pursue a “test” marketing project, the organization would strive for more work in public relations

Key Points:

Being in the room is ideal, but no one is doing that right now. So, instead of delaying those conversations, Theorem has shifted to video conferencing.
With a range of capabilities, Theorem needs to establish itself as an authority in a number of different areas. So, it has to be done over time with thought leadership content.
Theorem likes to break down their services into sprints versus long, complex projects that need to be “pitched”.

Resources Mentioned:

Andrew Upah: LinkedIn
Theorem: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with two marketing leaders from JazzHR. The conversation features the CMO, Allie Kelly, and the Content & Communication Manager, Kelly Peters, of JazzHR. The conversation provides a glimpse into their backgrounds, uncovers how the organization leverages content within their overall marketing strategy and dives a little deeper into what JazzHR has done to respond to the uncertainties prospects face right now.

Episode Highlights:

Allie Kelly and Kelly Peters each discuss their professional work experience and what has brought them to JazzHR
JazzHR helps organizations streamline their hiring process, especially smaller organizations that don’t have the internal infrastructure in place to manage the entire process
Allie discusses the transition JazzHR has made from a complete “on-premise” team to a fully remote team
The two professionals discuss how JazzHR has become a way for organizations to leverage remote hiring practices
Allie breaks down the unique offer JazzHR developed to help health care organizations with their hiring process during the coronavirus pandemic
With applicant tracking software, there are a number of solutions available to companies and the market is crowded
JazzHR has a big commitment to helping out their channel partners
JazzHR is essentially a 100% inbound organization, using content and other marketing initiatives to drive demand for their software
Even though JazzHR has a price point that seems transactional, the sales process operates very much like an enterprise sale because it touches everyone within the organization
JazzHR has an extremely low churn rate and content plays an important role in this process
The organization leverages feedback from customers to generate ideas and content topics
JazzHR uses a lot of data to build helpful reports and other educational content for prospects and customers
Engaging with peers and colleagues remains one of the biggest sources of inspiration & information for their existing roles

Key Points:

JazzHR created a completely free offer for organizations in the midst of this pandemic situation and built an entire campaign around it to get more traction and simply help their community
JazzHR’s marketing team brainstormed ideas on how to respond to the social distancing situation and settled in on a solution that just aimed to be helpful
JazzHR commits to taking a thought leadership approach to attract prospects at the top of the funnel

Resources Mentioned:

Allie Kelly: LinkedIn
Kelly Peters: LinkedIn
JazzHR: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Jennifer Karpus-Romain, the Director of Marketing Services and Industry Outreach at FayeBSG. Jennifer walks us through how she got her start as a writer and then transitioned into a B2B marketing role. Jennifer also discusses how she’s positioning the organization during this tough time of social distancing and what she’s focused on for the rest of the year.

Episode Highlights:

Jennifer talks about her foundation as a writer and how that has helped her find new ways to tell company stories
FayeBSG recently merged with another company, so the organization has been involved with a transition on the marketing side.
Jennifer spearheads the content initiatives at FayeBSG where they focus on a lot of industry research to inform their customer base.
Depending on the size of the organization, FayeBSG can have several different ideal customer profiles. In a lot of cases, their services are sparked by the need to evaluate and rollout a new technology stack.
Jennifer discusses the key messages FayeBSG is sharing with prospects and customers during the social distancing period that is in place.
Jennifer pointed out that everyone has slightly different working hours now and it’s important to create content that can be consumed at any time (webinars, podcasts, etc.).
Jennifer is focused on creating content that isn’t too “pushy” right now and is focused on helping sales professionals navigate conversations with prospects.
Jennifer’s team has operated in a remote environment for awhile, so many of her day-to-day activities haven’t changed with social distancing rolling out.

Key Points:

In times of crisis and uncertainty, we wanted our messaging just to be like…”we’re here for you.”
Right now, it’s important to create virtual experiences, podcasts and webinars...because everyone’s hours are different.
In this type of situation, there is growth that can come out of this period. Everyone can take a step back and test out new technologies that might be more effective moving forward.

Resources Mentioned:

Jennifer Karpus-Romain: LinkedIn
Jennifer Karpus-Romain: Twitter @Jenniferkarpus
FayeBSG: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Rachel Metzler, the Marketing Director at Alight Analytics. Since most marketers and small agencies don’t have an in-house data scientist, Rachel’s company helps fill this gap. Rachel talks about her background, some adjustments the company has made in the midst of social distancing and discusses how analytics can really help improve your campaigns.

