Episode 334: Building relationships in the world of e-commerce with Dan Daron from Searchspring

Episode Summary

Dan Daron of Searchspring links an improved e-commerce customer experience directly to a company’s bottom line. Merchandising and improved search solutions are important to this improved customer experience, whether the company is a retailer, brand, or B2B wholesaler or SAAS company.

“If a customer can’t find the products that they’re looking for, you’ve basically lost them. They have, little to no attention span these days,” says Dan.

Calling on his experience at Searchspring and as an e-commerce and marketing consultant for16 years, Dan provides tips on merchandising. He also discusses how Searchspring works with e-commerce teams to provide the tools and services to enable them to succeed. He describes how Searchspring is building relationships, becoming a thought leader in the e-commerce industry, and creating a community among e-marketers. He also gives hints about what the company’s recent merger with Nextopia will mean for the industry.

Highlights include:

Improving your search engine is a quick way to improve your bottom line.
Customizing product recommendations will drive both upsells and cross-sells, while simultaneously improving the customer experience.
Searchspring gains customers through building relationships. It builds these relationships through a variety of channels including Sales Development Representatives, thought leadership, trade shows, media, and developing relationships within the tight-knit e-commerce community.

Guest Profile

Name: Dan Daron
What he does: He leads marketing growth at Searchspring, a company that provides merchandising, analytics, and user-friendly search tools and solutions to online brands. Searchspring is "on a mission to give ecommerce teams superpowers."
Company: Searchspring
Key Quote: "We really get down to the nitty-gritty of [offering] a solution that's going to work best for you. So through that sales cycle and through that journey, we really want to make sure to understand the needs of our customers."

Key Insights

User-friendly search capabilities give online merchants the same merchandising capabilities as brick-and-mortar stores. "If you think of brick-and-mortar retail store, you walk in the front entrance and there's a display there. They may have products on that display because they're running a promo .. or they may be unloading some inventory, trying to get rid of things and they've got them on sale. As you go into the store further, you'll find that the aisles, the displays, the walls -- everything is curated for a very specific business reason. What Searchspring allows merchants to do is implement those very same strategies on their stores."
Searchspring has a different strategy from many competitors when implementing e-commerce sites. "Some of our other competitors will often implement really quick, but you have to build it out and customize it from there. So we take the reverse approach so that the final product is solid when they're ready to go live. And for a lot of our, our bigger brands and bigger retailers, that's super important."
Searchspring is using high-level awareness content and resources along the customer journey. "Basically, we get into guides and webinars and everything like that. And anytime we can leverage our customers, the platforms, and our partners that always adds to the value of those resources."

Episode Highlights

“Ecommerce managers and online merchandisers for brands, retailers, B2B wholesale stores. Our sweet spot is SMB to mid-market, though we will go upstream further than that as well when it’s a good fit. We support pretty much any commerce platform. However, we specialize in, you know, Shopify, big commerce, Magento Viva Net Suite, and we also do a lot with custom platforms as well.”

“We actually have a very long list of channels that we operate through. We do have an outbound team, SDR BDR. We also, you know, have full inbound, social paid retargeting thought leadership, eBooks webinars. We do a lot of trade shows and events. This company was pretty much founded on trade shows and events. … It’s really about networking and getting to know those people. The e-commerce industry is a very tight-knit, close community.

And so it’s really about building those relationships. We leverage press quite a bit and we have an extensive partner network. “

“It’s an amazing experience. I can’t say too many people get the chance to, uh, you know, look under the hood of one of their competitors and vice versa. And so we merged the two teams together, which was pretty impressive, and we did it in a very short period of time. So we’re going through the process of assessing tools. We’re assessing processes, you know, looking at our ABM approaches and everything like that, and overall lead gen. And so there’s a lot of stuff in flux right now, but it’s definitely heading in a great direction. And, through that, we went from, on the marketing side, a three-person team to an eight-person team and we’re very specialized now and the team merged very well.”

“Our sales and marketing teams are pretty tight. We actually have a pretty good feedback loop from our sales team. You know, we’re constantly learning, listening in, on sales calls, really listening to the customer in those calls as well.”

“A lot of the marketing efforts previously were really driven around trade shows and events. Once I came on board — once I switched over, –uh, the team was, was pretty solid and we started to look at things quite differently. We were really starting to go down the road of ABM. We actually had a very tight ICP at the time. And so we were, you know, diving into an ABM approach that was really gonna put us in front of that audience.”

Episode 334: Building relationships in the world of e-commerce with Dan Daron from Searchspring

Episode Summary

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

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