Episode Summary
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.
Guest Profile
- Name: Andy Jonak
- What he does: As the Director of Marketing at Vicom, Andy serves as the company’s leading brand evangelist on how its IT services can bring value and drive innovation to any business.
- Company: Vicom
- Noteworthy: "We are not looking for transactions, we are looking for customers. We want to understand, holistically, what the customer is doing, whether they're doing it with us or not, so that can help us guide them on the right solution."
Key Insights
- Establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. In the world of content marketing, it's vital to understand your industry and to be perceived as an expert in your space. To stay relevant, Andy says he leans on internal subject matter experts to let him know "what trends we should be focusing on, what particular areas and solutions we should be considering, and what's hot right now." Then he packages that information into different types of content. Andy likes to lean on the sales team and subject matter experts because of their regular interaction with customers. “They see what's going on, understand the trends, and know where we need to focus,” Andy says. “They help to give the perception of thought leadership.”
- Differentiate yourself by building trust with your customers. In the crowded space of IT solutions, the biggest challenge Andy has at Vicom is how to differentiate it from all the other firms that essentially sell the same things at the same price. "It really comes down to our people and the trust we build with customers," Andy says. Vicom uses subject matter experts and sales expertise to build genuine trust with customers. It might sound like a cliché, but "our goal is always to try and be some sort of trust advisor to our customers," Andy says.
- Content marketing is only one piece of the puzzle. Coming from a sales background, Andy approaches everything in marketing through "sales glasses." When he entered the marketing space, he saw a lot of firms treating social media content as their primary means of advertising. Through his sales glasses, "it just didn't make sense that it was the only vehicle for being able to drive business," Andy says. While he also invests in strong content for Vicom's website, social media channels and emails, Andy's go-to marketing strategy is telemarketing — which he refers to as an "unsung hero” in reaching customers.
Episode Highlights
- Looking at marketing through ‘sales glasses’
“Everything I look at in marketing is through sales glasses. I have 28 years of sales experience, so I keep that in mind and look at that from everything that I do. It’s not just about making nice things and good content — yes, that stuff is important — but it’s about helping to drive business within these enterprise firms. It’s not necessarily an easy thing in marketing where, at times, it can be pretty hard to judge. Marketing can be a subjective thing, so how do you bring some objective into the subjective piece? … So the focus for me is helping drive business forward, which is more demand gen than just marketing.”
- Telemarketing isn't an outdated sales technique
“Two and a half years ago, firms were looking at [social media and content marketing] almost primarily as their route to business, and that was their way to be able to get business. For me, coming from the sales side with my sales glasses on, it just didn’t make sense that that’s the only vehicle able to drive business. So the marketing around email and the telemarketing piece I keep talking about [has] been so important because it’s a cost-effective, high-touch way to be able to reach out to people. Yes, it’s not easy to get people on the phone. Yes, when you get them on the phone they’re not always happy to hear from you, but I think it’s one of those unsung heroes that has been effective going back decades that people thought they would never have to do anymore.”
- Investing in customer education is always worth it
“What do we do with customers in terms of investment? The access to our architecture team and subject matter experts and all those sorts of things are an investment on Vicom’s part — we do want to educate the customers. We do lots of things like lunch and learns, different educational type things that are of no cost to the customers, just to get our people talking to them, trying to build that trust and genuineness I think is so important so they understand who our people are and who we truly are. Then they will see through those different investments, that we’re the real thing and we’re there to help support them and not just looking for transactions.”
- You don't always need to reinvent the wheel
“We’ve created these different types of campaign kits where we package everything together — I call them framework kits — and they include everything that’s necessary to launch and execute a successful multi-touch marketing campaign. I created these kits to be reusable so that the next time we do one, I can take probably 80% of that and reuse it … None of it’s rocket science — we’re taking things and packaging them in such a way that they’re really easy to execute and we can just use it over and over again because I can’t be reinventing the wheel each time we do something.”
- Solving one of the biggest challenges in IT: differentiating yourself
“We’ve had a lot of firms that we continue to work with that have been customers of ours for many, many years. Being genuine by building trust and building good relationships has helped us provide good content and good subject matter expertise to show that we are very well-rounded as an organization and we don’t have one great technical person — we have a team of really good, different technical people that bring a lot to the table. We use that, and that’s really what helps us differentiate and, we believe, solves one of the biggest challenges in what we do in IT.”