Episode Highlights:

Rachel talks about her experience in cybersecurity marketing and how this is her third role in marketing B2B technology.
Alight Analytics is a small, startup style company and she works with a small marketing team.
Rachel’s company works with two different ideal customer profiles: 1) Small agencies and 2) SMBs.
Recently, Alight Analytics had to take its core team of 50 people and transition fully to a remote team for social distancing purposes.
A big thing right now is just trying to be empathetic with customers’ situation when prospecting or even communicating with customers.
Webinars are a big initiative at Alight Analytics and the organization has a passionate CEO who can spearhead these types of presentations.
Content marketing and content syndication is a relatively new territory, but the organization plans to use this avenue more effectively.
When co-marketing and getting leads from co-marketing campaigns, the organization has implemented a system where SDRs follow-up with one-to-one communications and this has improved results significantly.
LinkedIn has been a really successful online advertising platform as of late.
Rachel discusses some projects she would execute if given a $20k budget to just “test” things out.

Key Points:

With social distancing in place, the organization has really shied away from large email blasts, focusing instead on one-to-one communication.
Digital channels are huge right now. Alight Analytics had already made a large investment in webinars before social distancing was implemented.
Marketing qualified leads - that metric for us, is not where we measure success.

Resources Mentioned:

Rachel Metzler: LinkedIn
Alight Analytics: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown talk with Joe Staples, the Chief Marketing Officer at Motivosity. Joe talks about some of the adjustments the company has made to their messaging during social distancing, discusses strategies around paid search and engaging prospects using high quality content.

Episode Highlights:

Joe Staples shares information on his background and his journey of being a head of marketing or CMO for about twenty years.
Joe leads marketing efforts for an employee recognition software platform that allows team members to give and recognize accomplishments of their peers.
Joe discusses Motivosity’s ideal customer profile, largely consisting of HR departments.
During the social distancing period, Joe has pivoted Motivosity’s messaging a bit to coincide with a lot of the remote work situations faced by prospects and clients.
One of the big components of the customer journey is determining how much education needs to be provided up front - many prospects are unaware that a solution like Motivosity exists for their situation.
About 80% of the sales is done virtually as prospects go through demos and get to experience the platform before making a purchase.
Motivosity has done a few trade shows, but are fortunate enough to not have trade shows as a major driver for demand.
It’s important for us to figure out how to get multiple hooks into a deal and get to the right people that will make the call and make the ultimate decision.
We use as many mediums as possible, videos are great. Whitepapers, articles and webinars are all a great tool for us.
Motivosity elected to hire internal resources to prepare video content versus leveraging outside freelancers.
When building a team, Joe focused on graphic design as one of the very first full-time resources.
Joe Staples discusses some projects he would execute if given a $20k budget to just “test” things out.

Key Points:

Digital demand is the name of the game for us.
For us, since we’re an employee engagement platform, it’s more important than ever.
We look at the topic and then determine the best medium to share that topic. If the topic is zany or whacky, we use video. Otherwise, if it’s more about the nuts and bolts, we’ll use an ebook or article.

Resources Mentioned:

Joe Staples: LinkedIn
Motivosity: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino sits down and chats with Latane Conant, the Chief Marketing Officer at 6Sense. 6Sense is an Account Engagement Platform that allows companies to proactively target the right accounts based on real-time data and behavior. Latane talks about her background before becoming a CMO, discusses the trends in B2B buying and talks about this uncertain time we are operating within right now.

Episode Highlights:

Latane Conant shares her background as a professional and talks about how she graduated with a degree in accounting...and found her way into a sales role.
Latane discusses the ideal customer profile for 6Sense, which includes B2B sales and marketing teams.
In a B2B buying cycle, there’s a concept of a “dark funnel” where buyers are conducting a lot of research before making a purchase.
Only 13% of sales and marketing teams actually have confidence in their CRM data.
During several virtual coffee talks with CMOs around the country, Latane discovered a few key themes - one being the fact that “putting our heads in the sand is the worst thing we can do.”
Another key theme discussed with CMOs is around automation and how we shouldn’t be sending anything automated right now...and probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway.
When operating in this climate, it’s ok to acknowledge what’s going on and empathy is very important.
Latane mentioned that there is a lot of public shaming on LinkedIn and discusses how coaching can be done privately versus in public forums.
BDRs have a tough job and it’s even tougher right now. So, their team is focused on educating and learning. Right now, maybe it’s important to put double the amount of time into account research.
Latane discusses the pros and cons of having BDRs report to marketing versus the sales teams.
Latane talks about how she works with the leader of the BDR team and they collaboratively set the tone for the week...each week.
ABM is really about understanding your ideal customers in real-time and identifying those key buying signals.
ABM is more than just selecting the right accounts, you have to define a business objective up front as well.
Latane breaks down how their podcast/video series was created and how they use it within their own marketing strategy.
Latane discusses some projects she would execute if given a $20k budget to just “test” things out.

