Episode 285: Positioning Your Firm as a ‘Trusted Advisor’ with Taylor Vossler of C3 Technology Advisors

Episode Summary

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.

Guest Profile

Name: Taylor Vossler
What she does: As Director of Marketing at technology consulting firm C3 Technology Advisors, where she’s responsible for the brand marketing strategy.
Company: C3 Technology Advisors
Noteworthy: Taylor previously built out the marketing department at a tier one automotive manufacturer before C3’s CEO recruited on her on LinkedIn.

Key Insights

C3 positions itself as a “trusted advisor” that can genuinely help versus a specialist or service provider that can only implement one kind of project. The company has launched a “What the Tech?” webinar series to help companies understand how to evaluate certain tools. “We're not going to beat around the bush. We are very straightforward … this is a bad solution for you, this is a great solution for you … we're agnostic,” says Taylor.
Taylor acknowledges that relations between sales and marketing isn’t always super smooth, but she says monthly alignment meetings can help. She’ll sit down with sales and ask what the pipeline looks like, and identify opportunities for assistance, which will help her set campaign priorities.
Apart from webinars, Taylor says she leverages quarterly newsletters and case studies to deliver content throughout the customer journey. The newsletters provide a way to offer thought leadership and show customers the range of services C3 provides. They’ll also share case studies highlighting a specific project with customers who might have similar needs.

Episode Highlights

“This is a newsletter that not only talks about industry and what’s happening in the industry — we also talk about who we aren’t … we’ll highlight a C3 team member and then we’ll also provide basic blog articles, thought leadership that we’ve put together as well, just to keep them informed again, cause sometimes when C3 started back in 2008, it was just basically a Telecom brokerage firm … we do network, we do security. We do a bunch of different things now. And so this is one way to reintroduce ourselves as we’re different. We’re not just Telecom.”

“I would say the biggest challenge we currently have is the separation of what a trusted advisor actually is. So all the time we go into a new client … they’re like, Oh, well you’re Avar right? No, we’re not Avar, we don’t sell hardware. Now, if you want us to find someone to sell you hardware — yes, we can help you with that, but we don’t personally go in and plug phones in. And we don’t give you hardware. So that’s one thing that we’re really trying to really define and set apart ourselves from everybody else … the trusted advisor movement is new.”

“This is actually coming from another organization that we’ve leveraged called, Avant Communication. So they help provide us reports to understand where the industry’s going. So we’re able to share those reports and we’re also able to build upon those reports … and then we can write blog posts about it.”

“I do have a marketing coordinator that does work under me, who helps with quite a bit. So fortunately he’s very comfortable with SEO, with web applications, coding … short-term demand gen. … and the long term strategy, that’s more on my end, along with the CEOs.”

“Our joke is — and it’s very true — it doesn’t have to be perfect when you first start, and I’m sure, most marketers can relate to this. You launch a new landing page … you give it a thousand visits or 30 days. You evaluate it, you see what’s working, what’s not, and again — if it’s not — let’s change it up. Let’s see what we can do to help make this page bigger and better than before, and actually make it do what you want it to do. So if it’s conversion great, if it’s just brand awareness, it’s going to be a lot harder to track, but we can still track it.”

“I won’t lie — 100% honest, there definitely are times where we do butt heads — that’s going to happen anywhere, no matter what, everyone’s going to be butting heads at one point or another … At the end of the day, everyone in the organization is still looking at what’s best for that organization, so that’s really what it comes down to.”

Episode 285: Positioning Your Firm as a ‘Trusted Advisor’ with Taylor Vossler of C3 Technology Advisors

Episode Summary

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

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