Episode Summary
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.
Guest Profile
- Name: Marybeth Sheppard
- What she does: As the Senior Vice President of Marketing at SEVENROOMS, a hospitality technology company, Marybeth oversees its B2B marketing strategy and works with major brands like Bloomin’ Brands. (Think: Outback Steakhouse, Bonefish Grill and Fleming’s)
- Company: SEVENROOMS
- Noteworthy: Before joining SEVENROOMS, Marybeth worked at Seamless, Grubhub’s online ordering service. There, she managed the company’s B2B marketing functions, from restaurant marketing to delivery driver marketing.
Key Insights
- In an effort to increase cohesion between her marketing team and the sales department, Marybeth has each new marketing hire walk through the sales process; this way, they can better understand and work with the sales team. She also makes sure all of marketing’s “invisible” initiatives are presented to sales so that everyone’s on the same page.
- You can’t know if you’re doing a good job without metrics. That’s why Marybeth sets metric-driven goals for her team, which she also ties to their compensation. At the start of each meeting, she presents data to orient the team’s conversation around performance.
- SEVENROOMS has shifted its marketing strategy because of COVID-19’s toll on the hospitality industry. Instead of focusing on the right now with clients, the sales and marketing teams encourage clients to think about the future and how they can shift to meet customer concerns as the world begins to reopen.
Episode Highlights
- Letting the sales team in on the "invisible" marketing initiatives
- Walk a day in your sales reps' shoes...
- Use data to evaluate your performance
- When COVID-19 turns your marketing strategy upside down...
- Evolving from a team of two to a team of eight