Key Points:

There’s a saying, measure twice, cut once. I think it’s about educating and learning and maybe doubling the time you normally spend on account research.
It’s ok to acknowledge that it’s a tough time. And then it’s really about empathizing on what this tough time means.
Typically in sales, there’s a give-get formula. That’s what the best sellers practice. What we’re practicing here at 6Sense is give-give, pure give.

Resources Mentioned:

Latane Conant: LinkedIn
6Sense: Website
TalkingSense: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with the Director of Marketing at Rootstrap. Rootstrap is a company that builds apps from scratch, rescues existing products and provides additional development muscle for internal projects. Patrick talks about how the organization builds relationships with prospects and has a focus on both inbound and outbound strategies.

Episode Highlights:

Patrick Ward shares his background within marketing and talks about what drew him to the opportunity at Rootstrap.
Patrick discusses the ideal customer profile of Rootstrap which mostly covers three different industries - e-commerce, e-learning and healthcare.
Rootstrap engages customers in two very specific ways: 1) Either they come to them with a product which needs to be built or 2) Staff augmentation.
The sales cycle for Rootstrap’s engagements can be three, six or even nine months to close, so it’s important to nurture prospects throughout the entire journey.
Rootstrap uses both inbound and outbound marketing strategies.
Rootstrap’s podcast serves as a way to generate interest with prospective customers and helps establish thought leadership.
Once Rootstrap has determined a client has a problem which they can solve, it becomes more about education to help them convert.
It’s almost like marketing and sales is one in the same, in the b2b space. You really need to be a consultant.
If you genuinely provide the best solution for clients, even if it’s not yours, even if it’s recommending them to someone else, that’s going to get you a much better referral from the person and will build a long-term relationship.
Marketing is a lot about building systems and this process allows Patrick to create initiatives that run themselves. He then focuses on analyzing what is working effectively.
What are some Patrick’s favorite resources to keep up with #b2btech marketing?

Key Points:

Patrick urges marketers to enable products and services to continue to help other people - to keep the economy moving during the pandemic situation.
If your marketing is focused on inbound, you’re less at risk to algorithm changes and other major platform changes.
It’s helpful to listen to practitioners instead of just theorists. Taking lessons from practitioners is far more valuable than taking advice from theorists.
It’s important for marketers to be mindful of all the other industries that are struggling and to try and help them.

Resources Mentioned:

Patrick Ward: LinkedIn
Rootstrap: Website
Masterclass: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

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During this episode of Tech Qualified, we chat with Dawn White, the Director of Marketing and Account Management at Integrated Design, Inc. (IDI). Dawn talks about her background in account management, how she transitioned to marketing, why she focuses on the success of customers first and outlines some of the major changes she made when taking over marketing.

Episode Highlights:

Dawn White shares her background story and talks about how she started in account management at IDI...then transitioned to overseeing marketing as well.
Dawn discusses the ideal customer profile of IDI, which includes both direct customers and partner organizations.
Dawn talks about the homegrown CRM that existed prior to her rolling out Hubspot to the team.
One of the first initiatives Dawn went through in marketing was to complete a content audit.
Hubspot is an integral part of the marketing and sales infrastructure at IDI.
Dawn focuses on really keeping in touch with customers, through newsletters and simply picking up the phone.
Dawn discusses how the website is used to complete a pre-evaluation for prospects and then how this information is shared with sales & partners to create a relationship.
When moving into her marketing role, upselling was a component of her job...but so was customer satisfaction.
Hubspot is a crucial component to ensuring marketing and sales teams are on the same page throughout a customer’s lifecycle.
From the account management side, it’s important to never ask for more than we are giving in the relationship.
At IDI, we’re consultants. We’re not trying to sell you something that you don’t need.
Our sales process involves consultation. It requires a deep-dive into a customer’s environment and overall organization.
Dawn took a Storybrand course to further refine IDI’s messaging. One of the big lessons learned is how the customer is the “hero” in your messaging.
What are some Dawn’s favorite resources to keep up with #b2btech marketing?

3 Key Points:

Hubspot is a key part of IDI’s technology stack and ensures marketing and sales teams are aligned throughout the customer journey.
Dawn participates in a Rising Leaders Program within the Ann Arbor area and this helps her get plugged in to the local marketing community.
Dawn took a course from Storybrand to help facilitate the company’s website redesign efforts.

Resources Mentioned:

Dawn White: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawn-white-59221879/
IDI: https://www.idesign.com/
Hubspot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Storybrand: https://storybrand.com/
Motion: motionagency.io/access

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