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
