Episode 311: The Importance of Pivoting Your Marketing With Lori McInerney of Hunt Club

Episode Summary

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.

Guest Profile

Name: Lori McInerney
What she does: As the Vice President of Marketing at Hunt Club, a recruiting firm that uses a wide network of subject matter experts to find great talent, Lori works to produce highly targeted customer acquisition and engagement campaigns.
Company: Hunt Club
Noteworthy: “I like to think of myself as a marketer always wearing a sales lens.”

Key Insights

Lori says that content is more important than ever. To that end, her team is currently focused on creating SEO-friendly content as well as webinars that inform and establish Hunt Club’s expertise. One of the brand’s most recent webinars had an unprecedented 800 registrations, which told Lori her team was doing something right.
According to Lori, remaining paralyzed in these frustrating and confusing times is probably the worst thing you can do. The key moving forward is to not focus on COVID in conversations with clients but rather, to address the client’s business needs directly. “We don't talk about COVID anymore — we talk about how to deliver demand for the company, how to deliver the best ROI, how to engage in the most tactful, resourceful way with our customers and prospects. At the same time, we keep laughing and not let it bring you down because these can be challenging times,” she says.
Lori attributes Hunt Club’s success in the COVID-19 era to its leadership team’s quickness to respond and pivot rather than remain “frozen.” She reminds listeners to focus on the priorities and not get caught up in the chaos. For her team, that has meant honing in on how to drive more ROI and be tactful in their marketing and sales strategies.

Episode Highlights

“Our experts are a lot of senior people and executives and leaders, and so are our candidates as well as our clients — so you think of this flywheel approach where our experts refer candidates, our candidates refer experts, our candidates refer clients and so forth. That’s also again the power of referrals and the power of having this massive network. You can’t just get that through a recruiter.”

“Obviously, pre-COVID, our go-to market strategy changed pretty significantly in certain areas, from a marketing perspective, from a demand perspective and from a sales perspective. How we did shift, though, was in making sure that we are doing everything we can for our current customers and our current ICP and buyer persona audience but then also shifting to a lot of industries and a lot of roles in companies that are hiring now and do have the needs right now.”

“From a content perspective, number one is just delivering good content of value, being sensitive, being aware of our audiences more so than ever and making sure that if we are going to deliver email campaigns and webinars and content and other things to drive demand, that it’s resourceful, that we’re being really conscious of our audience and what we’re sending to each audience and making sure that we’re building the relationships now to hopefully convert in the future.”

“The survey that we sent out and a lot of the data that we’re seeing says you still have a lot of companies and a lot of CEOs and founders saying that finding the right talent now is more critical than ever. You talk about the cost of a bad hire and how expensive it is to not hire the right people from the beginning. I think it’s even a much bigger impact today.”

“The head of sales and myself stay pretty close. We connect at least weekly, if not more. There’s always a pipeline meeting with the sales team. My team is involved in that meeting. Marketing’s responsible for driving demand, driving the right demand, and it’s using the appropriate channels, the best channels. The channels that might work for us are not going to work for other companies. How do we work closely with sales and make sure we’re converting leads and having the right relationships and that we’ve given sales the right tools?”

“We as marketers live and live in data. That’s why I love things like surveys. The one that we just did was successful. It’s like, hey we sent the survey to thousands of people, we got hundreds of responses, here’s the questions we asked, here are the data, so at some point, you can’t argue the data. But again, it’s about then how can we work with sales and services to use this data.”

Episode 311: The Importance of Pivoting Your Marketing With Lori McInerney of Hunt Club

Episode Summary

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

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