Episode Summary
Nathan Bliss is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Kinsta, a WordPress hosting platform that knows what it does well and continues to get better at it.
“We don’t bend a lot on where we feel we fit in,” Nathan says. “It’s kind of like why you can’t Google a discount code for a Tesla. The price is the price. So that may sound a bit standoffish, but we ultimately feel that we want to provide that level of value.”
Nathan’s previous roles include everything from account executive and solutions specialist to sales coach and regional sales manager, so he calls himself a sales and revenue guy “through and through.” That background gives him a unique approach to his current position as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, in which he combines his passion for recruiting top-tier employees with his knowledge of what strengths a company should emphasize from a selling standpoint.
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Nathan discusses how to move from a broad to a more targeted marketing approach, why it’s possible for a bootstrapped company to grow with the right marketing and the aspect of management he’s currently struggling with the most: delegating.
“We are not institutionally backed and we have no institutional financing,” Nathan says. “So we had to use very scrappy, time-tested methods to grow the business from its historic past. And now if you go to Google and you search a term anywhere related to WordPress or building a website that kind of falls anywhere on that spectrum of interest, it’s hard not to find a search result [for us] on page one of Google.”
Guest Profile
- Name: Nathan Bliss
- What he does: As the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Kinsta, a WordPress hosting platform, Nathan develops and oversees efforts to bring in more clients and enhance Kinsta’s authority in the WordPress space.
- Company: Kinsta
- Noteworthy: Nathan worked for PayPal for two years but says he sadly never met Elon Musk (though he recommends Musk’s biography).
Key Insights
- Sales and marketing work together with the right team. You can’t be successful in sales unless you have a good marketing team and vice versa. According to Nathan, success comes from recruiting the right people to be on those respective teams.
- Your marketing won’t be effective without a strong company identity. Identify the problem your company is solving and what your strengths are within that arena. Then, once you know where your brand fits within the marketplace, don’t bend. Stand your ground and get even better at what you already do best.
- Good marketing and sales leaders — and leaders in all areas, for that matter — know how to delegate. It’s easy to work insanely long hours when your job involves two key departments, but working longer doesn’t always mean you’re working more effectively. Pick tasks that you can easily teach someone else to do to best manage your time.
Episode Highlights
- How Kinsta aligns sales and marketing to be as successful as possible
- Working hard ≠ working long hours
- You need to know what gap you fill to sell successfully
- Once you know your identity and it works for you, don’t be tempted to change
- There’s nothing wrong with a broad marketing approach at first, but it needs to evolve over time