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.

Phil Rimmler’s entire job revolves around marketing crushed diamonds. “We help companies attach a digital record to a physical object, similar to inventory management, anti theft detection, things like that. And we do that by crushing up diamonds, literal diamonds, and mixing them with a UV epoxy,” he says. That UV epoxy, when applied to objects such as fine art, creates a one-of-a-kind tag for the object, and finding customers for this niched product is Phil’s job as Marketing Manager at DUST Identity. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Phil discusses what it’s like working for a fairly new company selling a product that’s only appealing to particular high-end or high-profile clients such as the military. Phil explains how much of his day-to-day work is detailed ethnographic, user and competitor research to keep DUST both appealing and relevant — particularly during a global pandemic that causes customer needs to change constantly. “What our efforts are mainly focused on is creating that collateral so that during that customer journey when an organization knows that they want to solve this issue, how can we best position ourselves to seem like the likely and logical and economical answer?” he says.

Marketing isn’t about taking advantage of people — although that doesn’t stop some brands from taking an exploitative marketing approach. Andrei Faji, the Vice President of Global Marketing at Shopgate, wants to do the opposite. “We’ve intentionally decided not to go down that path. We found that we had a real opportunity to level-set and get to the bottom line around what actually matters,” he says. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Andrei talks about what marketers should really focus on: starting and maintaining conversations with consumers, especially now in light of the pandemic. For Andrei, marketing is about communicating your organization’s value sincerely, with the goal of solving a problem rather than selling a product or service. To do this, it’s important to create a message that accurately reflects your company, one that every employee can get behind. Andrei applies this to Shopgate’s strategy with direct response marketing, which he feels cuts through the noise of today’s digital chaos. “Direct response allowed us to put together some unique offline campaigns to really get in front of decision makers and make a real statement,” Andrei says. “I think one thing that we as marketers sometimes take for granted is the power of being bold and making a true statement, knowing full well that not everybody is going to respond to that statement, but the statement still needs to be made because you need to put a flag in the ground.”

You could say that data has informed most of Derrick’s professional decisions — starting with his first job as an SEO specialist. Derrick moved his way up the marketing ranks before eventually joining ConvertKit, an email marketing platform that makes email easier and more robust for professional creators. As ConvertKit’s Marketing Director, he helps online creators grow their businesses to earn a living online. During Derrick’s first year at ConvertKit, the leadership team noticed a dismal lack of growth. Taking a look at the data, they decided to drastically change their core product. “We decided to innovate by leading with a core product change to achieve a better product market fit,” says Derrick. This didn’t come without challenges. He notes, “Our current customer base wasn’t super excited about it. Part of that was because of our market positioning.” In this episode, Derrick discusses how ConvertKit revamped both its product and business model, and how this shift affected its marketing strategy. Besides product changes, he’s seen the brand’s marketing evolve considerably in just two and a half years. For instance, when Derrick first joined, ConvertKit relied heavily on affiliate marketing. It has since expanded its marketing avenues to include organic search, podcasting and video storytelling. Now, Derrick’s team is focused on product marketing; to complement ConvertKit’s strong brand advertising, they hope to better convey how its product brings value to users.

COVID-19 hit the hospitality industry hard. So much so that Heath Shatouhy, the VP of Sales and Marketing at the staffing marketplace Jitjatjo, reports, “If you look at the recent jobs report, nearly two-thirds of people filing for unemployment are from the hospitality and leisure industry.” As a staffing platform that focuses on connecting companies and workers in the hospitality industry, the pandemic has thus taken a big toll on Jitjatjo. Yet this hasn’t stopped Heath and his team from working hard to support Jitjatjo’s gig workers. In fact, since the emergence of COVID-19, the platform has cut its margins to keep money in the hands of workers, or talent, as it calls them. On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Heath explains how his team has adapted to get through these difficult times and help those struggling. Knowing that many workers join the hospitality industry because they want to help others, Heath felt there was no better way to support them than by protecting their livelihoods. “If you approach clients and customers with a genuine desire to help without worrying about paybacks, it will come back to you. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow, but it will come back because they will remember you because you were genuine and you did try to help them out as best you could. And that really goes a long way,” Heath says.

For Ewa Baska, Marketing Director at Buildout, a SaaS company that creates marketing software for commercial real estate brokers, the marketing fundamentals she learned in school and early jobs have always been her inner guidebook. “I always knew that I wanted to go into marketing just by always wanting to know more about brands and studying all the exciting things that companies can bring to humans,” she says. But some things you can’t learn from school — like what to do when a pandemic hits. In such circumstances, it’s important to think before you act, Ewa says. For Buildout, that meant taking a step back to reflect and create a strategic marketing response plan rather than reacting hastily. It was a move that’s made all the difference in connecting with new customers and retaining current ones. On this episode of Tech Qualified, Ewa shares how her team conducted an audit to adjust their marketing strategy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. She also discusses the value of adding a human touch to Buildout’s brand messaging, one that focuses on being humble and genuine.